"*On page 10 of The Origins of Woke, Hanania writes, “The government mandates came first, and the ideology later.” That strikes me as unpersuasive. I don’t see a legal mandate behind the trans movement, BLM, or students shouting down conservative speakers."
There isn't an explicit legislative mandate tied to the ideologies, but behind these movements really is government power. The civil rights acts of 1964 and 1990 and the 13th and 14th amendments do empower these movements since the laws themselves have been reinterpreted by later courts in ways the people who passed the laws never intended. If you want to put those laws back in their original box, then legislation really is necessary. It probably won't suffice even it is possible to gain such legislative majorities, but let's not pretend that the laws themselves aren't part of the problem.
The problem is not "the laws" but our abandonment of the very idea of "the law".
A point I've repeated over the years is that it is doing an injustice, so to speak, to the word 'law' or the concepts 'rule of law' and 'equal justice under law' to call these recently-laid, vague, and infinitely flexible liability minefields 'law' at all. If anything, they represent the abolition of law and its replacement with blank-checks written out to future elites. The right should have never recognized these abuses as legitimate 'law' at all.
Real Law would be a good map of the minefield. "Step here, safe, there, boom." You can safely navigate a minefield with such a map, and thus plan your steps and interactions with others with confidence. Fake Law is to mark off an area the size of Texas with wide fuzzy borders with no marking or labels inside besides the single word, "Mines?!" People either avoid getting anywhere close to that whole area, or if they can't feasibly do so, they pray for good luck.
For example, any attempt to legislate with text that is too vague to be understood is traditionally void for vagueness and thus not 'law' at all. But almost all of our 'laws' concerning the controversies that are the subject of 'wokeism' have all proven to be precisely so: too vague to be understood. Not even by the original drafters!
That's because you can't be said to understand 'rules' if you are perpetually very uncertain as to what you can and cannot do. And in these identity-focused fields, expert legal professionals are often providing expensive advice in memos that in the final analysis don't amount to much more than, "Hi client, best we can say is that you might as well flip a coin if you want to know how the litigation would turn out."
Just because something calls itself legislation or regulation and follows the formal rituals appropriate to the passage of actual law, doesn't mean it is. If something purports to be law but doesn't allow legal experts to predict with good confidence and accuracy, in normal, mainstream cases, what is and what is not allowed, and what will happen to transgressors of rules and rights, then it is merely the wolf of lawless power wearing the sheep's clothing of law.
Sure, there is always a relatively small set of extreme cases, edge cases, hard cases, and novel cases of first impression for which it is reasonable to say it would be hard for a lawyer in the field to know which side would prevail in a trial. But our problem is that the legal uncertainty extends routinely to the very cores of our common disputes, and nowhere more especially than in matters involving these 'woke' topics of ideological and political controversy.
Justice Marshall famously wrote, "It is emphatically the province and duty of the judicial department to say what the law is." But today even after SCOTUS issued a holding with hundreds of pages of opinion, no one knows what the law actually requires or forbids with regards to colleges implementing de facto race quotas on their student bodies, and everybody suspects the colleges will just continue to do it and find some barely-legal way to hide the ball.
So, are the courts telling us what the law is? They can't. There is no actual law there to tell about.
One way to think about it is that the laws & far more, the ever-increasing regulations & bureaucracy create an ecosystem that attracts & nurtures woke ideology.
@Yancy Ward: I suggest that you add the Griggs. v. Duke Power decision (1971), which created the "disparate impact" doctrine, to your list of government interventions. Disparate impact requirements are effectively an early implementation of woke demands for "equity".
But disparate impact is the natural extension of the blank slate idea. If races (etc) are equal we shouldn't find these wild disparate impacts in society.
And we aren't getting rid of blank slate, and not even because of leftist ideology. No "inferior" group is going to recognize their own inferiority. Each group will act in their own special interest to carve out whatever slice of the pie they can for themselves by whatever means at their disposal.
If this were a more cynical era we would call it "the spoils system". Everyone would just expect that "of course the Irish control the city police department, the mayor had to give it to them to get their votes".
Blacks have a special thing going for them. They are losers so their votes are cheaper to buy. And racial solidarity is a very easy thing for them to exercise, they pick a side and 90% of them get behind it. No wasted votes there. Imagine if you delivered the police department up to the Irish and half the Irish didn't vote for you, what a waste.
Many of these oppressed interest groups are just a combination of cheap and effective votes and social pressure.
As long as that's true political and social entrepreneurs are going to want to pick that $100 off the sidewalk, and they will need some kind of "ideology" to justify it to themselves and reduce the pushback from their enemies.
I guess if whites or straights or whatever decided "fuck it, we are voting as a united block until the blacks start acting better" they could just force it on them. The way the Chinese do to the Malays in Singapore. But whites, straights, etc are divided, and they care more about their internal political struggles than black (etc) dysfunction. One side says "if we get the X vote we can win power with only 40% of Y" or whatever and so they pick up that $100 bill.
Applying the "Three Languages of Politics" analysis, wokism seems like an extreme version of the progressive "oppressor v. oppressed" worldview. But Trumpism doesn't look at all like an extreme version of conservatism. Trumpism, as has often been noted, is not very conservative. Trump himself is seen by traditional conservatives as a barbarian. To what extent is Trumpism a mirror image of wokism, with the roles of oppressor and oppressed reversed? Are Trumpism and wokism squeezing out traditional conservatism, liberalism, and libertarianism?
I’ve long found the best explanation for Trump’s behavior is that he behaves like a Democrat thinks a Republican would act. I think your version of this might have slightly more explanatory power.
1) He acknowledged that Iraq, the war on terror, etc were wrong and should end.
2) He dropped the self destructive and ineffective GOP posturing on cutting SS/Medicare.
3) He admitted that The Great Replacement by people from shithole countries was a terrible idea.
4) He was onboard with The Federalist Society and judges, but its obvious he isn't pro-life personally.
The GOPe/Conservatives had some bad ideas and bad politics that it wouldn't change. So they became vulnerable to a political entrepreneur. As far as I can tell they haven't learned enough and changed enough to deal with this issue, so if not Trump it will be someone else.
Much of Trumpism is anti-wokism. Most anti-woke critiques of woke are used, in practice, far more by Trump voters than by Dem voters (Biden or any), or even by most GOPe folk.
I’m tired of Trump, too. But that doesn’t stop him, or Woke, from being important. Like we in Slovakia already tired of the war next door in Ukraine. Fine to say and be tired, but it’s silly to think it’s the last essay on any important, relevant topic or person.
The killer app for any political movement in a system like ours is the capacity to use power when won to help supporters, hurt opponents, and solidify its hold on power, while denying that capacity to the opposition when they are in power. An asymetric spoils system.
Doing this in a system that pretends to be one based on individualism and equally-applied laws requires an ideological Narrative that provides a cover story and set of socially-acceptably excuses for the heads-we-win, tails-you-lose differential treatment, e.g., it's legal for a President to do something but illegal for the next President to undo it.
The outline of this story is really simple and has been stable for a long time. Orwell wrote it out just as plainly and explicitly.
