I was debating with my husband whether it would come to blood. I think there is a strong anti-violence sentiment among most woke acolytes - but not all, as evidenced by antifa. I think most are content to eviscerate other human beings online and threaten their careers and families.
Ah. But for those who do the ruining, it's fun, fun, fun! Exercising power over others is fun! A more heady sense of pleasure can not be had. (Feel like I'm channeling Carlin. He would have a great riff on this.)
I'm not a huge fan of marriage as an institution (although I am married because it's cheaper than a lawyer for the legal benefits - I'm a pragmatist) for certain reasons although I admit monogamy is a net positive for society. But, I would never call anyone else out on their choice. Who the hell died and made this person your priest? Just - the arrogance of these people. They think they are the end-all, be-all of righteousness. Makes me crazy. What happened to live and let live?
It was the same with “Politically correct.” As Alinsky teaches in Rules for Radicals, to name something is to enable criticism, which supporters don’t want to happen. Which is why Wokes attack any name given, as Freddie notes in one of his most popular substack posts.
No. I first heard the phrase 31 years ago in a college English class. I then saw it in a news magazine.
It almost immediately became a subject of ridicule, like that book. There were many others. Did some of the language stick around, especially in Education Depts.? Sure.
My sense is that the real PC days were the 1980s. By the time the term PC gained currency, it was as a way to combat or denigrate what was going on.
I don't have any real evidence, other than remembering having heard it for the first time in 1990 as a pejorative. (Yes, memories are faulty, and I was only 16 or 17, but it's the memory I have.)
I'm too young to remember when PC came on the scene, but my mother recalls first hearing the phrase "politically correct" when a good friend of hers was gushing about her new boyfriend ("...and he's politically correct!"). My mom's kneejerk reaction, as I understand it, was (1) "what the hell does 'politically correct' mean?" and (2) "what an obnoxious-sounding phrase". But it was clearly an instance of someone using the term unironically and in a positive, earnest way rather than to mock it. I'm not sure exactly when this event took place, but almost certainly sometime in the early-to-mid 80's.
I imagine the unironic, used-in-praise phase of "politically correct" lasted considerably longer than that of "woke", mainly because everything happens much faster in the internet age.
That's because Gen X was raised to understand irony. Many young people today have no sense of irony, no sense of humor, and take everything so seriously that it's a wonder they don't pop a vein.
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.
I dunno, the history of labor relations shows that it is entirely possible to have unionization without pronouns, and recent events in Ukraine show that it is possible to play Wokemon (at least when western donors are watching) and at the same time, gut labor protections.
In fact, the two have nothing necessarily in common with one another.
They don't even talk about the pie. They jaw endlessly, but the discourse is about discourse.
If we kill the white male living inside each of us, if we purify our hearts sufficiently, if we are only inclusive enough, then surely all things will follow. If Fully Automated Luxury Gay Space Communism has not arrived, it's because we weren't worthy enough.
And I get to say to myself that I'm the moral equivalent to Sir Thomas More. Not the real Sir Thomas More, who I understand was pretty outspoken, but the "Man for all Seasons" Sir Thomas More, who refused to assent to that which he disbelieved, but if not put to it, could live his life.
Of course, I'm not Sir Thomas More. Not even close. And any adverse consequences I face at my workplace (a university) kind of (kind of!) pale to what More faced. Still, I get to claim say to myself that I'm like him.
Yup. Burn up the planet, watch the world reorganize around the end of the American empire, and keep grinding out crappier and crappier lives for the poor of all races, but if you celebrate Pride Month and mandate antiracism training your Global Oil & Guns Inc. can consider itself "one of the good guys."
Yes, it gives something for everyone. As late as 2018, Yascha Mounk near-universal alarm about "PC culture," which people in his surveys saw as a bigger problem than climate change or inequality. Maybe the "PC culture" label has fallen off because nobody self-identifies as PC. I think the meaning of PC and woke can more or less be equated as "social liberalism that's gone too far." It's an inherently relative definition. It's just what the person you're talking to thinks has gone too far, whatever they think "too far" is. Just look at the responses to this post (and others like it) on this sub. They range from "professional-class language-policing is counterproductive to social progress" to "we should have stopped gay rights in the '90s." That's a broad enough spectrum for most everyone to find themselves. Whatever its terms, I think we are going to see the same dynamics for a while. Liberalism has lost socially and politically, so true believers in universities and NGOs will get more combative as their numbers shrink, and "anti-woke," will continue to add popular energy to an ascendant right wing that grows more extreme by the day.
I almost responded earlier that the most cynical take is the wokeness/political correctness is just a legitimation strategy by the status quo. This effort at legitimacy is two pronged. First it uses the woke discourse to make the current system seem good and worthwhile, or at a minimum more just than in the past. It's kind a dialectical flip, but the constant "US is bad, irredeemably racist, everything is problematic" attitude on many ways shores up the status quo. It makes it seem as though such woke people are working to overcome it, or at least gives off the idea that they can do better. HR departments love DEI for this reason.
The second is both simpler and more bleak. It keeps up this illusion that our participation in the political system matters, that those with the real power care in the slightest about what we think and what we want to happen. It gives an illusion of control over a system which is beyond our control for the most part. Arguing about "wokeness" like any other wedge issue, makes it seem as if there is far more consequence to these arguments than there ever actually was.
Also, I feel like I didn't articulate this thought very well. To give an example, Disney mostly works to promote socially liberal views within it's film franchises now. There's nothing inherently bad about this, but they're still Disney. It's a way to make it feel like you're doing more than just watching a high budget CGI animation or that Disney isn't a corporate behemoth anymore. Without this kind of veneer, it'd just be the 50th remake of Beauty and the Beast. They need this narrative to put on a mask.
"so true believers in universities and NGOs will get more combative as their numbers shrink, and "anti-woke," will continue to add popular energy to an ascendant right wing that grows more extreme by the day"
So those who are against the insanity on the left are feeding the right? This makes no sense. The actions of the insane are feeding the right. Those on the left who are against the insanity are trying to *stop* the insanity by policing their own. Something I wish we'd see more of on the right to police their own.
The two are related. Progressives have always been a small number, but now they are losing even more people, a loss the remaining progressives have compensated for by getting more moralistic and retrenched. That's the wokeism. Wokeism feeds backlash, and the right is benefitting from the backlash. The right is also growing more extreme, but it is able to attract more and more moderates who feel closer to far-right cultural positions than they do to wokeism.
Of course there's an antiwoke left. Freddie's one of the more serious and thoroughgoing examples, but that antiwoke left has neither stopped wokeness nor expanded the appeal of labor leftism or Marxism or another brand very much.
1. When I said "left" I didn't mean communist / socialist type leftism. I meant it in the way leftism was referred to typically in America during my formative years: "liberal" ideas (i.e., Democrat party ideas).
