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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.
What she's calling Woke 1.0 was actually already Woke 2.0. Woke 1.0 existed on tumblr, it was Atheism+ and the invention of a billion insane genders.
These are non-achievements. Wokeism is still the law of the land. Policy is still based on it. Until you can get fired from university positions for being accused of being a communist, it isn't done. Until 13/52 is openly stated and policy is based on it being true and self evident, it isn't done. Until BLM is viewed the same as Kony2012, it isn't done. Until stating your pronouns gets you laughed out of a room, it isn't done. As long as people are willing to openly call themselves socialists, antifa, anti-racists and the like, it isn't done. Until Ibram Kendi, Kehinde Andrews, Priya Gopal and all such people are destitute, derided, and working in McDonalds cleaning toddler vomit from the ballpit, it isn't done.
Some would go even further and describe Woke 1.0 as the "political correctness" movement in the 1990s. @JeSuisCharlie recently touted the virtues of a film called PCU, which I haven't seen, although my understanding is that it satirises the political correctness trend on university campuses. See, for example, this clip, depicting a feminist caricature using the phrase "rape culture". This film came out in 1994. Given the lead time to write, produce, edit and release a film, this implies that "political correctness" was ascendant as late as 1992.
Which rather illustrates the point that wokeness is cylical, with periods of ascendancy followed by periods of dormancy.
...or the "New Left" of the 60's, or various far-left movements in early 20th century Europe from Spain to Russia, and and so on and so on, probably until the French Revolution, if not before...
I see the tendency to group the Woke with such things like the 60s left or the French Revolution, but I don't think that quite captures it. Woke is actually just the latest iteration of identity-based tribalism. 10,000 years ago, it might have simply been "Grog looks like he's one of those guys from the tribe across the river; let's kill him and steal his stuff," and 300 years ago, it might have been "X people intrinsically belong in chains due to their nature, while Y people like me intrinsically belong to the ruling class above them due to our nature," and today, it's "X people have been oppressed by Y people throughout history; therefore, individuals who belong to groups X and Y deserve privileges/disadvantages to counteract this historical effect, which we know as a FACT had some unfair and unjust effect in the lives of these specific individuals." People have been coming up with rationales for why unfairly discriminating against people they dislike is actually virtuous and even obligatory forever, only changing up the rationales based on what the current population would be receptive to. Wokeness is the version that's been most perfectly evolved for modernity.
A major difference between woke and the other identity-based tribalisms is that it is adopted and promulgated by members of the hated tribe. Big difference between "Whitey is the enemy" coming from Stokely Carmichaeel and "Whitey is the enemy" coming from e.g. Stephen King.
I'm not convinced. As I was arguing with @6tjk last week. If we take the intesectionalist's definition of "Whiteness" seriously, Stephen King is not white.
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