Every working society has winners and losers in all the great social games: successes and failures, haves and have-nots, normals and deviants, those with high and low social status, and so forth. We can just call them the high and low. Natural human instinct is for the low to envy and bitterly resent the high and to tell stories about injustice to boost their self-esteem and to try and sooth their humilated egos and explain why their situation is not their fault. Instead, it is the fault of the high, who didn't win fair and square, but, in the best case, only by good luck, and in the worst case, by evil malfeasance, exploitation, and oppression. That is, they caused the low to lose, whereas, in a just society, they would have been the high.
And if you support the left and it's story about 'equality' and 'justice, the leaders will use their formal and cultural power to be King Robin Hood and redistribute all the wealth, jobs, and status to the low. And the left gets to do this with state power, because the low 'need and deserve' to get a special exception to the general law. The right does not get to do it, because the high are already the high, and neither need nor deserve anything.
That's what the left is, and that's what 'woke' is. The whole ecosystem of cooperating constituencies and parts and tools.
The major strategic blunder of the right has been to repeatedly and idiotically concede even an inch to the principle that the Constitution had always strictly prohibited such asymetric group-on-group predation, and banned the capacity of masses of voters to vote themselves goodies they can get someone else to pay for. Once the principle is conceded in any way in any field, the inch immediately becomes ten thousand miles and the right can never, ever win the game of outbidding the left on the genoristy of promised goodies, and can never get the toothpaste back in the tube, providing us with the mechanism of the ratchet of our political history.
This is the best analysis of “woke” I have seen. Love the blind man and the elephant analogy. I was just reading Hanania’s definition of “woke” in his book and noticing that it misses so much. I like what Rufo is doing, but I am concerned about a lot of what he is saying. Amen to “tired of the woke wars.”
I think a better analogy is the traditional rivalries between military specialties as regards which deserves most credit for winning wars. Army vs Navy vs Air Force, or Infantry vs Artillery, etc.
Like sports team loyalty, this is fine so far as the social psychology of morale, cohesiveness, and solidarity, but dumb if one takes it too seriously. In reality, these are all essential parts of a machine doing their part and working together toward a common overall objective, with the expectation that overall victory will lead to each unit receiving their fair share of glory and booty.
Likewise, it's fine to zoom in and focus on details of one particular contributing factor to the story of how progressive leftist ideology evolved to what it is today, and it may even be smart as regards what is most effective in communicating a popularized version of the story to rally the forces of mass public opposition. But if one takes it too far and plants a flag to declare a single factor as the be-all-end-all explanation, one misses the forest for the trees.
The best way to understand what is going on is to see contemporary progressivism as a kind of evolving social phenomenon that is like a semi-decentralized firm competing in the political marketplace, consisting of the various elements of a political coalition, cooperating and doing their part according to their roles in the game, to gain and keep power, and use it to pay off everyone on their side, and hurt everyone on the other side. The overarching consensus narrative and ideology of the firm is a convenient cover story providing a boost in manufactured solidarity and excusing what would otherwise be seen as norm-violating behavior.
Progressive ideology has long had a core of coherent ideas, the sum of which only seem incoherent because, in public speech and practice, it is watered down by politically expedient unprincipled exceptions. Those exceptions can be tolerated and hand-waved away with rationalizations for a long time, but they create internal frictions and irritations like a buried splinter. And so as soon as some constituency kept around as part of an "exception to policy" becomes unnecessary to victory in the political game, it gets thrown under the bus and the mainstream ideological consensus immediately reformulated to rectify the transgression. The history of changes in American leftist politics and ideas since WWII shows this to be the case.
Do you have a brief list of the hard core coherent ideas in Progressive ideology in mind you could share? I would be interested in your thoughts on that matter. I see their ideology as more of an abstract one, roughly that reality and its parts can be perfected, joined with a focus on oppressor/oppressed story telling where the oppressed is always to be lionized. Together these abstractions lead to a crusading, we are the good guys out to help the weak poor and vulnerable, and those who are against us are evil oppressors. I think the ideas as apply to reality stem from these abstractions, but are themselves mutually incoherent for the most part because of the dichotomy the world view forces the world into; that works in small individual cases, but breaks down when applied with a wider view where the oppressed in one case are oppressing another, where reality can't quite be perfected here without making it worse there, etc.
But like I said, I am really interested in hearing your thoughts! (I miss your blog, by the way.)
I miss the world that was just safe enough for that blog to exist. I would like to do it again, but things being such as they are, I would need to feel much more assured of being as robustly doxxing-proof as it is possible to be. Alas, I don't think substack would make any special exceptions for me, and even though I'm no cyber-ignoramous, it has become quite obvious that the level of technical proficiency required to achieve my desired level of security is surprisingly high, requiring practically elite-caliber skills which are certainly well above my own capabilities.
Yes but, in my view, there is a psychology underlying these abstractions. And that underlying psychology, counter-intuitively, is very different from the ostensible ideology. It is typically in fact born of resentfulness, self-pity and more-virtuous/sophisticated-than-thou vanities The hugely mistaken idea that progressivism is nice-and-kind-but-naive-and-unrealistic is what has allowed it for so long to seduce and run rings around politicians, the media and the rest of us.
Oh, I agree, there is definitely a psychology at play, particularly in the leadership, but I don't think there is a universal one. That is to say, the leadership probably has more than it's share of psychopaths or other dark triad types, and so does the followership probably, but I suspect there is a big difference in the overall nature of the followership and the leadership. I think that is a big part of its success, that it attracts both what we might call "evil people" and people who are merely weak and broken, along with those who are genuine do gooders who haven't realized the evil yet, the naive and unrealistic. Something for damned near everyone, which is not something most ideologies/cults manage.
Re: "we do not have a consensus answer to some important questions. How we should react to differences in average outcomes by race? What should be the configuration of male and female roles? With regard to sexual conduct, when and how should people make an issue of the conduct of others?"
Treat persons as individuals. Let adults find their own roles. Enforce rules against nuisance. Don't impose politics on children. Roll back the state.
Mine isn't a consensus answer. But it is a modest, reasonable, mostly 'live and let live' answer.
My maximum charitable reading of Woke would be that it is a reasonable response *by ethnic leaders who have been most impacted* to the immoderate revolution in criminal justice that happened during the 1980s and 1990s. It is also a rational response to the situation that many academics and intellectuals find themselves in within the market economy: they are not useful, but they can steal things and break stuff. If they can do so under color of law, so much the better for them.
It is rational for them to do what they are doing. Glenn Loury himself has a book jacket quote on Michelle Alexander's "New Jim Crow," the favorite citation of all good woke criminal justice reformers. I doubt he even regrets endorsing the book. Woke is a recruiting mechanism that takes young people craving meaning and struggle which gets them very excited about certain issues and then funnels some portion of them into nonprofit or government work. These graduates are then chewed up by reality and then replaced by moar fresh graduates.
Woke is reasonable as a cheap way of getting loot for certain people. Much of world history is driven by people who love fighting to take loot and land from weak people who are incapable of defending themselves effectively. The great industrial economy is a historical novelty and an exception to the general rule of trade being a close cousin to piracy. Usually, traders are also thieves and killers. When you realize how unusual the bundle of moral values is (universal respect for property rights), deviations from it stop seeming so unusual. With Woke, they have valid legal claims for property belonging to various rich people and rich institutions run by terrified pacifists. All they have to do to loot them is create an appropriate case or controversy and then pay a court filing fee, and they have a potential claim to some institution or individual's loot. Because of how easy it is to file a reputationally harmful suit, they don't even have to file cases to extract sinecures and payments.