2. If it wasn't already obvious, I'm rather uninterested in expanding the appeal of Marxism (though I'm certainly sympathetic to some of labor leftism and their policy priorities that don't involve a revolution overturning capitalism in favor of socialism / communism). I favor well-regulated capitalism, like most "moderate" liberals. The leftist (as defined as communist / socialist) wing of the Democrat coalition has never been a priority of mine.
I am still completely unpersuaded by your argument that anti-woke is feeding the right -- unless you are referring to the right that is anti-woke (i.e., the entire right), in which case, we're not saying different things. The right isn't "attracting" moderates; the extremist liberals are repulsing them.
"Progressives have always been a small number, but now they are losing even more people, a loss the remaining progressives have compensated for by getting more moralistic and retrenched."
Are wokeists really progressive leftists who are worried about shrinking numbers? It seems strange in the context of the unprecedented (at least in recent history) popularity of a leader like Bernie Sanders.
I’m not sure where some of this is coming from, but I don’t need to just continue the thread for the sake of continuing.
I’m not sure that there’s a difference between woke liberals repelling people and antiwoke conservatives attracting them. These amount to the same thing. I chose the second way of saying it to emphasize that the right is also getting more extreme, but more and more moderates are moving to the right because even relatively hard right positions are more acceptable to them than campus antiracism, trans rights, fear of being canceled etc. People debate why that is and whether that’s an acceptable choice, but it’s happening. It just is. Bernie seemed a promising exception to this trend, but he failed twice. What can those of us who wanted Bernie’s policies and movement dynamics do to try to get something good going and improve on his model? It’s a long and complicated conversation, but most of us aren’t having it. We’re just rehearsing the same 1-3 antiwoke talking points that some leftists, and all moderates and conservatives share. It’s nice to be popular, but we aren’t getting anywhere yet.
Obviously woke libs don’t care about numbers. Your Nathan J Robinson types will tell you they don’t play to the masses but care about being morally correct or something. Seems dumb in a popular democracy, but there you have it. They probably reason that right wing opinions used to be only credited by a very small intellectual elite but are now very popular, so we can wait 50 years to take over the courts and get a Fox News like they did. But, we can’t wait. They’re quite wrong. TLDR the wokeists are dumb and bad. Everyone on Substack, whether leftist or conservative, or whatever kind of moderate thinks this. It’s why Substack exists. I assumed I was speaking to people who agree on that one.
As for the terms thing… there’s not enough time to unpack “liberal” (a word with too many definitions) vs leftist vs Marxist etc. People don’t use them consistently. But I will credit FdB. He’s a Marxist who speaks to people. He’s a real Marxist, not just a guy on the left who doesn’t read books by women but wants a cool name for that, a real Marxist. And he speaks to people who are all points on the political spectrum, or all points on the antiwoke spectrum, which is all points. Pretty hard to do that.
My primary objection is to your characterization of the liberal anti-woke feeding the right. That's not true. The woke are feeding the right. Are there some moderates throwing their lot in with the right because of the woke left's excesses? Yep. But they are then the right, and not the anti-woke left. So the woke left is pushing at least some moderates to the right. But if you remain a liberal and anti-woke, you are not helping the right.
"But I will credit FdB. He’s a Marxist who speaks to people. He’s a real Marxist, not just a guy on the left who doesn’t read books by women but wants a cool name for that, a real Marxist. And he speaks to people who are all points on the political spectrum, or all points on the antiwoke spectrum, which is all points. Pretty hard to do that."
Wholeheartedly agreed. It's why I'm here despite my general disagreements with him on economic philosophy.
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.
I only mention this because of your concluding question about what comes next -- South Park, to me, doesn't feel like a late addition to the parody of the ongoing PC culture. To me, post-grunge 90s just feels like a different era entirely, probably as a revolt against the philosophical indie rockers of the early 90s. South Park's vulgarity wasn't a backlash to the current dominant culture but instead itself defined the culture of the late 90s alongside, like, Limp Bizkit and DGenerationX and whatnot.
(Grunge started in the eighties, and I remember hearing Screaming Trees and Soundgarden back in high school, which I graduated in '89. It was simply a combination of metal and punk. Those indie philosophers came out of folk and punk mixed.)
"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.
To me this might be the key difference. I think the popular form of it is a fad that has already peaked and a lot of it was fed as a reaction to the particulars of Trump. However institutions have spent the last 3 decades being hollowed out by a combination of consumerism and austerity politics. There's no crusty old dean figure to stand up to it anymore in education and government and the NGO industrial complex.
The worst fears of conservatives are a fever dream but it's plenty capable of rendering all manner of organizations completely dysfunctional in a way the student activists of the PCU days weren't ever able to.
How do you figure it's "austerity politics", the universities that are leading the charge here are presently the most privileged institution financially, they basically don't pay taxes and have an effective monopoly on life changing goods (and charge accordingly).
There's a common progressive idea that this is because of "austerity politics" and "capitalism" when in fact the culprits here are some of the most privileged classes of current society.
Perhaps the political praxis, cancel culture, etc are how those organizations *obtain their privilege* in way of austerity politics and capitalism, but that's an interesting criticism of both progressive and conservative politics - money from social programs always goes to the privileged in favor of the disprivileged, and people with privilege will maneuver their way around the cuts.
To be fair, it's not necessarily the universities themselves that are leading the charge, but the students at those universities demanding mandatory Wokemon and that their opponents be silenced.
This exactly. Universities have over time, through a series of intentional and unintentional policy decisions, evolved in a direction of consumer facing businesses. They are also increasingly staffed by untenured educators on the front line subject to the pressures of activists in the student body on one end and administrators on the other more concerned with selling the place than the integrity of the educational mission.
The administrators also want to protect and expand their budgets and their turf.
More Woke, more committees, ombudspersons, outreach coordinators and other bullshit jobs to enforce and institutionalize Woke, enables them to do just that.
Yes, universities are places of hugely unequal earnings, they're financed by predatory lending, and they take advantage of the tax code in a grossly regressive way. Wokeism really does help those with cultural power deflect attention from these facts. However, the media, NGOs, and universities take advantage of a system that's regressive overall. The trouble with starting materialist analysis from the antiwoke position is that, although most all your conclusions will be accurate, the analysis tends to stop wherever there isn't conspicuous wokeness. Whatever their insights, the antiwoke people don't usually have much to say about capital as such, or any analysis of a place that isn't Blue America, where extreme inequality and permissive social culture are conjoined in unique ways they are not in Texas, or Germany, or Korea, or India. On the left, I suspect this is because most of the antiwoke crowd are themselves academics and are unfamiliar with power that doesn't take certain liberal cultural forms.
They're not financed by predatory lending, the predatory lending was created because universities had managed to put themselves and their graduate in elite positions in society - first by eliteness, then by merit, and now... by wokeness.
