I would say that both the woke moderates and the woke radicals are to blame for the general air of superiority and condescension. I was a solid Democrat voter of the NPR-listening variety (voted for Clinton, Nader, Kerry, Obama, Clinton, Biden, Harris) but got off the train when my faculty-lounge-friends (literally, I'm an English professor) told me that I was participating in "white supremacy." When ordinary acts of critical thinking got strange labels, I was done. I'm now a radical centrist, subscribing to periodicals like Persuasion (center left) and The Dispatch (center right). I saw the Democratic party go along with the faculty-lounge weirdness. My progressive friends got judgey and condescending about anyone who didn't see the world through their very narrow window. I still voted for Harris (not wanting Trump's authoritarian populism) but I was deeply annoyed that I didn't have a better choice. My analysis is that it started with woke radicals but then the moderates didn't have the backbone to resist. I blame them both.
"It started with woke radicals but then the moderates didn't have the backbone to resist." Let's see whether someone can beat that one-sentence summary.
As this nails apportioning blame, the more interesting questions are why and how. A major culprit is staffing. If a moderate pol staffs her office with radicals, that’s going o influence her policy and presentation. What I don’t understand is why this is so pervasive. For all his many, many faults, Trump works hard to hire and appoint people who will carry out his agenda. Is it just laziness that prevents dems from doing the same? A few hypotheses:
- It’s easier to have a career in the democratic party by playing coalition politics than by building popular support that transcends party (the kind that Obama and Trump built). staffing is an instrument of managing the coalition.
- The left is so disconnected from what non-elites want, that there is no pipeline of young staffers who didn’t get incubated in wokeness in academia.
- Laziness. It’s much easier to staff from an established network and set of universities than do the hard work of recruiting people with more diverse views
- Being a staffer pays so poorly that only the rich can afford to do it, which limits the pool to those coming from elite universities. Trump Republicans sidestep this because Trump’s graft makes entering republican politics a better long-term financial bet.
It is worth mentioning the staffers are the reason I do not feel hopeful for the Democratic Party, and the reason why I do not see myself ever going back to it. They are the future of the party and extreme progressive philosophy is their religion. Religion is not easily changed or overcome. The olds will phase out.. and my biggest fear is that they will be in charge of the country. I am not that old yet, and my child does not get another cold. An absolute shift was needed and I voted accordingly. Every time I hear the usual suspects critiquing Trump’s picks or potential policies, many of us DO NOT CARE because after my initial pause and concern I keep going back to the most extreme beliefs of the party and then I breathe easier. Seems like we all picked our poison. I was done with the current poison which I helped pick 4 years ago. No more until they become normal… and even then my anger and sense for betrayal does not let me see beyond what is happening right now.
Intensely toxic psychological violence and terror (cancel culture, groupthink, lies, gaslighting) is a social cancer that has almost completely consumed any sanity that existed on the "left".
I'm not anti-Trump, but there is a lot of evidence that "graft" is a staff pipeline in both parties. See Rufo's reports on immigration NGOs for example. Democrat hysteria about stupid shit like Project 2025 actually obscures real corruption on the "right". That might be semi-intentional by the globalist puppet masters that control the political parties.
This really hits the “nail” on the head. The pervasiveness of wokeness started in elite schools seeking to undo all societal wrongs. That attempted good deed has backfired radically, pun attended.
NYT's "review" of DeBoer's book is classic, reactionary bullshit by the professional-managerial class attempting to cover up their complicity in the problem.
How many folks know that the ever loathsome Dylan Mulvaney visited the White House? Rather few, I would guess. However, lots of folks took heed of Trump's campaign ads.
Honestly - it was Hilary flailing to beat Bernie in 2016. Bernie pushed a classical Marx class-based message and she recognized how big a threat that was to her corporate brand. Voila. The grand push into Woke. Thank you Hilary. We owe you so much.
If you can’t beat them, join them — I think that’s the essence of the matter.
I’m trying to figure out how much the virtual environment of 2020 helped contribute to that, because online movements tend to be much more radical and divorced from reality than movements that start on the ground.
Your observation that there is a divorce from reality is a crucial insight. (postmodernism is premised on that divorce, and the totalitarian "left" has most fully embraced it).
To push the reasoning even further: The moderates could not push back on the woke radicals because they both shared a common goal of equality. They just wanted different paths to get there. But 60 years of increased social programs, education by moderates failed to create the equality that moderates desired.
Then the woke radicals said if you do not join us in a maximalist push for immediate equality, you are all racists, sexists, colonialists, and transphobes. The moderates had no response and could not stand to be called bad names in public, so they caved in and pretended to be woke.
The fundamental problem is that equality is impossible to achieve. Every ideology eventually hits the hard wall of reality. The Left did around 2010, so they had to choose between giving up in their strongly held beliefs or rejecting reality. The woke represent the rejection of reality.
For those who are interested, I write more here (and I have an entire series of articles on the Origins of the Woke coming out within the next few weeks):
... white leftist savior was actually a homosexual groomer using drugs to induce a troubled 15-year old black boy into sexual liaisons who was then murdered by the kid he was grooming after attempting to blackmail him with homemade porn ...
Same. Traditional Dem voter here. Woke is unAmerican and wrong and morally corrupt. And pushed with such sneering arrogance by sanctimonious faculty everywhere. Universities are ground zero for this disease. Start the cure there.
My professional org the American Academy of Pediatrics has destroyed itself on trans ideology. I’m disgusted and ashamed. And destroyed its credibility of core issues like vaccines.
Sadly, Democrats moderates didn’t flush this sewage from their own sewers. They let it back up. Now the entire city stinks of this backed up shit in every institution: corporations, schools, the arts, media, even our sports leagues. So, the sanitation workers of The Right show up to do the nasty work of it. It takes a certain sort of sanitation worker to climb down into these sewers to blast this stuff out. That’s Trump. Democrats should have done it themselves.
Come on. Harris embraced Cheney and Bush. I am no fan of those two though I stupidly thought at the time they were doing the right thing to save this country from terrorism. But now the democrat party is the war, surveillance and we will control you party. At some point you have to wake up.
Biden brought us peace and prosperity!! We aren’t in any wars! Kamala attempted to use Cheney to get Republican votes, she didn’t embrace any of the asinine Cheney policies. Republicans in Congress supported Cheney warmongering as late as January 2021 which means I will never vote for Republicans anytime soon!
Well said, Susan!! I’m also a professor and a strong moderate. Being judged for not being radical enough really pissed me off and pushed me to the center. I still identify as a Democrat but I voted third party this year. Harris has endorsed too many crazy left wing stuff in the past, and I wasn’t voting for Trump.
Authoritarian populism? Sounds like an oxymoron. Isn't it what the Dems mean when they talk about Democracy? Will of the people? How can you call it authoritarian? Just because Trump wants to move away from the all progress-choking bureaucracy, you want to call him authoritarian? Are you really an English professor?
[--->] 4º) Este país caerá infaliblemente en manos de la multitud desenfrenada, para después pasar a tiranuelos casi imperceptibles, de to dos colores y razas.
Curious juxtaposition of comment about "authoritarian populism" as reason to vote for Dem ticket, while recognizing lockstep inclinations of contemporary Dems.
Your pithy summary is excellent, Susan. My question is "when did it start?" My belief is long before "woke" was born, back in the mid-1980s. But does that make sense to you?
Ideologies of the Left started in the French Revolution in the 1790s, but Leftist ideology did not really have a big impact on the USA until the late 1960s. Much of the politics of the Baby boomer Left during that era bears striking resemblance to Woke ideology.
The latest iteration seems to have started around 2010.
Yes I was going to say something to the effect that we can’t quite pin it on a group, but on a dynamic: I think the problem is in the energy between these groups, in how the issues were volleyed, and how the energy accumulated with each hit and was returned and amplified in kind.
Really? Wrote in a foreigner who really is ruling Salvador with an iron fist because...? Trump's authoritarianism? You know that he already was a president once before.
Thank you Susan, you have covered most of what I would say. We must be twins separated at birth (I shifted away from engineering to get a secondary teaching credential in English :)).
I agree with many of the commenters here. However, I'd like to give a special shout-out to academia and mainstream media, two institutions where I once worked, as well as Hollywood and NGOs like the ACLU, Planned Parenthood, and the Southern Poverty Law Center, all of which have abandoned their primary missions.
I was once an NPR-listening, NYT-reading, Unitarian church "liberal." Now, I look at each of these places and wonder how they justify their biases. My "lived experience" of having mixed race children enables me to see the destructiveness of calling all white people "racist" while insisting things like being on time or writing well are signs of white supremacy (Yes, real comments said to me at a Unitarian Church).
I didn't vote for either Trump or Harris (left that part blank), but I completely understand why he won. The American cultural elite drank the kool-aid the far left is selling, and now they too are part of the problem. Until those places become more diverse in thought, the divisions will remain.
Very similar experience to yours. Also a former Unitarian (30 years), NPR listener and NYT subscriber. I still get the NYT, but consume it now with a critical eye. I did vote for Harris, because not voting was not an option since in my view that would have helped Trump.
If you really believe in the One God, you must know that Unitarian Church isn't a Bible-based church. Why waste your time on "pretend" faith? This is fascinating to me-the length to which people are willing to go to pretend and virtue signal.
Religion and faith are not the same thing. Religion can play a useful role in society without requiring belief in a God. Look up the history of the Ethical Culture movement for more insight into this.
Ditto and I wrote someone in for president. But I would have voted Harris if I were in a swing state. I breathed both a sigh of relief and of angst when Trump won.
Free reader here. My instinct is that no apportioning of blame would make sense of the rise of Democratic wokeness that did not take account of social media. Wokeness is, whatever else it is, a moralizing tendency, and it could never have gained traction with significant numbers of people without a sphere in which moralizing can have its efficacy concentrated to a high degree.
A close relative of mine was what we would now call 'woke' before any of these issues came into wide circulation in the culture. They were espousing identitarian positions in 2006 or 2007, without any significant influence of social media, and it was obvious to me that they were getting it from their undergraduate university classes in cultural studies, postcolonial studies, etc. So that's real: A younger person educated into wokeness via the faculty lounge. Yet even so, that this relative of mine was the vanguard of a powerful force in the culture arriving 5-10 years later could not, I think, have been predicted, because those courses they were taking and their basic political thrust had been being offered for at least a couple of decades at that point (Spivak and Bhabha and Foucault and so fourth).
In the present context, my hunch is that the 'moderate/radical' distinction starts to break down, because--thanks to social media--we are all on campus now. I think both people who thought of themselves as radical and people who thought of themselves as moderate got caught up in wokeness in more or less equal proportions because of the psychological forces of moralism, basically fear of not appearing to grasp the morally obvious in front of an agitated crowd of one's peers. 'Moral clarity', whether in an identitarian guise or some other, is neither moderate nor radical if it is just equivalent to 'not being evil'.