My maximum charitable reading of Woke is that persons expounding Woke beliefs want to be fair and nice. The problem, there, is that: 1) reality isn't fair and; 2) denial of reality is a path to catastrophe and; 3) "nice" is sufficiently ill-defined as to have little meaning.
More charitable than all the readings that say that they're "irrational" or merely suffering from "Cluster B Personality Disorders." Hard to say that with any integrity when they are so effective at achieving their goals. Crazy people are reliably erratic and often incapable of achieving anything but self-harm. If one thinks that one's opponents are crazy and erratic, then you will not treat them with the seriousness that an implacable, effective, and violent enemy deserves.
I think this is one of those cases where it is useful to differentiate between the "woke leadership" and the "woke followers". The leadership gets the spoils, while the followers get very little. Some of those leaders are no doubt psychopaths or Cluster-B's who are in it for the personal gain and are indifferent to whether it is good for anyone else. Some of those followers are genuinely nice people who are mistaken about the good they do. Some of the followers are just nuts and self destructive, but few of the leadership are; just because you are crazy (psychopathic) doesn't mean you are instrumentally unable to achieve your ends, and if you are unable to do so you don't become leadership.
Sure. The followers are the many, many people in academia, in government, and those seeking affirmative action who are filled with the appropriate sentiment of acquisitive envy. Then there are the sub-followers influenced by that middle layer who are more likely to be on the crazy side.
Unfair is often used as synonymous with injustice. We should call it unfair when some are born with high IQ, others like F. Gump with low. Nobody’s fault, nobody to blame. Injustice is when a person is victimized by another, whether deliberately or not. The justice system is to punish the perpetrators, the victimizers, so as to reduce future injustice, and maybe some compensation to the victims.
We are all victims of reality, but that’s because life is unfair. Not necessarily because the winners do injustice to the losers, tho that often does happen.
The woke reject the unfairness of true reality, like lower avg. black IQs, and wrongly label it injustice.
"My second thought is that all of the anti-Woke perspectives are all quite uncharitable."
That's because they spring from the "Power Elite" via the promotion of Communism via way of Cultural Marxism, using the Gramsci-Fabian tactic, and are wholly totalitarian and hostile to those who don't want that, and are thus not worthy of charity, but instead must be utterly destroyed.
Unless you like shortages, food lines, power outages, secret police, show trials, gulags, purges, executions, and famines, of course.
The Woke perspectives consist largely of self-indulgent haters of civilization, misusing the impulse in other people to be charitable, and thus forcing us to suppress that impulse for our society to survive. The Woke are the ultimate disproof of Hanlon's Razor; they show (or make true) that malice is nearly always a more accurate explanation for asserted disagreements than is either incompetence or honest difference of opinion.
Woke is the heritage of Puritanism, a continuation of a branch of Christianity, which is not to say that it is compatible with many of the other branches, nor implied in the entire schema (though some claim this). In many senses and in many guises has the same virtues and vices that Puritanism always had and can be taken charitably in that light (and criticized using some of the same critiques).
1. The monotheistic movement of Judaism had a very strong internal identity tied to a specific people group but open to converts. The history of Judaism as told in their scriptures gives a very strange tension, a high-wire act, in which the Chosen People are the weakest being backed by the strongest and upending expectations. At every turn, marginal people are part of the story and the outside voice appears in victory... the Patriarchs are not the Pharaohs, Benjamin is the smallest, David is not Saul, the Prophets are not the strongest Kings, Ruth, Ester, it keeps on going.
2. Christianity pushed this even further and opened a bunch of doors with serious ambiguity. Some people believe that Jesus was the pinnacle of history and we should always be trying to go back to the Gospels. Others hold up the Early church as the paragon to be approximated, which frankly seems to ignore its many issues even if you take the book of Acts at face value. However, many Christians believe that even Jesus was just a stop on the way of a grand inversion; and others, that even if Jesus was wholly right, that Paul was wrong to try to rein in the movement by reinforcing the social structures of the day (Roman slavery, norms of marriage, sexual morality, etc).
3. The Woke believe they are trying to continuously extend the umbrella of divine/universal love, peace, etc that is implied in perfect equality. They are, as the saying goes, trying to immanentize the eschaton. Bring heaven to earth, move towards utopia; and they are themselves often willing to bear some (apparent or self-perceived) burden to do it. They see themselves as pulling down the great and supporting the weak, and rewarding those who do likewise with well-deserved support and praise.
4. Of course, there are those who find the rewards motivating in themselves. But overall, they are pushing towards a goal, either yet another step on the path that included freedom for the Jews, salvation for the Gentiles, loosing the bonds of the captive, freeing the slaves, suffrage for women, etc. All the way, this was a holy crusade without the taint of the actual Crusades - Papism and so on.
5. Universalism/Unitarianism is another stop on the way, an abortive attempt, but continuous with it and a marker in how Populism basically ends up ignoring the self-proclaimed saints. They declared that they weren't a 'church' and immediately all their unenlightened 'normies' left. So they recanted and tried to go back to getting tithes. That didn't really work either.
5. Nietzsche threw out all of this and said that the entire endeavor was 'slave morality.' Thus he rejected Christianity and Judaism in a single stroke. That didn't make him popular with Jews but it at least seemed internally consistent. The 'Nature Red in Tooth and Claw' folks - militant evolutionary biologists - also end up rejecting all of this. It isn't apparent that their stance is compatible with any notion of a happy civilization.
6. Everyone else ends up somewhere on a spectrum, saying 'up to this point but no further.' It's hard to make these perspectives rationally Pure. The Roman Catholics, for instance, venerate tradition and say 'much of importance is mysterious.' Then you get into infighting among the puritan Catholics, ironically.
7. Purity is incompatible with moderation and toleration. But a continuous pursuit of 'virtue' seems internally consistent. An attempt to perfect oneself, one's society, and humanity finds no virtue in mediocrity or limited aims. I can sympathize. This is reflected as the tension between the bounded and the unbounded.
8. Unquestionable vice can hide in every skin. Absolute power corrupts and attracts the corrupt. That doesn't mean that everyone is necessarily guilty by association.
Another viewpoint, whose leading proponent is Peter Turchin, is that woke is a consequence of "Elite Overproduction." As the Wikipedia entry says "Elite overproduction has been cited as a root cause of political tension in the U.S., as so many well-educated Millennials are either unemployed, underemployed, or otherwise not achieving the high status they expect. Even then, the nation continued to produce excess lawyers and PhD holders, especially in the humanities and social sciences, for which employment prospects were dim..."
Combine a glut of student-debt ridden young people who were not given the high-paid jobs they expected, with the large number of still healthy boomers who have not been retiring and opening up paths toward financial advancement, that creates a natural craving on the part of the young to blast open that roadblock to the money and power to which they feel entitled. Finding moral failings on the part of those who have the jobs they want is a way to force them to make way.
I think Turchin's thesis is very important to understanding the reason for the competition, definitely. I don't know that it explains the reason for the nature of the competition, however. That is, why is the competition for jobs focusing on moral failings, and why are those moral failings things like "Said something now considered mean 10 years ago in passing on Twitter?" or "There are only two genders?"
