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Some time ago, I posted about how it feels like wokeism is getting less popular. I didn't have much to back it up, except some observations about a popular techie watering hole called HackerNews, so the whole exercise left me with more questions than answers.
Well, today I chanced upon "The Great Awokening Is Winding Down" by Musa al-Gharbi, a sociologist from Columbia University that focuses on "how we think about, talk about, and produce knowledge about social phenomena including race, inequality, social movements, extremism, policing, national security, foreign policy and domestic U.S. political contests." (With that broad a scope of inquiry, I wouldn't be surprised if he wasn't a fellow mottizen). Al-Gharbi puts together a compelling story: there are fewer woke-related cancellation events, fewer research papers are published related to woke ideology, newspapers are writing less often about race/racism/racists, and companies--including media companies--are not only pushing back more strongly against the demands of social justice warriors, but also closing their purses and defunding both internal DEI departments as well as financial pledges they made to the bankrupt ideals of equity just a few years ago.
While this type of news warms my heart, most of the evidence al-Gharbi provides is composed of disparate op-ed columns from American newspapers. Throughout the last ten years, there have always been dissenting voices that managed, somehow, to walk the thin line between criticizing woke ideology and not falling victim to it. So I don't see why al-Gharbi puts any trust in these pieces, even one as monumental as the Times' recent response to GLAAD.
That said, al-Gharbi's analysis provides some value when he describes the recent behavior of companies and when he provides some numbers to back up his claims. The numbers he shares seem to confirm that the public is losing both interest and tolerance for wokeish puritanism. But the numbers themselves are so remote as to heavily dilute their meaning. For example, there is the fall in the frequency of terms like "race", "racists", and "racism" in papers like NYT, LAT, WSJ, and WP. Or the falling number of scholarly articles about identity-based biases. Al-Gharbi chooses to interpret these as evidence for this theory, but doesn't take into account other factors that could be responsible for this behavior. Like, maybe papers are using fewer words like "racists", and instead using some new fangled euphemism (like homeless -> unhoused)? Or perhaps, in the scholarly article case, these topics have moved to other forums, like described in Scott's recent "Links for February" post:
The arguments that convince me the most are when al-Gharbi talks about the changes in company behavior. These are hard, reality-based events that are orchestrated by smooth talking servants of the Invisible Hand (praise thy golden touch!). You can't argue with a company that not only doesn't pander to internal activist pressure, but goes onto punish them by expelling them from its belly. This mirrors my own experience working in the corporate world where more and more people roll their eyes at DEI-sponsored programming, finding convenient excuses to skip out. Even leadership's support, once crisp and vocal, has died down in volume to a DEI-themed zoom background or a quick few words mechanically tacked on somewhere.
Emotionally, the most salient point and the one I hang my hopes on is how Gen-Z seems to be rebelling against the enforced work puritanism. It's probably my nostalgia, but as a child of the 90s, I can't help but see in this behavior the reflection of my childhood. You had gory movies like Tarantino's Reservoir Dogs and Kill Bill. You had gory games, probably led by id titles like Doom and Quake--titles which introduced hundreds of thousands of people to online deathmatching. You had dirty grunge, whose raw scream was quickly adapted and made into Billboard Top 100 records. But you also had plenty of metal and industrial sub-genres spin off and avoid total commercialization. Let's not forget the two movies that closed out the decade, both quite clear in their anti-puritanical message: Fight Club and The Matrix.
While later on all of this was sublimated into the cheery smiles and pastel colors of the aughts, if today's teenagers feel a similar sort of anger and distrust of righty and lefty moralists, I can rest easy--the world will not end, at least not for another decade or two.
It may, in fact, be true that we are in a temporary lull as it pertains to concrete and public exercises of woke power. However, I think the great lesson of post-2014 wokeness is that its most enduring victories - the ones that create lasting changes to the legal and cultural infrastructure - are achieved directly after, or in the months following, specific events which get maximally weaponized into a coordinated outrage machine.
Before Michael Brown, the “cops are killing innocent black men for no reason” narrative was just not on the radar of most people; afterward, suddenly this narrative was everywhere, and activists were working every day to locate examples to turn viral, in order to maximize the salience of the narrative and to solidify as many concrete gains - and put as much money into the pockets of activists - as possible. Thousands of new jobs and tentacles of the NGO-industrial complex were generated in that roughly two-year-period - even while support for BLM began steadily declining among white Americans not too long after the initial 2014 spike.
Then, just as that level of support had finally dropped below a certain threshold, and most people had stopped thinking or caring about that narrative, George Floyd happened, and suddenly the outrage machine went right back into full gear and ratcheted everything one step further. The activist class had spent the intervening years quietly laying the scaffolding behind the scenes, waiting for the right viral event to light the fuse that would allow them to spring into coordinated action. Even as most Americans now start to lose interest in the narrative and things start to get pared back slightly from the new 2020 peak, the overall baseline level of power accrued to the activist class still vastly exceeds the old pre-2020 baseline, which was itself vastly larger than the previous pre-2014 baseline.
So, my question to the public who are belatedly starting to rethink things and to push back on the extremes which they themselves were willing to tolerate in the immediate aftermath of that viral event is as follows: Will you have the moral courage and willpower and hard-heartedness the next time a George Floyd level event happens, to say, “I don’t give a fuck”? When the news shows you some incident with horrible optics and constructs an expansive and emotionally-manipulative narrative around it, will you stand firm and reject fundamental elements of that narrative? Will you say, “it’s completely fine that this happened, and we should change nothing about our society to prevent it from happening again”? Or, like the previous times, will you say, “I understand why you’re angry and I agree things need to change, but do you have to be quite so extreme about your response?” If all you can muster is the latter, then you’re allowing another ratchet of the dial one more step to the left and they’re going to claim as much more power as they can before you start to lose interest again.
There is talk on the Dissident Right - I was actually exposed to it initially by James Lindsay, who is himself only a lukewarm member of the DR - that the activist class is quietly laying the groundwork for a “Drag Floyd” or “Trans Floyd”; in other words, the increasingly aggressive pushing of things like Drag Queen Story Hour into as many Red enclaves as possible is a tactic designed to eventually provoke one or more violent responses which can be virally weaponized. Eventually somebody will get radicalized enough to take violent action against one of these drag queens, or one of these doctors who performs sex changes on minors, and that will be just what the outrage machine needed to light the spark. Will the parts of the public who matter be able to hold firm and say, “Well yeah, what did you think was going to happen? Sorry, we’re not interested in another ratchet”? I predict that they will not. That would require much more conviction and unity/clarity of purpose than the Anglosphere public is willing and able to muster. No, we’ll get another massive coordinated action, another permanent power grab, and it’ll take a few years for people to start forgetting about that narrative, during which a new baseline will have been established, from which we will never retreat.
The left and the right aren’t symmetrical, tho. Feel-good press bulletins get amplified, while the walk-back is a small blurb in the business section of the WSJ. Stuff getting worse or better doesn’t correlate with the # of words spent.
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