So faculty lounge politics (in certain departments) is perhaps a smouldering ember, but Twitter et al. is the combustible fuel source.
In a way, I think the more revealing question might be: Who are the people in the Democratic party who staunchly and consistently did *not* embrace wokeness, and how are they different from everyone else?
Perhaps those of us who were not in academia and were too old to have been educated after the radical takeover of academia began in the 1980s were less likely to embrace wokeness. Our academic peers were, I am guessing, too cowed to resist.
For what it's worth, I think 'academia' is too simple. My undergraduate education, in a 'Great Books' program with a second major in philosophy during 2005-2010, was totally free of pre-woke ideas. It was really something encountering for the first time, in this relative of mine, someone who insisted both that there was no such thing as truth and that that was somehow liberatory of oppressed people of colour everywhere!
CIA-funded Frankfurt School Marxists/Neo-Marxists were allowed to infect academia and 1960s counterculture with their ideological pathology. That is the perfect example of the merger of the corporate-state with neo-communism that "woke" was intended to establish (see Marcuse).
As an independent, I always leaned left. Now I’m thinking of voting in a Republican primary. I just don’t think I can make a difference in the left’s take. I find woke people rather silly, especially in their superciliousness (I think so much about woke is, er, not smart). Even Hillary could go on too long about identity.
I’m not sure I would have believed it was occurring if I weren’t on Twitter.
Democrat Party reformers have always gotten stabbed in the back. Tammany Hall. Bernie is the most recent in a long line of examples. Clyburn, a corrupt, black southern elite Democrat, led the backstabbing, a perfect example of race grifting and corruption.
As a Republican, I guess I can be neutral. I would blame the radicals, but more fundamentally I blame the primary system, the same system that put a lunatic at the head of my party. The crackpots aren't as large a fraction of the Democratic Party, but they are a rich, articulate and deeply committed group, who made it very hard to get nominated without being at least a little woke. I don't think Harris has any deep woke convictions, but what choice did she have in California politics, or in the 2020 presidential primary? Even as unwoke a politician as Biden thought he had to exclude the vast majority of the population - everyone who was not a black woman - from being chosen for the Vice Presidency and the Supreme Court.
The primary system works as long as we show up to vote. For unknown reasons, a large number of general election voters won't pick a party and vote for the moderate (probably) candidate for that party in the primary system. That leaves a vacuum for the extreme candidates to win primaries in both parties.
I think both parties are corrupt tools of oligarchs, and refuse to register with either one on principle. Would be happy to vote for a major-party moderate now and then, but my state has closed primaries.
The Democrats who control my state could open them up, but I guess they were too busy ranting about ‘democracy’ to actually implement it.
Not sure if it addresses the original question but lack of primaries is insulting & manipulative to all voters, especially third party voters. It seems that voters rarely get more than the lesser of x choices*. A child understands when you only present them w options of your choosing. Perhaps there is some degree of resentment, anger, apathy, &/or ... that carries over to less obvious beliefs & behaviors?
* off note, interesting that most state ranked choice (ie more choices) ballot initiatives failed.
Because "woke" is an umbrella term and multi-dimensional its entry into the mainstream of Democratic Party politics is probably overdetermined, in my view, especially if I think of the term as mainly signifying a focus on identity rather than policy more generally as the main marker of "woke" politics.
In this analysis, the seeds really lie in the 2016 conflict between Sanders and Clinton. Although that election pre-dates the rise of "wokism" as the sort of thing that now makes it a central topic of discourse, the subtext of that primary race was very much inflected with identitarian politics. Sanders constituency was primarily younger and male, and he specifically eschewed identity politics in favor of a focus on class and a redistributive economic message. Clinton ran as a continuation of the Obama administration, and her identity as a woman was central to her campaign, as was the imprimatur Obama had given her. The message was like "OK, we elected a Black man president, now it's time to break the highest glass ceiling and elect a White woman." This subtext came out in the primary season in attacks on Sanders for his diffidence on race and the macho element within the "Bernie Bro's" element of his supporters.
For me, that was really the beginning of identity superseding policy as the cornerstone of Democratic Party strategy, with gender the obvious leading edge (which continued into 2024 with the Democrats idea that the issue of reproductive freedoms and the votes of women would be dispositive in Harris's race against Trump.)
Beyond that point, a number of central factors combined to make woke politics central for Democrats, and while I think AOC and the squad helped to foster this, as leading symbols and articulate champions, I think they might be better seen as consequences of a broader shift that was already underway, and that then became catalyzed by several key events and factors, not least of which were Trump's own actions as president.
The impact of these catalysts, the most significant of which was the videotaped murder of George Floyd was primarily on the White, socioeconomically advantaged, "college educated" demographic that comprises the Democratic Party's core support. In particular, the way in which Black Lives Matter was embraced by the same people who had bussed down to the Women's March on January 21, 2017 (or whose daughters had gone) expanded identitarism as a policy framework. BLM posters sprouted in suburban communities, and a lot of people who didn't have much to fear from crime and public disorder on the streets embraced the call to "defund the police." I think that it's around this time that I first began to hear the phrases "virtue signalling" and "luxury beliefs."
The role of discourse on college campuses also seems like a factor, perhaps particularly in the way in which this particular rising generation has remained closely bonded with parents, at least within the "college-educated" professional class. Gender fluidity, at least in its overt expression, is a relatively new phenomenon, but some public consequences, like the socially-mediated requirement to register one's pronouns as part of identifying oneself, or the use of gender-neutral or inclusive terms like "Latinx" and "BIPOC," all flowered quite rapidly in the period after 2016. In a period of relative economic prosperity with no visible foreign war it was probably natural that the impetus of the rebellious spirit on college campuses focused on expanding rights for marginalized groups like LGBTQ+ individuals, along with an increased focus on the ineluctable wrongs of the colonial past. The dominant ideoogy that arose on college campuses, in the way that dominant ideologies do in socially-norming environments, certainly filtered into the mainstream during a period when the person who was president was actually saying the quiet part of rightwing orthodoxy out loud, all the time.
The outcome, it seems to me, is that in the most recent election it never mattered how Harris tried to position herself in the 100 days or so that she was given. The Democratic Party as a whole had become identified with a certain kind of college-educated, economically-advantaged elite that was more focused on the needs of certain groups than on the general economic well-being and pubic safety of the populace as a whole.
Blaming either AOC and other leftwing politicians for this, or laying it at the feet of Democratic centrists seems like a false dichotomy to me, though in strictly instrumental terms it clearly is the political center of the party that is to blame for how the Party's identity has changed so much in the 16 years since Obama was elected. Whether this was a matter of leading the change or reacting to a change within the core demographic of the party's support seems like an open question to me, but it does seem worth observing that in the past the party has had room for a vocal leftwing without adopting policy approaches outside of the mainstream.. Perhaps the real problem is not so much that the party adopted "wokism," but that in the absence of a compelling, coherent message, it allowed itself to be tagged with that label and couldn't find a way to untag itself.
This is the best explanation of this phenomenon I have ever seen. Mounk’s and so many other’s simplistic explanations, all of which pretty much mimic and serve the Right’s purposes, pale in comparison.
The OSS/CIA funding of the Frankfurt School from the 1940s to the 60s (Marcuse) was the real origin of "wokeism", Critical Theory, and neo-marxist "identity politics".
That was part of a wider movement toward postmodern relativism (and critiques of mythic religion and modern rationalism). See my longer comment in a separate subthread.
I will channel my inner Ivan Krastev here (man, that was one of the best podcasts ever! What a brilliant mind, and what a refreshingly novel perspective) and argue that the "2x2 way" of thinking about this problem is in itself an outdated lens.
The 'wokeness' problem of the Democratic Party is the Brahminification of the Democratic Party, as you and other have argued conclusively. It is the fact that an entire 'educated class' has taken over the party: even Seth Moulton's campaign manager resigned when Seth made the obvious point that he didn't want his two young girls compete against (biological) men in sports, protesting "trans discrimination" in typical woke righteousness. Now, does it matter if this guy is "woke moderate" or "woke radical"? My best guess is that he is a moderate, given Seth's politics. But more importantly, it is the wrong lens. What clearly is true is that this ex-campaign manager was a product of the Brahmin class of politics. Probably Ivy educated, or at least Ivy adjacent. Probably white and privileged. Probably never once spoke to the college volleyball players who refuse to play against a biological male as they protest something they consider deeply 'unfair'...
What I would love to see you write about is this interesting dynamic within the Brahmin coalition, as I predict it:
On the one hand...as far as voters go, we will see further erosion of the Dem coalition well beyond the working class (unless Trump does something so insane that the centrifugal forces become centripetal again). On the other hand...as far as Brahmin professionals in institutions go, we are only at the midway point: Most are still under 50 and have risen -in media, in the academies, in corporate America- to a mid-level. They are Associate Professors now - not quite leading the institutions yet (with the occasional Claudine Gay exception). Not quite sitting on that endowed chair yet.
But they have critical mass in those institutions! And that is why your "cocktail party analogy" holds true here: Their professional bubble is intact. Their career path still points 'woke', even as they (may!) realize that the country is abandoning their ship.
I wish I was more optimistic here, but I see this as a pretty devastating dynamic. How do you convince these institutionalized Brahmins to leave the party?
Nice point - a third dimension is the brahmin class versus everyone else, which of course also separates (say) the groups claiming to represent Latinos and most actual Latinos in the country.
Absolutely agree, the prevalence of woke dogma in the under 50s has a critical mass in the institutions and isn't budging. Once they've swallowed and spouted so many lies, how can they turn back? Whoops? Not a lot of historical precedent for that kind of backtracking.
Matt Chilliak was Seth Moulton's campaign manager. He is quite white. He went to the University of Saskatchewan and graduated with honors. All this is from LinkedIn.
It’s really not that hard to look up your best guess reckons. the dudes didn’t go to an ivy league, he went to a university in canada. Anyone parroting that “woke” has come from ivy league universities is parroting right wing talking points and has well and truly drunk Trump’s kool-aid. The pressure comes from LGBT groups and people who support them — the reason why universities do this is because they have a population of young people and have had to adapt to queer issues (including to homosexuality and the lgb parts of the lgbt community) faster than the wider population. They started dealing with these issues a decade ago — yall are just catching up.
Canada is ruled by communists. They don't need an "ivy league" to infiltrate elite or quasi-elite institutions with communist totalitarianism, they already accomplished that goal years ago.
Well, they are abandoning it, Sapphi. Hate to pop your bubble, but reality pops them at times!
If you are interested in understanding the deeper point here, read David Brooks' "How the Ivy League broke America". If you are a woke ideologue, then you probably consider Brooks a man with "right wing talking points". If you are a Persuasion reader and writer of the philosophically liberal mind, then you will know otherwise.
