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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.
(I use this analogy not to invoke Godwin's law, but because it's the first example I could think of a once-ascendant ideology which is now widely condemned. Wokeness is not Nazism, not "like" Nazism, not "as bad as" Nazism.)
From Germany in 1933-45, Nazism was the thing. The Nazi party was in power, swastika flags flew everywhere, "Heil Hitler" was the official greeting. Since the end of the war, Nazism is perhaps the most widely reviled and condemned ideology in the world. Labelling someone a Nazi is such a reliable rhetorical kill-button that it's become a cliché, and yet still sees unironic use every day. In the Anglosphere and Western Europe, no public figure openly identifies as a Nazi. Even things with incidental connections to the Nazi regime (like the phrase "final solution", or the term "concentration camp", which the Nazis did not coin and which had an entirely legitimate meaning prior to the war) have become untouchable by association. In some cases this stigmatisation is enforced by law (e.g. for understandable reasons it's illegal to display a swastika in Germany), but not always: publicly wearing a swastika t-shirt in Boston is a legally protected act under the First Amendment, and yet one's likelihood of getting beaten up by a complete stranger for doing so is similar to the likelihood of same in Berlin.
Now imagine a counterfactual world wherein Nazism went into retreat, without being so aggressively stigmatised. After the war, the Nazi party was no longer in power, but politicians elected as party members during its peak make no especial effort to distance themselves from their electoral pasts: indeed, many politicians proudly self-identify as Nazis, and openly announce their intent to seek election under a Nazi platform. Academics with cushy university jobs hang swastika flags in their offices, and no one so much as raps them on the knuckles. While most Germans have gotten back into the habit of greeting each other with "Guten tag", a handful still use "Heil Hitler", and this is treated essentially as an amusing anachronistic idiosyncrasy, like someone who persists in referring to the internet as the "world wide web". Whenever Nazi atrocities are brought up in public, the reaction among those responsible is not solemn contrition but flippant dismissal: "ha ha, we sure did get a bit carried away, didn't we?" And whenever Jews complain that open expressions of support for this ideology make them uncomfortable, people roll their eyes and tell them to stop moaning. We had the Nuremberg trials, the party is no longer in power – what more do you want? Let the baby have its bottle.
In the above scenario, I doubt many would say that Nazism as an ideology had decisively lost. I think most would describe it as dormant, not extinct.
After the Sydney Sweeney "great jeans" thing, I observed that there has been a vibe shift, in that, while woke people are still free to publicly express pretty out-there opinions without it having much impact on their public standing, there's no longer any expectation for normies to play along, to mouth along with the catechism. On the surface, this might look like we've "beaten" woke. But as many other commenters below have pointed out, I think it's premature to be doing victory laps. Sure, I don't have to pretend to agree that American Eagle is covertly promoting white supremacy, and I won't get into trouble for denying that it is – but woke people can still explicitly state that and face no career repercussions of any kind. I don't have to pretend to support putting convicted male rapists in women's prisons, or the sterilisation of autistic teenagers by their thousands – but every June, without fail, my entire office (my entire city) gets festooned with flags celebrating both. (Lest you think I'm exaggerating, last weekend I walked past a mural depicting a trans-identified female with prominent mastectomy scars that was paid for with EU money).
Wokeness is not extinct: wokeness is dormant, and AOC knows this better than anyone. If she really wanted to distance herself from a permanently radioactive ideology, she couldn't afford to be half this flippant.
Heaven forbid anyone be allowed to hold and express political or ethical opinions that clash with yours! Where would American democracy be then?
The salient characteristic of "wokeness" that right-wingers had a legitimate case against - the thing that needed, needs, to be wiped out - is cancel culture. It was the unprecedented defection from American norms around freedom of speech, freedom of thought, and peaceful coexistence with people from the other side of the aisle. If there are still wokes out there cancelling people, that's one thing. But the fact that people still hold beliefs of the kind that wokeness sought to enforce by illegitimate means, that is not relevant. It's normal. It's the equivalent of non-murderous German nationalists, who do not deserve to automatically be tarred with the Nazi brush just because they pursue similar aims to those that the Nazis committed horrific crimes in pursuit of.
And my point, which you seem determined not to grasp, is that even with woke supposedly in retreat, there's still an asymmetry. Woke people in positions of power and influence can express obviously insane opinions (like "American Eagle is covertly promoting eugenics and white supremacy") without repercussions, while conservatives cannot do the same. Even normie centrists cannot publicly express many opinions which are well-attested by the sciences without being smeared as "far-right".
