Largely spot-on but... woke people are the same as Joe Biden supporters? Really?
I think the two groups don't actually overlap much. Woke people are young, white and college-educated: the three worst demographic groups for Biden in the primary.
I think some went for Sanders and others went for Warren. Warren was much more woke than Sanders in her presentation, but I think Sanders may have appealed to the woke mentality in a different way.
I suspect he drew a lot of support from people who oppose capitalism but who also suspected in their heart of hearts that capitalism would never end and that Bernie would never be president... to Freddie's point, a little like the people who think racism is terrible but also that it will never disappear no matter how much you denounce it. Some of us liked Warren precisely because she didn't seem to speak to that attitude; instead she had a list of seventy-four policy changes that would make things better if you implemented them, the implication being that you *can* make things better and that politics isn't just the performance of emotion. It all fit very awkwardly with the SJW rhetoric she deployed in the debates.
This is something I've noticed a lot, that Freddie equates SJ politics with the Young Democratic mainstream opposed to the Bernie wing, when in reality it doesn't break down nearly so simply—plenty of red roses support these politics, DSA is constantly embroiled in fights over these issues. I guess one could say "DSA members who practice this kind of politics aren't real DSA members," but we all know what fallacy that is.
I think the only real commonality between SJWs and Biden voters is that Freddie doesn't like them. I find that a lot of Bernie supporters are psychologically similar to the woke, in the sense that they're embittered about the world and (at some level) don't really believe that their political activities can make things better.
I think that's right. I gave money to Warren and then voted for Biden (I live overseas and by the time Democrats Abroad got to vote, Biden and Sanders were the only candidates left).
I also belonged to an Indivisible group in the country where I'm now based, whose members were mostly female, over 40 and employed in the international aid/public health sector. At the meeting where we discussed our primary preferences, I was almost the only person whose first choice wasn't Warren. I'd changed my mind by that time, not because I didn't think Warren was the best theoretical president (she clearly was) but because her almost total lack of black and working-class support in the early primaries made it clear that Trump would beat her.
The thing that struck me about the group's members, though, is that even though they stanned Warren and Stacey Abrams, most of them didn't think much of Bernie or AOC. International aid work is fundamentally a results-oriented profession and I think Warren's appeal to people with that personality type is almost irresistible. I don't mean that as a criticism in any way; I agreed with them on almost every point except Warren's electability.
What are you talking about? Biden made huge gains in white college educated people. He lost in almost every other demographic. Establishment Democrats are the party of wealthy elites, Wall Street and large corporations now. Woke provides them a moral cover while they continue screwing the rest of of in the real material ways that DeBoer outlines here.
I don't think older white college educated people, corporations, etc. are engaging in the absolutist, ruthless interpersonal politics Freddie is talking about. Coke isn't a fervent believer that white people are racist. They're just along for the ride.
Yeah this whole thread of comments is based on a failure to understand how dramatically the Democratic coalition has changed. The Democrats are the party of college educated whites, now, the heart of the social justice movement. Uneducated voters of color are trending hard Republican.
But the syllogism doesn't work: "college educated whites are the heart of the social justice movement; college educated whites supported Democrats in greater numbers in 2020 than previously; ergo, social justice practitioners are mainstream Democrats"? SJ people (what noun should I use??) are a *very specific generation* of the college educated—they're almost all quite young, and I would bet they're less white than the college-educated population as a whole. They're much more in Bernie's demographic camp than Biden's.
I also feel like regarding white and nonwhite support you're committing same "rates versus levels" mistake as Democrats do, just in mirror image. Complacent Democrats say, "stop all this fretting about the Black and Latino vote; you see we still get the vast majority of those votes," ignoring the problem that the rate is declining and might continue to decline. You see that decline ("uneducated voters of color are trending hard Republican") and mistake it for a reversal in the level of support, so that "the Democrats are the party of college educated whites, now"—as if they don't still get far more support from POC.
Uneducated voters of some color are trending that way; the boundaries of color shift over time. Some of what is "of color" nowdays will be white in 50 years.
