Doing This Again Makes Me Hate Myself and Hate You, But Yes, Something Happened to Liberalism in the 2010s, and Sometimes That Thing is Called "Woke"
what can Obama's "beer summit" tell us about how the American left evolved?
I hate this. I hate doing this. This is all so tired and pointless. It’s a waste of everyone’s time, most importantly mine. Donald Trump and his goons are completely obliterating the notion of delegating powers to Congress (and separation-of-powers conservatives cheer) and to the states (and states-rights conservatives cheer) in defiance of the constitution (and originalists cheer). We have much bigger problems. But for some reason, here in this era, the Trump unbound era, the vibe-shifted era, the post-whatever era, we still have people who insist on denying that there was a clear change in American liberalism from the middle of the Obama administration to the middle of Biden’s term. This is, yes, fine, fine, fine, have it your way, fine, the WOKE question. And the answer from a lot of liberals is (still, now, today, in twenty twenty fucking five) that there is no such thing as woke, that it’s all just liberalism, that if you plucked your average liberal journalist or academic or fucking candlestick maker from 2008 and deposited them in 2018, they would have fit in seamlessly, and the era of terms like “misogynoir” is the era we’ve always lived in, it has always been this way, social justice liberalism never evolves, there’s nothing to see here, nothing to discuss, and certainly nothing that decent people could critique.
Here is the contention I have made, am making, and I hope to never make again: though the exact dimensions and timeline will always be subject to debate, American liberalism clearly experienced dramatic changes in the 2010s, and these changes are specific and comprehensible. Liberals in 2010 weren’t the same as liberals in 2020. They just weren’t. They changed in comprehensible and expressible ways. And this absolutely dogged insistence that no such change occurred is one of the weirdest, most obviously dishonest political claims of my lifetime. It’s a record of a political and intellectual tendency defined by its powerlessness and directed by people who think that asking them to defend their ideals is a kind of crime. And, just… why? Why why why? A lot of dedicated people insisted that American liberalism had to evolve, worked hard to force it to evolve, and ultimately achieved remarkable success in doing so. It’s not a surprise, and frankly not interesting, that I personally think that that evolution was mostly disastrous. But so what? Shouldn’t these people be celebrating how liberalism was changed over time, to emphasize race and gender and sexual orientation to an even greater degree than it already did? I just find it bizarre, as well as willfully obtuse, to defend a political project by insisting that it never existed, especially when the evidence of its influence is all around us.