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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.
If feel like "touted the virtues" is overstating things but it is a fun movie that I had recently rewatched and had been considering posting about as an interesting culture war time capsule.
The plot revolves around rich-preppies colluding with university president Jessica Walter, playing an ersatz Hillary Clinton, to drive "the normies" off campus. Part of their plan is to explicitly de-normalize normie behavior like guys asking girls out, so that the university can claim that they are responding to legitimate complaints rather than engaging in illegal discrimination.
The whole "rape culture" thing was satire back in the 90 but now it has fallen victim to Muggeridge's Law.
Wikipedia claims the term was first used in 1974, although I can't remember hearing it before the early 2010s.
Weirdly enough I actually think the term is a perfectly legitimate one: it's uncontroversially true that certain cultures promote rape, downplay the severity of it, or protect those guilty of it rather than protect their victims. It's just that every example of a culture meeting this description is a culture that modern feminists would object to being so characterised. "Gangs of adult men sexually exploit adolescent girls in their thousands, and the police turn a blind eye to it for decades for fear of 'inflaming community tensions' (the perpetrators are disproportionately Pakistani men) and because of the girls' socioeconomic background" is such an on-the-nose description of a rape culture it hurts – but intersectional feminists would likely get mad if I said that the UK was a rape culture provided that the rapists are Pakistani. Likewise, pretty much any Muslim-majority country in MENA could reasonably be characterised as a rape culture.
I don't disagree with feminists that rape cultures exist – I disagree with which cultures ought to be characterised as such.
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