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For many, perhaps most Republicans, Woke demonstrated that the present crisis is existential. It is common to see arguments that "woke is over"; rarely do people making such arguments explain their understanding of exactly how "woke" "ended". The only remotely plausible answer I can see is that Trump was re-elected.
Arguments that Woke is over and therefore it's time to move on from Trump are self-defeating if Trump is the only coordination point powerful enough to actually deliver meaningful setbacks to the woke coalition. If we had compromised and not pushed Trump in this last election, even a non-Trump Republican victory would likely have resulted in unbroken Woke advances, simply because very few of the plausible Republican candidates are willing to do what is necessary to contest the culture war, and none to the degree Trump brings to the table.
And it should be emphasized that the sauce here isn't, for the most part, Trump himself or the choices he personally makes. It's Trump as a Schelling point for war rather than surrender. Sell him out, and the people coordinating our end of the sale will absolutely, obviously sell us next. Republicans like myself stick with Trump because we see no viable alternative.
[EDIT] - an amusing note for Massie in particular is that his campaign apparently sent out an advert today, using an old endorsement given by Trump in 2022 to try to fool voters into thinking that Trump was endorsing him now, rather than his opponent. One plays the cards one has, I suppose.
1990's PC ended because leftist activism shifted from social issues (and Palestine) to economic and environmental issues (and Palestine). After the Battle of Seattle in 1999, all the cool kids were trying to stop the WTO, and actually devoting your life to campaigning against domestic racism, sexism etc. was cringe. The same happens in reverse after the failure of Occupy around 2011. I am less aware of trends in lefty youth activism than I was when I was an active student Lib Dem, but with hindsight it seems plausible that there was another flippening driven by the failure of summer-of-Floyd BLM activism and the 2020 Democratic primary - the cool kids attacking the Biden administration from the left were doing so over economics or climate, not over insufficient wokeness.
So "woke is over", if it is, in the sense that the activist energy on the left has shifted elsewhere, which also means that people like Matthew Yglesias who were never entirely comfortable with wokeness are more able to express less-woke views while remaining lefties in good standing.
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I don't think that woke is over. However, I do think that woke has been dealt serious body blows in the last few years and is much weaker than many people here thought it would be at this point.
It's not just that Trump won despite being widely considered both by wokes and non-wokes to represent a repudiation of wokism.
It's also that woke failed to censor the Internet. Non-wokes successfully created myriads of their own websites. Woke didn't even manage to destroy 4chan. Non-woke took over X. Race realism, actual racism, anti-immigration stances, and open misogyny are now common on mainstream social media. Even on Reddit a few non-woke positions can be seen: for example, being against mass immigration is common on /r/europe, even while the sub sticks to woke positions on all other major issues.
In addition to this, woke overreached on policing and affirmative action. It is now common to see Trump-hating Democratic Party voters on city subreddits support strong policing against street crime and vagrancy. City residents noticed the 2020 crime spike.
Even back in 2020, California Proposition 16, which would have made certain banned kinds of affirmative action legal, failed to pass. In San Francisco in 2021 a public backlash caused the school board to scrap a plan to rename a bunch of schools for woke reasons.
Woke also overreached on trans issues. Peak trans activism is over. Woke pronouns are starting to seem like a brief, now-dated fad. Still in use, but much less talked about these days, and they seem to be of a certain time period.
None of this is to say that woke has been defeated. It will probably rise again in some form, and relatively softer versions of woke continue to have strong influence in institutions. But woke has not overwhelmed the country like many feared, nor is it likely to do so even after Trump is gone.
To be fair, one of the reasons why woke is much weaker than many people here thought it would be at this point is precisely because many people all over the place who thought that it would become overwhelmingly powerful took action to try to stop it.
Case in point, I suspect this issue is still a bit of a kill-shot. Corner a congresscritter before midterms and ask them "Yes/No, should the government pay for sex changes for illegal immigrant rapists that we can't deport?" I think a lot of the (D)'s running for office still can't bring themselves to say no, even if it costs them.
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Woke did fantastic at censoring the internet. They silenced loads of people, they broke up organizations, they debanked people, the works. Elon bought X, and they went out of their way to try and ensure the purchase did as much damage to him as possible. And if Trump had lost the election, I'm quite confident they would be well into the process of destroying his businesses and personal fortune at this very moment, and the censorship would have returned at full strength. Likewise the other tech companies; they hedged when it looked like Trump had momentum, and when he won they bent the knee. Had he lost, the censorship would have simply continued to ratchet up.
None of this is guesswork. Europe is not shy about announcing their intentions for censorship of the internet, nor of providing practical demonstrations of how their system works. Democrats publicly announced their intention to create a similar regime in America, and were well on their way to doing so when Trump won.
This is true, and the massive violence spike that killed ~8,000 black Americans slacked off. And yet, the officials they voted for are largely still in place, and still executing as much of the decarceration agenda as they think they can get away with.
Woke owns the schools, and a large plurality, possibly an outright majority of those staffing the schools are either true believers in trans ideology or unwilling to impede the true believers in any way. Ditto the medical field, from what I've seen. The activists are somewhat quieter because they don't at this moment have the Federal Government as a megaphone. Nothing I have seen indicates to me that they or their coalition have moderated in any way, nor that Blue Tribe is any closer to cutting them loose. Instead, Blue Tribe will do what it did under Biden: claim woke is over and nothing's happening, while providing their movement limitless resources and the full backing of every major social instutition.
The problem is not woke overwhelming the country. The problem is whether, in the process of preventing such overwhelm, the country survives in any meaningful way.