The main responsibility lies with a major subset of woke radicals: institutional wokes, by which I mean institutions dominated by wokeness (eg, large swaths of academia, certain foundations and nonprofits) and influential groups within important institutions (eg, key news outlets, social media, elite professions). Through perceived and actual power and pressure, they moved many major politicians (including most major Democratic primary candidates in 2020, not least Kamala Harris in ways that came back to haunt her in 2024) to at least pay lip service to woke positions and policies.
What’s more, the nature of such positions and policies was often absolutist. For instance, lumping the many clearly legitimate needs and rights of transgenders together with demands regarding youth sports and pre-adulthood medical treatments, for which research and shades of nuance may be necessary. Then there are the language mandates and charges of cultural appropriation that irk large segments of the population.
Many political and corporate woke moderates caved to such pressure and went among for the ride, with Harris being the leading example - again, much to her detriment, despite her efforts to distance herself during the campaign. But they didn’t initiate wokeness, spark its absolutism or fan its flames to nearly the degree that the institutional wokes did.
Black mother with disabled child prosecuted/jailed for truancy by Kamala Harris in California. All ADA/508/504 paperwork, doctors' notes for hospitalization, etc. done as per school requirements.
The elite-left San Fransicko milieu that first put Kamala in power also funded the Jim Jones suicide cult, which was multiculturalist/left. Most of the suicide cult victims were poor and working class blacks. She has been deeply evil for a very long time.
I’m inclined to blame the woke radicals more since they started this whole thing and they made the stakes so high for establishment democrats. The radicals paint anyone who disagrees with them as being white supremacists etc., making it tough for moderates not to buckle.
No doubt the establishment democrats share a huge amount of blame for being so weak but the AOC contingent waged a campaign specifically designed to force the rest of the party to capitulate, and they succeeded.
“The AOC contingent” — you mean the people most invested in both “identity politics” (what we used to call “civil rights”) and socialist economics, in line with Bernie Sanders 2016?
After Hillary took out the 2016 nomination with moderate economics, the only thing she had to attract radical voters was identity politics. Those who didn’t care about that turned to trump. The rest are still on the left because Clinton, Biden, and Harris managed not to alienate them entirely by pushing an agenda of staunch civil rights.
In a world where they never “capitulated to woke”, Biden never won in 2020 and we’d be coming into Trump’s third term now, not his second.
Jimmy Dore exposed AOC for the hypocrite she really is when she caved on demanding public health care be further socialized. AOC is a classic example of the Iron Law of Institutions* (and the long history of Tammany Hall corruption in the Democrat Party).
The Iron Law of Institutions is this: “the people who control institutions care first and foremost about their power within the institution rather than the power of the institution itself. (cont.)
Thus, they would rather the institution ‘fail’ while they remain in power within the institution than for the institution to “succeed” if that requires them to lose power within the institution.”
Anything is possible if enough people in power go along with it. After all, many of the rights we hold dear, such as freedom of speech and right to assemble, can also be found in both the Chinese and Russian constitutions.
The law and constitution are just a words on paper. It's up to individual people to actually enforce it.
> Many MAGA people are staunch constitutionalists
They sure didn't seem to mind Trump breaking the law, which he flagrantly violated many times long before January 6. Multiple violations of the Hatch Act (such as doing his convention speech on the WH grounds), firing five inspectors general for no reason, refusing to send executives to testify to Congress.
It’s not up to individuals to enforce it. It’s up to the government institutions to enforce it and they will. Trumps own SCOTUS has ruled against him time and time again. Republicans would never stand for such a power grab. If you believe so you are wearing blinders.
As I mentioned earlier the January 6 MAGA crowd would be the exception to supporting the constitution (although many believed they were defending it). Your examples of Trumps bad behavior are poor comparisons to him becoming dictator or threatening democracy.
As I said earlier, California is a big threat due to their inability to get the November 5th ballots counted and allowing ballot harvesting and not requiring a photo ID.
The "Summer of Floyd" opened my eyes, and those of my law partner in criminal defense (who is my wife), to the "radical" woke, who will cannibalize their own when one of their number is perceived to have become heterodox in speech or act. While we were never "woke," we were classical "bleeding heart" liberals who'd dedicated our professional lives to the representation of accused individuals, most of them poor, young, male, and Black.
We represented Greg McMichael, who, along with his son, were depicted in the infamous video released in May 2020 of the shooting death of Ahmaud Arbery on a sunny street one afternoon in Brunswick, Georgia. A narrative quickly arose that it was nothing less than a "lynching" in broad daylight, a race-based killing revealing, yet again, that, so the story goes, it is not safe to be Black anywhere in the streets of white America. The truth was far from that.
The criminal defense community, in which we were deeply embedded for 30 years, skews left, often far left, and, of course, Democratic. My liberal leanings, and those of my wife, suited us well in a profession rife with the deleterious effects of racism in criminal justice, or, as the preferred nomenclature has it now, the "criminal legal system," since "justice" is apparently missing from it.
We did not realize when taking on that case that we would become the "near enemy," to be condemned and castigated by our own community of criminal defense lawyers who could not imagine, as if they'd forgotten what they do for a living, how we could represent "those racist people."
So, perhaps it is myopic, or at least a fallacy of using anecdotal evidence to reach a generalization, but the sordid experience in the aftermath of that trial resulted, for us, not only in severed professional ties and lost friendships in our "cancellation," it also propelled us to read widely to understand the development of identitarianism and its encroachment into our profession. (Thank you, Yascha Mounk, for your writings in this area; they helped immensely in our understanding of our own experience.)
The radical woke, we therefore concluded, had the greater effect to push away, to "cancel," and turn off even those people adjacent to them, who, like my wife and me, will still cast our vote with the Democrat, whoever she may be, but who now understand why so many others have rejected the party and have moved right. Trump and Trumpism is a dangerous direction for the country we love, but our own experience has helped us understand it in a way we never could before. We blame the radical woke. Or, perhaps we should thank them for waking us up to places and people like Persuasion, Yascha Mounk, Jonathan Haidt, Jonathan Rausch, and a host of other clear thinkers we did not know before the "Summer of Floyd."
Very sorry to hear you and your wife were caught up in the intellectual chaos and cancellation of "identitarianism." It must have been a shocking, demoralizing experience, but hopefully you will rejoin this effort which needs all the neutral, balanced, respectful voices it can muster. We all have some work to do.
Don't know if it answers your question, but wokeness began as a rejection of Obama-era liberalism, like the Sixties New Left began as a rejection of New Frontier/Great Society liberalism. (And this time there wasn't an obvious Vietnam-sized reason for it.) While both intensified considerably under Nixon and Trump, that's not what started it. Both used "liberal" as a deadly insult (even if the later one tacks on a "neo"). In spite of which plenty of liberals fell for it, because of this weird belief this culture has that the more extreme you are the more principled you are, so yelling "Revolution!" feels more righteous than negotiation and compromise and dealmaking. And of course, both ended up driving the country to the right.
It is deeper than the “extremist-radical” axis: it is a worldview steeped in post-modernism, historical revisionism and presentism to which the college educated have been subscribing to various degrees for decades. Concepts like “privilege” and “intersectionality” are here to stay for a long time: they provide both indulgences and the justification for the woke’s place in society, as well as a mild struggle where the stakes are the lowest. It is the difference between people who deal with symbols and the people who deal with things in a rich society.
Wokeness is the Catholic Holy Office, the Soviet Politburo, in modern form. It is the seizure of an organization by a revolutionary power. Read you some Kissenger & Krugman, and the recent history of Unitarian Universalism. Meet the new boss, same as the old boss.
Anne-Marie Slaughter is a personal friend of Hillary Clinton and one of her closest personal advisor.
A graduate from Oxford University, Harvard University and Princeton University, she served on the board of the Council on Foreign Relations and is currently CEO of the New America Foundation.
In other words, she is a card carrying member of the US Elite.
In an opinion articled published in the Financial Times, here what Anne-Marie Slaughter recently argued:
Title: For business, DEI should be an economic priority
"DEI has become a politicised term. Indeed, some Republican politicians have called Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris a “DEI hire”, implying that she was selected because of her racial identity rather than her talent and experience.
"But if you are a business person, you should read DEI as short for demographic and economic imperative. This is not a fad or a woke conspiracy, but a simple matter of maths and marketing"
"Reading DEI to stand for demographic and economic imperative does not exclude a simultaneous embrace of diversity, equity and inclusion. Indeed, diverse workforces are unlikely to work well together without strategies of equity and inclusion to ensure that everyone gets the training and support they need to succeed and to create the cohesion and productivity that happen when everyone feels they belong"
"A business coalition for DEI should have a simple goal. Your workforce should look like America, at every dimension and level"
He is a smart and talented man. He did a lot of good things while facing an incredibly hostile Congress. He was part of the center-left establishment. But let's remember that it was under the Obama Administration that the transgender bathroom drama started. Why did people in his administration get involved in this transgender bathroom wars? Did he fail to control people he hired?
While I will not fully exonerate some members of the populist wing (AOC had she/her on her Instagram), no one can deny the elite wing of the Democratic Party has enormous responsibility in this mess.
I thought I'd share the final paragraph from my recent Substack post:
"I’d like to finish with a point that is perhaps controversial and unoriginal but needs to be hammered home; it should now be crystal clear that Democrats are steadily alienating male voters – mostly white ones, but increasingly many who are nonwhite. This is dismissed as “misogyny” by many Democrats and there is certainly plenty of that. But when one gender and one race is singled out as the source of all that is evil and nothing that is good in a nation that they themselves were instrumental in building (to say the least), members of that group can become disheartened. No one wants to be a member of a party that considers him the enemy. I must say that I share this feeling (I have never oppressed anyone). For me, no amount of frustration with Democrats would ever make me vote for human beings as despicable as Donald Trump and his brownshirts. But clearly, tens of millions of men -- white, black and brown – overcame whatever distaste for Trump they might have had and did just that."
After a very superficial glance at the comments on here thus far, I'd say I largely agree with what appears to be the consensus view, namely that the trend was initiated by woke radicals, and gradually embraced by the more moderate and/or corporate elements of the Democratic Party.
With that said, I'd like to add another element to this discussion by posing the following question: Why did the Democrats commit such a gross miscalculation in assessing the degree of support "being woke" would garner them? Throughout the course of the woke movement, there has been a significant silent majority who have never wholly embraced its tenets. Academics have often embraced, along with other radicals, views that are, by definition "fringe". How in the minds of Democrats, did that ever add up to a winning election formula?
This leads me to a second question, which is: What is it about wokeness that so many are afraid to stand up to? And why apparently, does it take radical right wing populists like Donald Trump, to suddenly make it "safe" to speak out against the neo religious woke agenda? What's frightening is what Trump and others on the far right offer is hardly an appealing alternative; the replacement of leftist identitarian madness with far right leaning white identitarian madness. And although Trump's support was significantly multiethnic, there is no denying his appeal to far right, often white, voters.
