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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.
Or the "extraneous stuff" will overtake the core mission and the institution will collapse, a looted, gutted corpse. See, e.g., South African governmental institutions, and their power grid, water works, and mining regulators.
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