The overlap is definitely there, but not explicit -- being, rather, more like a "motte-bailey" dynamic. One way to think about this is that, whereas the "unwoke" Berniecrats whose grievances are very "class-first" and not very intersectional always presented a somewhat-credible threat of refusing to support Biden in a general election and instead going third-party -- by contrast, the woke left has never presented any such threat. Obviously woke leftists would have preferred Warren (or Sanders too for that matter), but the transition to supporting Biden was seamless and entailed no dilemma. By contrast, the class-firsters had a difficult choice to make: go third-party, or vote Dem to get rid of Trump. Since the class-firsters had that choice, they are therefore a distinct entity from Bidenism and could still in theory defect from Bidenism; whereas, woke leftists had no such choice and are therefore properly understood as part of Bidenism (albeit a rhetorically radical part).
Just to be clear--I think Freddie and some others may have missed it--I was talking about choices in the Democratic primary, not the general election. Obviously lots of woke people voted for Biden in November, because the Trump presidency was a fact and there was less abstaining/voting third party than in 2016.
In the primaries I think Sanders probably got most of the SJW vote (along with an important block of anti-woke leftists: basically Freddie's team). He was the most left-wing candidate and whatever else you want to say about SJWs, they're left-wing too. And there were a few SJWs who voted Warren because Sanders wasn't intersectional enough. Someone has already commented that this is probably a small group and I agree, but I know one person in that category.
I stand by my original comment. Woke people voting for Biden in the primary was not a thing, at all.
I'm thinking that perhaps Freddie isn't making a clear enough distinction between "the woke" in a narrow sense and the broader professional middle class.
Most of the people in my Indivisible group fall into the second category: middle-aged, upper-middle-class women whose support for the Democratic Party is based more on identity issues than class issues *but who don't hold extreme views on identity* (or on class either, for that matter). These aren't the screamers and cancelers... but whether Freddie likes it or not, I think most of the screamers and cancelers did vote Bernie in the primary if they bothered to vote at all.
There's a big distinction between AOC and the "woke HR consultant", certainly. To me, for thinking about political blocs and sub-blocs and which bloc is or isn't distinct from the Biden consensus, it's just most useful to begin by mulling over which bloc presents a semi-credible threat of defecting. I think the class-first Berniecrats (maybe in particular those not entirely won over by AOC) still present that threat.
"An obvious conclusion one must draw from social justice politics is that most people are inherently bigoted, perhaps irredeemably so."
I actually have to agree with this -- most people do make baseless snap judgments. The thing is, if it's inherent in humans to make snap judgments and prefer their own kind, then why are we blaming? Why not just put mitigating mechanisms in place and leave it at that?
If you look at a picture of any orchestra from the 1940s, you will see literally not a single woman there (even on the harp), and no Black people. Go to any American orchestra nowdays, and you'll see zillions of women and minorities. I remember seeing the LA Chamber Orchestra when I lived near their Burbank theater and realizing that out of the whole violin section, there was ONE man.
This all came about due to screened auditions, which American orchestras use (and European ones do not). Instead of bitching out the juries about prejudice and forcing them to undergo struggle sessions, they just said, "Okay, fine. We're putting up a screen during the first two rounds of the auditions."
This was originally done to keep jurists from being biased in favor of their own students, but the literal next audition season after the screens went up for either Boston of Cleveland, ALL four open violin positions went to women. ALL OF THEM.
To the credit of American orchestras, the juries swallowed hard, took their medicine, and the screens stayed up. And they are still up -- precisely because people will always manage to judge based on something stupid and irrelevant.
And that's it. No blame, no name-calling, no accusations, no struggle sessions -- just a piece of fabric. Identify the problem, identify an impersonal solution, implement, and then take metrics that allow you to judge how successful you are. Had we tried to fix the problem by fixing individual hearts and minds, it would never have worked. When people audition without a screen, women and minorities are STILL judged more harshly to this day. It's better than it was, but it's still there; genres of music that do not screen are still horribly overbalanced in favor of white men.
But there are ways to fix problems without fixing individual hearts and minds. If I'm auditioning for an orchestra (or trying to get a job, or whatever), I just want a fair g/d shot. I don't care if the jurists grovel before me and confess to their repulsive sexism although to be honest, I might not mind since I'm also human and imperfect, but really as long as the screen is there, I don't care if the assistant principal oboe is an asshole or not.