The interesting thing, and why the blind men and elephant metaphor might be apt, is that all of this seems to matter. What we see is the end result of many different things being true and creating this strange cult like behavior that is accepted by the mainstream despite being considered gross and excessive by an apparent majority.
I too can't help but see in it some weakness in the juggernaut of Christianity.
I think of my beloved, long-dead Christian grandmothers. One of them I rather fancy would be tempted into "wokeness" to a degree (only if her life were displaced in time).
My Baptist grandmother attended a church that had a flashing sign, "We Preach Christ". And that they did, and not much else. Even at Wednesday night supper, the speaker would not really stray far from the Gospel as gray heads nodded and murmurs of assent and "amen" were heard. When on visits I was deposited in Sunday school, we would memorize Bible verses. I was crackerjack at that. The prize was - a Bible! There were no supplementary books either in her home or at the church.
My other grandmother - raised Baptist but turned to the more socially-appropriate Presbyterians - had a large library of what you might call 20th century liberal Christianity apologetics, and "historical" Holy Land books, and C.S. Lewis of course, and Catherine Marshall, and "Seven Storey Mountain" type stuff. And the Bible in Greek, Hebrew, etc. side by side. All possible translations. She loved a good speaker on early Christianity or archeology.
She was a big reader in general, and much closer to "intellectual" than Baptist Granny. She had a great interest in Indians and had lots of books on that subject too. She liked it known that she spoke some (rather Castilian) Spanish. She had grown up with Mexicans as the default other. She spoke tolerantly on subjects like divorce, or sympathetically on civil rights, if such (infrequently) arose.
Even as a child I observed in her an occasional tendency to enjoy giving a little impression of drama, or self-importance, in what she said or thought. I was a nearsighted child, and once when a neighbor stopped in and made some obligatory polite remark-about-the-grandchild re my "pretty blue eyes" (they are blue, not especially pretty) - to my inward wonderment my grandmother responded at length about my vision, practically making it sound like I was legally blind.
She didn't perhaps have quite enough to occupy her mind, and not quite enough originality of mind.
If I were inclined to sympathy with those intent on destroying the country (and perhaps more) - I would think of how they might work upon someone like my grandmother, who despite what I have written was not a silly woman. She was capable, shrewd in business matters, conscientious, an excellent cook and homemaker, etc. - and far better-natured than I. She was also quite genuine in her faith - as I found after her death as she lay dying she took comfort in choosing her favorite hymns and Bible passages, and writing them on a scrap of paper ("Be Thou My Vision' was always listed first), planning in her mind her funeral service - it's just that faith wasn't quite enough.
The fact that I do not think of any of this in connection with my grandfathers, whom I admittedly did not know nearly as well as my grandmothers - may tell you something more signal than my actual comment ...
The "blind men and the elephant" framing is spot on - this is a weird new set of beliefs that everyone is trying to fully understand.
I keep thinking about the Millenarian fervor that exploded around the invention and adoption of the printing press in Holland and Germany and how this "woke" moment is strikingly similar. Social justice mobs trying to create heaven on earth are not new, and thankfully this modern incarnation seems way less murderous and able to enforce their will on unwilling participants than they were in the 1500s. I imagine that Catholics and traditionalists at the time felt like blind men poking at some strange creature, trying to figure out what the hell it actually was.
“I hear the voice of the late Jeffrey Friedman telling me to instead take people with whom I disagree at their word, rather than apply reductionism. I hear Robert Wright make the case for cognitive empathy, so that I don’t succumb to the belief that I understand the other side’s true motives better than they understand themselves.”
I think I have cognitive empathy regarding the woke but it is certainly not returned and this leads to the temptation to psychologize the woke because their behavior is often illiberal. When socialism/communism was popular in the 30s/40s, it produced a lot of ex-communists who certainly understood the appeal of communism but they also understood that communism was “fascism with a human face” and resisted it. Communism attracted well-meaning people but it also attracted authoritarians. Wokeism has some of these “fascism with a human face” elements in that it has constructed a totalitarian ideology and attracts authoritarians who delight in the economically perverse and/or ethically dubious edicts issued by the DEI bureaucrats. Like the ex-communists before us, we can have cognitive empathy while also resisting it. Wokeism is mostly coherent but it quickly falls apart upon examination. Wokels are like Marxists in that they don’t tolerate criticism very well and exhibit the same dogmatic tendencies of orthodox Marxists, which was similar to a cult at one point. Lastly, I agree that Hanania doesn’t fully explain Wokeism but he explains a big part. Wokeism would likely continue to exist in the absence of government edicts because egalitarianism is a quasi-religion among a significant number of activists. But it would be seriously deflated. At least I hope so.
Given the seemingly elevated rates of clinical and sub-clinical Cluster B personality disorders (nb. histrionic personality disorder) among persons subscribing to Woke ideology, taking these persons at their word seems to be a failure of critical thinking.
Based on what I know of Haidt, Mounk, and Rauch, I’m not sure it’s fair to attribute “conservatism is eewww” to them. As for “not treat[ing] Woke as a coherent set of ideas that one can comfortably hold intellectually”--I haven’t read Mounk’s latest book yet, but from what I’ve heard him say about it in recent interviews, it sounds like he does exactly that.
An interesting breakdown of woke. We are all weary of the debate, no matter how justified. Whether it be a woke dupe or a right-wing dolt, in either case it is someone insisting how I must think or behave and persecuting me if I disagree. And in either case, attempting to persuade them to moderate and tolerate is a fool’s errand, for they will not retreat from their self-righteous stance.
Thanks for your comment. Couple of things: First, futility of persuasion applies to either left or right. Neither wants to cooperate with anyone. Second, I'm not seeking destruction, rather I'd ignore the extremists and concentrate on others, who may not align exactly with me, but are at least willing to find a way to cooperate.
Right vs. left, and all Ideology is a dead-end at best, and a trap at worst. Much like "free speech" platforms who slam the door after you're dependent and change the rules, all ideology is subject to entryism and subversion. This requires you to accept things you don't want in order to remain in an ideological tribe, which eventually becomes so unbearable you leave it and join another tribe, wash, rinse, repeat.
The solution is to instead focus on outcomes. What do you want for yourself and your children, your family? I want them to be able to realize their dreams, and their enemies smashed.
Bingo. It may be tiresome to deal with wokeness related controversies, but we're past the point where that matters. It's that time when "politics should be discussed on all fours." Bring it, lefties.
Kling wrote:
"*On page 10 of The Origins of Woke, Hanania writes, “The government mandates came first, and the ideology later.” That strikes me as unpersuasive. I don’t see a legal mandate behind the trans movement, BLM, or students shouting down conservative speakers."
There isn't an explicit legislative mandate tied to the ideologies, but behind these movements really is government power. The civil rights acts of 1964 and 1990 and the 13th and 14th amendments do empower these movements since the laws themselves have been reinterpreted by later courts in ways the people who passed the laws never intended. If you want to put those laws back in their original box, then legislation really is necessary. It probably won't suffice even it is possible to gain such legislative majorities, but let's not pretend that the laws themselves aren't part of the problem.