"The system" doesn't, functionally exist as it pertains to Society:TM:, this is another set of progressive ideas that I find wrong, because it suggests somehow that the solution to "huh, all of our staunchest activists and advocates happen to benefit from immense class privilege and the solutions that get implemented seem to increase that class privilege" turns out to be - "more progressive activism", at no point does anyone ever even seek the answer to the question of "how do we keep fashionable New York socialite intellectual progressives from using leftism as a reason why they should get student loan forgiveness, it net increases equality but College is Important, nevermind that my diploma lets me work at a magazine in a vibrant gentrified neighborhood".
Materialist analysis of anywhere that isn't Blue America, economically - does not matter, because we have decided (as a national policy, in 1993) that we would all be richer and materially better off if we demolished all of the positions in the economy that didn't rely on being an apartment-dwelling, university educated manager.
The system is an abstraction, but any analysis of anything big involves abstractions. "Woke capitalism" is also an abstraction. It's just one that's limited to a handful of companies. Those companies have a huge amount amount of power. That power should be critically analyzed. There is no reason we can't criticize the dialectic unity between gay rights and gentrification, between abortion and the urban vs rural economic divide. In fact intellectuals of various stripes have done this forever, and now they're getting more attention from more people who can see what is happening defies simple lib-left, con-right binary analysis.
The problem is when that criticism of elites defaults to the more limited complaints about "the elites whose cultural habits I don't like." "College educated managers" in Texas don't put pronouns on their Zoom names. There is no such thing as corporate feminism in Korea. India doesn't have any of the woke ills of family breakdown and ultra-individualism, and yet, every single one of these places is part of the world economy, part of the capitalist system. Their culture is different. The system is the same.
I wonder what the percentage of college educated professionals work in Austin vice the entire rest of Texas?
Your critique only holds water to the extent that the economic center of gravity doesn't revolve around places where you have to get educated by University to get by, and to a certain degree - acclimate (read: learn to shut your mouth) to University values.
On the more minor point about college lending, I'm being misread as a proponent of loan forgiveness. I'm not in favor of loan forgiveness though I have every personal and familial reason to be. College lending is predatory because of what it sold to the largest college class in history. Some 50% of adults in the US went to some college, a group of people that is much poorer, much more diverse, and WAAAAYYYYYYYY more conservative than the magazine editor stereotype. The magazine editor went to a college that was nearly all white, and her parents paid for it. The rest of the college cohort went to college because they were told it was how you could earn a decent living. Colleges got rich from this, and it turned out to be largely untrue. We don't have enough money in the treasury to forgive everyone's loans, and like Freddie, I think that money is much better spent on healthcare, housing, social infrastructure. But let's not pretend huge numbers of people who are a lot more like us than Ivy League degenerates didn't get totally screwed.
The only austerity practiced at a university is that of intellectual diversity. Believe me, there is plenty of money sloshing around, it only needs to be used for the "right" things. The adjunct crisis (which is a crisis) comes more from universities realizing how much cheap labor is out there. As Freddie spoke the other day, this is basic economics. Supply and demand.
Yes, the adjunct crisis is one of cheap labor. A generation of soft-handed (largely) white kids from the suburbs thought that graduate school was the path to self-actualization, and they made a historic glut of PhDs ready to be exploited for their narrow skillset, tragic sense of entitlement, and antisocial cultural habits. It's easy to make fun of this cohort. It unites left and right the way that antiwoke criticism does. They're relatively privileged and have no one to blame but themselves. However, the system that got them is getting everybody. "Just go to trade school!" is the new "just learn to code!" Capital does not have much use for 99% of us, not in a way that would link skill, pride in work, social esteem, and material security.
"Capital" has a use for every single person who is getting paid. This is why they are getting paid. They bring some sort of value to someone, and in aggregate, this adds up to a functioning economy. There is nothing else to do this. The problem is that these over-credentialed feel that they are worth more, when, indeed, they simply aren't, as shown by the labor statistics.
And of course, there is going to be a rush to move to whatever is going to be the "next big thing", and by the time it is being touted by the chattering class, it will be too late. In other words, you need to stay ahead of the curve. See Freddie's post the other day, re pharmacists.
I think we agree in analysis, just not in the value judgment. The over-credentialed are seeing they are not special snowflakes, and the adjuncts, like nurses and teachers before them, are seeing their labor doesn't add up to much worth on the market. Hilarious comeuppance. I feel that way too. Freddie does tout economics 101, and nobody can mock overeducated pussies like FdB. It's likely why he has such a large conservative fanbase. Where he and I break off from that fanbase is in the judgment of a system that gives so little to so many, not in how we think the system does what it does. Tellingly, Freddie's advice is not "stay ahead of the curve," but that we need to understand that most of what determines our individual life is well outside our control, and to approach collective politics accordingly.
But, the core of our, I am speaking of western society here, issues is the conflict between communalism and individualism. I would say that you are correct in that we disagree on those grounds.
I don't know that there's the same state level funding focused on keeping the university affordable for its own sake. Agreed of course on the lack of intellectual diversity.
Also good to see you around, assuming you are the aaron david I think you are!
Money is definitely a bigger factor now. Unlike the 90's, most universities simply can't afford to piss of their students anymore because budgets are so tight and state money has dried up faster than the Colorado River. Admins will go the Moon if it means they can snare 10 students from another university.
Oh that's definitely part of it. If you look at both the number and salary of most academic admin jobs these days, it looks like a housing price index pre-2008. But while I would say it's a hefty chunk of the problem, I would not say it's 99% of the reason. That's a stretch.
They CANNOT "downsize their bloated admin payroll" and remain in compliance with DOE (and, for R1's, NSF, NIH, etc) reporting requirements. The reporting requirements are just staggering. If you don't work at a university, you have no idea.
Admin bloat is not a result of DEI initiatives though, it's been going on for decades now. The former did not originate to serve the latter at all, although I would readily admit they are doing that now. It just made it a LOT easier for all this DEI stuff to entrench itself into academia.
For Admin bloat: it's just plain ole' academic bureaucracy, government overreach, and basic greed that did that.
It's not super important that he uses Freud's somewhat discredited psychological framework to explain woke culture. What's important is that it helps clarify (at least for me) the broader dynamics at play in society as a whole and answers a question that has been bugging me for a while - how did the progenitors of the free-wheeling 60s turn into today's Puritans?
Two yeas into PC rearing it's head I was running APDA (parlimentary debate league) in 92-93. My partner and I used a the team name Handicapped Black Lesbian making fun of it.
At the world championship the women's colleges ask me to come talk about the fact that they were 40% of competitors and only 10% of trophies. I listened for a while and explained that, unlike policy debate, the judges were all students that schools had to BEG and promise beer to show up and judge once a year at the schools tournament, so training them to judge was out. APDA is "just convince the judges." So I don't know maybe flirt with the guy judges and form sisterly alliances with the gals? Maybe just debate better?