Yes, I know that this exact mechanism won't work for a lot of injustices, but it's an example of how changing hearts and minds is not only unnecessary to justice and fairness, but that focusing on that can blind us to simpler solutions that will basically make the problem go away while allowing people to retain their right to remain assholes in perpetuity. Because people will remain assholes, whether we like it or not.
I'm seeing way too much to get into in the first article -- it will take a long time to unpack it, and ... to be honest, I don't think anyone who read that and probably the dude who wrote it did unpack all of it. "50% more likely than what and when?" was the first thing I wondered. Before the 1970s, the comparison point was pretty much zero aside from the occasional harpist, always hired part time and gigging and never a formal part of the orchestra.
And I have read that stupid NYT article. It's typical faux wokeness from the grotesquely privileged. Blind auditions and standardized tests are like vaccinations against bias: they don't solve the whole problem but they solve some of it. Now that we've forgotten how awful the situation was before they were used, we're blaming them for the very problems they help solve. Tommasini has no clue how bad the situation will get once they are removed.
For context, the author of the first link is a famous statistician who spends a lot of time critiquing sloppy methodological practices, not someone with a deeper agenda trying to blindside you.
Big picture, if we're comparing orchestras in 2020 to orchestras in 1940, there's no reason to think that they would look identical, even without blind screens. The role of women in society has changed, the number of women in the labor force has skyrocketed, girls are raised with dramatically different expectations about their life prospects. There are lots of industries without blind screens where the gender balance between 1940 and 2020 changed dramatically. Again, I think the blind screen is obviously a good idea, and it seems possible it's even had a small role in this. But the actual data doesn't seem to suggest that it's been the driving force.
I should have been clearer about my issues with the first article, sorry. I'm sort of still getting used to the fact that Substack has more room for thinking out loud and expressing doubts.
Basically ... that article reads a lot like the blizzards-of-disparate-numbers I've run into in the past where someone has something they want proven ahead of time, and they will spew a cloud of small factlets from different sources that fog things up more than they clarify. I've been around long enough and done enough research to be able to smell that sort of thing, but I've also got to confess that I can't spend the time to tease that exact article apart right now. I'd like to, and I'm prepared to be proven wrong. But ... yeah, it pinged my "smoke and mirrors" radar. Pull enough small facts from different sources, all with different methodologies, and you can get it to line up with a pre-chosen conclusion fairly easily while looking incredibly erudite at first blush.
Regarding point 2: I agree that the politics you're talking about is too censorious and punitive, but there's an obvious problem with the statement that you can think of more cases of people being mercilessly purged than of people being quietly corrected: we wouldn't hear about the quiet corrections, whereas we do hear about the purges. I imagine that the quiet corrections are, whatever their merits on substance, pretty common (which doesn't excuse the too-frequent purges).
Great post. I would go even further and say it’s not enough for SJP folks to ignore the material plight of marginalized groups. In the rare event that an initiative to address those concerns gains momentum, they will co-opt it and make it about the plight of privileged academics and journalists.
After the murder of George Floyd, I was appalled to see elites try to make the movement about their own professional grievances. An officer of the state KILLED a black man over twenty dollars. And I saw tenured academics using the hashtag to complain about (for example) all-white panels at sociology conferences.
They saw an opportunity (lots of outrage and emotion) and instead of asking “how can I address police violence” they immediately turned to their own professional and social circles with a list of demands about things like the size of their book advances and who wins awards.
All of a sudden, it was the summer of “give me what I want or you’re a racist” in every elite or artsy or academic organization. Meanwhile, ordinary people were in the streets trying to address what actually happened. Imagine what these elites could have done if they had supported this movement instead of making it about themselves.
I remember twenty years ago, in a college class on Toni Morrison, reading a book by bell hooks about Morrison's novels. She compared the experiences of the mother in Sula (who nearly starves to death with her family and sells her leg to keep her family alive) to hooks's own stress around her tenure case. I thought it was an obscene comparison but no one else in the class seemed to see the problem.