Democrats will continue to hang their hats and political fortunes on identitarian policies and the larger culture war at their own peril. As Sam Harris recently opined "Identity politics is dead."
As a final thought, I'd like to very briefly draw attention to, what I believe, is one of the major factors that has brought us to this moment. At a very high level, I would point to the rise of neoliberalism in many western liberal democracies. Simply put, through the dismantling of the welfare state, tax policies that favour the rich, corporate welfare, union busting, free trade, and continued deregulation of the economy, the middle class has been disappearing at an alarming rate, with the gap between rich and poor, and an affordability crisis, at levels never before seen. This led to significant disillusionment with the liberal project among many voters, who no longer believe that liberalism, or liberal governments work for them. This has further led to the rise of radical left wing populism (wokeness), and radical right wing populism (MAGA). Not to mention the few of us in the middle who cling furiously to the promise of a truly liberal society. Sadly, what both these extremes fail to understand is that liberalism was never the problem - it was the misapplication of liberalism by myopic politicians on both sides of the political isle more interested in their own ambitions than following through on their promises to everyday people.
If the Democrats really want to become relevant again, they must have the courage to drop out of the culture wars, and adopt common sense positions that are in the best interests of everyday people. It is possible to teach our children about the horrific history of slavery without teaching that being white makes you irredeemably racist. And this applies to just about every aspect of the woke position - you don't need to promote false narratives about gender, race, or any other topic to create a more just world. You don't need to invert the power structure and replace it with a new one that believes that the solution to past discrimination is present discrimination. Finally, just stop holding on to the insane belief that the path to freedom lies in the embrace of authoritarian populism, and discarding the liberal values and principles that create the space for freedom, allowing each of us to freely express these ideas without fear of reprisal.
It's mostly the fault of academia for becoming an ever-narrowing echo chamber, but I also blame the formerly independent-minded and rebellious professional-class Gen Xers and elder millennials who left their intellect and creativity behind and have fallen into a scoldy (tsk tsk) social justice quietism. This cohort would be the moderates, or those who could openly express ambivalence toward questionable ideas. But instead they virtue signal and look inward. I think they are subject to social pressures, but I also think that there is something happening psychically to this cohort. Here's what I've seen:
I've been in academia since I stepped onto a small liberal arts campus in 1994, and after a BA in English, an MFA in poetry, and a PhD in American literature, I ended up in the college classroom, teaching millennials at first and now Gen Z (God help me). This is all to say that I have seen "identitarianism" (my preferred term) grow from the roots on up, from the admittedly exhilarating seminar discussions of Foucault and bell hooks and Judith Butler in 1996 to the watered-down versions of these authors' ideas that circulate today in bite-sized social media posts. I find it all so insufferable, though I've been able to "code-switch" (if I can use this term) when I walk on campus. It's a survival mechanism that allows me to suffer without anyone noticing. But I remain independent in my private life, not getting too upset at the victories, small and large, of these warring tribes. I'll just say that I'm happy that Harris and the democrats lost, though I'm not that elated or anything.
What I have noticed is that many of my old college friends (Gen Xers, all of them) have over the past five or six years adopted the language of the academy. One is a librarian, there are a couple grade school teachers, another tends a small farm in Nebraska and raises kids, another runs a test prep center, another works at a grocery store in Idaho, there are a couple yoga teachers, a couple social workers, several others who work at non-profits, and a few corporate types. What they all have in common is that they were once fun-loving, transgressive self-described liberals who enthusiastically voted for Obama in 2008. But in the end they weren't too overtly political.
Now in everyday conversation they are throwing around terms like "white privilege," "patriarchy," "heteronormativity," "marginalized peoples," etc. I don't talk to these friends more than once or twice a year, if that, and so it's so jarring to see them casually talk like this while remembering how much fun we used to have. I don't know if it's a deeply felt conversion or mere virtue signaling, but this shift has made me think about what's happened to this cohort (mostly white children of professional class boomers, now entering middle age).
I can go down the list of the people I mentioned above:
The organic grocery store worker in Idaho was an English major and remained a reader after college. She was a big fan of Raymond Carver, Richard Ford, among others. In 2018 she publicly said she was never going to read another white man again and still claims that this was the best decision she ever made.
One of the yoga teachers runs a "white accountability" group in her suburb (she married someone who works in finance who was a Republican until Trump). She was one of the most apolitical in our friend group, perhaps even normie (not "alternative").
One of the social workers (perhaps woke before the term existed, so the following is not surprising) kept going on about how she's finally understanding her "internalized white supremacy" while at a backyard bbq a couple years ago, but that she has "a lot of work to do."
One of the school teachers said he thinks the 1619 Project doesn't go far enough (at the same bbq).
The librarian (a guy) was into punk and other edgy music and also anarchism, and attended the "Battle for Seattle" WTO protest in 1999. I see him about once a year, and there are always references to "privilege," "cis," "patriarchy," and "the things we men have put women through over the years." We recently had a conversation about 80s edgelord musician Steve Albini, whom we both liked, and he kept going on about how admirable it was for Steve Albini in later years to acknowledge his white privilege and the harms his band name ("Big Black") inflicted on the marginalized. I understand his point, but it's strange to hear this coming from the former edgy punk with a rapier wit.
Another guy who works as a "creative" in Brooklyn: I told him I was excited to see Morrissey in concert a couple weeks ago, and he went on to tell me how problematic it was that I was supporting such a person. (We were both big Smiths fans back in the day.)
The farmer raising her kids in Nebraska: We bonded in college because we were both raised on the wrong side of the tracks by uneducated single mothers. We were comrades who understood each other in a sea of wealthy classmates. The only difference was that she was biracial, her father Scandinavian and her mother Chinese. Race was never a huge part of our friendship; it was just a fact. She took Chinese in college and did study abroad in China to connect with her roots. We talked about cultural differences between her extended family and mine. But in 2021, she started saying things like, "I finally understand, that as a racialized being, that I am marginalized," albeit with a sense of hesitancy as if she was trying out an idea. She's still peppering conversation with language like this. Up until a few years ago, she was always loud, brash, and independent, so this inward-looking tone shift is unsettling. I don't think she sees me as comrade now as she did in college.
Many others in my college cohort that I didn't mention above similarly have shifted their tone. I think it began as #Resistance clamoring about Trump and has now defused into a quietism that sees whiteness and masculinity as the problem to be stewed over. I recently scanned many of these peoples' Facebook pages and see many recent posts blaming white women for the election results, with two of them posting that map titled "if only non-college educated whites voted," showing a sea of red, as if to say, "these dumb whites created this mess."
I'm sure that if many of the people I reference above were to read this, they would be able to make a reasonable argument for their shift in thinking, for their "awakening" to a new set of ideas. They would probably see me as someone who just isn't getting it yet. (I find this ironic, because I was reading the source texts back in the 90s! Foucault, Butler, Angela Davis, etc.--I was stepped in it. But I moved past them to incorporate other points of view. Most of my college friends weren’t reading critical theory back then; they were just finishing their degrees.)
So, I would say that there is something going on inside the collective mind of this big cohort that is keeping them from resting easy in moderation, this cohort being the educated professional elder millennials and Gen Xers. I want to say that there is some kind of spiritual malaise or emptiness that has stifled their life force. I mean, they all seem tired and sad. Perhaps it's the fatigue of raising kids or working non-fulfilling jobs or just getting old. But still, as I talk to them, it seems that they're now just waiting for the barbarians to bust through the gate. They don't seem to have a positive vision of the future. They seem to be circling the wagons around their children, hunkering down in their blue cities. In any case, it seems that they've fallen into a tense quietism, a state that explains why they haven't shown any signs of revolt after Trump's reelection.
Very well put. Those most subject to social pressures, by my account, are the ones who helped launch fringe ideas into social currency.
For gen x, it was much easier to resist groupthink and censorship when it was coming from the right. Once it came from the left, it broke their brains and circumvented their fiercely independent ethos.
I would say that both the woke moderates and the woke radicals are to blame for the general air of superiority and condescension. I was a solid Democrat voter of the NPR-listening variety (voted for Clinton, Nader, Kerry, Obama, Clinton, Biden, Harris) but got off the train when my faculty-lounge-friends (literally, I'm an English professor) told me that I was participating in "white supremacy." When ordinary acts of critical thinking got strange labels, I was done. I'm now a radical centrist, subscribing to periodicals like Persuasion (center left) and The Dispatch (center right). I saw the Democratic party go along with the faculty-lounge weirdness. My progressive friends got judgey and condescending about anyone who didn't see the world through their very narrow window. I still voted for Harris (not wanting Trump's authoritarian populism) but I was deeply annoyed that I didn't have a better choice. My analysis is that it started with woke radicals but then the moderates didn't have the backbone to resist. I blame them both.
"It started with woke radicals but then the moderates didn't have the backbone to resist." Let's see whether someone can beat that one-sentence summary.
As this nails apportioning blame, the more interesting questions are why and how. A major culprit is staffing. If a moderate pol staffs her office with radicals, that’s going o influence her policy and presentation. What I don’t understand is why this is so pervasive. For all his many, many faults, Trump works hard to hire and appoint people who will carry out his agenda. Is it just laziness that prevents dems from doing the same? A few hypotheses:
- It’s easier to have a career in the democratic party by playing coalition politics than by building popular support that transcends party (the kind that Obama and Trump built). staffing is an instrument of managing the coalition.
- The left is so disconnected from what non-elites want, that there is no pipeline of young staffers who didn’t get incubated in wokeness in academia.
- Laziness. It’s much easier to staff from an established network and set of universities than do the hard work of recruiting people with more diverse views
- Being a staffer pays so poorly that only the rich can afford to do it, which limits the pool to those coming from elite universities. Trump Republicans sidestep this because Trump’s graft makes entering republican politics a better long-term financial bet.
It is worth mentioning the staffers are the reason I do not feel hopeful for the Democratic Party, and the reason why I do not see myself ever going back to it. They are the future of the party and extreme progressive philosophy is their religion. Religion is not easily changed or overcome. The olds will phase out.. and my biggest fear is that they will be in charge of the country. I am not that old yet, and my child does not get another cold. An absolute shift was needed and I voted accordingly. Every time I hear the usual suspects critiquing Trump’s picks or potential policies, many of us DO NOT CARE because after my initial pause and concern I keep going back to the most extreme beliefs of the party and then I breathe easier. Seems like we all picked our poison. I was done with the current poison which I helped pick 4 years ago. No more until they become normal… and even then my anger and sense for betrayal does not let me see beyond what is happening right now.
*another country
Personnel is policy, and yes it's a pipeline issue of woke trust fund kids.