The problem is not "the laws" but our abandonment of the very idea of "the law".
A point I've repeated over the years is that it is doing an injustice, so to speak, to the word 'law' or the concepts 'rule of law' and 'equal justice under law' to call these recently-laid, vague, and infinitely flexible liability minefields 'law' at all. If anything, they represent the abolition of law and its replacement with blank-checks written out to future elites. The right should have never recognized these abuses as legitimate 'law' at all.
Real Law would be a good map of the minefield. "Step here, safe, there, boom." You can safely navigate a minefield with such a map, and thus plan your steps and interactions with others with confidence. Fake Law is to mark off an area the size of Texas with wide fuzzy borders with no marking or labels inside besides the single word, "Mines?!" People either avoid getting anywhere close to that whole area, or if they can't feasibly do so, they pray for good luck.
For example, any attempt to legislate with text that is too vague to be understood is traditionally void for vagueness and thus not 'law' at all. But almost all of our 'laws' concerning the controversies that are the subject of 'wokeism' have all proven to be precisely so: too vague to be understood. Not even by the original drafters!
That's because you can't be said to understand 'rules' if you are perpetually very uncertain as to what you can and cannot do. And in these identity-focused fields, expert legal professionals are often providing expensive advice in memos that in the final analysis don't amount to much more than, "Hi client, best we can say is that you might as well flip a coin if you want to know how the litigation would turn out."
Just because something calls itself legislation or regulation and follows the formal rituals appropriate to the passage of actual law, doesn't mean it is. If something purports to be law but doesn't allow legal experts to predict with good confidence and accuracy, in normal, mainstream cases, what is and what is not allowed, and what will happen to transgressors of rules and rights, then it is merely the wolf of lawless power wearing the sheep's clothing of law.
Sure, there is always a relatively small set of extreme cases, edge cases, hard cases, and novel cases of first impression for which it is reasonable to say it would be hard for a lawyer in the field to know which side would prevail in a trial. But our problem is that the legal uncertainty extends routinely to the very cores of our common disputes, and nowhere more especially than in matters involving these 'woke' topics of ideological and political controversy.
Justice Marshall famously wrote, "It is emphatically the province and duty of the judicial department to say what the law is." But today even after SCOTUS issued a holding with hundreds of pages of opinion, no one knows what the law actually requires or forbids with regards to colleges implementing de facto race quotas on their student bodies, and everybody suspects the colleges will just continue to do it and find some barely-legal way to hide the ball.
So, are the courts telling us what the law is? They can't. There is no actual law there to tell about.
Thanks for this interesting comment!
One way to think about it is that the laws & far more, the ever-increasing regulations & bureaucracy create an ecosystem that attracts & nurtures woke ideology.
Anti-discrimination Acts in general empower them: this is not just a US problem.
@Yancy Ward: I suggest that you add the Griggs. v. Duke Power decision (1971), which created the "disparate impact" doctrine, to your list of government interventions. Disparate impact requirements are effectively an early implementation of woke demands for "equity".
But disparate impact is the natural extension of the blank slate idea. If races (etc) are equal we shouldn't find these wild disparate impacts in society.
And we aren't getting rid of blank slate, and not even because of leftist ideology. No "inferior" group is going to recognize their own inferiority. Each group will act in their own special interest to carve out whatever slice of the pie they can for themselves by whatever means at their disposal.
If this were a more cynical era we would call it "the spoils system". Everyone would just expect that "of course the Irish control the city police department, the mayor had to give it to them to get their votes".
Blacks have a special thing going for them. They are losers so their votes are cheaper to buy. And racial solidarity is a very easy thing for them to exercise, they pick a side and 90% of them get behind it. No wasted votes there. Imagine if you delivered the police department up to the Irish and half the Irish didn't vote for you, what a waste.
Many of these oppressed interest groups are just a combination of cheap and effective votes and social pressure.
As long as that's true political and social entrepreneurs are going to want to pick that $100 off the sidewalk, and they will need some kind of "ideology" to justify it to themselves and reduce the pushback from their enemies.
I guess if whites or straights or whatever decided "fuck it, we are voting as a united block until the blacks start acting better" they could just force it on them. The way the Chinese do to the Malays in Singapore. But whites, straights, etc are divided, and they care more about their internal political struggles than black (etc) dysfunction. One side says "if we get the X vote we can win power with only 40% of Y" or whatever and so they pick up that $100 bill.
Applying the "Three Languages of Politics" analysis, wokism seems like an extreme version of the progressive "oppressor v. oppressed" worldview. But Trumpism doesn't look at all like an extreme version of conservatism. Trumpism, as has often been noted, is not very conservative. Trump himself is seen by traditional conservatives as a barbarian. To what extent is Trumpism a mirror image of wokism, with the roles of oppressor and oppressed reversed? Are Trumpism and wokism squeezing out traditional conservatism, liberalism, and libertarianism?
I’ve long found the best explanation for Trump’s behavior is that he behaves like a Democrat thinks a Republican would act. I think your version of this might have slightly more explanatory power.
Trump did three big things in his 2016 campaign.
1) He acknowledged that Iraq, the war on terror, etc were wrong and should end.
2) He dropped the self destructive and ineffective GOP posturing on cutting SS/Medicare.
3) He admitted that The Great Replacement by people from shithole countries was a terrible idea.
4) He was onboard with The Federalist Society and judges, but its obvious he isn't pro-life personally.
The GOPe/Conservatives had some bad ideas and bad politics that it wouldn't change. So they became vulnerable to a political entrepreneur. As far as I can tell they haven't learned enough and changed enough to deal with this issue, so if not Trump it will be someone else.
Much of Trumpism is anti-wokism. Most anti-woke critiques of woke are used, in practice, far more by Trump voters than by Dem voters (Biden or any), or even by most GOPe folk.
Whatabout Trumpism? I don't know -- whatabout Trumpism? I thought the topic, here, was wokism. What am I missing?
Kling wrote:
"Ideally, this will be my last essay that includes the term “woke.” I am tired of the woke wars. I don’t think I have much to contribute."
Unfortunately, "woke wars" isn't tired of you.
I’m tired of Trump, too. But that doesn’t stop him, or Woke, from being important. Like we in Slovakia already tired of the war next door in Ukraine. Fine to say and be tired, but it’s silly to think it’s the last essay on any important, relevant topic or person.
All the explanations that apply only to the US are wrong.
The killer app for any political movement in a system like ours is the capacity to use power when won to help supporters, hurt opponents, and solidify its hold on power, while denying that capacity to the opposition when they are in power. An asymetric spoils system.
Doing this in a system that pretends to be one based on individualism and equally-applied laws requires an ideological Narrative that provides a cover story and set of socially-acceptably excuses for the heads-we-win, tails-you-lose differential treatment, e.g., it's legal for a President to do something but illegal for the next President to undo it.
The outline of this story is really simple and has been stable for a long time. Orwell wrote it out just as plainly and explicitly.
Every working society has winners and losers in all the great social games: successes and failures, haves and have-nots, normals and deviants, those with high and low social status, and so forth. We can just call them the high and low. Natural human instinct is for the low to envy and bitterly resent the high and to tell stories about injustice to boost their self-esteem and to try and sooth their humilated egos and explain why their situation is not their fault. Instead, it is the fault of the high, who didn't win fair and square, but, in the best case, only by good luck, and in the worst case, by evil malfeasance, exploitation, and oppression. That is, they caused the low to lose, whereas, in a just society, they would have been the high.