Leaving a separate comment to discuss separate issues: I think it's far too simple, and unfair, to suggest that SJ folks uniformly rejected Tara Reade's accusations out of hand. Of course some did, but many were openly troubled by them early on, when they were at their point of maximum credibility (peaking at the C-SPAN story), and only expressed doubts as contradictions became impossible to ignore (Lindsay Beyerstein and Michelle Goldberg both wrote fair pieces that didn't attack Reade but pointed out relevant changes in her and her witnesses' statements over time and other inconsistencies). Then more reporting was done and the wheels fell off, credibility-wise; I don't think anyone can be blamed for not believing the accusation given all that's come out and how little support it has. (And yet, some SJ people *still* continued to believe the accusation, like your nemesis Noah Berlatsky!) Now, one can say that this is a totally different standard than the one the same people applied to Bret Kavanaugh, and there's something to that…but that seems like ordinary partisanship, not something specific to the SJ left.
Yeah the Tara Reade media cycle happened during the final days of the Sanders campaign. During that period the core of the social justice left - young people - was still very much on team Bernie and many of them were pushing the story as hard as they could. The accusations didn't go anyway because an overwhelming number of people (including Bernie Sanders) did not believe that the name Tara Reade belongs in the same sentence as 'credibly', not because the social justice left made a compromise.
Perhaps we just can't reconcile our perceptions of vague groups. My experience is that social justice types hate Bernie and his supporters. But that could be my idiosyncratic experience.
I think maybe the problem here is in trying to identify SJ types (again, I really want a noun here) as a coherent faction. It might be more accurate to describe SJ politics as a *tendency* that's common among educated young people and applied in different ways within different factions. So of course we all know the ride-and-die for Biden SJs (Joy Reid, etc.); there are also plenty who loathed Biden but grimly went with him after the primary (elsewhere I mentioned Berlatsky), and some red rose SJ types who still have never reconciled themselves to Biden. The fact that SJ is so prevalent on campuses, and so dangerous to run afoul of, means that people in all factions of the young left are trained to speak and practice it.
The intra-SJW distinctions are important, and yet I can't think of a person who'd I'd classify as "SJW" or "woke" or "intersectionally radical" who's a credible defection threat from the existing Biden-Harris ruling coalition. Any Berniecrat who defects is probably of the staunchly class-first, SJ-skeptical, intersectionality-critical variety (whom all the SJWs will instantly demonize as "crypto alt right" the instant the defection happens).
I think you can draw some subgroup of SJ Warrenites who hated Bernie, but in reality that's a microscopic demographic. Sanders absolutely dominated with young people who are the driving force in everything you're talking about in this article. That his campaign was in some ways captured by that demographic and in the process had such a different flavor than his 2016 campaign likely played a role in him going from the guy who won Michigan to the guy who lost it.
Yes, that's an important point—Biden, in many people's analyses, won the primary by being the only candidate who *didn't* take all his cues from Twitter and try to court campus activists.
"take all his cues from Twitter and try to court campus activists."
"Twitter" and "campus" are different things, and this gets at my enduring frustration with the "campus activism" theory of social justice: the internet is the far more plausible culprit in cultivating a lot of these anxieties and tendencies.
yes, a lot of the ppl who express these anxieties and tendencies are overeducated. but they're also ppl who in many cases adapted to social justice before they set foot on campus. but no sooner than they set foot on the internet.
That’s fair! Though I would note that as a Sarah Lawrence student at the turn of the millennium, I saw a fair amount of the same tendencies, even though the internet was comparatively nascent. So there’s probably a chicken and egg problem here.
Well done, sir. Perfectly laid out. And the Knuckles stuff had me crying laughing. Indeed it seems like fandom is neatly divided into Wokesters and Gamergaters now. It's sad.
Also, this school of politics is also why I've given up on paying attention to the Oscars even though I love movies and have a very eclectic taste. Every year since 2016 there's been a new moral panic about how harmful Movie X is.
Oh and the ratings keep going down the more elitist and woke the ceremony gets. This year will be a disaster of Hindenburg proportions for them.
How DARE you say racial discussions about Sonic the Hedgehog aren't important? If you're saying this doesn't matter, it implies all of the conversations I've witnessed about Godzilla and social justice don't matter, and that cuts DEEP.
