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Notes -
One signal that wokeness is waning: the words printed at the bottom of the helmets of NFL players.
I don't have metrics on this, this is all just my subjective perception. I scrubbed through my recording of the games while writing this in the interest of accuracy.
At the start of the 2020 season, just a few months after social justice become trendy, the NFL decided to allow players to swap out the name of their team on the back of the helmet for a social justice message. At that time they could choose one of four messages: "Stop Hate," "It Takes All Of Us," "End Racism," or "Black Lives Matter." The league would also sometimes print these messages on the field.
At the season opener this past Thursday, with the L.A. Rams facing the Buffalo Bills, I noticed a new message: "Choose Love." I thought it was just nearly all of the Rams sporting this one, but this article says it was all of them. Few of the Bills were displaying anything except for their team name. That the preferred message was so non-specific was a signal itself that attitudes may be shifting. The article says that the NFL says "Choose Love" is a message against hate crimes and gun violence, but I would never have guessed that had it not been spelled out for me.
This past Sunday I watched three games: Cincinnati Bengals vs. Pittsburgh Steelers, Green Bay Packers vs. Minnesota Vikings, and Tampa Bay Buccaneers vs. Dallas Cowboys.
For Bengals vs Steelers I saw zero of these messages. Notably neither quarterback on either team had such a message.
In Packers vs Vikings I couldn't see any messages on the Packers, I'd say about a third of the Vikings had them. Neither quarterback had them.
For Cowboys vs. Bucs I saw none on the Cowboys, about half of Bucs players had them, which included the quarterback Tom Brady, sporting "Inspire Change."
In all of the games I noticed just one "Black Lives Matter," on a Vikings player.
Maybe I'm just misremembering the prevalence of these the past two seasons, but I thought they used to be more likely than not, especially for star players.
Overt cultural pressure is less important now that banks, universities, bureaucracies, and schools are, in large part, captured by wokist moral reasoning.
Wow, I must have missed the memo.
"It's cool, we won, you can take the sticker off now."
Who is coordinating this action? Who is telling league execs and players' publicists that their great work is over? You're hypothesizing a conspiracy tailoring its response to the level of institutional capture. This also suggests that the last couple years were the only ones where those darned woke moralists felt threatened enough to exert overt pressure!
There is an easier and more realistic explanation. Those slogans were never important. For a brief period, the invisible hand identified them as a cheap appeal to the current Cultural Moment^TM. In the absence of that signal, most everyone went back to the default.
This is unnecessarily antagonistic and reads into Supah's comment something that isn't there. There doesn't need to be coordination/conspiracy for fashion/fads to change over time. It's not at all uncommon for peope who see themselves as trendsetters to tire easily of what was trendy last month, especially when a trend has since been codified by less-cool bodies, like commercial institutions.
I agree with your conclusion, but didn’t read Supah’s comment like that at all.
“Overt social pressure” is distinct from status. Trendsetters aren’t changing tactics because the ideology became “less important”; they’re pursuing a separate goal. He was definitely asserting that pressure and not status was the goal.
Edit: per his clarification, pressure was obviously not the end goal. It was a means to policy ends. This is still a reading that does not rely on trends or fads, but activist strategy.
You might have read me as asserting that pressure was the goal in and of itself, but that is not what I wrote. Clearly, influence in policy is more important to most activists than just getting culturally-popular institutions to signal fealty to their cause. This is apparent from listening to woke/leftist media products, which in my experience spend a lot more time thinking about how to actually pass Medicare-for-all, or gun bans, or abortion guarantees, or fossil fuel restrictions than they do about getting instagram influencers or sports stars to parrot the latest slogans. Further, it's a sort of obvious assumption to make if one assumes that the activists are operating in good faith and believe their own statements; to assume otherwise would be to assume cynical grifting. While there's a lot of grift in politics, assuming it's universal - particularly on the left - strikes me as a mistake.
Furthermore, there's no reason to think that policy success requires uniform cultural pressure. There is limited activist money and time, which isn't always focusing on the same institutions and causes. Moreover, as an idea becomes successful, former activists "graduate" into institutional positions, and now have the opportunity to influence policy directly rather than being forced to form rabble-rousing pressure groups spearheaded by popular cultural influencers. Illinois just put second-degree murder on a "no-cash-bail" list. Congratulations, I guess?
Still, the slogans were extremely important in that they shifted the overton window of permissible behavior. How many corporations were divesting from oil and gas exploration due to ESG in 2018? How many new """diversity""" racial set-asides and sinecures have been created since 2020? How much money was funneled to activist NGO groups? How many people will get fired today for saying things about differential crime rates? How many melanated workers and students can demand that their pale comrades get punished for verbal lese majeste of being insufficiently deferential to the aggrieved? Would opposition to affirmative action get you called fascist in 2018? I could go on but I don't want to belabor the point too much.
Moreover, the slogans continue to be important because they spread a large number of actively false and pernicious ideas through the population, and tied those ideas to one's moral standing in the community (after all, only Nazis don't support BLM, right?). Without BLM and these slogans permeating every aspect of life in 2020, there's no way that the general public comes to believe that 1,000 unarmed black people are shot by cops every year (it's actually more like ten) (cite: https://www.skeptic.com/research-center/reports/Research-Report-CUPES-007.pdf), or white liberals come to believe that white people are more violent than black people (13/52, etc.) (https://twitter.com/wesyang/status/1101118880154611713). So their effect is going to be long-lived (or at least continue until something else actively drums them out of the public's heads).
My mistake.
I maintain that the life cycle of slogans and stickers is better understood by capitalism than by activism. They were promoted--at a corporate level--to serve a market, and they faded away when that market lost cohesion. I think the distinction is important when gauging influence and popularity of the underlying movement.
Honestly it's probably both. Capitalism is adaptable to a wide range of aesthetics and policies; the activists provide the substance of the aesthetic and, ironically, serve as market-leaders and promoters for those corporations which are on board with the slogans.
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