3 weeks later I quit the league ( I was bored with it anyway) bc they were so MAD at me attending tournaments was awful. What they had wanted was a GUARANTEE they'd win more. How the fuck?
Since then, organized debate went off the rails with kritik cultural marxist arguments, with teams literally arguing they are poor and disadvantaged so the judge has to vote for them. Colleges have followed debate theory into crapper.
"Rather, it’s a mix of earnestly concerned progressives who think the left is shooting itself in the foot (hi), conservatives delighted that the left is shooting itself in the foot, and conservatives afraid that (or opportunistically stoking fears that) critical race theory and drag queen story hours and so forth announce the apocalypse."
It's this of course: 'opportunistically stoking fears," but "fears" isn't the right word- it's like transphobia - nobody is AFRAID of you. They are enraged you aren't just asking to be left alone, you ACTUALLY THINK you will get to be the cultural hegemony. That the Home Team will not see itslef history and selves VALORIZED = USA #1!
This is healthy and normal, PC and WOKE wake up the Jacksonian instincts (that in the end run this place), and we get a reset when another new young left learns to Fear & Loathe. Eventually we will make Cultural Marists raise their right hand. McCarthy silenced marxists for 60 years.
You know, when that next wave of McCarthyism comes along there will be awfully strong evidence that you were once a paid subscriber to a socialist publication.
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.
Good gods...the arrogance involved with telling a Hispanic person they are not Hispanic enough staggers me. And yet, this is not the first time I have heard of it.
In Philadelphia, there is a health care center that serves the LGBT community, known as the Mazzoni Center. Over the last few years, Mazzoni has been wracked with the same woke convulsions that are tearing the gay community apart...this one is being erased, that one is problematic, blah, blah. Naturally, this shakes up the Mazzoni leadership on a regular basis, and, really, the best way to ensure that half the Philadelphia gay community despises you is to become the executive director. One such ED was a woman named Lydia Gonzalez Sciarrino, who was "latinx", which checked one box, but--gasp!--she was heterosexual. At the time she was appointed, I thought to myself, "She will be pry-barred out of that job within a year."
She didn't last eight months. One of the criticisms lodged against her was that, while she was "latinx", she was also "white-passing", which presumably made her less intersectional and thus unacceptable. I was gobsmacked that supposedly leftist people were telling someone they weren't the ethnicity they obviously were. It's possible the "white-passing" thing was just a stalking horse for getting rid of a candidate the woke crowd never liked, but still. You don't get to tell someone they are not Hispanic enough!
C.f. that one guy back in 2008 who ranted about how Obama "wasn't even from the hood".
None of this is new. "Acting white". "Uncle Tom". For white people, the word that starts with the letter "W" and rhymes with the N-word.
It's a culture/tribal war, not a race war. Telling somebody that they're "not Hispanic enough" has nothing to do with their actual ethnic background or genetic makeup, and has everything to do with them not sharing the same culture as the modal Hispanic American.
But that's a different line of implied grievance- one that's quite distinct from blatantly dismissive phony race-baiting on the basis of a political stance. It's also an accurate observation, at least as far as the words in your quote.
Barack Obama really isn't from "the 'hood." After a continent-hopping childhood of the sort spent by so many American kids with educated parents in government/military/diplomatic service in the post-WW2 era, the winds of fortune dropped him back into his birthplace- the island paradise of Hawaii, attending one of the most historic and exclusive private prep schools in the country, Punahou School. And from there, to elite Occidental College. Columbia, Harvard, and U. Chicago.
I loathe speculating beyond the data. But that IS the data. However the array of experiences in his youth may have influenced Barack Obama's political attitudes and ambitions, he isn't one of the black Americans who comes from a background of personal struggle to overcome the deprivations of a childhood and youth spent in an economically deprived urban black neighborhood (i.e., "the 'hood", in the popular argot.) Unlike his wife, Michelle, who grew up on the South Side of Chicago, raised by working class parents.
That said, it's one thing to challenge Barack Obama in regard to the way his background may have influenced his political views. And quite another to seriously attempt the folly of reclassifying the immutable physical fact of someone's ethnic ancestry.
I mean, it can work as joke. This is the sort of stuff that had better be funny. But when such absurd judgements are leveled in order to score points for a political agenda, they're leadenly humorless practically without exception.
In that regard, I also have to note that Dinesh D'Souza's repeated attempts to portray Barack Obama as if he's a Marxist-Leninist Black Supremacist Vanguardist make even less sense than the Wingnut Left insinuating that he isn't black enough. The only people who could possibly buy into either line are only doing it to massage their own preconceived notions.
I'm indigenous...an indigenous Celt. True story. Took a DNA test and I was literally 98% British isles/Ireland. (I'm half Irish half American.) I'm the wrong kind of indigenous and you're the wrong kind of Hispanic! Fun times.
Yep. The baggage of the verbiage, part of the cross we bear for our middle-class roots, b/c it aint cool to be plainspoken in polite society. If you liked that PC trip down memory lane then best check out “Politics and the English Language.” That one, by a guy who had an uncanny knack for seeing a bit further down the road than most and that dates back to the ‘40s, is a most edifying read, and you’ll be happy you tackled the assignment. Your homework is due tomorrow, b/c there’s no time to waste when it comes to the truth...
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?
No. We just have to hope that we grow out of it. However, given that rationality and lucidity are not dominant traits in human beings (emotions are), it might be a while. I was watching videos of crazy Black Friday shoppers yesterday and musing on our emotional, irrational side and why we get so crazy. Like self interest gone wild. And, BTW, I am not the excluded third observer here. I indict myself as well. Although I do have to admit to avoiding in-person Black Friday interaction, I happily partake online! ;-)
I was debating with my husband whether it would come to blood. I think there is a strong anti-violence sentiment among most woke acolytes - but not all, as evidenced by antifa. I think most are content to eviscerate other human beings online and threaten their careers and families.
Ah. But for those who do the ruining, it's fun, fun, fun! Exercising power over others is fun! A more heady sense of pleasure can not be had. (Feel like I'm channeling Carlin. He would have a great riff on this.)
I'm not a huge fan of marriage as an institution (although I am married because it's cheaper than a lawyer for the legal benefits - I'm a pragmatist) for certain reasons although I admit monogamy is a net positive for society. But, I would never call anyone else out on their choice. Who the hell died and made this person your priest? Just - the arrogance of these people. They think they are the end-all, be-all of righteousness. Makes me crazy. What happened to live and let live?
It was the same with “Politically correct.” As Alinsky teaches in Rules for Radicals, to name something is to enable criticism, which supporters don’t want to happen. Which is why Wokes attack any name given, as Freddie notes in one of his most popular substack posts.
Yes! The “Okay, what the fuck am I supposed to call…”post! Mas. Ter. Piece!
or in pokemon Woke is the evolution from PC?