I’m surprised that more people don’t view these beliefs as alarming. To believe oneself to be in possession of the whole truth and total moral goodness is historically the shortest way towards committing massacres. The other side is no longer human. Nevermind that their post modern theories were actually on their way out in academia because they’ve more holes than Swiss cheese. The race card saved these people and now they got to turn it into an endless Maoist struggle with no discernible goals.
I do wonder how the market pressures will impact things. I have been a consistent consumer of left of center journalism for some time but the SJ takeover of some of these institutions in a way that allows me to predict the content of an article before I read it has me reconsidering my budget allocations. I can't quite imagine not getting my paper NYT, but I am repeatedly struck by how many NYT stories are accompanied by comments that run 2 or 3 to 1 against the thesis of the story because it is too knee jerk SJ oriented. At some point some of those commenters, who are subscribers, are going to decide that they can just read their substacks and give up the NYT and I just don't think there are enough SJ millenials to make up for their dollars, but maybe I underestimate their buying power?
Going off your 'Politics in everything' point - I think there's a certain social prestige to doing 'important work' as a writer and I get the sense that the Kotaku, Deadspin, Teen Vogue, etc writers really just don't want to be doing the job that they've been hired to do. They see themselves as temporarily displaced activists and political thinkers. It's embarrassing to tell people at Brooklyn parties that you - a prestigious college graduate - just churn out video game content for the internet for starvation wages. And for obvious reasons that you've touched on in previous articles, I don't see the future of working in the increasingly-bleak content mines as ever gaining more social prestige, which means this problem won't be disappearing.
From an epidemiology standpoint, topics of debate spread on social media based on how easily debatable they are, independent of their importance. Since replies and reshares are so easy, trivia spreads as easily as important news.
Trivia may even have the advantage due to accessibility. In programming circles this is called “bikeshedding.” Debate over the color of a bike shed is something everyone can voice an opinion on, because it’s something everyone understands and doesn’t really matter. A complicated project that requires technical expertise will get approved without debate because nobody feels qualified to have an opinion and people assume the experts know what they’re doing.
Is there really much of a barrier to entry for a debate over a Sonic character? Finding out more about it is likely a search away, not that I’ve bothered. The jargon isn’t that obscure; people can pick it up without study, and if they use it wrong, that just fuels more debate. And much like sports, people can have passionate opinions safely because we all know it doesn’t really matter. So the conditions seem pretty favorable to social media debate?
And so, trivia competes with more important subjects and wins.
An example of an important subject that was too technical to make it in social media is the FDA’s inexcusable delay in approving cheap COVID tests for mass screening. It’s likely that the death toll could have been reduced by hundreds of thousands if cheap, rapid tests were approved by last summer, so that everyone who needs to work or go to school could get tested twice a week.
Even going by racial justice considerations alone, the death toll of black people from COVID was far higher than wrongful deaths from the police last year, but most people never even heard of the rapid testing and still don’t know about the lost opportunity squandered by bureaucratic delay.
Imagine a world where everyone had been protesting for COVID testing last summer?
"You’re left with a group of people who will excoriate someone who uses the word “crazy” as a hater of the disabled but who went to war on behalf of a man who was a key part of perpetuating the myth of the welfare queen. It’s bizarre."
The calculus is to align with power. Biden has power. The Gawker comment section poster who got yelled at in 2012 for writing "crazy" probably has no power. The desire to align with power seems pretty straightforward and not-weird. It is certainly weird, though, for a movement which is planning to align with power and to make compromises with power to *also* use interactions with the non-powerful as an opportunities to develop a brand of being "uncompromising." Why develop that brand in the first place if the only possible outcome is hypocrisy?
Great piece! One small gripe-like point: "The personal is political" as a slogan may have taken on the connotation you're talking about, e.g. video games are "political," but the term is a feminist one and is much more narrow. The phrase itself is actually meant to critique the distinction between public/private life, political/domestic as artificial. "The personal is political" is really just a way to say that the *domestic* realm is a part of the public/political realm. The current usage of the term seems to be an extension of its original meaning, but it's ultimately a lot less helpful (imo) when stretched to this degree.