Intensely toxic psychological violence and terror (cancel culture, groupthink, lies, gaslighting) is a social cancer that has almost completely consumed any sanity that existed on the "left".
It's funny that you still feel the need to insult Trump when the topic has nothing to do with him?
You people lost exactly because of this type of stupidity, that you just can't ALL stop doing.
I'm not anti-Trump, but there is a lot of evidence that "graft" is a staff pipeline in both parties. See Rufo's reports on immigration NGOs for example. Democrat hysteria about stupid shit like Project 2025 actually obscures real corruption on the "right". That might be semi-intentional by the globalist puppet masters that control the political parties.
This really hits the “nail” on the head. The pervasiveness of wokeness started in elite schools seeking to undo all societal wrongs. That attempted good deed has backfired radically, pun attended.
Kamala/Biden were examples of 'moderates' who didn't have the backbone to resist
Except for the fact that based on voting record Kamala was THE most radical Senator in the Dem Senate when she served.
You guys can't even spot the extremists. Maybe that could be the problem. Blinders.
See Freddie DeBoer's book "How Elites Ate the Social Justice Movement", or John McWhorter's "WOKE RACISM".
https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/How-Elites-Ate-the-Social-Justice-Movement/Fredrik-deBoer/9781668016022
NYT's "review" of DeBoer's book is classic, reactionary bullshit by the professional-managerial class attempting to cover up their complicity in the problem.
How many folks know that the ever loathsome Dylan Mulvaney visited the White House? Rather few, I would guess. However, lots of folks took heed of Trump's campaign ads.
Honestly - it was Hilary flailing to beat Bernie in 2016. Bernie pushed a classical Marx class-based message and she recognized how big a threat that was to her corporate brand. Voila. The grand push into Woke. Thank you Hilary. We owe you so much.
If you can’t beat them, join them — I think that’s the essence of the matter.
I’m trying to figure out how much the virtual environment of 2020 helped contribute to that, because online movements tend to be much more radical and divorced from reality than movements that start on the ground.
Your observation that there is a divorce from reality is a crucial insight. (postmodernism is premised on that divorce, and the totalitarian "left" has most fully embraced it).
https://gordonhahn.com/2021/04/29/the-new-american-communo-fascism-and-its-postmodernist-roots/
Agreed.
To push the reasoning even further: The moderates could not push back on the woke radicals because they both shared a common goal of equality. They just wanted different paths to get there. But 60 years of increased social programs, education by moderates failed to create the equality that moderates desired.
Then the woke radicals said if you do not join us in a maximalist push for immediate equality, you are all racists, sexists, colonialists, and transphobes. The moderates had no response and could not stand to be called bad names in public, so they caved in and pretended to be woke.
The fundamental problem is that equality is impossible to achieve. Every ideology eventually hits the hard wall of reality. The Left did around 2010, so they had to choose between giving up in their strongly held beliefs or rejecting reality. The woke represent the rejection of reality.
For those who are interested, I write more here (and I have an entire series of articles on the Origins of the Woke coming out within the next few weeks):
https://frompovertytoprogress.substack.com/p/why-achieving-equality-is-an-impossible
https://frompovertytoprogress.substack.com/p/the-left-has-hit-a-historical-dead
https://frompovertytoprogress.substack.com/p/the-rebirth-of-the-totalitarian-left
I guess my first questions are what do you mean by "woke", what do you mean by "radical" and then what do you mean by "woke radical"?
I do appreciate you distinguishing between old fashioned economic leftists (which would be me) and the identity politics leftists.
A primary Kamala booster (apex parasite) is a lobbyist for a corrupt payday lender. The booster also advocates for "woke" racial segregation.
https://www.public.news/p/dei-consultant-caught-in-payday-lending
www. public. news /p/dei-consultant-caught-in-payday-lending
Define "woke"? No problem:
https://twitter.com/wesyang/status/1712505992540274708
twitter. com /wesyang/status/1712505992540274708
excerpt:
... white leftist savior was actually a homosexual groomer using drugs to induce a troubled 15-year old black boy into sexual liaisons who was then murdered by the kid he was grooming after attempting to blackmail him with homemade porn ...
WOKE = RACE GRIFTERS
Not just the backbone, although that is important, but a good alternative strategy.
leftist reformers, typically the people with alternative strategies, are almost always stabbed in the back by other leftists (sociopaths/psychopaths).
the classic example: Orwell's Homage to Catalonia. 1930s, spanish civil war.
Same. Traditional Dem voter here. Woke is unAmerican and wrong and morally corrupt. And pushed with such sneering arrogance by sanctimonious faculty everywhere. Universities are ground zero for this disease. Start the cure there.
Eliminating Department of Education will be a good start. The only way to end Wokeness is to starve it financially.
I’m a retired and agree with closing the DOE. We already have State, county and local boards. DOE is an expensive nuisance.
My professional org the American Academy of Pediatrics has destroyed itself on trans ideology. I’m disgusted and ashamed. And destroyed its credibility of core issues like vaccines.
Sadly, Democrats moderates didn’t flush this sewage from their own sewers. They let it back up. Now the entire city stinks of this backed up shit in every institution: corporations, schools, the arts, media, even our sports leagues. So, the sanitation workers of The Right show up to do the nasty work of it. It takes a certain sort of sanitation worker to climb down into these sewers to blast this stuff out. That’s Trump. Democrats should have done it themselves.
Democrats have been stabbing reformers in the back for a long time. Tammany Hall, etc.
Except Republicans’ sewers are much worse—Bush/Cheney. Trump talked a good game but Cheney was still in House leadership in January 2021.
Come on. Harris embraced Cheney and Bush. I am no fan of those two though I stupidly thought at the time they were doing the right thing to save this country from terrorism. But now the democrat party is the war, surveillance and we will control you party. At some point you have to wake up.
Biden brought us peace and prosperity!! We aren’t in any wars! Kamala attempted to use Cheney to get Republican votes, she didn’t embrace any of the asinine Cheney policies. Republicans in Congress supported Cheney warmongering as late as January 2021 which means I will never vote for Republicans anytime soon!
Well said, Susan!! I’m also a professor and a strong moderate. Being judged for not being radical enough really pissed me off and pushed me to the center. I still identify as a Democrat but I voted third party this year. Harris has endorsed too many crazy left wing stuff in the past, and I wasn’t voting for Trump.
Authoritarian populism? Sounds like an oxymoron. Isn't it what the Dems mean when they talk about Democracy? Will of the people? How can you call it authoritarian? Just because Trump wants to move away from the all progress-choking bureaucracy, you want to call him authoritarian? Are you really an English professor?
most 3rd world revolutionaries. learn some history.
digital.csic.es/bitstream/10261/28362/1/BolivarPen.pdf
Vd. sabe que yo he mandado veinte años y de ellos no he sacado más que pocos resultados ciertos:
[] 1º) La [latin] América es ingobernable para nosotros.
[] 2º) El que sirve una revolución ara en el mar.
[] 3º) La única cosa que se puede hacer en [latin] América es emigrar.
cont.
[--->] 4º) Este país caerá infaliblemente en manos de la multitud desenfrenada, para después pasar a tiranuelos casi imperceptibles, de to dos colores y razas.
Curious juxtaposition of comment about "authoritarian populism" as reason to vote for Dem ticket, while recognizing lockstep inclinations of contemporary Dems.
Your pithy summary is excellent, Susan. My question is "when did it start?" My belief is long before "woke" was born, back in the mid-1980s. But does that make sense to you?
It depends upon what you mean by “it.”
Ideologies of the Left started in the French Revolution in the 1790s, but Leftist ideology did not really have a big impact on the USA until the late 1960s. Much of the politics of the Baby boomer Left during that era bears striking resemblance to Woke ideology.
The latest iteration seems to have started around 2010.
CIA and "controlled opposition" on the "left"
https://attackthesystem.com/2021/12/06/curtis-yarvin-mencius-moldbug-on-tucker-carlson-today-09-08-21/
Yes I was going to say something to the effect that we can’t quite pin it on a group, but on a dynamic: I think the problem is in the energy between these groups, in how the issues were volleyed, and how the energy accumulated with each hit and was returned and amplified in kind.
same; Ross Perot (I was young), Clinton, Bush 2, Gore, Obama, Obama, Hilary, Biden
I wrote-in Trump 2 - voted for Najiv Bukele, the Palestinian-born President of El Salvador who jailed 70,000 hardcore, face-tattooed gangsters.
Our Woke friends have stopped calling.
Really? Wrote in a foreigner who really is ruling Salvador with an iron fist because...? Trump's authoritarianism? You know that he already was a president once before.
When do you expect to apologize to the rest of us clearer-headed citizens for what you have done to us?
Thank you Susan, you have covered most of what I would say. We must be twins separated at birth (I shifted away from engineering to get a secondary teaching credential in English :)).
I agree with many of the commenters here. However, I'd like to give a special shout-out to academia and mainstream media, two institutions where I once worked, as well as Hollywood and NGOs like the ACLU, Planned Parenthood, and the Southern Poverty Law Center, all of which have abandoned their primary missions.
I was once an NPR-listening, NYT-reading, Unitarian church "liberal." Now, I look at each of these places and wonder how they justify their biases. My "lived experience" of having mixed race children enables me to see the destructiveness of calling all white people "racist" while insisting things like being on time or writing well are signs of white supremacy (Yes, real comments said to me at a Unitarian Church).
I didn't vote for either Trump or Harris (left that part blank), but I completely understand why he won. The American cultural elite drank the kool-aid the far left is selling, and now they too are part of the problem. Until those places become more diverse in thought, the divisions will remain.
Very similar experience to yours. Also a former Unitarian (30 years), NPR listener and NYT subscriber. I still get the NYT, but consume it now with a critical eye. I did vote for Harris, because not voting was not an option since in my view that would have helped Trump.
If you really believe in the One God, you must know that Unitarian Church isn't a Bible-based church. Why waste your time on "pretend" faith? This is fascinating to me-the length to which people are willing to go to pretend and virtue signal.
Religion and faith are not the same thing. Religion can play a useful role in society without requiring belief in a God. Look up the history of the Ethical Culture movement for more insight into this.
Ditto and I wrote someone in for president. But I would have voted Harris if I were in a swing state. I breathed both a sigh of relief and of angst when Trump won.
Bret Stephens, the NYT's smartest, said before the election that "A Trump win makes me nauseous. A Harris win makes me scared."
Dear Yascha,
Free reader here. My instinct is that no apportioning of blame would make sense of the rise of Democratic wokeness that did not take account of social media. Wokeness is, whatever else it is, a moralizing tendency, and it could never have gained traction with significant numbers of people without a sphere in which moralizing can have its efficacy concentrated to a high degree.