Does this make PC the AOL of modern liberalism?
PC quickly became mocked by larger society. Woke is being institutionalized by society. It is PC on steroids.
Or is that just 20/20 hindsight?
No. I first heard the phrase 31 years ago in a college English class. I then saw it in a news magazine.
It almost immediately became a subject of ridicule, like that book. There were many others. Did some of the language stick around, especially in Education Depts.? Sure.
This is very different.
My sense is that the real PC days were the 1980s. By the time the term PC gained currency, it was as a way to combat or denigrate what was going on.
I don't have any real evidence, other than remembering having heard it for the first time in 1990 as a pejorative. (Yes, memories are faulty, and I was only 16 or 17, but it's the memory I have.)
I'm too young to remember when PC came on the scene, but my mother recalls first hearing the phrase "politically correct" when a good friend of hers was gushing about her new boyfriend ("...and he's politically correct!"). My mom's kneejerk reaction, as I understand it, was (1) "what the hell does 'politically correct' mean?" and (2) "what an obnoxious-sounding phrase". But it was clearly an instance of someone using the term unironically and in a positive, earnest way rather than to mock it. I'm not sure exactly when this event took place, but almost certainly sometime in the early-to-mid 80's.
I imagine the unironic, used-in-praise phase of "politically correct" lasted considerably longer than that of "woke", mainly because everything happens much faster in the internet age.
I heard that lesbians originally used it as a term of mockery. As in, is it politically correct if I’m attracted to [male actor]?
That's because Gen X was raised to understand irony. Many young people today have no sense of irony, no sense of humor, and take everything so seriously that it's a wonder they don't pop a vein.
2022 hindsight
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.
And best of all, other than a few token hires, a diversity committee here and there, Woke does little or nothing to change the way the pie is sliced.
I dunno, the history of labor relations shows that it is entirely possible to have unionization without pronouns, and recent events in Ukraine show that it is possible to play Wokemon (at least when western donors are watching) and at the same time, gut labor protections.
In fact, the two have nothing necessarily in common with one another.
They don't even talk about the pie. They jaw endlessly, but the discourse is about discourse.
If we kill the white male living inside each of us, if we purify our hearts sufficiently, if we are only inclusive enough, then surely all things will follow. If Fully Automated Luxury Gay Space Communism has not arrived, it's because we weren't worthy enough.
*Queer not gay, silly
Shit, sorry 'bout that. I'll report to the pound for diversity reeducation.
Maybe the next term to be neologized as a synonym for "same-sex attracted" will be "silly." Unless- did that already happen?
Bread and circuses
Definitely one kind of circus....
And I get to say to myself that I'm the moral equivalent to Sir Thomas More. Not the real Sir Thomas More, who I understand was pretty outspoken, but the "Man for all Seasons" Sir Thomas More, who refused to assent to that which he disbelieved, but if not put to it, could live his life.
Of course, I'm not Sir Thomas More. Not even close. And any adverse consequences I face at my workplace (a university) kind of (kind of!) pale to what More faced. Still, I get to claim say to myself that I'm like him.
whatever gets you through the day, friend. I'm a Leo, which I'm told does a lot to explain my grand internal self narratives.
Yup. Burn up the planet, watch the world reorganize around the end of the American empire, and keep grinding out crappier and crappier lives for the poor of all races, but if you celebrate Pride Month and mandate antiracism training your Global Oil & Guns Inc. can consider itself "one of the good guys."
Yes, it gives something for everyone. As late as 2018, Yascha Mounk near-universal alarm about "PC culture," which people in his surveys saw as a bigger problem than climate change or inequality. Maybe the "PC culture" label has fallen off because nobody self-identifies as PC. I think the meaning of PC and woke can more or less be equated as "social liberalism that's gone too far." It's an inherently relative definition. It's just what the person you're talking to thinks has gone too far, whatever they think "too far" is. Just look at the responses to this post (and others like it) on this sub. They range from "professional-class language-policing is counterproductive to social progress" to "we should have stopped gay rights in the '90s." That's a broad enough spectrum for most everyone to find themselves. Whatever its terms, I think we are going to see the same dynamics for a while. Liberalism has lost socially and politically, so true believers in universities and NGOs will get more combative as their numbers shrink, and "anti-woke," will continue to add popular energy to an ascendant right wing that grows more extreme by the day.
I almost responded earlier that the most cynical take is the wokeness/political correctness is just a legitimation strategy by the status quo. This effort at legitimacy is two pronged. First it uses the woke discourse to make the current system seem good and worthwhile, or at a minimum more just than in the past. It's kind a dialectical flip, but the constant "US is bad, irredeemably racist, everything is problematic" attitude on many ways shores up the status quo. It makes it seem as though such woke people are working to overcome it, or at least gives off the idea that they can do better. HR departments love DEI for this reason.
The second is both simpler and more bleak. It keeps up this illusion that our participation in the political system matters, that those with the real power care in the slightest about what we think and what we want to happen. It gives an illusion of control over a system which is beyond our control for the most part. Arguing about "wokeness" like any other wedge issue, makes it seem as if there is far more consequence to these arguments than there ever actually was.
Also, I feel like I didn't articulate this thought very well. To give an example, Disney mostly works to promote socially liberal views within it's film franchises now. There's nothing inherently bad about this, but they're still Disney. It's a way to make it feel like you're doing more than just watching a high budget CGI animation or that Disney isn't a corporate behemoth anymore. Without this kind of veneer, it'd just be the 50th remake of Beauty and the Beast. They need this narrative to put on a mask.
"so true believers in universities and NGOs will get more combative as their numbers shrink, and "anti-woke," will continue to add popular energy to an ascendant right wing that grows more extreme by the day"
So those who are against the insanity on the left are feeding the right? This makes no sense. The actions of the insane are feeding the right. Those on the left who are against the insanity are trying to *stop* the insanity by policing their own. Something I wish we'd see more of on the right to police their own.
The two are related. Progressives have always been a small number, but now they are losing even more people, a loss the remaining progressives have compensated for by getting more moralistic and retrenched. That's the wokeism. Wokeism feeds backlash, and the right is benefitting from the backlash. The right is also growing more extreme, but it is able to attract more and more moderates who feel closer to far-right cultural positions than they do to wokeism.
Of course there's an antiwoke left. Freddie's one of the more serious and thoroughgoing examples, but that antiwoke left has neither stopped wokeness nor expanded the appeal of labor leftism or Marxism or another brand very much.
1. When I said "left" I didn't mean communist / socialist type leftism. I meant it in the way leftism was referred to typically in America during my formative years: "liberal" ideas (i.e., Democrat party ideas).
