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Notes -
We Won
On Sunday Morning, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez went on ABC's This Week and proclaimed, "Woke 1 was crazy". The immediate context was AOC defending Wisconsin DSA governor candidate Francesca Hong, and so a lot of people are clowning on her for handwaving away everything that happened in 2015-2022. To the extent that this is about who you should vote for in the Wisconsin governor's race, I agree with the criticism, but I want to take a step back and appreciate how far we've come.
Think back to remember how it felt in the dark days of 2020 and 2021. It was far from clear that the reign of terror would ever end. Every week another subreddit or Twitter poster was banned. Facebook was removing posts supporting Kyle Rittenhouse as a policy. "Abolish the Police" was treated as a serious (if aspirational) policy proposal. Above everything else, the worst part was the psychological damage, the feeling that the entire world was going insane; that it was just you and a few guys from a Harry Potter fanfiction forum spinoff who were capable of the miniscule amount of critical thinking required to know that removing Aunt Jemima's face from bottles of pancake syrup did absoutely nothing to help black people.
The fact that even the left-wing of the Democratic Party is campaigning on health care, tax policy, and Palestine instead of racial humiliation is a big deal. There is a temptation to equate "woke" (more specifically "woke 1") with generic liberal Democrat stuff, but that's not really true. Conversely, it becomes easy to overlook some of Trump's greatest accomplishments. Turning DEI and Critical Race Theory into curse words and ending affirmative action were huge. People said it couldn't be done, and then they were done so fast that everyone forgot by the midterms.
(I use this analogy not to invoke Godwin's law, but because it's the first example I could think of a once-ascendant ideology which is now widely condemned. Wokeness is not Nazism, not "like" Nazism, not "as bad as" Nazism.)
From Germany in 1933-45, Nazism was the thing. The Nazi party was in power, swastika flags flew everywhere, "Heil Hitler" was the official greeting. Since the end of the war, Nazism is perhaps the most widely reviled and condemned ideology in the world. Labelling someone a Nazi is such a reliable rhetorical kill-button that it's become a cliché, and yet still sees unironic use every day. In the Anglosphere and Western Europe, no public figure openly identifies as a Nazi. Even things with incidental connections to the Nazi regime (like the phrase "final solution", or the term "concentration camp", which the Nazis did not coin and which had an entirely legitimate meaning prior to the war) have become untouchable by association. In some cases this stigmatisation is enforced by law (e.g. for understandable reasons it's illegal to display a swastika in Germany), but not always: publicly wearing a swastika t-shirt in Boston is a legally protected act under the First Amendment, and yet one's likelihood of getting beaten up by a complete stranger for doing so is similar to the likelihood of same in Berlin.
Now imagine a counterfactual world wherein Nazism went into retreat, without being so aggressively stigmatised. After the war, the Nazi party was no longer in power, but politicians elected as party members during its peak make no especial effort to distance themselves from their electoral pasts: indeed, many politicians proudly self-identify as Nazis, and openly announce their intent to seek election under a Nazi platform. Academics with cushy university jobs hang swastika flags in their offices, and no one so much as raps them on the knuckles. While most Germans have gotten back into the habit of greeting each other with "Guten tag", a handful still use "Heil Hitler", and this is treated essentially as an amusing anachronistic idiosyncrasy, like someone who persists in referring to the internet as the "world wide web". Whenever Nazi atrocities are brought up in public, the reaction among those responsible is not solemn contrition but flippant dismissal: "ha ha, we sure did get a bit carried away, didn't we?" And whenever Jews complain that open expressions of support for this ideology make them uncomfortable, people roll their eyes and tell them to stop moaning. We had the Nuremberg trials, the party is no longer in power – what more do you want? Let the baby have its bottle.
In the above scenario, I doubt many would say that Nazism as an ideology had decisively lost. I think most would describe it as dormant, not extinct.