A close relative of mine was what we would now call 'woke' before any of these issues came into wide circulation in the culture. They were espousing identitarian positions in 2006 or 2007, without any significant influence of social media, and it was obvious to me that they were getting it from their undergraduate university classes in cultural studies, postcolonial studies, etc. So that's real: A younger person educated into wokeness via the faculty lounge. Yet even so, that this relative of mine was the vanguard of a powerful force in the culture arriving 5-10 years later could not, I think, have been predicted, because those courses they were taking and their basic political thrust had been being offered for at least a couple of decades at that point (Spivak and Bhabha and Foucault and so fourth).
In the present context, my hunch is that the 'moderate/radical' distinction starts to break down, because--thanks to social media--we are all on campus now. I think both people who thought of themselves as radical and people who thought of themselves as moderate got caught up in wokeness in more or less equal proportions because of the psychological forces of moralism, basically fear of not appearing to grasp the morally obvious in front of an agitated crowd of one's peers. 'Moral clarity', whether in an identitarian guise or some other, is neither moderate nor radical if it is just equivalent to 'not being evil'.
So faculty lounge politics (in certain departments) is perhaps a smouldering ember, but Twitter et al. is the combustible fuel source.
In a way, I think the more revealing question might be: Who are the people in the Democratic party who staunchly and consistently did *not* embrace wokeness, and how are they different from everyone else?
Good point and great question!
Perhaps those of us who were not in academia and were too old to have been educated after the radical takeover of academia began in the 1980s were less likely to embrace wokeness. Our academic peers were, I am guessing, too cowed to resist.
For what it's worth, I think 'academia' is too simple. My undergraduate education, in a 'Great Books' program with a second major in philosophy during 2005-2010, was totally free of pre-woke ideas. It was really something encountering for the first time, in this relative of mine, someone who insisted both that there was no such thing as truth and that that was somehow liberatory of oppressed people of colour everywhere!
CIA-funded Frankfurt School Marxists/Neo-Marxists were allowed to infect academia and 1960s counterculture with their ideological pathology. That is the perfect example of the merger of the corporate-state with neo-communism that "woke" was intended to establish (see Marcuse).
Here is an example of that: a liberal, black DEI administrator and reformer was subject to vicious psychological and organizational bullying/terrorism for daring to critique "woke" crap. https://www.newsweek.com/dei-college-director-fired-not-being-right-kind-black-person-1813481
As an independent, I always leaned left. Now I’m thinking of voting in a Republican primary. I just don’t think I can make a difference in the left’s take. I find woke people rather silly, especially in their superciliousness (I think so much about woke is, er, not smart). Even Hillary could go on too long about identity.
I’m not sure I would have believed it was occurring if I weren’t on Twitter.
Democrat Party reformers have always gotten stabbed in the back. Tammany Hall. Bernie is the most recent in a long line of examples. Clyburn, a corrupt, black southern elite Democrat, led the backstabbing, a perfect example of race grifting and corruption.
To answer your question: this frustrated but consistently voting Democrat stayed off of most social media starting in 2018.
It has been interesting watching what happened in the party since then.
As a Republican, I guess I can be neutral. I would blame the radicals, but more fundamentally I blame the primary system, the same system that put a lunatic at the head of my party. The crackpots aren't as large a fraction of the Democratic Party, but they are a rich, articulate and deeply committed group, who made it very hard to get nominated without being at least a little woke. I don't think Harris has any deep woke convictions, but what choice did she have in California politics, or in the 2020 presidential primary? Even as unwoke a politician as Biden thought he had to exclude the vast majority of the population - everyone who was not a black woman - from being chosen for the Vice Presidency and the Supreme Court.
The primary system is indeed a big source of the problem - both for Democrats and for Republicans, as you rightly note.
The primary system works as long as we show up to vote. For unknown reasons, a large number of general election voters won't pick a party and vote for the moderate (probably) candidate for that party in the primary system. That leaves a vacuum for the extreme candidates to win primaries in both parties.
I think both parties are corrupt tools of oligarchs, and refuse to register with either one on principle. Would be happy to vote for a major-party moderate now and then, but my state has closed primaries.
The Democrats who control my state could open them up, but I guess they were too busy ranting about ‘democracy’ to actually implement it.
primaries are controlled by the corrupt donor classes, as is everything else.
parasites flourish in social systems that are dis-integrating (fragile to disruption).
Not sure if it addresses the original question but lack of primaries is insulting & manipulative to all voters, especially third party voters. It seems that voters rarely get more than the lesser of x choices*. A child understands when you only present them w options of your choosing. Perhaps there is some degree of resentment, anger, apathy, &/or ... that carries over to less obvious beliefs & behaviors?
* off note, interesting that most state ranked choice (ie more choices) ballot initiatives failed.
Because "woke" is an umbrella term and multi-dimensional its entry into the mainstream of Democratic Party politics is probably overdetermined, in my view, especially if I think of the term as mainly signifying a focus on identity rather than policy more generally as the main marker of "woke" politics.
In this analysis, the seeds really lie in the 2016 conflict between Sanders and Clinton. Although that election pre-dates the rise of "wokism" as the sort of thing that now makes it a central topic of discourse, the subtext of that primary race was very much inflected with identitarian politics. Sanders constituency was primarily younger and male, and he specifically eschewed identity politics in favor of a focus on class and a redistributive economic message. Clinton ran as a continuation of the Obama administration, and her identity as a woman was central to her campaign, as was the imprimatur Obama had given her. The message was like "OK, we elected a Black man president, now it's time to break the highest glass ceiling and elect a White woman." This subtext came out in the primary season in attacks on Sanders for his diffidence on race and the macho element within the "Bernie Bro's" element of his supporters.
For me, that was really the beginning of identity superseding policy as the cornerstone of Democratic Party strategy, with gender the obvious leading edge (which continued into 2024 with the Democrats idea that the issue of reproductive freedoms and the votes of women would be dispositive in Harris's race against Trump.)
Beyond that point, a number of central factors combined to make woke politics central for Democrats, and while I think AOC and the squad helped to foster this, as leading symbols and articulate champions, I think they might be better seen as consequences of a broader shift that was already underway, and that then became catalyzed by several key events and factors, not least of which were Trump's own actions as president.
The impact of these catalysts, the most significant of which was the videotaped murder of George Floyd was primarily on the White, socioeconomically advantaged, "college educated" demographic that comprises the Democratic Party's core support. In particular, the way in which Black Lives Matter was embraced by the same people who had bussed down to the Women's March on January 21, 2017 (or whose daughters had gone) expanded identitarism as a policy framework. BLM posters sprouted in suburban communities, and a lot of people who didn't have much to fear from crime and public disorder on the streets embraced the call to "defund the police." I think that it's around this time that I first began to hear the phrases "virtue signalling" and "luxury beliefs."
The role of discourse on college campuses also seems like a factor, perhaps particularly in the way in which this particular rising generation has remained closely bonded with parents, at least within the "college-educated" professional class. Gender fluidity, at least in its overt expression, is a relatively new phenomenon, but some public consequences, like the socially-mediated requirement to register one's pronouns as part of identifying oneself, or the use of gender-neutral or inclusive terms like "Latinx" and "BIPOC," all flowered quite rapidly in the period after 2016. In a period of relative economic prosperity with no visible foreign war it was probably natural that the impetus of the rebellious spirit on college campuses focused on expanding rights for marginalized groups like LGBTQ+ individuals, along with an increased focus on the ineluctable wrongs of the colonial past. The dominant ideoogy that arose on college campuses, in the way that dominant ideologies do in socially-norming environments, certainly filtered into the mainstream during a period when the person who was president was actually saying the quiet part of rightwing orthodoxy out loud, all the time.
The outcome, it seems to me, is that in the most recent election it never mattered how Harris tried to position herself in the 100 days or so that she was given. The Democratic Party as a whole had become identified with a certain kind of college-educated, economically-advantaged elite that was more focused on the needs of certain groups than on the general economic well-being and pubic safety of the populace as a whole.
Blaming either AOC and other leftwing politicians for this, or laying it at the feet of Democratic centrists seems like a false dichotomy to me, though in strictly instrumental terms it clearly is the political center of the party that is to blame for how the Party's identity has changed so much in the 16 years since Obama was elected. Whether this was a matter of leading the change or reacting to a change within the core demographic of the party's support seems like an open question to me, but it does seem worth observing that in the past the party has had room for a vocal leftwing without adopting policy approaches outside of the mainstream.. Perhaps the real problem is not so much that the party adopted "wokism," but that in the absence of a compelling, coherent message, it allowed itself to be tagged with that label and couldn't find a way to untag itself.
This is the best explanation of this phenomenon I have ever seen. Mounk’s and so many other’s simplistic explanations, all of which pretty much mimic and serve the Right’s purposes, pale in comparison.
The OSS/CIA funding of the Frankfurt School from the 1940s to the 60s (Marcuse) was the real origin of "wokeism", Critical Theory, and neo-marxist "identity politics".
That was part of a wider movement toward postmodern relativism (and critiques of mythic religion and modern rationalism). See my longer comment in a separate subthread.
Good morning Yascha!
I will channel my inner Ivan Krastev here (man, that was one of the best podcasts ever! What a brilliant mind, and what a refreshingly novel perspective) and argue that the "2x2 way" of thinking about this problem is in itself an outdated lens.
The 'wokeness' problem of the Democratic Party is the Brahminification of the Democratic Party, as you and other have argued conclusively. It is the fact that an entire 'educated class' has taken over the party: even Seth Moulton's campaign manager resigned when Seth made the obvious point that he didn't want his two young girls compete against (biological) men in sports, protesting "trans discrimination" in typical woke righteousness. Now, does it matter if this guy is "woke moderate" or "woke radical"? My best guess is that he is a moderate, given Seth's politics. But more importantly, it is the wrong lens. What clearly is true is that this ex-campaign manager was a product of the Brahmin class of politics. Probably Ivy educated, or at least Ivy adjacent. Probably white and privileged. Probably never once spoke to the college volleyball players who refuse to play against a biological male as they protest something they consider deeply 'unfair'...
What I would love to see you write about is this interesting dynamic within the Brahmin coalition, as I predict it:
On the one hand...as far as voters go, we will see further erosion of the Dem coalition well beyond the working class (unless Trump does something so insane that the centrifugal forces become centripetal again). On the other hand...as far as Brahmin professionals in institutions go, we are only at the midway point: Most are still under 50 and have risen -in media, in the academies, in corporate America- to a mid-level. They are Associate Professors now - not quite leading the institutions yet (with the occasional Claudine Gay exception). Not quite sitting on that endowed chair yet.
But they have critical mass in those institutions! And that is why your "cocktail party analogy" holds true here: Their professional bubble is intact. Their career path still points 'woke', even as they (may!) realize that the country is abandoning their ship.
I wish I was more optimistic here, but I see this as a pretty devastating dynamic. How do you convince these institutionalized Brahmins to leave the party?