2. If it wasn't already obvious, I'm rather uninterested in expanding the appeal of Marxism (though I'm certainly sympathetic to some of labor leftism and their policy priorities that don't involve a revolution overturning capitalism in favor of socialism / communism). I favor well-regulated capitalism, like most "moderate" liberals. The leftist (as defined as communist / socialist) wing of the Democrat coalition has never been a priority of mine.
I am still completely unpersuaded by your argument that anti-woke is feeding the right -- unless you are referring to the right that is anti-woke (i.e., the entire right), in which case, we're not saying different things. The right isn't "attracting" moderates; the extremist liberals are repulsing them.
"Progressives have always been a small number, but now they are losing even more people, a loss the remaining progressives have compensated for by getting more moralistic and retrenched."
Are wokeists really progressive leftists who are worried about shrinking numbers? It seems strange in the context of the unprecedented (at least in recent history) popularity of a leader like Bernie Sanders.
I’m not sure where some of this is coming from, but I don’t need to just continue the thread for the sake of continuing.
I’m not sure that there’s a difference between woke liberals repelling people and antiwoke conservatives attracting them. These amount to the same thing. I chose the second way of saying it to emphasize that the right is also getting more extreme, but more and more moderates are moving to the right because even relatively hard right positions are more acceptable to them than campus antiracism, trans rights, fear of being canceled etc. People debate why that is and whether that’s an acceptable choice, but it’s happening. It just is. Bernie seemed a promising exception to this trend, but he failed twice. What can those of us who wanted Bernie’s policies and movement dynamics do to try to get something good going and improve on his model? It’s a long and complicated conversation, but most of us aren’t having it. We’re just rehearsing the same 1-3 antiwoke talking points that some leftists, and all moderates and conservatives share. It’s nice to be popular, but we aren’t getting anywhere yet.
Obviously woke libs don’t care about numbers. Your Nathan J Robinson types will tell you they don’t play to the masses but care about being morally correct or something. Seems dumb in a popular democracy, but there you have it. They probably reason that right wing opinions used to be only credited by a very small intellectual elite but are now very popular, so we can wait 50 years to take over the courts and get a Fox News like they did. But, we can’t wait. They’re quite wrong. TLDR the wokeists are dumb and bad. Everyone on Substack, whether leftist or conservative, or whatever kind of moderate thinks this. It’s why Substack exists. I assumed I was speaking to people who agree on that one.
As for the terms thing… there’s not enough time to unpack “liberal” (a word with too many definitions) vs leftist vs Marxist etc. People don’t use them consistently. But I will credit FdB. He’s a Marxist who speaks to people. He’s a real Marxist, not just a guy on the left who doesn’t read books by women but wants a cool name for that, a real Marxist. And he speaks to people who are all points on the political spectrum, or all points on the antiwoke spectrum, which is all points. Pretty hard to do that.
My primary objection is to your characterization of the liberal anti-woke feeding the right. That's not true. The woke are feeding the right. Are there some moderates throwing their lot in with the right because of the woke left's excesses? Yep. But they are then the right, and not the anti-woke left. So the woke left is pushing at least some moderates to the right. But if you remain a liberal and anti-woke, you are not helping the right.
"But I will credit FdB. He’s a Marxist who speaks to people. He’s a real Marxist, not just a guy on the left who doesn’t read books by women but wants a cool name for that, a real Marxist. And he speaks to people who are all points on the political spectrum, or all points on the antiwoke spectrum, which is all points. Pretty hard to do that."
Wholeheartedly agreed. It's why I'm here despite my general disagreements with him on economic philosophy.
oh. Noticed that, did you?
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.
I only mention this because of your concluding question about what comes next -- South Park, to me, doesn't feel like a late addition to the parody of the ongoing PC culture. To me, post-grunge 90s just feels like a different era entirely, probably as a revolt against the philosophical indie rockers of the early 90s. South Park's vulgarity wasn't a backlash to the current dominant culture but instead itself defined the culture of the late 90s alongside, like, Limp Bizkit and DGenerationX and whatnot.
(Grunge started in the eighties, and I remember hearing Screaming Trees and Soundgarden back in high school, which I graduated in '89. It was simply a combination of metal and punk. Those indie philosophers came out of folk and punk mixed.)
"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.
To me this might be the key difference. I think the popular form of it is a fad that has already peaked and a lot of it was fed as a reaction to the particulars of Trump. However institutions have spent the last 3 decades being hollowed out by a combination of consumerism and austerity politics. There's no crusty old dean figure to stand up to it anymore in education and government and the NGO industrial complex.
The worst fears of conservatives are a fever dream but it's plenty capable of rendering all manner of organizations completely dysfunctional in a way the student activists of the PCU days weren't ever able to.
How do you figure it's "austerity politics", the universities that are leading the charge here are presently the most privileged institution financially, they basically don't pay taxes and have an effective monopoly on life changing goods (and charge accordingly).
There's a common progressive idea that this is because of "austerity politics" and "capitalism" when in fact the culprits here are some of the most privileged classes of current society.
Perhaps the political praxis, cancel culture, etc are how those organizations *obtain their privilege* in way of austerity politics and capitalism, but that's an interesting criticism of both progressive and conservative politics - money from social programs always goes to the privileged in favor of the disprivileged, and people with privilege will maneuver their way around the cuts.
To be fair, it's not necessarily the universities themselves that are leading the charge, but the students at those universities demanding mandatory Wokemon and that their opponents be silenced.
This exactly. Universities have over time, through a series of intentional and unintentional policy decisions, evolved in a direction of consumer facing businesses. They are also increasingly staffed by untenured educators on the front line subject to the pressures of activists in the student body on one end and administrators on the other more concerned with selling the place than the integrity of the educational mission.
The administrators also want to protect and expand their budgets and their turf.
More Woke, more committees, ombudspersons, outreach coordinators and other bullshit jobs to enforce and institutionalize Woke, enables them to do just that.
As also at nonprofits
Yes, universities are places of hugely unequal earnings, they're financed by predatory lending, and they take advantage of the tax code in a grossly regressive way. Wokeism really does help those with cultural power deflect attention from these facts. However, the media, NGOs, and universities take advantage of a system that's regressive overall. The trouble with starting materialist analysis from the antiwoke position is that, although most all your conclusions will be accurate, the analysis tends to stop wherever there isn't conspicuous wokeness. Whatever their insights, the antiwoke people don't usually have much to say about capital as such, or any analysis of a place that isn't Blue America, where extreme inequality and permissive social culture are conjoined in unique ways they are not in Texas, or Germany, or Korea, or India. On the left, I suspect this is because most of the antiwoke crowd are themselves academics and are unfamiliar with power that doesn't take certain liberal cultural forms.
They're not financed by predatory lending, the predatory lending was created because universities had managed to put themselves and their graduate in elite positions in society - first by eliteness, then by merit, and now... by wokeness.