After the Sydney Sweeney "great jeans" thing, I observed that there has been a vibe shift, in that, while woke people are still free to publicly express pretty out-there opinions without it having much impact on their public standing, there's no longer any expectation for normies to play along, to mouth along with the catechism. On the surface, this might look like we've "beaten" woke. But as many other commenters below have pointed out, I think it's premature to be doing victory laps. Sure, I don't have to pretend to agree that American Eagle is covertly promoting white supremacy, and I won't get into trouble for denying that it is – but woke people can still explicitly state that and face no career repercussions of any kind. I don't have to pretend to support putting convicted male rapists in women's prisons, or the sterilisation of autistic teenagers by their thousands – but every June, without fail, my entire office (my entire city) gets festooned with flags celebrating both. (Lest you think I'm exaggerating, last weekend I walked past a mural depicting a trans-identified female with prominent mastectomy scars that was paid for with EU money).
Wokeness is not extinct: wokeness is dormant, and AOC knows this better than anyone. If she really wanted to distance herself from a permanently radioactive ideology, she couldn't afford to be half this flippant.
Heaven forbid anyone be allowed to hold and express political or ethical opinions that clash with yours! Where would American democracy be then?
The salient characteristic of "wokeness" that right-wingers had a legitimate case against - the thing that needed, needs, to be wiped out - is cancel culture. It was the unprecedented defection from American norms around freedom of speech, freedom of thought, and peaceful coexistence with people from the other side of the aisle. If there are still wokes out there cancelling people, that's one thing. But the fact that people still hold beliefs of the kind that wokeness sought to enforce by illegitimate means, that is not relevant. It's normal. It's the equivalent of non-murderous German nationalists, who do not deserve to automatically be tarred with the Nazi brush just because they pursue similar aims to those that the Nazis committed horrific crimes in pursuit of.
Then someone should probably have figured out a way to wipe it out. But they haven't, and the best defense available depends entirely on mirroring its tactics. There simply is not support for any other form of response, and people are never, ever going to accept "heads we cancel you, tails you tolerate us" as a stable equilibrium. And yet, in values-incoherent environments, that is precisely the deal on offer from all sides.
1990s-style maximal-free-speech norms were an unsustainable confluence of one-off factors, and they are gone now and are not going to come back. They have no constituency, and Free Speech ideology itself is variously either wildly unpopular or wildly hypocritical (CP? Revenge Porn? Malicious code? Copyright? Deepfake porn? The N-word, or slurs generally?). People, speaking generally, do not actually want Free Speech. They want "Free Speech" for speech within a standard deviation of what they consider good and normal, and speech outside that island of tolerance they do not want to see or to know about or for it to exist at all. This is all they have ever wanted or ever will want, and impressions to the contrary are artifacts of large-scale, coordinated, and evidently unsustainable lies. One of the most popular lies you're cutting across in your comment: "you shouldn't censor, because if you violate the taboo on censorship then others will turn around and censor you." But this only makes sense if they actually will turn around and censor you; if "free speech" goes dormant when you censor, it can either stay dormant forever, prove the maxim correct and render free speech to the past-tense, or it can wake up, at which point the argument is falsified and your initial censorship was the correct choice after all. Neither horn of the dilemma results in durable free-speech norms; the argument was never anything more than a feel-good deepity.
But they are tarred with the Nazi brush, observably, in the real world we actually live in. At some point, "deserve" is just a word you've made up to describe things that aren't going to happen. People notice this, and they stop playing along or pretending otherwise.
People want more good things and less bad things. Speech is a thing. The math is pretty simple.
One can be a free speech absolutist and still think CSAM should be illegal. The thing that makes it evil is the manner of its production, not its distribution.
Banning mere possession (with no before-the-fact knowledge of production) is already on shaky ground, free-speech-absolutist-wise. As soon as you cross into "This should be illegal because it resembles actual CSAM" you have to turn in your absolutist card.
Actually, you've probably already lost your card when you ban production, because CSAM includes material produced by sexting teens.
I think this is an extremely noncentral example of what people talk about when they talk about CSAM.
I'd consider the point of being an absolutist to be that one considers the principle to apply absolutely, such that it is just as appropriate to apply to noncentral cases as to central cases.
My point was that this is the first I've heard of teens sexting being categorised as CSAM, and would genuinely love to know in which jurisdictions it's categorised as such.
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Central enough to produce real felony charges, apparently.
Could you provide a citation?