Nice point - a third dimension is the brahmin class versus everyone else, which of course also separates (say) the groups claiming to represent Latinos and most actual Latinos in the country.
Absolutely agree, the prevalence of woke dogma in the under 50s has a critical mass in the institutions and isn't budging. Once they've swallowed and spouted so many lies, how can they turn back? Whoops? Not a lot of historical precedent for that kind of backtracking.
What “lies”?
Matt Chilliak was Seth Moulton's campaign manager. He is quite white. He went to the University of Saskatchewan and graduated with honors. All this is from LinkedIn.
Brahmins = RACE GRIFTERS (McWhorter)
Also see: How Elites Ate the Social Justice Movement , Fredrik deBoer
It’s really not that hard to look up your best guess reckons. the dudes didn’t go to an ivy league, he went to a university in canada. Anyone parroting that “woke” has come from ivy league universities is parroting right wing talking points and has well and truly drunk Trump’s kool-aid. The pressure comes from LGBT groups and people who support them — the reason why universities do this is because they have a population of young people and have had to adapt to queer issues (including to homosexuality and the lgb parts of the lgbt community) faster than the wider population. They started dealing with these issues a decade ago — yall are just catching up.
Canada is ruled by communists. They don't need an "ivy league" to infiltrate elite or quasi-elite institutions with communist totalitarianism, they already accomplished that goal years ago.
Well, they are abandoning it, Sapphi. Hate to pop your bubble, but reality pops them at times!
If you are interested in understanding the deeper point here, read David Brooks' "How the Ivy League broke America". If you are a woke ideologue, then you probably consider Brooks a man with "right wing talking points". If you are a Persuasion reader and writer of the philosophically liberal mind, then you will know otherwise.
The main responsibility lies with a major subset of woke radicals: institutional wokes, by which I mean institutions dominated by wokeness (eg, large swaths of academia, certain foundations and nonprofits) and influential groups within important institutions (eg, key news outlets, social media, elite professions). Through perceived and actual power and pressure, they moved many major politicians (including most major Democratic primary candidates in 2020, not least Kamala Harris in ways that came back to haunt her in 2024) to at least pay lip service to woke positions and policies.
What’s more, the nature of such positions and policies was often absolutist. For instance, lumping the many clearly legitimate needs and rights of transgenders together with demands regarding youth sports and pre-adulthood medical treatments, for which research and shades of nuance may be necessary. Then there are the language mandates and charges of cultural appropriation that irk large segments of the population.
Many political and corporate woke moderates caved to such pressure and went among for the ride, with Harris being the leading example - again, much to her detriment, despite her efforts to distance herself during the campaign. But they didn’t initiate wokeness, spark its absolutism or fan its flames to nearly the degree that the institutional wokes did.
Nice point.
Thanks.
Black mother with disabled child prosecuted/jailed for truancy by Kamala Harris in California. All ADA/508/504 paperwork, doctors' notes for hospitalization, etc. done as per school requirements.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H2wthHcQHCg
www. youtube. com /watch?v=H2wthHcQHCg
The elite-left San Fransicko milieu that first put Kamala in power also funded the Jim Jones suicide cult, which was multiculturalist/left. Most of the suicide cult victims were poor and working class blacks. She has been deeply evil for a very long time.
I’m inclined to blame the woke radicals more since they started this whole thing and they made the stakes so high for establishment democrats. The radicals paint anyone who disagrees with them as being white supremacists etc., making it tough for moderates not to buckle.
No doubt the establishment democrats share a huge amount of blame for being so weak but the AOC contingent waged a campaign specifically designed to force the rest of the party to capitulate, and they succeeded.
“The AOC contingent” — you mean the people most invested in both “identity politics” (what we used to call “civil rights”) and socialist economics, in line with Bernie Sanders 2016?
After Hillary took out the 2016 nomination with moderate economics, the only thing she had to attract radical voters was identity politics. Those who didn’t care about that turned to trump. The rest are still on the left because Clinton, Biden, and Harris managed not to alienate them entirely by pushing an agenda of staunch civil rights.
In a world where they never “capitulated to woke”, Biden never won in 2020 and we’d be coming into Trump’s third term now, not his second.
Jimmy Dore exposed AOC for the hypocrite she really is when she caved on demanding public health care be further socialized. AOC is a classic example of the Iron Law of Institutions* (and the long history of Tammany Hall corruption in the Democrat Party).
excerpt:
The Iron Law of Institutions is this: “the people who control institutions care first and foremost about their power within the institution rather than the power of the institution itself. (cont.)
Thus, they would rather the institution ‘fail’ while they remain in power within the institution than for the institution to “succeed” if that requires them to lose power within the institution.”
https://medium.com/@jesse.singal/the-iron-law-of-institutions-and-the-left-333c42c246af
No third term for Trump. He has no pathway to that and could never create one.
He could never be dictator either. It’s not possible within the bounds setup by the Constitution.
Anything is possible if enough people in power go along with it. After all, many of the rights we hold dear, such as freedom of speech and right to assemble, can also be found in both the Chinese and Russian constitutions.
Biden and the Democrat-aligned Deep-State repeatedly attempted to destroy FREE SPEECH, as is documented in the #twitterfiles
"Leftists" keep their heads buried in the sane, as usual.
Anything is possible? Like the moon spinning out of orbit tonight? SMH
It’s impossible based on the current laws we have. It would take decades to try and change those types of things if even possible.
Many MAGA people are staunch constitutionalists (not the Jan 6 crowd and their believers mind you).
The law and constitution are just a words on paper. It's up to individual people to actually enforce it.
> Many MAGA people are staunch constitutionalists
They sure didn't seem to mind Trump breaking the law, which he flagrantly violated many times long before January 6. Multiple violations of the Hatch Act (such as doing his convention speech on the WH grounds), firing five inspectors general for no reason, refusing to send executives to testify to Congress.
If you’re going to quote me, use the whole quote.
Many MAGA people are staunch constitutionalists (not the Jan 6 crowd and their believers mind you).
It’s not up to individuals to enforce it. It’s up to the government institutions to enforce it and they will. Trumps own SCOTUS has ruled against him time and time again. Republicans would never stand for such a power grab. If you believe so you are wearing blinders.
As I mentioned earlier the January 6 MAGA crowd would be the exception to supporting the constitution (although many believed they were defending it). Your examples of Trumps bad behavior are poor comparisons to him becoming dictator or threatening democracy.
As I said earlier, California is a big threat due to their inability to get the November 5th ballots counted and allowing ballot harvesting and not requiring a photo ID.
The "Summer of Floyd" opened my eyes, and those of my law partner in criminal defense (who is my wife), to the "radical" woke, who will cannibalize their own when one of their number is perceived to have become heterodox in speech or act. While we were never "woke," we were classical "bleeding heart" liberals who'd dedicated our professional lives to the representation of accused individuals, most of them poor, young, male, and Black.
We represented Greg McMichael, who, along with his son, were depicted in the infamous video released in May 2020 of the shooting death of Ahmaud Arbery on a sunny street one afternoon in Brunswick, Georgia. A narrative quickly arose that it was nothing less than a "lynching" in broad daylight, a race-based killing revealing, yet again, that, so the story goes, it is not safe to be Black anywhere in the streets of white America. The truth was far from that.
The criminal defense community, in which we were deeply embedded for 30 years, skews left, often far left, and, of course, Democratic. My liberal leanings, and those of my wife, suited us well in a profession rife with the deleterious effects of racism in criminal justice, or, as the preferred nomenclature has it now, the "criminal legal system," since "justice" is apparently missing from it.
We did not realize when taking on that case that we would become the "near enemy," to be condemned and castigated by our own community of criminal defense lawyers who could not imagine, as if they'd forgotten what they do for a living, how we could represent "those racist people."
So, perhaps it is myopic, or at least a fallacy of using anecdotal evidence to reach a generalization, but the sordid experience in the aftermath of that trial resulted, for us, not only in severed professional ties and lost friendships in our "cancellation," it also propelled us to read widely to understand the development of identitarianism and its encroachment into our profession. (Thank you, Yascha Mounk, for your writings in this area; they helped immensely in our understanding of our own experience.)
The radical woke, we therefore concluded, had the greater effect to push away, to "cancel," and turn off even those people adjacent to them, who, like my wife and me, will still cast our vote with the Democrat, whoever she may be, but who now understand why so many others have rejected the party and have moved right. Trump and Trumpism is a dangerous direction for the country we love, but our own experience has helped us understand it in a way we never could before. We blame the radical woke. Or, perhaps we should thank them for waking us up to places and people like Persuasion, Yascha Mounk, Jonathan Haidt, Jonathan Rausch, and a host of other clear thinkers we did not know before the "Summer of Floyd."
Very sorry to hear you and your wife were caught up in the intellectual chaos and cancellation of "identitarianism." It must have been a shocking, demoralizing experience, but hopefully you will rejoin this effort which needs all the neutral, balanced, respectful voices it can muster. We all have some work to do.
Don't know if it answers your question, but wokeness began as a rejection of Obama-era liberalism, like the Sixties New Left began as a rejection of New Frontier/Great Society liberalism. (And this time there wasn't an obvious Vietnam-sized reason for it.) While both intensified considerably under Nixon and Trump, that's not what started it. Both used "liberal" as a deadly insult (even if the later one tacks on a "neo"). In spite of which plenty of liberals fell for it, because of this weird belief this culture has that the more extreme you are the more principled you are, so yelling "Revolution!" feels more righteous than negotiation and compromise and dealmaking. And of course, both ended up driving the country to the right.
It is deeper than the “extremist-radical” axis: it is a worldview steeped in post-modernism, historical revisionism and presentism to which the college educated have been subscribing to various degrees for decades. Concepts like “privilege” and “intersectionality” are here to stay for a long time: they provide both indulgences and the justification for the woke’s place in society, as well as a mild struggle where the stakes are the lowest. It is the difference between people who deal with symbols and the people who deal with things in a rich society.
Wokeness is the Catholic Holy Office, the Soviet Politburo, in modern form. It is the seizure of an organization by a revolutionary power. Read you some Kissenger & Krugman, and the recent history of Unitarian Universalism. Meet the new boss, same as the old boss.
Anne-Marie Slaughter is a personal friend of Hillary Clinton and one of her closest personal advisor.
A graduate from Oxford University, Harvard University and Princeton University, she served on the board of the Council on Foreign Relations and is currently CEO of the New America Foundation.
In other words, she is a card carrying member of the US Elite.
In an opinion articled published in the Financial Times, here what Anne-Marie Slaughter recently argued:
Title: For business, DEI should be an economic priority
"DEI has become a politicised term. Indeed, some Republican politicians have called Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris a “DEI hire”, implying that she was selected because of her racial identity rather than her talent and experience.