And if you support the left and it's story about 'equality' and 'justice, the leaders will use their formal and cultural power to be King Robin Hood and redistribute all the wealth, jobs, and status to the low. And the left gets to do this with state power, because the low 'need and deserve' to get a special exception to the general law. The right does not get to do it, because the high are already the high, and neither need nor deserve anything.
That's what the left is, and that's what 'woke' is. The whole ecosystem of cooperating constituencies and parts and tools.
The major strategic blunder of the right has been to repeatedly and idiotically concede even an inch to the principle that the Constitution had always strictly prohibited such asymetric group-on-group predation, and banned the capacity of masses of voters to vote themselves goodies they can get someone else to pay for. Once the principle is conceded in any way in any field, the inch immediately becomes ten thousand miles and the right can never, ever win the game of outbidding the left on the genoristy of promised goodies, and can never get the toothpaste back in the tube, providing us with the mechanism of the ratchet of our political history.
This is the best analysis of “woke” I have seen. Love the blind man and the elephant analogy. I was just reading Hanania’s definition of “woke” in his book and noticing that it misses so much. I like what Rufo is doing, but I am concerned about a lot of what he is saying. Amen to “tired of the woke wars.”
I think a better analogy is the traditional rivalries between military specialties as regards which deserves most credit for winning wars. Army vs Navy vs Air Force, or Infantry vs Artillery, etc.
Like sports team loyalty, this is fine so far as the social psychology of morale, cohesiveness, and solidarity, but dumb if one takes it too seriously. In reality, these are all essential parts of a machine doing their part and working together toward a common overall objective, with the expectation that overall victory will lead to each unit receiving their fair share of glory and booty.
Likewise, it's fine to zoom in and focus on details of one particular contributing factor to the story of how progressive leftist ideology evolved to what it is today, and it may even be smart as regards what is most effective in communicating a popularized version of the story to rally the forces of mass public opposition. But if one takes it too far and plants a flag to declare a single factor as the be-all-end-all explanation, one misses the forest for the trees.
The best way to understand what is going on is to see contemporary progressivism as a kind of evolving social phenomenon that is like a semi-decentralized firm competing in the political marketplace, consisting of the various elements of a political coalition, cooperating and doing their part according to their roles in the game, to gain and keep power, and use it to pay off everyone on their side, and hurt everyone on the other side. The overarching consensus narrative and ideology of the firm is a convenient cover story providing a boost in manufactured solidarity and excusing what would otherwise be seen as norm-violating behavior.
Progressive ideology has long had a core of coherent ideas, the sum of which only seem incoherent because, in public speech and practice, it is watered down by politically expedient unprincipled exceptions. Those exceptions can be tolerated and hand-waved away with rationalizations for a long time, but they create internal frictions and irritations like a buried splinter. And so as soon as some constituency kept around as part of an "exception to policy" becomes unnecessary to victory in the political game, it gets thrown under the bus and the mainstream ideological consensus immediately reformulated to rectify the transgression. The history of changes in American leftist politics and ideas since WWII shows this to be the case.
Do you have a brief list of the hard core coherent ideas in Progressive ideology in mind you could share? I would be interested in your thoughts on that matter. I see their ideology as more of an abstract one, roughly that reality and its parts can be perfected, joined with a focus on oppressor/oppressed story telling where the oppressed is always to be lionized. Together these abstractions lead to a crusading, we are the good guys out to help the weak poor and vulnerable, and those who are against us are evil oppressors. I think the ideas as apply to reality stem from these abstractions, but are themselves mutually incoherent for the most part because of the dichotomy the world view forces the world into; that works in small individual cases, but breaks down when applied with a wider view where the oppressed in one case are oppressing another, where reality can't quite be perfected here without making it worse there, etc.
But like I said, I am really interested in hearing your thoughts! (I miss your blog, by the way.)
@Doctor Hammer -- The phrases "coherent ideas" and "Progressive ideology" are broadly incompatible.
I miss the world that was just safe enough for that blog to exist. I would like to do it again, but things being such as they are, I would need to feel much more assured of being as robustly doxxing-proof as it is possible to be. Alas, I don't think substack would make any special exceptions for me, and even though I'm no cyber-ignoramous, it has become quite obvious that the level of technical proficiency required to achieve my desired level of security is surprisingly high, requiring practically elite-caliber skills which are certainly well above my own capabilities.
Woke cancel culture killed that idea. I was missing your comments, too.
Yes but, in my view, there is a psychology underlying these abstractions. And that underlying psychology, counter-intuitively, is very different from the ostensible ideology. It is typically in fact born of resentfulness, self-pity and more-virtuous/sophisticated-than-thou vanities The hugely mistaken idea that progressivism is nice-and-kind-but-naive-and-unrealistic is what has allowed it for so long to seduce and run rings around politicians, the media and the rest of us.
Oh, I agree, there is definitely a psychology at play, particularly in the leadership, but I don't think there is a universal one. That is to say, the leadership probably has more than it's share of psychopaths or other dark triad types, and so does the followership probably, but I suspect there is a big difference in the overall nature of the followership and the leadership. I think that is a big part of its success, that it attracts both what we might call "evil people" and people who are merely weak and broken, along with those who are genuine do gooders who haven't realized the evil yet, the naive and unrealistic. Something for damned near everyone, which is not something most ideologies/cults manage.
Re: "we do not have a consensus answer to some important questions. How we should react to differences in average outcomes by race? What should be the configuration of male and female roles? With regard to sexual conduct, when and how should people make an issue of the conduct of others?"
Treat persons as individuals. Let adults find their own roles. Enforce rules against nuisance. Don't impose politics on children. Roll back the state.
Mine isn't a consensus answer. But it is a modest, reasonable, mostly 'live and let live' answer.
My maximum charitable reading of Woke would be that it is a reasonable response *by ethnic leaders who have been most impacted* to the immoderate revolution in criminal justice that happened during the 1980s and 1990s. It is also a rational response to the situation that many academics and intellectuals find themselves in within the market economy: they are not useful, but they can steal things and break stuff. If they can do so under color of law, so much the better for them.
It is rational for them to do what they are doing. Glenn Loury himself has a book jacket quote on Michelle Alexander's "New Jim Crow," the favorite citation of all good woke criminal justice reformers. I doubt he even regrets endorsing the book. Woke is a recruiting mechanism that takes young people craving meaning and struggle which gets them very excited about certain issues and then funnels some portion of them into nonprofit or government work. These graduates are then chewed up by reality and then replaced by moar fresh graduates.
Woke is reasonable as a cheap way of getting loot for certain people. Much of world history is driven by people who love fighting to take loot and land from weak people who are incapable of defending themselves effectively. The great industrial economy is a historical novelty and an exception to the general rule of trade being a close cousin to piracy. Usually, traders are also thieves and killers. When you realize how unusual the bundle of moral values is (universal respect for property rights), deviations from it stop seeming so unusual. With Woke, they have valid legal claims for property belonging to various rich people and rich institutions run by terrified pacifists. All they have to do to loot them is create an appropriate case or controversy and then pay a court filing fee, and they have a potential claim to some institution or individual's loot. Because of how easy it is to file a reputationally harmful suit, they don't even have to file cases to extract sinecures and payments.