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And my point, which you seem determined not to grasp, is that even with woke supposedly in retreat, there's still an asymmetry. Woke people in positions of power and influence can express obviously insane opinions (like "American Eagle is covertly promoting eugenics and white supremacy") without repercussions, while conservatives cannot do the same. Even normie centrists cannot publicly express many opinions which are well-attested by the sciences without being smeared as "far-right".
That may be, but the problem is that conservatives are not allowed to state their beliefs; not that progressives are allowed to do so. And your post sounded a lot more like you thought it was a problem that progressives were allowed to voice their beliefs at all.
(I also wouldn't describe the American Eagle thing as "obviously insane". The pun is pretty obvious, and "good genes" is, you know, literally the etymological meaning of the word "eugenics", so it's hard to argue that the ad wasn't playing with garden-variety eugenics-adjacent ideas, the question is just how deliberate, how consciously politically-motivated the reference was. I don't believe it was intended as some sort of pointed dogwhistle or propaganda, rather than a slightly naughty reference to low-grade wrongthink which they correctly reckoned to be widely held by their target audience; and I don't particularly think that whiteness was on the makers' minds, just ordinary non-race-specific, non-systematized folk eugenics. But it's a question of degree rather than of kind.)
Well, that wasn't the point I was making at all. Perhaps I didn't express myself clearly enough. My point was that woke people can get away with publicly expressing rather out-there opinions without taking any kind of reputational hit, while conservatives or moderates cannot even get away with expressing comparably (or even much less) crazy opinions. This doesn't look like wokeness has been defeated.
This seems like a rather extreme motte-and-bailey/sanewashing to me. Eugenics is the belief that governments should take proactive interventionist measures to improve the genetic fitness of the populations they govern. It is not the belief that some people are congenitally more attractive than others. If it meant the latter, there would be literally no one on the planet who didn't qualify as a eugenicist, and if everyone's a eugenicist, no one is.
The "is" belief "some people are congenitally hotter than others" in no way implies the "ought" belief "the government should intervene to improve the genetic fitness of the population it governs".
Then why just list "debatably-crazy things lefties are still allowed to say" rather than "debatably-crazy things righties still aren't allowed to say" as the watermark? That's really what gave me that impression. It's difficult to take your aside about Pride Month as anything else than "Pride Month celebrations should end", as distinct from "Conservatives should be allowed to have equally-extravagant celebrations".
Not so. Radical progressives would be very uncomfortable with the sheer phrase "good genes" - the belief that some genes are in any objective sense better than others is viewed as a dangerous slippery slope to proactive eugenicism. Certainly no one would deny that there are, biologically, genes for particular eye colors or cranial structures, but the far-left view is that attractiveness is subjective, and Sydney Sweeney genes are in no objective sense "better" than Danny DeVito genes, it just happens to be the case that more people are into Sweeney-like body-types/it's more socially acceptable to express attraction to Sweeney-like body-types.
Talking about "good" and "bad" genes, with the possible exception of medical conditions, is, precisely as I said, a "slightly naughty" reference to a widely-held opinion that's benignly, but significantly at odds with the maximally progressive view. It doesn't mean you're secretly advertising to Hitler, but I think it's fair to take it as a signal that you are less than maximally concerned with the opinions of the radical left; as a signal that you are addressing normal people, not Tumblr keyboard warriors. It's not especially sinister, but the keyboard warriors weren't entirely wrong to think that the ad was winkingly espousing a worldview antithetical to their own.
This is not very relevant, but I will note that one can hold the position "Pride Month celebrations should end" without actually supporting crushing them by force.
Like, I think Pride Month celebrations should end, in the sense that it would be good if people were less attached to the idea and didn't run/join Pride Month celebrations. I would petition the webforums I go to that run Pride Month celebrations to stop doing so, attempting to convince them of this, but all the forums I'm a member of which run such celebrations have also threatened to ban me for blasphemy against SJ.
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Because the OP was claiming that woke is defeated, and wokes being able to say absurd extreme things without repercussion is not what a defeated movement looks like. I presumed it went without saying that conservatives and moderates still cannot express comparably crazy (and in some cases, ordinary commonsense) opinions without repercussion. I mean, it obviously does go without saying: even you aren't disputing it.