"The system" doesn't, functionally exist as it pertains to Society:TM:, this is another set of progressive ideas that I find wrong, because it suggests somehow that the solution to "huh, all of our staunchest activists and advocates happen to benefit from immense class privilege and the solutions that get implemented seem to increase that class privilege" turns out to be - "more progressive activism", at no point does anyone ever even seek the answer to the question of "how do we keep fashionable New York socialite intellectual progressives from using leftism as a reason why they should get student loan forgiveness, it net increases equality but College is Important, nevermind that my diploma lets me work at a magazine in a vibrant gentrified neighborhood".
Materialist analysis of anywhere that isn't Blue America, economically - does not matter, because we have decided (as a national policy, in 1993) that we would all be richer and materially better off if we demolished all of the positions in the economy that didn't rely on being an apartment-dwelling, university educated manager.
The system is an abstraction, but any analysis of anything big involves abstractions. "Woke capitalism" is also an abstraction. It's just one that's limited to a handful of companies. Those companies have a huge amount amount of power. That power should be critically analyzed. There is no reason we can't criticize the dialectic unity between gay rights and gentrification, between abortion and the urban vs rural economic divide. In fact intellectuals of various stripes have done this forever, and now they're getting more attention from more people who can see what is happening defies simple lib-left, con-right binary analysis.
The problem is when that criticism of elites defaults to the more limited complaints about "the elites whose cultural habits I don't like." "College educated managers" in Texas don't put pronouns on their Zoom names. There is no such thing as corporate feminism in Korea. India doesn't have any of the woke ills of family breakdown and ultra-individualism, and yet, every single one of these places is part of the world economy, part of the capitalist system. Their culture is different. The system is the same.
I wonder what the percentage of college educated professionals work in Austin vice the entire rest of Texas?
Your critique only holds water to the extent that the economic center of gravity doesn't revolve around places where you have to get educated by University to get by, and to a certain degree - acclimate (read: learn to shut your mouth) to University values.
On the more minor point about college lending, I'm being misread as a proponent of loan forgiveness. I'm not in favor of loan forgiveness though I have every personal and familial reason to be. College lending is predatory because of what it sold to the largest college class in history. Some 50% of adults in the US went to some college, a group of people that is much poorer, much more diverse, and WAAAAYYYYYYYY more conservative than the magazine editor stereotype. The magazine editor went to a college that was nearly all white, and her parents paid for it. The rest of the college cohort went to college because they were told it was how you could earn a decent living. Colleges got rich from this, and it turned out to be largely untrue. We don't have enough money in the treasury to forgive everyone's loans, and like Freddie, I think that money is much better spent on healthcare, housing, social infrastructure. But let's not pretend huge numbers of people who are a lot more like us than Ivy League degenerates didn't get totally screwed.
The only austerity practiced at a university is that of intellectual diversity. Believe me, there is plenty of money sloshing around, it only needs to be used for the "right" things. The adjunct crisis (which is a crisis) comes more from universities realizing how much cheap labor is out there. As Freddie spoke the other day, this is basic economics. Supply and demand.
-aaron david
Yes, the adjunct crisis is one of cheap labor. A generation of soft-handed (largely) white kids from the suburbs thought that graduate school was the path to self-actualization, and they made a historic glut of PhDs ready to be exploited for their narrow skillset, tragic sense of entitlement, and antisocial cultural habits. It's easy to make fun of this cohort. It unites left and right the way that antiwoke criticism does. They're relatively privileged and have no one to blame but themselves. However, the system that got them is getting everybody. "Just go to trade school!" is the new "just learn to code!" Capital does not have much use for 99% of us, not in a way that would link skill, pride in work, social esteem, and material security.
"Capital" has a use for every single person who is getting paid. This is why they are getting paid. They bring some sort of value to someone, and in aggregate, this adds up to a functioning economy. There is nothing else to do this. The problem is that these over-credentialed feel that they are worth more, when, indeed, they simply aren't, as shown by the labor statistics.
And of course, there is going to be a rush to move to whatever is going to be the "next big thing", and by the time it is being touted by the chattering class, it will be too late. In other words, you need to stay ahead of the curve. See Freddie's post the other day, re pharmacists.
Really, this is all economics 101.
I think we agree in analysis, just not in the value judgment. The over-credentialed are seeing they are not special snowflakes, and the adjuncts, like nurses and teachers before them, are seeing their labor doesn't add up to much worth on the market. Hilarious comeuppance. I feel that way too. Freddie does tout economics 101, and nobody can mock overeducated pussies like FdB. It's likely why he has such a large conservative fanbase. Where he and I break off from that fanbase is in the judgment of a system that gives so little to so many, not in how we think the system does what it does. Tellingly, Freddie's advice is not "stay ahead of the curve," but that we need to understand that most of what determines our individual life is well outside our control, and to approach collective politics accordingly.
No need to call anyone names.
But, the core of our, I am speaking of western society here, issues is the conflict between communalism and individualism. I would say that you are correct in that we disagree on those grounds.
I don't know that there's the same state level funding focused on keeping the university affordable for its own sake. Agreed of course on the lack of intellectual diversity.
Also good to see you around, assuming you are the aaron david I think you are!
Money is definitely a bigger factor now. Unlike the 90's, most universities simply can't afford to piss of their students anymore because budgets are so tight and state money has dried up faster than the Colorado River. Admins will go the Moon if it means they can snare 10 students from another university.
Oh that's definitely part of it. If you look at both the number and salary of most academic admin jobs these days, it looks like a housing price index pre-2008. But while I would say it's a hefty chunk of the problem, I would not say it's 99% of the reason. That's a stretch.
They CANNOT "downsize their bloated admin payroll" and remain in compliance with DOE (and, for R1's, NSF, NIH, etc) reporting requirements. The reporting requirements are just staggering. If you don't work at a university, you have no idea.
The institutions that have the worst cases of modern PC are the richest. I'm not sure how it follows that austerity is a factor.
The admin explosion is due to federal Dept of Education mandates to comply with This and with That.
Admin bloat is not a result of DEI initiatives though, it's been going on for decades now. The former did not originate to serve the latter at all, although I would readily admit they are doing that now. It just made it a LOT easier for all this DEI stuff to entrench itself into academia.
For Admin bloat: it's just plain ole' academic bureaucracy, government overreach, and basic greed that did that.
reported for insensitive Colorado River metaphor.
Reported for not believing women
Dam you
Reported for too soon
That’s What Sh
nm
Your comment (particularly the last 2 sentences) brought to mind this slightly tangential piece: https://criticaltherapyantidote.org/2022/08/08/freud-explains-cancel-culture/
It's not super important that he uses Freud's somewhat discredited psychological framework to explain woke culture. What's important is that it helps clarify (at least for me) the broader dynamics at play in society as a whole and answers a question that has been bugging me for a while - how did the progenitors of the free-wheeling 60s turn into today's Puritans?