"But if you are a business person, you should read DEI as short for demographic and economic imperative. This is not a fad or a woke conspiracy, but a simple matter of maths and marketing"
"Reading DEI to stand for demographic and economic imperative does not exclude a simultaneous embrace of diversity, equity and inclusion. Indeed, diverse workforces are unlikely to work well together without strategies of equity and inclusion to ensure that everyone gets the training and support they need to succeed and to create the cohesion and productivity that happen when everyone feels they belong"
"A business coalition for DEI should have a simple goal. Your workforce should look like America, at every dimension and level"
https://www.ft.com/content/9aa506a9-0ff2-49f6-8e91-17d2504f1b5c
________________
Here is another example. Barack Obama.
He is a smart and talented man. He did a lot of good things while facing an incredibly hostile Congress. He was part of the center-left establishment. But let's remember that it was under the Obama Administration that the transgender bathroom drama started. Why did people in his administration get involved in this transgender bathroom wars? Did he fail to control people he hired?
While I will not fully exonerate some members of the populist wing (AOC had she/her on her Instagram), no one can deny the elite wing of the Democratic Party has enormous responsibility in this mess.
I thought I'd share the final paragraph from my recent Substack post:
"I’d like to finish with a point that is perhaps controversial and unoriginal but needs to be hammered home; it should now be crystal clear that Democrats are steadily alienating male voters – mostly white ones, but increasingly many who are nonwhite. This is dismissed as “misogyny” by many Democrats and there is certainly plenty of that. But when one gender and one race is singled out as the source of all that is evil and nothing that is good in a nation that they themselves were instrumental in building (to say the least), members of that group can become disheartened. No one wants to be a member of a party that considers him the enemy. I must say that I share this feeling (I have never oppressed anyone). For me, no amount of frustration with Democrats would ever make me vote for human beings as despicable as Donald Trump and his brownshirts. But clearly, tens of millions of men -- white, black and brown – overcame whatever distaste for Trump they might have had and did just that."
After a very superficial glance at the comments on here thus far, I'd say I largely agree with what appears to be the consensus view, namely that the trend was initiated by woke radicals, and gradually embraced by the more moderate and/or corporate elements of the Democratic Party.
With that said, I'd like to add another element to this discussion by posing the following question: Why did the Democrats commit such a gross miscalculation in assessing the degree of support "being woke" would garner them? Throughout the course of the woke movement, there has been a significant silent majority who have never wholly embraced its tenets. Academics have often embraced, along with other radicals, views that are, by definition "fringe". How in the minds of Democrats, did that ever add up to a winning election formula?
This leads me to a second question, which is: What is it about wokeness that so many are afraid to stand up to? And why apparently, does it take radical right wing populists like Donald Trump, to suddenly make it "safe" to speak out against the neo religious woke agenda? What's frightening is what Trump and others on the far right offer is hardly an appealing alternative; the replacement of leftist identitarian madness with far right leaning white identitarian madness. And although Trump's support was significantly multiethnic, there is no denying his appeal to far right, often white, voters.
Democrats will continue to hang their hats and political fortunes on identitarian policies and the larger culture war at their own peril. As Sam Harris recently opined "Identity politics is dead."
As a final thought, I'd like to very briefly draw attention to, what I believe, is one of the major factors that has brought us to this moment. At a very high level, I would point to the rise of neoliberalism in many western liberal democracies. Simply put, through the dismantling of the welfare state, tax policies that favour the rich, corporate welfare, union busting, free trade, and continued deregulation of the economy, the middle class has been disappearing at an alarming rate, with the gap between rich and poor, and an affordability crisis, at levels never before seen. This led to significant disillusionment with the liberal project among many voters, who no longer believe that liberalism, or liberal governments work for them. This has further led to the rise of radical left wing populism (wokeness), and radical right wing populism (MAGA). Not to mention the few of us in the middle who cling furiously to the promise of a truly liberal society. Sadly, what both these extremes fail to understand is that liberalism was never the problem - it was the misapplication of liberalism by myopic politicians on both sides of the political isle more interested in their own ambitions than following through on their promises to everyday people.
If the Democrats really want to become relevant again, they must have the courage to drop out of the culture wars, and adopt common sense positions that are in the best interests of everyday people. It is possible to teach our children about the horrific history of slavery without teaching that being white makes you irredeemably racist. And this applies to just about every aspect of the woke position - you don't need to promote false narratives about gender, race, or any other topic to create a more just world. You don't need to invert the power structure and replace it with a new one that believes that the solution to past discrimination is present discrimination. Finally, just stop holding on to the insane belief that the path to freedom lies in the embrace of authoritarian populism, and discarding the liberal values and principles that create the space for freedom, allowing each of us to freely express these ideas without fear of reprisal.
It's mostly the fault of academia for becoming an ever-narrowing echo chamber, but I also blame the formerly independent-minded and rebellious professional-class Gen Xers and elder millennials who left their intellect and creativity behind and have fallen into a scoldy (tsk tsk) social justice quietism. This cohort would be the moderates, or those who could openly express ambivalence toward questionable ideas. But instead they virtue signal and look inward. I think they are subject to social pressures, but I also think that there is something happening psychically to this cohort. Here's what I've seen:
I've been in academia since I stepped onto a small liberal arts campus in 1994, and after a BA in English, an MFA in poetry, and a PhD in American literature, I ended up in the college classroom, teaching millennials at first and now Gen Z (God help me). This is all to say that I have seen "identitarianism" (my preferred term) grow from the roots on up, from the admittedly exhilarating seminar discussions of Foucault and bell hooks and Judith Butler in 1996 to the watered-down versions of these authors' ideas that circulate today in bite-sized social media posts. I find it all so insufferable, though I've been able to "code-switch" (if I can use this term) when I walk on campus. It's a survival mechanism that allows me to suffer without anyone noticing. But I remain independent in my private life, not getting too upset at the victories, small and large, of these warring tribes. I'll just say that I'm happy that Harris and the democrats lost, though I'm not that elated or anything.
What I have noticed is that many of my old college friends (Gen Xers, all of them) have over the past five or six years adopted the language of the academy. One is a librarian, there are a couple grade school teachers, another tends a small farm in Nebraska and raises kids, another runs a test prep center, another works at a grocery store in Idaho, there are a couple yoga teachers, a couple social workers, several others who work at non-profits, and a few corporate types. What they all have in common is that they were once fun-loving, transgressive self-described liberals who enthusiastically voted for Obama in 2008. But in the end they weren't too overtly political.
Now in everyday conversation they are throwing around terms like "white privilege," "patriarchy," "heteronormativity," "marginalized peoples," etc. I don't talk to these friends more than once or twice a year, if that, and so it's so jarring to see them casually talk like this while remembering how much fun we used to have. I don't know if it's a deeply felt conversion or mere virtue signaling, but this shift has made me think about what's happened to this cohort (mostly white children of professional class boomers, now entering middle age).
I can go down the list of the people I mentioned above:
The organic grocery store worker in Idaho was an English major and remained a reader after college. She was a big fan of Raymond Carver, Richard Ford, among others. In 2018 she publicly said she was never going to read another white man again and still claims that this was the best decision she ever made.
One of the yoga teachers runs a "white accountability" group in her suburb (she married someone who works in finance who was a Republican until Trump). She was one of the most apolitical in our friend group, perhaps even normie (not "alternative").
One of the social workers (perhaps woke before the term existed, so the following is not surprising) kept going on about how she's finally understanding her "internalized white supremacy" while at a backyard bbq a couple years ago, but that she has "a lot of work to do."
One of the school teachers said he thinks the 1619 Project doesn't go far enough (at the same bbq).
The librarian (a guy) was into punk and other edgy music and also anarchism, and attended the "Battle for Seattle" WTO protest in 1999. I see him about once a year, and there are always references to "privilege," "cis," "patriarchy," and "the things we men have put women through over the years." We recently had a conversation about 80s edgelord musician Steve Albini, whom we both liked, and he kept going on about how admirable it was for Steve Albini in later years to acknowledge his white privilege and the harms his band name ("Big Black") inflicted on the marginalized. I understand his point, but it's strange to hear this coming from the former edgy punk with a rapier wit.
Another guy who works as a "creative" in Brooklyn: I told him I was excited to see Morrissey in concert a couple weeks ago, and he went on to tell me how problematic it was that I was supporting such a person. (We were both big Smiths fans back in the day.)
The farmer raising her kids in Nebraska: We bonded in college because we were both raised on the wrong side of the tracks by uneducated single mothers. We were comrades who understood each other in a sea of wealthy classmates. The only difference was that she was biracial, her father Scandinavian and her mother Chinese. Race was never a huge part of our friendship; it was just a fact. She took Chinese in college and did study abroad in China to connect with her roots. We talked about cultural differences between her extended family and mine. But in 2021, she started saying things like, "I finally understand, that as a racialized being, that I am marginalized," albeit with a sense of hesitancy as if she was trying out an idea. She's still peppering conversation with language like this. Up until a few years ago, she was always loud, brash, and independent, so this inward-looking tone shift is unsettling. I don't think she sees me as comrade now as she did in college.
Many others in my college cohort that I didn't mention above similarly have shifted their tone. I think it began as #Resistance clamoring about Trump and has now defused into a quietism that sees whiteness and masculinity as the problem to be stewed over. I recently scanned many of these peoples' Facebook pages and see many recent posts blaming white women for the election results, with two of them posting that map titled "if only non-college educated whites voted," showing a sea of red, as if to say, "these dumb whites created this mess."
I'm sure that if many of the people I reference above were to read this, they would be able to make a reasonable argument for their shift in thinking, for their "awakening" to a new set of ideas. They would probably see me as someone who just isn't getting it yet. (I find this ironic, because I was reading the source texts back in the 90s! Foucault, Butler, Angela Davis, etc.--I was stepped in it. But I moved past them to incorporate other points of view. Most of my college friends weren’t reading critical theory back then; they were just finishing their degrees.)
So, I would say that there is something going on inside the collective mind of this big cohort that is keeping them from resting easy in moderation, this cohort being the educated professional elder millennials and Gen Xers. I want to say that there is some kind of spiritual malaise or emptiness that has stifled their life force. I mean, they all seem tired and sad. Perhaps it's the fatigue of raising kids or working non-fulfilling jobs or just getting old. But still, as I talk to them, it seems that they're now just waiting for the barbarians to bust through the gate. They don't seem to have a positive vision of the future. They seem to be circling the wagons around their children, hunkering down in their blue cities. In any case, it seems that they've fallen into a tense quietism, a state that explains why they haven't shown any signs of revolt after Trump's reelection.
Very well put. Those most subject to social pressures, by my account, are the ones who helped launch fringe ideas into social currency.
For gen x, it was much easier to resist groupthink and censorship when it was coming from the right. Once it came from the left, it broke their brains and circumvented their fiercely independent ethos.