Anti-Anti-Woke Physician, Heal Thyself

monetizing anti-anti-woke sentiment sure looks a lot like monetizing anti-woke sentiment

If you haven’t already, please check out my recent podcast appearance on mental illness and the gentrification of disability with Bari Weiss.

Let’s be upfront with a point that I have to keep on making: if being anti-woke is a grift, being anti-anti-woke is also a grift. The constant accusation that criticizing social justice politics can only stem from the pursuit of financial reward has and can have no evidentiary backing, and so the counter-accusation is exactly as damning. Just as people will name someone like Jesse Singal as an anti-woke grifter, we can easily name people who are making a small fortune by reflexively denying critiques like his. My dear, dear friend Michael Hobbes springs immediately to mind as someone who treats attacking the anti-anti-woke as a daily trip to the salt mines, a true journeyman, a mercenary. Because accusations of grifting are fundamentally arguments of intent, of pure motives, there’s no way to settle the matter empirically, and we’re left with “are not! are too!” I will repeat myself in saying that in writing you either take money or you don’t. You’re an amateur or a professional. There’s no other lens through which to consider pecuniary gain. It’s all grift or none of it is.

Of course, the point in social justice discourse is always to appeal to the in-group and never to the out-group. (Problematically, given that the out-group is much larger than the social justice in-group and that we live in a democracy.) So just saying “grift grift grift grift grifty grift grift,” while utterly bankrupt as politics, has the salutary effect of raising a writer’s esteem within their movement and peer group even as it hurts the movement itself. Don’t make me tap the sign.

Consider this New Republic piece by Ian Beacock. Beacock, at least, does not accuse his target of grifting directly, but there’s the same tired indictment of motives that you always see in this space. It’s a social justice movement footsoldier doing the scut work of condescendingly explaining why an anti-woke attitude is incorrect, this time in the form of a review of Yasha Mounk’s new book The Great Experiment. I really think that it’s indicative of how exhausted this discourse has become, and also that it demonstrates the fundamental emptiness of the anti-anti-woke career path. The review fundamentally is guilty of precisely what it accuses Mounk of: being intentionally vague, focusing on cherry-picked examples to the detriment of the bigger picture, and failing to maintain proportionality. Sadly for us, the extent to which one or the other rings true is a value-laden question, and the woke will have one set of values and the anti-woke will have another. Which is why this review, and so much else in this corner of the discourse, feels like spinning our wheels: you can’t judge either side of the debate in purely procedural terms, so you’re just left with people who disagree on substance who must nevertheless find some common ground on which to argue.

Beacock and Mounk have different perspectives on the world, and they render the former’s criticisms difficult to parse without first hashing out which perspective is correct. Casually, and without argument, Beacock dismisses Mounk’s feelings that “we need a more positive, optimistic take on what diverse democracy can achieve, a reminder of our purpose and destination.” Beacock’s argument is not that this is a bad perspective but rather that Mounk is attacking a strawman, that no one questions that vision of a healthy society. Which… feels intuitively unconvincing to me? It’s also a very good example of how anti-anti-woke sure looks like anti-woke in its practical effects. Right now, the American left-of-center is engaged in a white-knuckled embrace of doomerism and bitterness. Explore left online spaces and you will see hundreds of people (affluent by any rational international standard) who are in a competition to be the most disaffected and hopeless among their peers. A really frightening chunk of the anticapitalist left has been blackpilled, and I grow more aggravated with it by the day. This is anti-anti woke in sentiment but, because it threatens the viability of the woke political project, is anti-woke in potential.

Beacock is so intent on dismissing any of Mounk’s descriptive attitudes towards the state of the country that he doesn’t have time to wonder if, perhaps, there really is a politically disastrous pessimism conquering the left. Later, he derides Mounk for not properly citing sources when he suggests that there is a burgeoning rejection of the concept of multiracial and multicultural liberal democracy. If Mounk did indeed fail to give enough specifics, that’s a fair criticism. But also… come on. Rejection of the basic goal of living together in harmony is all around us. Nobody wants to hear about a rainbow coalition anymore, and talking about a (potential! future!) race-blind society is very unpopular. Afropessimism has exploded in popularity in the last several years, but it’s more than a century old, and groups like the Nation of Islam and the Black Panthers voiced resistance to the very concept of multiracial democracy decades ago. Their legacy is very powerful in the contemporary left. Or we might look at the radical feminists who withdrew from broader society and sometimes practiced political lesbianism rather than attempt to integrate with the men who they saw as inherently and coercively oppressive. That spirit of withdrawal rather than compromise has been reappearing throughout the American left. A decade ago, when Suey Park was saying “whiteness will always be the enemy,” utter fatalism about the American project was growing. This piece is a historical document about a rising rejection of cooperative multiculturalism that has only grown more and more ascendant over time.