That may be, but the problem is that conservatives are not allowed to state their beliefs; not that progressives are allowed to do so. And your post sounded a lot more like you thought it was a problem that progressives were allowed to voice their beliefs at all.
(I also wouldn't describe the American Eagle thing as "obviously insane". The pun is pretty obvious, and "good genes" is, you know, literally the etymological meaning of the word "eugenics", so it's hard to argue that the ad wasn't playing with garden-variety eugenics-adjacent ideas, the question is just how deliberate, how consciously politically-motivated the reference was. I don't believe it was intended as some sort of pointed dogwhistle or propaganda, rather than a slightly naughty reference to low-grade wrongthink which they correctly reckoned to be widely held by their target audience; and I don't particularly think that whiteness was on the makers' minds, just ordinary non-race-specific, non-systematized folk eugenics. But it's a question of degree rather than of kind.)
Well, that wasn't the point I was making at all. Perhaps I didn't express myself clearly enough. My point was that woke people can get away with publicly expressing rather out-there opinions without taking any kind of reputational hit, while conservatives or moderates cannot even get away with expressing comparably (or even much less) crazy opinions. This doesn't look like wokeness has been defeated.
This seems like a rather extreme motte-and-bailey/sanewashing to me. Eugenics is the belief that governments should take proactive interventionist measures to improve the genetic fitness of the populations they govern. It is not the belief that some people are congenitally more attractive than others. If it meant the latter, there would be literally no one on the planet who didn't qualify as a eugenicist, and if everyone's a eugenicist, no one is.
The "is" belief "some people are congenitally hotter than others" in no way implies the "ought" belief "the government should intervene to improve the genetic fitness of the population it governs".
Then why just list "debatably-crazy things lefties are still allowed to say" rather than "debatably-crazy things righties still aren't allowed to say" as the watermark? That's really what gave me that impression. It's difficult to take your aside about Pride Month as anything else than "Pride Month celebrations should end", as distinct from "Conservatives should be allowed to have equally-extravagant celebrations".
Not so. Radical progressives would be very uncomfortable with the sheer phrase "good genes" - the belief that some genes are in any objective sense better than others is viewed as a dangerous slippery slope to proactive eugenicism. Certainly no one would deny that there are, biologically, genes for particular eye colors or cranial structures, but the far-left view is that attractiveness is subjective, and Sydney Sweeney genes are in no objective sense "better" than Danny DeVito genes, it just happens to be the case that more people are into Sweeney-like body-types/it's more socially acceptable to express attraction to Sweeney-like body-types.
Talking about "good" and "bad" genes, with the possible exception of medical conditions, is, precisely as I said, a "slightly naughty" reference to a widely-held opinion that's benignly, but significantly at odds with the maximally progressive view. It doesn't mean you're secretly advertising to Hitler, but I think it's fair to take it as a signal that you are less than maximally concerned with the opinions of the radical left; as a signal that you are addressing normal people, not Tumblr keyboard warriors. It's not especially sinister, but the keyboard warriors weren't entirely wrong to think that the ad was winkingly espousing a worldview antithetical to their own.
Because the OP was claiming that woke is defeated, and wokes being able to say absurd extreme things without repercussion is not what a defeated movement looks like. I presumed it went without saying that conservatives and moderates still cannot express comparably crazy (and in some cases, ordinary commonsense) opinions without repercussion. I mean, it obviously does go without saying: even you aren't disputing it.
Difficult for you to take, perhaps. I thought the point was abundantly clear: an entire city being festooned with the flags of a particular ideology at the city council's behest is not what a defeated ideology looks like.
They might claim to be uncomfortable with the concept, but their revealed preferences (in terms of their choice of romantic partner, their aspirations for their children, who they sexually fantasise about, which sports teams and athletes they bet on, their attitudes towards inbreeding etc.) would tell a very different story.
But then we're back to equating between "woke" as in "the anti-free-speech cancellation machine" (which needed to be defeated) and "woke" as in "people holding left-wing opinions at all, however respectfully" (which there is no particular justification to expect to be 'defeated' overnight, any more than any mainstream belief system held by hundreds of millions of people).
Even if we grant this point for the sake of argument, that still leaves "phrases like good genes are taboo" as a bona fide leftist shibboleth that the American Eagle ad campaign would have been stepping on the toes of. The question then is whether they did so out of ignorance, or if they considered that left-wingers would be offended and decided that being seen to mildly upset SJWs suited their PR purposes just fine. I have no fixed belief, but the latter is plausible, and it would mean the woke brouhaha about the ad was by no means "crazy" in ascribing hostile intent to the ad, even if it was still something of an overreaction.
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