207 Comments
Aug 25, 2022Liked by Freddie deBoer

Wokeness has something for everyone, an all you can eat buffet where everyone gets a plate. Conservatives get their dose of rage porn, the "woke" get to signal that they're one of the good ones and get to make some hay out of exposure to liberal arts education, cynical dirtbag leftist types get to mock the woke for being absurd even though they tacitly share many of the same views, elected leaders left, right, and center get readymade talking points.

And everyone gets to ignore the myriad of disasters unfolding around us as the wheels fall off the whole system. We get to fight the battles of the 90s today like Civil War reenacters, because we have no idea what to do about what we are currently facing.

Expand full comment

"does the fact that PC faded the way trends do, of its own accord, amount to a challenge to the wisdom of (for example) attempting to legislate against wokeness now?"

Maybe, but it's also possible that 90s PC was always limited in its power by a still-entrenched pro-institutional mindset that most people had, especially toward higher ed. It seems like the difference between then and now is that now you really can bring institutions to their knees over "womyn," "pregnant people," etc. And part of this has to do with how hollowed out those institutions are by transactionalism, fear of market reprisals, etc. Policing people's speech is amusing if you're just a random scold. It's a lot different if you've suddenly got the ability to fire, de-license, or even imprison people.

Expand full comment

It would be interesting to go the future 30 years from now and try to see what people think after seeing and reading "White Fragility" at a yard sale.

Due to genetic variation (both my parents are Hispanic from one of the Caribbean islands), I am a melanin challenged Hispanic dude. It fucks with some of the social justice political types because technically I am a BIPOC so they don't know what to do with me sometimes when I jump into those political/social conversations. Do they take away my privilege as a BIPOC because of my skin tone... but that would be racist!?

I've even had Latino/Hispanic/LatinXmen tell me to my face that I'm not Hispanic.... no matter the culture I grew up with, my ancestors, and ability to dance well because I am too white looking.

I find those people cerebrally challenged.

Expand full comment

PC quickly became mocked by larger society. Woke is being institutionalized by society. It is PC on steroids.

Expand full comment
Aug 25, 2022·edited Aug 25, 2022

The big difference is 5 Very Online People can create what looks like an angry woke online mob. And journalists, being generally Very Online, refuse to believe that what appears to be an online mob is in fact 5 people with too much time on their hands.

As I’ve mentioned before Megan Markle claimed she was driven out of the UK by a racist mob. When the UK government investigated it could all be traced back to about 30 people.

In both cases the issue is Very Online People refusing to believe that Twitter isn’t real life.

Expand full comment

One difference I see: the 90s PC vibes were driven in large part by feminism. Today's woke PCness is driven by a backlash to women: if you're a conservative, women are what they always have been; if you're woke, the worst thing you could be is a straight white woman.

Expand full comment

Ok, so at the risk of stating the obvious: the Official PC Dictionary was intended as parody, and a lot, if not most, of the words in it were never used by anyone except occasionally in jest. I was a student at Oberlin College from 1987 to 1992, so I dare say I got a pretty good schooling in political correctness.

Anyway the key difference with today in my view isn't so much the focus of "PC" vs "woke", but rather the extent to which those mores have taken over elite institutions. "Political correctness" then was clearly an obsession of college students and only college students. Once people graduated and got real jobs, they put away such childish things. I think that's why there was some initial indifference to PC 2.0: people thought it would follow the same pattern of what happens on campus stays on campus. (IIRC Jesse Singal, among others, has spoken about this.)

Expand full comment

The fundamental difference was that 90s PC only held sway in very limited environments for two key reasons: it lacked the enforcement mechanism of social media mobbing, and artists and comedians never got on board, correctly gauging it as a restriction on their artistic freedom of expression and also plainly ridiculous. Comedians in the ‘90s were unanimously anti-PC and mocked it mercilessly. Today most mainstream comics have been captured by wokeness and their jokes are framed to enforce it, not mock it. Anti-woke comics are immediately sorted into their own category and while this gives them their own reliable audience niche, they’re declared untouchable heretics by the media clergy, and if you run in elite circles you have to be careful about admitting you like them.

Expand full comment

Am I the only cat to notice that Woke is a strong class signifier?