Two yeas into PC rearing it's head I was running APDA (parlimentary debate league) in 92-93. My partner and I used a the team name Handicapped Black Lesbian making fun of it.
At the world championship the women's colleges ask me to come talk about the fact that they were 40% of competitors and only 10% of trophies. I listened for a while and explained that, unlike policy debate, the judges were all students that schools had to BEG and promise beer to show up and judge once a year at the schools tournament, so training them to judge was out. APDA is "just convince the judges." So I don't know maybe flirt with the guy judges and form sisterly alliances with the gals? Maybe just debate better?
3 weeks later I quit the league ( I was bored with it anyway) bc they were so MAD at me attending tournaments was awful. What they had wanted was a GUARANTEE they'd win more. How the fuck?
Since then, organized debate went off the rails with kritik cultural marxist arguments, with teams literally arguing they are poor and disadvantaged so the judge has to vote for them. Colleges have followed debate theory into crapper.
"Rather, it’s a mix of earnestly concerned progressives who think the left is shooting itself in the foot (hi), conservatives delighted that the left is shooting itself in the foot, and conservatives afraid that (or opportunistically stoking fears that) critical race theory and drag queen story hours and so forth announce the apocalypse."
It's this of course: 'opportunistically stoking fears," but "fears" isn't the right word- it's like transphobia - nobody is AFRAID of you. They are enraged you aren't just asking to be left alone, you ACTUALLY THINK you will get to be the cultural hegemony. That the Home Team will not see itslef history and selves VALORIZED = USA #1!
This is healthy and normal, PC and WOKE wake up the Jacksonian instincts (that in the end run this place), and we get a reset when another new young left learns to Fear & Loathe. Eventually we will make Cultural Marists raise their right hand. McCarthy silenced marxists for 60 years.
You know, when that next wave of McCarthyism comes along there will be awfully strong evidence that you were once a paid subscriber to a socialist publication.
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.
Good gods...the arrogance involved with telling a Hispanic person they are not Hispanic enough staggers me. And yet, this is not the first time I have heard of it.
In Philadelphia, there is a health care center that serves the LGBT community, known as the Mazzoni Center. Over the last few years, Mazzoni has been wracked with the same woke convulsions that are tearing the gay community apart...this one is being erased, that one is problematic, blah, blah. Naturally, this shakes up the Mazzoni leadership on a regular basis, and, really, the best way to ensure that half the Philadelphia gay community despises you is to become the executive director. One such ED was a woman named Lydia Gonzalez Sciarrino, who was "latinx", which checked one box, but--gasp!--she was heterosexual. At the time she was appointed, I thought to myself, "She will be pry-barred out of that job within a year."
She didn't last eight months. One of the criticisms lodged against her was that, while she was "latinx", she was also "white-passing", which presumably made her less intersectional and thus unacceptable. I was gobsmacked that supposedly leftist people were telling someone they weren't the ethnicity they obviously were. It's possible the "white-passing" thing was just a stalking horse for getting rid of a candidate the woke crowd never liked, but still. You don't get to tell someone they are not Hispanic enough!
She was the brown face of white supremacy.
That’s what we need you know: Socialism with a brown white supremacist face.
C.f. that one guy back in 2008 who ranted about how Obama "wasn't even from the hood".
None of this is new. "Acting white". "Uncle Tom". For white people, the word that starts with the letter "W" and rhymes with the N-word.
It's a culture/tribal war, not a race war. Telling somebody that they're "not Hispanic enough" has nothing to do with their actual ethnic background or genetic makeup, and has everything to do with them not sharing the same culture as the modal Hispanic American.
But that's a different line of implied grievance- one that's quite distinct from blatantly dismissive phony race-baiting on the basis of a political stance. It's also an accurate observation, at least as far as the words in your quote.
Barack Obama really isn't from "the 'hood." After a continent-hopping childhood of the sort spent by so many American kids with educated parents in government/military/diplomatic service in the post-WW2 era, the winds of fortune dropped him back into his birthplace- the island paradise of Hawaii, attending one of the most historic and exclusive private prep schools in the country, Punahou School. And from there, to elite Occidental College. Columbia, Harvard, and U. Chicago.
I loathe speculating beyond the data. But that IS the data. However the array of experiences in his youth may have influenced Barack Obama's political attitudes and ambitions, he isn't one of the black Americans who comes from a background of personal struggle to overcome the deprivations of a childhood and youth spent in an economically deprived urban black neighborhood (i.e., "the 'hood", in the popular argot.) Unlike his wife, Michelle, who grew up on the South Side of Chicago, raised by working class parents.
That said, it's one thing to challenge Barack Obama in regard to the way his background may have influenced his political views. And quite another to seriously attempt the folly of reclassifying the immutable physical fact of someone's ethnic ancestry.
I mean, it can work as joke. This is the sort of stuff that had better be funny. But when such absurd judgements are leveled in order to score points for a political agenda, they're leadenly humorless practically without exception.
In that regard, I also have to note that Dinesh D'Souza's repeated attempts to portray Barack Obama as if he's a Marxist-Leninist Black Supremacist Vanguardist make even less sense than the Wingnut Left insinuating that he isn't black enough. The only people who could possibly buy into either line are only doing it to massage their own preconceived notions.
I'm indigenous...an indigenous Celt. True story. Took a DNA test and I was literally 98% British isles/Ireland. (I'm half Irish half American.) I'm the wrong kind of indigenous and you're the wrong kind of Hispanic! Fun times.
Throw in English cooking through about 20 years ago it’s a substantial deficit
I’m just hanging in for, “the Jews financed the Norman conquest”
I identify as a POC...that is a... Person of Canada. When I tell my leftie friends this, they look at me like I just farted in church.
This cracked me up. Thank you!
That book will probably play about as well as books about eugenics from the 1930s play now.
Yep. The baggage of the verbiage, part of the cross we bear for our middle-class roots, b/c it aint cool to be plainspoken in polite society. If you liked that PC trip down memory lane then best check out “Politics and the English Language.” That one, by a guy who had an uncanny knack for seeing a bit further down the road than most and that dates back to the ‘40s, is a most edifying read, and you’ll be happy you tackled the assignment. Your homework is due tomorrow, b/c there’s no time to waste when it comes to the truth...
One of his best. And that’s saying something.
His parody of modern euphemism-addicted wonkspeak can still make me lol
Jennifer Sey is great here: https://jennifersey.substack.com/p/am-i-my-husbands-keeper
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?
No. We just have to hope that we grow out of it. However, given that rationality and lucidity are not dominant traits in human beings (emotions are), it might be a while. I was watching videos of crazy Black Friday shoppers yesterday and musing on our emotional, irrational side and why we get so crazy. Like self interest gone wild. And, BTW, I am not the excluded third observer here. I indict myself as well. Although I do have to admit to avoiding in-person Black Friday interaction, I happily partake online! ;-)