Difficult for you to take, perhaps. I thought the point was abundantly clear: an entire city being festooned with the flags of a particular ideology at the city council's behest is not what a defeated ideology looks like.
They might claim to be uncomfortable with the concept, but their revealed preferences (in terms of their choice of romantic partner, their aspirations for their children, the people they sexually fantasise about, which sports teams and athletes they bet on, their attitudes towards inbreeding etc.) would tell a very different story.
But then we're back to equating between "woke" as in "the anti-free-speech cancellation machine" (which needed to be defeated) and "woke" as in "people holding left-wing opinions at all, however respectfully" (which there is no particular justification to expect to be 'defeated' overnight, any more than any mainstream belief system held by hundreds of millions of people).
Even if we grant this point for the sake of argument, that still leaves "phrases like good genes are taboo" as a bona fide leftist shibboleth that the American Eagle ad campaign would have been stepping on the toes of. The question then is whether they did so out of ignorance, or if they considered that left-wingers would be offended and decided that being seen to mildly upset SJWs suited their PR purposes just fine. I have no fixed belief, but the latter is plausible, and it would mean the woke brouhaha about the ad was by no means "crazy" in ascribing hostile intent to the ad, even if it was still something of an overreaction.
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Suppose there are a hundred people from a variety of backgrounds. Which is better:
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I don't understand the need for this hypothetical when Communism after the Cold war fits the bill.
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I slightly disagree with this; I'd say Nazism became the most reviled and condemned label in the world. The policies that supposedly make Nazism so terrible, namely killing millions of people based on ethnic characteristics, are enthusiastically supported in their modern form today by billions (and millions of westerners).
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Isn't this basically just a description of Japan? Like, seriously, read the WP article on Nippon Kaigi; most of the things you've stated have an exact parallel mentioned in that one article.
It wouldn't surprise me, but I'm not sufficiently acquainted with Japanese culture to pass comment.
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Even calling it "dormant" seems to me to be far overselling the state of things. At best, I'd say it's baiting, by creating the appearance of weakness which allows it to gain an advantageous position such that it can impose even greater strength than before. Perhaps one can argue that a key component of what defined "woke" was the appearance of strength and so conceding that appearance is, in itself, a retreat, but I'd say that's pretty weaksauce compared to the very real policies that have been locked in and still influence people's everyday lives just as much in 2026 as in 2021.
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That would largely describe Russia after the fall of the Soviet Union vis-a-vis communism, yes? And I would still say that the global communist movement took a big one on the chin after the events of 1991.
I’d argue it also more or less describes old local communists in the entire former Soviet Bloc, Falangists and other Franco supporters in Spain after 1975 (for a few decades, at least), Italian fascists and Japanese nationalists after 1945 (or at least after US occupation ended).
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Russia is still communist in spirit: the state is a full-on dictatorship that controls everything and spreads dogmatic propaganda full of doublespeak, currently fighting a pointless cruel war and struggling despite having a massive advantage, effectively massacring its own citizens. Even communist times had people with extra income and private property ("more equal than others"). Russia is also widely considered miserable and it's economy is declining.
Meanwhile, my understanding is that in non-Russian-aligned Slavic nations communism is widely stigmatized, and many have banned communist symbols and ideology.
Russia does not have a planned economy. The state does like to extort, terrorize and rob business owners who get big enough, but you can have that in capitalism. In communism, there is categorically no such thing as a business owner.
People need to learn other words for "incompetent centralized state" than "communism", or you just look like the mirror of one braincell leftists who call everything they don't like "nazi fascists", except you're not winning.
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I think it’s more accurate to describe all this as autocratic and despotic in spirit, with a legacy that goes back centuries.
I’d opt to nitpick here. This in large part is taking place in the Baltics, and they aren’t Slavic. Also, the reason these symbols got banned is not that these represent Communist ideology but because they were the symbols of the Soviet state, which is in turn interpreted as another vessel of Russian imperialism, which is seen as seeking to dissolve the national character of proud smaller nations under its rule. In other words, the ban is not of ideological intent but driven by nationalism and cultural considerations.