There’s always a shell game aspect to this kind of anti-anti-woke writing, a refusal to look at the “woke” in favor of the “anti.” Beacock chides Mounk for an (implied) support of the French model of multiculturalism, then suggests that Canada and New Zealand are better models. But of course if you Googled for 90 seconds you would find ample social justice critiques of both Canada and New Zealand, as you can for almost any nation on earth. Beacock himself could no doubt muster up woke criticisms of both nations. So if the point is to dismiss Mounk for his diagnosis of the social justice movement’s pessimism, how are these counterexamples at all? Indeed, I have long identified the reflexive fatalism and refusal to acknowledge progress as a major flaw of the social justice left, as a belief that better things are possible is an absolutely integral element of effective progressive politics. (Because, you see, I sincerely want progressive politics to win.) It’s strange that Beacock finds this idea so unworthy of consideration.

Beacock summarizes the anti-woke project as

those who feel aggrieved when others indicate their pronouns, or are shocked to find that they cannot criticize a model’s body on Twitter without being told that this is disgusting behavior or write yet another piece about cancel culture only to hear from the Internet that they have lost their sense of proportion

This is giving the game away. It’s referring only to the most witless elements of the critique and ignoring the worst excesses of the social justice movement. As the above image demonstrates, social justice politics have driven some people legitimately insane. Would Beacock be as easily dismissive of criticisms of those so woke they insist Anne Frank had white privilege? Those who say that the phrase “I see what you mean” is ableist because some people can’t see, and so must be forbidden? There’s this liar’s poker element to woke discourse I find very tiresome: I don’t believe that there’s a single soul alive who doesn’t know that this shit is crazy and dangerous. They’d just prefer to not focus on it when arguing. Well, yeah: I would prefer not to have to answer for Christopher Rufo, either. But them’s the breaks. You can’t have it both ways. You can’t say that it’s legitimate to hang the dopiest conservative critiques of social justice politics on the rest of us and then turn around and declare that you shouldn’t have to answer for, say, the woman who said that it was good that a child was eaten by an alligator because he was white. You hang those on me, I hang these on you. As they all do, Beacock fixates on proportionality while simultaneously dismissing the social justice movement’s great and growing power. But that movement has effortlessly colonized academia, media, the nonprofit industrial complex, and sundry other discursive spaces in the past decade. If normie-ass Tom Hanks feels compelled to play defense and say that he shouldn’t have been allowed to play the role of a gay man, you know the movement is winning. So what disproportionality are you talking about, Ian?

Beacock writes of Mounk and the larger anti-woke project, “The dangerous moment is when that spine-straightening impulse slips beyond sanctimony into the conviction that only you are interested in building a better world; that others want something deliberately darker.” But these are the exact terms on which critics of social justice politics are pilloried themselves! The woke relentlessly accuse their critics of political nihilism, relentlessly critique the anti-woke as motivated by evil, relentlessly say that anyone who doesn’t fall in line with them is racist and sexist and homophobic and more. Sanctimony? Oh, lord, no! None of that in the woke world! This is the funhouse mirror element of the woke/anti-woke binary, the way they both distort and reflect each other, are guilty of the things that they critique, and over time grow more and more like the caricature their critics have made of them. I engage in this stuff because I want a left that can win and a left that insists on slicing the onion of identity thinner and thinner cannot win. But I haven’t enjoyed this ride for a long time, and I would like to get off. The trouble is that people like Beacock always demand that the anti-woke disarm unilaterally, despite knowing that’s not going to happen. Because there actually are stakes at hand, here, and it does us no good to pretend otherwise.