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Woke via the UK Foreign Office and the JIDF have managed to enshittify /pol/ into an almost unusable state. Thankfully somewhat too late because the culture that spawned there and on 4chan in general has spread enough through the internet for this not to matter too much.
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That was a bit of a fluke though. It wouldn't have happened if a mentally unstable billionaire didn't start musing about buying it, and porgressives haven't committed unforced error of actually compelling him through court to buy it, because they thought that will own him somehow.
I'm also anxious about how long it will last. The EU is constantly seething over it. Right now Musk is safe because he's in the US, but if the administration changes, they'll likely go after him, and could easily cause twitter to fall back to friendly hands again.
Sure, but "peak trans activism" was an absolute blitzkrieg, were they could roll into any institution unopposed. Now they're finally getting pushback, but that doesn't mean they lost.
This is something that drives me crazy about the discourse about wokeness. In the blitzkrieg era we were met with denials that anything is happening to begin with, "Woke/SJW is just a boogeyman", etc. They took over essentially every major institution during that time, and now that they stumbled and had to slow down somewhat, the same people who were denying their existence are now declaring the fight to be over.
Seen this thread, out of curiosity?
No, somehow this one has not popped up on my feeds.
Not surprising, for my part I've seen an interview with a Ukrainian mother that moved to California because of the war, and had her daughter put into foster care and transed. Blue states are still full steam ahead with this stuff.
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Woke ended in 2019 after the presidential campaigns of Beto O'Rourke and Kirsten Gillebrand fizzled out before the primary season even started. The final nail was put in the coffin when the Democrats nominated Joe Biden, possibly the least woke candidate in the race apart from possibly Michael Bennett. After that, woke was no longer an identifiable phenomenon and a boogeyman that stood for whatever conservatives were opposing at the moment.
What definition of "woke" are you using that doesn't include the Great Uprising of 2020? Or that there's still not a single elected Democrat willing to say anything less than trans maximalism.
Eh, maybe Fetterman has. So there's one but also kind of a joke.
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...I understand that this place is corrosive to the angels of our better nature, and I freely admit to significant corrosion myself. Is this your genuine viewpoint, or are you trolling me?
It's my genuine viewpoint. I get the impression that most Republicans are stuck in a bubble where they don't pay attention to what rank and file Democrats actually do, or who they actually vote for. There were a few woke reps who managed to get elected in 2020, and a couple more from earlier, but a lot of them were primaried out before the Biden administration ended. The 2020 primary showed that beyond certain limited areas, there was no national appetite for woke politics. Black church ladies aren't woke. Neither are Hispanics, by and large. Suburban Democrats aren't. Rural granola types aren't. Wokeism only ever appealed to a certain segment of urban voter, who Republicans try to paint as being representative of the party, precisely because they're an easy target.
If woke had died in 2019, we wouldn't have have had Admiral Rachael, or the Nuclear crossdressing thief, or Jackson nominated for the supreme court. Woke lost its uncontested superiority, but that didn't diminish its hold over true believers.
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Your claim that woke ended in 2019 makes me think that our definitions of woke are completely different. You seem to be defining woke as a temporary electoral strategy used by a few Democratic candidates. So, once Biden won and the most aggressively progressive campaigns fizzled out you determined that woke politics died.
All it really showed was that kind of excessive campaigning was electorally toxic. It does not show that the underlying ideology disappeared. Democrats are smart enough now to lick their fingers and gauge which way the wind is blowing so they've backed off, but our elites have not. It means the Democrats rejected the most explicit version of it. Meanwhile, the institutional version continued spreading. What I see as woke did not peak in 2019. It peaked after 2019, especially around 2020–2022, when DEI, intersectionality, equity policies, and identity based moral grandstanding became much more popular across our mainstream.
You say suburban Democrats are not woke, yet suburban Democrats are mostly college educated, and higher education is one of the main providers of this worldview. Suburban Dems may not act like campus activists anymore (unless you're in Somaliapolis), but a lot of them still support the institutional assumptions like equity, disparate outcomes as proof of discrimination, etc.
Also, Black church ladies and Hispanics pursuing their own self-interests are not indicators that woke is dead. Most voters aren't ideologues. Again, it's the institutions, and that is where this worldview lives. Higher and general ed, HR departments, foundations, activist nonprofits, media organizations, school administrations, professional associations, entertainment companies, and bureaucratic agencies.
Public backlash eventually arrived and these institutions did not willingly abandon wokeism. Some backed off. Others have begun to repaint it. They rename things. "Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion” becomes “Academic Culture and Community”, ideological screening can just be worded as “values alignment.” Their goal remains the same, it's just that the strategy just needs to be updated.
Woke became less useful for political campaigns, but that is very from it ending. What ended was the open branding. The institutional ideology remains, and it is adapting to embed itself more quietly.
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Nah, they are. The suburban Dem women get their politics from TikTok now, and they believe the septum piercings.
Their husbands secretly voted for Trump.
Suburbanites comprise a large portion of my social circle, ranging in age from 20s to 70s, and I can assure you that none of these things is true.
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BLM2 was in 2020 and there wasn't a single rank-and-file Democrat that opposed it. Every single Dem-sympathizing poster here expressed no objection to it, and the majority were outright sympathetic. Biden had age limits on gender reassignment procedures abolished. Then there's the question of if it even makes sense to judge thia by which politician gets elected. You can claim it was no specific politicians's fault that CRT got shoved into school curricula and mandatory corporate workshops, but that just shows your entire approach to this is flawed.
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