Is support for communism not stigmatized in Poland, Ukraine, Croatia, etc?
Nostalgia for the bygone days of socialism – I imagine not (again, the Baltics and Poland are probably an exception more or less, in the latter case the reason being that there is scarce nostalgia to begin with)
Sympathy for Russia or merely Russian ‘imperialist’ sentiments for whatever reason – yes
Support for Marxism-Leninism – also yes, bit I imagine to a much lesser degree
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Yup. I've often said that wearing a hammer-and-sickle T-shirt on a college campus should be exactly as unacceptable as wearing a swastika T-shirt would be, and yet it isn't. It's interesting to note that all the examples of once-ascendant but now aggressively stigmatised ideologies I can think of are on the right. Even moderate conservatives have to preemptively condemn the extremists on their side, but it's not symmetrical: liberals don't have to preemptively condemn communists before they can air their views.
Cretins like Hasan Piker get glowing NYT profiles, even. They don't just not have to condemn them, it's apparently a benefit to be associated with evil leftists.
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The point isn't whether Nazism or communism is more stigmatized, it is that one can still see many instances of the sort of a thing going on you presented in your hypothetical on Nazism going around and still believe that communism has gone through a major defeat that has changed the situation worldwide fundamentally.
Agreed.
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You'll have to wait for the communists to start a total extermination race war and then proceed to lose horribly for them to be equally condemned.
Can I ask the Finns, or the eastern half of Poland? Or Tibet.
Both Finland and Poland invaded the Soviet Union, and then lost the war. They did not face an extermination race war. Did the Soviets kill 30 mil. Finns? Or a comparable fraction? No, they just won a war against them and took some land, then proceeded afterwards to have relatively warm relations up until literally a few years ago.
Communist propaganda detected. Report for termination, traitor.
All citizens listening to communist propaganda are demoted to Infra-Red clearance and reassigned to the food vats until further notice.
Damn, I knew the Internet is full bots, but I wasn't suspecting you of being one, let alone that you're Liberty Prime.
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What are you referring to, specifically?
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Does it count if the Khmer Rouge started a total extermination race war, largely directed at their own population, and then lost horribly to Vietnam?
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Oh, so a total extermination class war is perfectly fine, but a total extermination race war is suddenly "Whoa, not so fast, bucko!".
You'd be amazed at the number of self-identified leftists whose response to your rhetorical question would be yeschad.jpeg. One of Dublin's most recent mayors, for one.
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That's part of it, I'm sure: the Cold War was won peacefully, not via destruction and unconditional surrender and occupation and rebuilding.
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Exactly, people jump in with half-baked reason to condemn one side, even though another side was easily as murderous. "Oh no, our murders weren't as bad, because they're not race-based!". It makes absolutely no sense.
It makes complete sense if you are either non-white or otherwise care about the continued existence of non-whites in the centuries to come.
Communist murders of Kulaks were an attempt to purify their society from within, while Nazi murders of Untermench were an attempt to eradicate a people to make way for another. Although their means were unacceptable to contemporary observers, their ends were not; before the post-war consensus began to form, it was taken for granted that the world was the white man's heritage (see footnote 2, also see this excerpt). It is the principal objective of Woke to prevent a reversion to that state; do we not post on (stolen/conquered) land?
Don't you kind of have to be racist for this to make sense? I can see the tragedy in an entire group of people going extinct, but only if there are inherent differences between groups, and losing one one of the groups means forever losing their particular expression of traits.
Otherwise "kill anyone who disagrees" doesn't feel all that different from "kill anyone who looks different than me", particularly when the demand to not disagree includes conversations about agricultural reform that have caused mass starvation.
They believed in a global revolution. To the point that I had commies tell me you can't say real communism has been tried until there's still capitalism in any part of the world.
Tragedy? I have it on good authority that the disappearance of certain "particular expressions of traits" would be quite desirable indeed.
C'mon, acceptance of HBD is basically consensus here. What isn't, and what I aim to inculcate, is acceptance of its full implications.
If you object to the contents of any of my above links, can you explain why? If you do not, do you then object to @Chi_Wara's sentiment here? If so, what is he to do instead?
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