Isn't the slogan perfectly applied to the video game controversy though? The whole idea was, the way those games present the "princess as prize" is inherently political, or at least that's what the Sarkeesian position was, as I understood it.
The "princess as prize" trope is political, though the application here of the specific slogan, "the personal is political" seems off to me. "Personal is political" is used to imply that the domestic realm is a part of the political realm.
I've nothing substantive to add but there's a depressive effect of these articles. It's like someone is taking my thoughts, clarifying them in ways I haven't, and expressing them in ways I couldn't.
That said, this deserved some more space dedicated to the appalling levels of hypocrisy of the social justice politics. These people think everyone else is dumb, but we’re definitely not. It’s blindingly obvious to everyone else that these people - coincidentally - never actually have to sacrifice. It’s in part why usually completely unfunny conservatives keep scoring zingers. The August National member who thinks we need to boycott Georgia. The Yale grads who want to rename everything related to slavery. There’s people in here screeching about Tara Reade not being “credible” when anyone who even broached the topic of credibility during the previous five years was a monster for doing so. People aren’t stupid. They pick up on this.
Meanwhile, for those of us to the left of the social justice movement, it’s hard to take seriously people who consider words to be literal violence but also repeatedly try to get me to vote for war criminals. Words aren’t violence. An American bomb tearing apart the chest of an Iraqi boy so he bleeds to death is violence. There’s garden variety hypocrisy and then there’s “this is a completely intellectually vapid movement” level of hypocrisy. People can forgive the former, the latter not so much.
Yup. There is the same bone-chilling creepiness with SJWs as with religious fanatics. This post also links the two in what she calls "purity culture."
https://postwoke.substack.com/p/atlanta
Largely spot-on but... woke people are the same as Joe Biden supporters? Really?
I think the two groups don't actually overlap much. Woke people are young, white and college-educated: the three worst demographic groups for Biden in the primary.
Yeah, they're all over Bernie, Mr. Rainbows and Unicorn Poop For Everyone. (How will we actually implement it? Not my problem, kids.)
I think some went for Sanders and others went for Warren. Warren was much more woke than Sanders in her presentation, but I think Sanders may have appealed to the woke mentality in a different way.
I suspect he drew a lot of support from people who oppose capitalism but who also suspected in their heart of hearts that capitalism would never end and that Bernie would never be president... to Freddie's point, a little like the people who think racism is terrible but also that it will never disappear no matter how much you denounce it. Some of us liked Warren precisely because she didn't seem to speak to that attitude; instead she had a list of seventy-four policy changes that would make things better if you implemented them, the implication being that you *can* make things better and that politics isn't just the performance of emotion. It all fit very awkwardly with the SJW rhetoric she deployed in the debates.
This is something I've noticed a lot, that Freddie equates SJ politics with the Young Democratic mainstream opposed to the Bernie wing, when in reality it doesn't break down nearly so simply—plenty of red roses support these politics, DSA is constantly embroiled in fights over these issues. I guess one could say "DSA members who practice this kind of politics aren't real DSA members," but we all know what fallacy that is.
I think the only real commonality between SJWs and Biden voters is that Freddie doesn't like them. I find that a lot of Bernie supporters are psychologically similar to the woke, in the sense that they're embittered about the world and (at some level) don't really believe that their political activities can make things better.
FWIW, the DSA here in Detroit is all about this style of politics and so is the local defund the police movement. 🤷♂️
There weren't a lot of Warren voters who didn't become enthusiastic supporters of Biden after the primary was over
I think that's right. I gave money to Warren and then voted for Biden (I live overseas and by the time Democrats Abroad got to vote, Biden and Sanders were the only candidates left).
I also belonged to an Indivisible group in the country where I'm now based, whose members were mostly female, over 40 and employed in the international aid/public health sector. At the meeting where we discussed our primary preferences, I was almost the only person whose first choice wasn't Warren. I'd changed my mind by that time, not because I didn't think Warren was the best theoretical president (she clearly was) but because her almost total lack of black and working-class support in the early primaries made it clear that Trump would beat her.
