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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.
You have won a few battles, but all you have done is halt the advance. The woke have simply retreated to more easily defended positions. As long as they control academia and the arts (science AND culture) they will keep coming back and continue to be relevant.
"Woke 1 was crazy" does not mean that wokeness is dead. It simply means that mistakes were made and Woke 2, when it happens, will account for the learnings of the past.
I don't think academia is a great position to be in long term. Sure, it's easily defended, but like any walled fortress, it can be starved out. And it's already showing signs of hunger. COVID and the replication crisis are ravaging its moral authority, while it is being put under increasing financial strain by both right-wing government funding rugpulls, the decreasing perceived value of the degree, and the demographic decline of the customer base. Plus, being an academic has become increasingly unglamorous over the past two decades as would-be academics have realized that there are more would-be academics than there are slots, so you spend 5 years taking classes and working as a barely-paid TA for the privilege of fighting with six or seven other people just as qualified as you over the privilege of an underpaid non-tenure-track adjunct position. Right-wing colleges and universities probably won't suffer much from the demographic decline, and neither will the Ivy Leagues, but there's a good chance it wipes out small left-by-default liberal arts colleges. There was clearly an effort to compensate for this by importing students, but Trump's actions may have put a damper on that, at least for a bit.
Culture is also going to take a hit from this effect, since the colleges are the pipeline to it. It might be less vulnerable in some ways, particularly to direct government action, but there are signs that culture is going to increasingly fragment in the future and that will substantially weaken predominately left-wing institutions like Hollywood.
I don't think these developments are set in stone but if I saw lefties telling each other "at least we still have academia" I would finger it as cope.
Are we going to ignore the elephant in the room that is AI? It is bound to do something to the university system, even if it is just further decoupling the college experience from hard skills. If humans do not intellectually contribute to the object-level problems in the workplace anymore, then there can not be any pretense that any job requirements for them are about anything other than manners, that is, how they relate to other people; and so college will have to go all in on its role as finishing school.
I definitely think that AI might have an impact, but the Internet didn't have quite as big an impact as one might have predicted. If AI does make a big difference, I wonder how much of it will be because of the tech and how much because of the state of the university.
I am largely all right with colleges understanding that they are something like a finishing school.
Part of the problem at the top end of the US prestige pyramid is that the Ivy+ schools always knew they were finishing schools, but at some point (I think the 1990s) they decided that "finishing" the next generation of elites meant indoctrinating them in a particularly stupid form of left-wing "anti-oppression" politics, and not only (or even mostly) in the classroom.
What that got us was an elite that lie about their privilege and claim to be oppressed victims, and take it seriously when other elites do the same thing. Increasingly including conservative/Republican/red tribe elites.
Yes, I think this is exactly right. I find the claims of victimhood to be extremely revolting coming from elites, not because I think elites definitionally have it cushy, but because I think elites definitionally have obligations. What the Ivy league schools (and any school that is trying to give their students a liberal arts education so that they can be cultural leaders) should do is inculcate a sense of responsibility.
And I agree with you that righties can do the same thing. Righties usually couch it in terms of group oppression - not "I personally am oppressed" but rather "my group is being discriminated against by the great and powerful." Which does happen, and does need to be called out. But there is a fine line there and I think it's dangerous to emphasize it too much. In particular, I think right wing media spends too much time pushing "look at how we are being mistreated" stories instead of simply doing good gumshoe work.
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