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Notes -
wokeness is definitely losing influence. the trouble is in 2020 and 2021 the craziness sort of made institutions vulnerable and everyone rabid to the point that it was like our institutions were lying on the operating table with their chest ripped open and before it was sutured up radicals sort of added a bunch of shit they wanted changed. and it's hard to take that stuff out because you'd need to open the chest up again.
in other words, it seems clear that popular support for progressivism is waning. but the issue is all of these DEI and other progressive initiatives were forced into institutions along with the expectation that they be able to pass the purity tests that activists are known for. so they're now embedded in institutions even though the pressure to implement those policies is far weaker than it was. But they just sort of have this momentum; they were embedded into the institutional logic to the point that it's just a first principle that they must adhere to progressive priorities.
at some point, in some way, these things will be expunged from institutions to some degree. i just don't know how. I've heard someone say 'it's easy to be woke in a bull market' - and that suggests to me that if a recession comes businesses and other institutions will face enough difficulty in delivering on their core mission that they will need to strip out the extraneous stuff and the distractions.
the other mechanism i see at play is things like Desantis' response to the don't say gay bill. that introduced a cost to businesses becoming politicized; it conveyed that if you are going to enter partisan politics and pick a side you are going to face the wrath of the other side. and i think that at some point businesses are going to have this 'hey let's just focus on the basics. lets just focus on our core mission. i know there are costs associated with failing to support progressive initiatives, but there are also costs to becoming politicized. so let's just not enter the arena'
the greatest pressure keeping these progressive policies instituted is this sort of common knowledge among everyone who isn't progressive that if you don't support those initiatives or speak out against them there will be hell to pay so you just need to do it. it's the fear of the enforcement mechanism that keeps these policies instituted and not the enforcement mechanism itself, as the enforcement mechanism has largely become rusted out and no one actually knows if it works anymore because anytime its threats are heeded it's because of that same 'you're going to get us cancelled if you don't support these initiatives so i'm going to pressure you to support these initiatives. it's brilliant, in a way.
Wokeness isn't losing influence. It's just that it has so utterly won that it's just understood that the woke way is the right and proper way and any objections will be steamrollered so don't bother making them.
Evidence to the contrary
Eric Adams winning in New York on a tough on crime, skeptical of progressives message
Youngkin winning in VA
NJ gov race
the DA and progressive members of the SF city council being sweeped in elections
These are all examples of more moderate candidates beating progressive candidates in historically blue areas. and just in general social dialogue simply is not as militantly progressive as it was in 2020 and 2021. really the number of truly progressive people seems to be smaller. Things are more complicated than it's won or it hasn't.
Elections are a bad gauge because, if sufficiently democratic, they are close to being public-opinion polls. When people talk about wokeness being powerful, they usually mean it is disproportionately powerful compared to its popularity (or at least compared to its success, if they think public opinion on something is being driven by dishonest media coverage). It routinely gets institutions to act as if its dictates are universally popular, just the way society has decided things are done nowadays, even when they are unpopular or at least highly controversial. By comparison, essentially nobody talks about how pro-agriculture ideology is influential. When a public opinion poll finds that colleges discriminating against white/asian people is unpopular, but they do it anyway, that isn't cited as evidence that wokeness is weak. Now, it is true that elections have more direct impact than public-opinion polls. But lots of sources of power aren't elections - corporate policies, sympathetic media coverage, unelected government bureaucrats, etc. It didn't take an election for hospitals to ration healthcare based on racial "equity" or for the CDC/ACIP to recommend a COVID-19 vaccine-distribution plan that they estimated would result in thousands of additional deaths so that a larger fraction of those deaths would be white. So long as wokeness holds such a disproportionate influence over unelected institutions, I don't think it makes a lot of sense to assume it is waning just because it is unpopular with the general public and thus sometimes loses elections.
Elections are a good gauge because, if sufficiently democratic, power is popularity.
If what you mean is ‘disproportionately powerful relative to its popularity’ powerful is not the word that characterizes your view of it. Something can have marginal influence but that influence is still greater than its actual popularity.
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