The thing that struck me about the group's members, though, is that even though they stanned Warren and Stacey Abrams, most of them didn't think much of Bernie or AOC. International aid work is fundamentally a results-oriented profession and I think Warren's appeal to people with that personality type is almost irresistible. I don't mean that as a criticism in any way; I agreed with them on almost every point except Warren's electability.
What are you talking about? Biden made huge gains in white college educated people. He lost in almost every other demographic. Establishment Democrats are the party of wealthy elites, Wall Street and large corporations now. Woke provides them a moral cover while they continue screwing the rest of of in the real material ways that DeBoer outlines here.
I don't think older white college educated people, corporations, etc. are engaging in the absolutist, ruthless interpersonal politics Freddie is talking about. Coke isn't a fervent believer that white people are racist. They're just along for the ride.
Yeah this whole thread of comments is based on a failure to understand how dramatically the Democratic coalition has changed. The Democrats are the party of college educated whites, now, the heart of the social justice movement. Uneducated voters of color are trending hard Republican.
But the syllogism doesn't work: "college educated whites are the heart of the social justice movement; college educated whites supported Democrats in greater numbers in 2020 than previously; ergo, social justice practitioners are mainstream Democrats"? SJ people (what noun should I use??) are a *very specific generation* of the college educated—they're almost all quite young, and I would bet they're less white than the college-educated population as a whole. They're much more in Bernie's demographic camp than Biden's.
I also feel like regarding white and nonwhite support you're committing same "rates versus levels" mistake as Democrats do, just in mirror image. Complacent Democrats say, "stop all this fretting about the Black and Latino vote; you see we still get the vast majority of those votes," ignoring the problem that the rate is declining and might continue to decline. You see that decline ("uneducated voters of color are trending hard Republican") and mistake it for a reversal in the level of support, so that "the Democrats are the party of college educated whites, now"—as if they don't still get far more support from POC.
Uneducated voters of some color are trending that way; the boundaries of color shift over time. Some of what is "of color" nowdays will be white in 50 years.
I was referring to the pattern of votes in the Democratic primary, not the general election.
The overlap is definitely there, but not explicit -- being, rather, more like a "motte-bailey" dynamic. One way to think about this is that, whereas the "unwoke" Berniecrats whose grievances are very "class-first" and not very intersectional always presented a somewhat-credible threat of refusing to support Biden in a general election and instead going third-party -- by contrast, the woke left has never presented any such threat. Obviously woke leftists would have preferred Warren (or Sanders too for that matter), but the transition to supporting Biden was seamless and entailed no dilemma. By contrast, the class-firsters had a difficult choice to make: go third-party, or vote Dem to get rid of Trump. Since the class-firsters had that choice, they are therefore a distinct entity from Bidenism and could still in theory defect from Bidenism; whereas, woke leftists had no such choice and are therefore properly understood as part of Bidenism (albeit a rhetorically radical part).
Just to be clear--I think Freddie and some others may have missed it--I was talking about choices in the Democratic primary, not the general election. Obviously lots of woke people voted for Biden in November, because the Trump presidency was a fact and there was less abstaining/voting third party than in 2016.
In the primaries I think Sanders probably got most of the SJW vote (along with an important block of anti-woke leftists: basically Freddie's team). He was the most left-wing candidate and whatever else you want to say about SJWs, they're left-wing too. And there were a few SJWs who voted Warren because Sanders wasn't intersectional enough. Someone has already commented that this is probably a small group and I agree, but I know one person in that category.
I stand by my original comment. Woke people voting for Biden in the primary was not a thing, at all.
I'm thinking that perhaps Freddie isn't making a clear enough distinction between "the woke" in a narrow sense and the broader professional middle class.
Most of the people in my Indivisible group fall into the second category: middle-aged, upper-middle-class women whose support for the Democratic Party is based more on identity issues than class issues *but who don't hold extreme views on identity* (or on class either, for that matter). These aren't the screamers and cancelers... but whether Freddie likes it or not, I think most of the screamers and cancelers did vote Bernie in the primary if they bothered to vote at all.
There's a big distinction between AOC and the "woke HR consultant", certainly. To me, for thinking about political blocs and sub-blocs and which bloc is or isn't distinct from the Biden consensus, it's just most useful to begin by mulling over which bloc presents a semi-credible threat of defecting. I think the class-first Berniecrats (maybe in particular those not entirely won over by AOC) still present that threat.