My maximum charitable reading of Woke is that persons expounding Woke beliefs want to be fair and nice. The problem, there, is that: 1) reality isn't fair and; 2) denial of reality is a path to catastrophe and; 3) "nice" is sufficiently ill-defined as to have little meaning.
How charitable!
More charitable than all the readings that say that they're "irrational" or merely suffering from "Cluster B Personality Disorders." Hard to say that with any integrity when they are so effective at achieving their goals. Crazy people are reliably erratic and often incapable of achieving anything but self-harm. If one thinks that one's opponents are crazy and erratic, then you will not treat them with the seriousness that an implacable, effective, and violent enemy deserves.
I think this is one of those cases where it is useful to differentiate between the "woke leadership" and the "woke followers". The leadership gets the spoils, while the followers get very little. Some of those leaders are no doubt psychopaths or Cluster-B's who are in it for the personal gain and are indifferent to whether it is good for anyone else. Some of those followers are genuinely nice people who are mistaken about the good they do. Some of the followers are just nuts and self destructive, but few of the leadership are; just because you are crazy (psychopathic) doesn't mean you are instrumentally unable to achieve your ends, and if you are unable to do so you don't become leadership.
Sure. The followers are the many, many people in academia, in government, and those seeking affirmative action who are filled with the appropriate sentiment of acquisitive envy. Then there are the sub-followers influenced by that middle layer who are more likely to be on the crazy side.
Unfair is often used as synonymous with injustice. We should call it unfair when some are born with high IQ, others like F. Gump with low. Nobody’s fault, nobody to blame. Injustice is when a person is victimized by another, whether deliberately or not. The justice system is to punish the perpetrators, the victimizers, so as to reduce future injustice, and maybe some compensation to the victims.
We are all victims of reality, but that’s because life is unfair. Not necessarily because the winners do injustice to the losers, tho that often does happen.
The woke reject the unfairness of true reality, like lower avg. black IQs, and wrongly label it injustice.
"My second thought is that all of the anti-Woke perspectives are all quite uncharitable."
That's because they spring from the "Power Elite" via the promotion of Communism via way of Cultural Marxism, using the Gramsci-Fabian tactic, and are wholly totalitarian and hostile to those who don't want that, and are thus not worthy of charity, but instead must be utterly destroyed.
Unless you like shortages, food lines, power outages, secret police, show trials, gulags, purges, executions, and famines, of course.
The Woke perspectives consist largely of self-indulgent haters of civilization, misusing the impulse in other people to be charitable, and thus forcing us to suppress that impulse for our society to survive. The Woke are the ultimate disproof of Hanlon's Razor; they show (or make true) that malice is nearly always a more accurate explanation for asserted disagreements than is either incompetence or honest difference of opinion.
I was just contemplating how Hanlon's Razor only makes sense if you invert it.
Woke is the heritage of Puritanism, a continuation of a branch of Christianity, which is not to say that it is compatible with many of the other branches, nor implied in the entire schema (though some claim this). In many senses and in many guises has the same virtues and vices that Puritanism always had and can be taken charitably in that light (and criticized using some of the same critiques).
1. The monotheistic movement of Judaism had a very strong internal identity tied to a specific people group but open to converts. The history of Judaism as told in their scriptures gives a very strange tension, a high-wire act, in which the Chosen People are the weakest being backed by the strongest and upending expectations. At every turn, marginal people are part of the story and the outside voice appears in victory... the Patriarchs are not the Pharaohs, Benjamin is the smallest, David is not Saul, the Prophets are not the strongest Kings, Ruth, Ester, it keeps on going.
2. Christianity pushed this even further and opened a bunch of doors with serious ambiguity. Some people believe that Jesus was the pinnacle of history and we should always be trying to go back to the Gospels. Others hold up the Early church as the paragon to be approximated, which frankly seems to ignore its many issues even if you take the book of Acts at face value. However, many Christians believe that even Jesus was just a stop on the way of a grand inversion; and others, that even if Jesus was wholly right, that Paul was wrong to try to rein in the movement by reinforcing the social structures of the day (Roman slavery, norms of marriage, sexual morality, etc).
3. The Woke believe they are trying to continuously extend the umbrella of divine/universal love, peace, etc that is implied in perfect equality. They are, as the saying goes, trying to immanentize the eschaton. Bring heaven to earth, move towards utopia; and they are themselves often willing to bear some (apparent or self-perceived) burden to do it. They see themselves as pulling down the great and supporting the weak, and rewarding those who do likewise with well-deserved support and praise.
4. Of course, there are those who find the rewards motivating in themselves. But overall, they are pushing towards a goal, either yet another step on the path that included freedom for the Jews, salvation for the Gentiles, loosing the bonds of the captive, freeing the slaves, suffrage for women, etc. All the way, this was a holy crusade without the taint of the actual Crusades - Papism and so on.
5. Universalism/Unitarianism is another stop on the way, an abortive attempt, but continuous with it and a marker in how Populism basically ends up ignoring the self-proclaimed saints. They declared that they weren't a 'church' and immediately all their unenlightened 'normies' left. So they recanted and tried to go back to getting tithes. That didn't really work either.
5. Nietzsche threw out all of this and said that the entire endeavor was 'slave morality.' Thus he rejected Christianity and Judaism in a single stroke. That didn't make him popular with Jews but it at least seemed internally consistent. The 'Nature Red in Tooth and Claw' folks - militant evolutionary biologists - also end up rejecting all of this. It isn't apparent that their stance is compatible with any notion of a happy civilization.
6. Everyone else ends up somewhere on a spectrum, saying 'up to this point but no further.' It's hard to make these perspectives rationally Pure. The Roman Catholics, for instance, venerate tradition and say 'much of importance is mysterious.' Then you get into infighting among the puritan Catholics, ironically.
7. Purity is incompatible with moderation and toleration. But a continuous pursuit of 'virtue' seems internally consistent. An attempt to perfect oneself, one's society, and humanity finds no virtue in mediocrity or limited aims. I can sympathize. This is reflected as the tension between the bounded and the unbounded.
8. Unquestionable vice can hide in every skin. Absolute power corrupts and attracts the corrupt. That doesn't mean that everyone is necessarily guilty by association.
Another viewpoint, whose leading proponent is Peter Turchin, is that woke is a consequence of "Elite Overproduction." As the Wikipedia entry says "Elite overproduction has been cited as a root cause of political tension in the U.S., as so many well-educated Millennials are either unemployed, underemployed, or otherwise not achieving the high status they expect. Even then, the nation continued to produce excess lawyers and PhD holders, especially in the humanities and social sciences, for which employment prospects were dim..."
Combine a glut of student-debt ridden young people who were not given the high-paid jobs they expected, with the large number of still healthy boomers who have not been retiring and opening up paths toward financial advancement, that creates a natural craving on the part of the young to blast open that roadblock to the money and power to which they feel entitled. Finding moral failings on the part of those who have the jobs they want is a way to force them to make way.