Expand full comment
Aug 25, 2022·edited Aug 25, 2022

Interesting article. I'm increasingly starting to believe that wokeness, like PC before it, will eventually stop being influential. It'll just take longer because of social media.

The ideology is unpleasant and wears people out. Most people who believed in it at some point or another eventually reach a point where they go "God, I can't take it anymore! This is exhausting!"

Freddie himself would agree with that assessment. Go back to his article last year called This Too Shall Pass. The social upheaval of the 60s and early 70s eventually gave way to Reagan's 80s. This stuff is cyclical.

Expand full comment

Rather than wokeness and PC being exactly the same thing, could it be that wokeness is an evolved variant of PC, with greater potency and reach?

At the time it felt like PC "went away" because anybody with any sense found it risible, but perhaps that was just a long seasonal respite between waves.

Those who ardently believed in PC at the time were not persuaded by mockery to change their minds - when does being mocked do anything but reaffirm one's beliefs? Instead they recognized that their project was unlikely to be popular and set about making it mandatory instead, via the levers of institutional power on campus and in HR departments.

In other words, we've got a vaccine-resistant variant on our hands. If so, what's our next move?

Expand full comment
Aug 25, 2022·edited Aug 25, 2022

The thing is, back in the 90s, there was much, MUCH better rock music than there is now. That was perhaps the last great decade for rock, before the biz was destroyed by social media. And pre social media, all it took was Camille Paglia's Sexual Personae and Denis Leary's (yeah, I know he ripped off Bill Hicks) No Cure For Cancer to knock the PC/Woke crowd back on its heels. They were down, but not out, because of something called tenure. Another flock was raised, this time luckily armed with Twitter and other tools of destruction, and getting rid of this bunch is proving to be much more difficult.

Expand full comment

To complete the analogy, how does it all wrap up?

I keep harping on this, but the guy most responsible for killing PC off in the 1990's was Bill Clinton. The backdrop was the ongoing conflict between moderates and progressives in the Democratic Party. The former believed that excessive wokism spelled doom for the electoral hopes of the Democrats and the Dukakis loss in 1988 paved the way for the DLC to install their guy as the nominee.

Once Clinton decided that he wasn't going to be "out-niggered" by the GOP he took decisive action: publicly rejecting Sister Souljah and leaving the campaign trail multiple times to oversee the execution of death row inmates in Arkansas, including most notoriously the execution of Ricky Ray Rector who so profoundly brain damaged that he saved the dessert from his last meal for "after" the execution.

That reckoning for the modern Democratic Party has been delayed by Covid, which allowed Biden to defeat Trump in 2020. In 2024 the pandemic will no longer be the issue that is creating chaos in the country, having been replaced by inflation and crime, and widespread pessimism and dissatisfaction among the public will redound on the incumbent party.

Expand full comment

The mayor of NYC says that his city is the laughing stock of the country. Why? Because of the catch and release policy

The mayor of Chicago called for automatic revocation of bail for anybody accused of a violent crime.

The mayor of San Francisco decries the "bullshit" destroying her city. In the aftermath of a recall of the city's progressive prosecutor she appoints as a replacement one of the recalled prosecutor's fiercest critics, somebody who promises to crack down on crime and reverse the lenient policies of her predecessor.

If you look closely you can already see the wheels starting to come off. What presages the end isn't the opposition of conservatives, it's the opposition of Democrats.

Expand full comment

I was around during the PC era. Woke is different and it might be because of social media. I don't recall that there were so many cancelings in the PC era, probably because it was so much more difficult to pile on. Any pile on would have meant letter writing, sit-ins, or some manifestation that took real effort. A Twitter pile on takes no effort. That's the difference.

Expand full comment

Between 90's "PC" and current "woke" was Christian Lander's 2008 blog post and book Stuff White People Like. 

https://stuffwhitepeoplelike.com/

Its humor has held up. The folks he jabs are still around, perhaps with gray man buns.

Looking at the reviews on Amazon many missed the book's point by saying  "I know lots of white working class folks not like this at all!" 

Phoebe, I was in my thirties in the 90's. The way I recall it is that we felt like we were at a "good cop or bad cop" decision point. Yes, we thought, let's concede a few reasonable points to the "PC" (good cop). Otherwise the hard line academia lefties (bad cop) will have their way in 25 years.

That gamble turned out well ....

Expand full comment