I think Turchin's thesis is very important to understanding the reason for the competition, definitely. I don't know that it explains the reason for the nature of the competition, however. That is, why is the competition for jobs focusing on moral failings, and why are those moral failings things like "Said something now considered mean 10 years ago in passing on Twitter?" or "There are only two genders?"
The interesting thing, and why the blind men and elephant metaphor might be apt, is that all of this seems to matter. What we see is the end result of many different things being true and creating this strange cult like behavior that is accepted by the mainstream despite being considered gross and excessive by an apparent majority.
I too can't help but see in it some weakness in the juggernaut of Christianity.
I think of my beloved, long-dead Christian grandmothers. One of them I rather fancy would be tempted into "wokeness" to a degree (only if her life were displaced in time).
My Baptist grandmother attended a church that had a flashing sign, "We Preach Christ". And that they did, and not much else. Even at Wednesday night supper, the speaker would not really stray far from the Gospel as gray heads nodded and murmurs of assent and "amen" were heard. When on visits I was deposited in Sunday school, we would memorize Bible verses. I was crackerjack at that. The prize was - a Bible! There were no supplementary books either in her home or at the church.
My other grandmother - raised Baptist but turned to the more socially-appropriate Presbyterians - had a large library of what you might call 20th century liberal Christianity apologetics, and "historical" Holy Land books, and C.S. Lewis of course, and Catherine Marshall, and "Seven Storey Mountain" type stuff. And the Bible in Greek, Hebrew, etc. side by side. All possible translations. She loved a good speaker on early Christianity or archeology.
She was a big reader in general, and much closer to "intellectual" than Baptist Granny. She had a great interest in Indians and had lots of books on that subject too. She liked it known that she spoke some (rather Castilian) Spanish. She had grown up with Mexicans as the default other. She spoke tolerantly on subjects like divorce, or sympathetically on civil rights, if such (infrequently) arose.
Even as a child I observed in her an occasional tendency to enjoy giving a little impression of drama, or self-importance, in what she said or thought. I was a nearsighted child, and once when a neighbor stopped in and made some obligatory polite remark-about-the-grandchild re my "pretty blue eyes" (they are blue, not especially pretty) - to my inward wonderment my grandmother responded at length about my vision, practically making it sound like I was legally blind.
She didn't perhaps have quite enough to occupy her mind, and not quite enough originality of mind.
If I were inclined to sympathy with those intent on destroying the country (and perhaps more) - I would think of how they might work upon someone like my grandmother, who despite what I have written was not a silly woman. She was capable, shrewd in business matters, conscientious, an excellent cook and homemaker, etc. - and far better-natured than I. She was also quite genuine in her faith - as I found after her death as she lay dying she took comfort in choosing her favorite hymns and Bible passages, and writing them on a scrap of paper ("Be Thou My Vision' was always listed first), planning in her mind her funeral service - it's just that faith wasn't quite enough.
The fact that I do not think of any of this in connection with my grandfathers, whom I admittedly did not know nearly as well as my grandmothers - may tell you something more signal than my actual comment ...
Perhaps there's a gene cluster for piety on the X chromosome...
The "blind men and the elephant" framing is spot on - this is a weird new set of beliefs that everyone is trying to fully understand.
I keep thinking about the Millenarian fervor that exploded around the invention and adoption of the printing press in Holland and Germany and how this "woke" moment is strikingly similar. Social justice mobs trying to create heaven on earth are not new, and thankfully this modern incarnation seems way less murderous and able to enforce their will on unwilling participants than they were in the 1500s. I imagine that Catholics and traditionalists at the time felt like blind men poking at some strange creature, trying to figure out what the hell it actually was.
“I hear the voice of the late Jeffrey Friedman telling me to instead take people with whom I disagree at their word, rather than apply reductionism. I hear Robert Wright make the case for cognitive empathy, so that I don’t succumb to the belief that I understand the other side’s true motives better than they understand themselves.”
I think I have cognitive empathy regarding the woke but it is certainly not returned and this leads to the temptation to psychologize the woke because their behavior is often illiberal. When socialism/communism was popular in the 30s/40s, it produced a lot of ex-communists who certainly understood the appeal of communism but they also understood that communism was “fascism with a human face” and resisted it. Communism attracted well-meaning people but it also attracted authoritarians. Wokeism has some of these “fascism with a human face” elements in that it has constructed a totalitarian ideology and attracts authoritarians who delight in the economically perverse and/or ethically dubious edicts issued by the DEI bureaucrats. Like the ex-communists before us, we can have cognitive empathy while also resisting it. Wokeism is mostly coherent but it quickly falls apart upon examination. Wokels are like Marxists in that they don’t tolerate criticism very well and exhibit the same dogmatic tendencies of orthodox Marxists, which was similar to a cult at one point. Lastly, I agree that Hanania doesn’t fully explain Wokeism but he explains a big part. Wokeism would likely continue to exist in the absence of government edicts because egalitarianism is a quasi-religion among a significant number of activists. But it would be seriously deflated. At least I hope so.
We should all call them Wokels, and laugh at them. Often and everywhere.
These church ladies certainly deserve mockery. Look at this buffoonery from a libertarian (more like simpertarian). I’m. surprised he didn’t trot out the Marxist ad hominem of “false consciousness”. https://substack.com/@aaronrosspowell/note/c-40557156?r=b5zww&utm_medium=ios&utm_source=notes-share-action
Given the seemingly elevated rates of clinical and sub-clinical Cluster B personality disorders (nb. histrionic personality disorder) among persons subscribing to Woke ideology, taking these persons at their word seems to be a failure of critical thinking.
Wokels! May I use it?
Based on what I know of Haidt, Mounk, and Rauch, I’m not sure it’s fair to attribute “conservatism is eewww” to them. As for “not treat[ing] Woke as a coherent set of ideas that one can comfortably hold intellectually”--I haven’t read Mounk’s latest book yet, but from what I’ve heard him say about it in recent interviews, it sounds like he does exactly that.
An interesting breakdown of woke. We are all weary of the debate, no matter how justified. Whether it be a woke dupe or a right-wing dolt, in either case it is someone insisting how I must think or behave and persecuting me if I disagree. And in either case, attempting to persuade them to moderate and tolerate is a fool’s errand, for they will not retreat from their self-righteous stance.
I agree, debate is pointless. They must be destroyed, or they will destroy us. There is no middle-ground, nor possible compromise.
Thanks for your comment. Couple of things: First, futility of persuasion applies to either left or right. Neither wants to cooperate with anyone. Second, I'm not seeking destruction, rather I'd ignore the extremists and concentrate on others, who may not align exactly with me, but are at least willing to find a way to cooperate.
Right vs. left, and all Ideology is a dead-end at best, and a trap at worst. Much like "free speech" platforms who slam the door after you're dependent and change the rules, all ideology is subject to entryism and subversion. This requires you to accept things you don't want in order to remain in an ideological tribe, which eventually becomes so unbearable you leave it and join another tribe, wash, rinse, repeat.
The solution is to instead focus on outcomes. What do you want for yourself and your children, your family? I want them to be able to realize their dreams, and their enemies smashed.
It really is that simple.
Bingo. It may be tiresome to deal with wokeness related controversies, but we're past the point where that matters. It's that time when "politics should be discussed on all fours." Bring it, lefties.