"An obvious conclusion one must draw from social justice politics is that most people are inherently bigoted, perhaps irredeemably so."
I actually have to agree with this -- most people do make baseless snap judgments. The thing is, if it's inherent in humans to make snap judgments and prefer their own kind, then why are we blaming? Why not just put mitigating mechanisms in place and leave it at that?
If you look at a picture of any orchestra from the 1940s, you will see literally not a single woman there (even on the harp), and no Black people. Go to any American orchestra nowdays, and you'll see zillions of women and minorities. I remember seeing the LA Chamber Orchestra when I lived near their Burbank theater and realizing that out of the whole violin section, there was ONE man.
This all came about due to screened auditions, which American orchestras use (and European ones do not). Instead of bitching out the juries about prejudice and forcing them to undergo struggle sessions, they just said, "Okay, fine. We're putting up a screen during the first two rounds of the auditions."
This was originally done to keep jurists from being biased in favor of their own students, but the literal next audition season after the screens went up for either Boston of Cleveland, ALL four open violin positions went to women. ALL OF THEM.
To the credit of American orchestras, the juries swallowed hard, took their medicine, and the screens stayed up. And they are still up -- precisely because people will always manage to judge based on something stupid and irrelevant.
And that's it. No blame, no name-calling, no accusations, no struggle sessions -- just a piece of fabric. Identify the problem, identify an impersonal solution, implement, and then take metrics that allow you to judge how successful you are. Had we tried to fix the problem by fixing individual hearts and minds, it would never have worked. When people audition without a screen, women and minorities are STILL judged more harshly to this day. It's better than it was, but it's still there; genres of music that do not screen are still horribly overbalanced in favor of white men.
But there are ways to fix problems without fixing individual hearts and minds. If I'm auditioning for an orchestra (or trying to get a job, or whatever), I just want a fair g/d shot. I don't care if the jurists grovel before me and confess to their repulsive sexism although to be honest, I might not mind since I'm also human and imperfect, but really as long as the screen is there, I don't care if the assistant principal oboe is an asshole or not.
Yes, I know that this exact mechanism won't work for a lot of injustices, but it's an example of how changing hearts and minds is not only unnecessary to justice and fairness, but that focusing on that can blind us to simpler solutions that will basically make the problem go away while allowing people to retain their right to remain assholes in perpetuity. Because people will remain assholes, whether we like it or not.
So, while I'd imagine everyone reading this agrees blind screening is great, the accepted narrative might be pushed a little bit:
https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2019/05/11/did-blind-orchestra-auditions-really-benefit-women/
In any case, we might be headed in the opposite direction soon enough: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/16/arts/music/blind-auditions-orchestras-race.html
I'm seeing way too much to get into in the first article -- it will take a long time to unpack it, and ... to be honest, I don't think anyone who read that and probably the dude who wrote it did unpack all of it. "50% more likely than what and when?" was the first thing I wondered. Before the 1970s, the comparison point was pretty much zero aside from the occasional harpist, always hired part time and gigging and never a formal part of the orchestra.
And I have read that stupid NYT article. It's typical faux wokeness from the grotesquely privileged. Blind auditions and standardized tests are like vaccinations against bias: they don't solve the whole problem but they solve some of it. Now that we've forgotten how awful the situation was before they were used, we're blaming them for the very problems they help solve. Tommasini has no clue how bad the situation will get once they are removed.
For context, the author of the first link is a famous statistician who spends a lot of time critiquing sloppy methodological practices, not someone with a deeper agenda trying to blindside you.
Big picture, if we're comparing orchestras in 2020 to orchestras in 1940, there's no reason to think that they would look identical, even without blind screens. The role of women in society has changed, the number of women in the labor force has skyrocketed, girls are raised with dramatically different expectations about their life prospects. There are lots of industries without blind screens where the gender balance between 1940 and 2020 changed dramatically. Again, I think the blind screen is obviously a good idea, and it seems possible it's even had a small role in this. But the actual data doesn't seem to suggest that it's been the driving force.
I should have been clearer about my issues with the first article, sorry. I'm sort of still getting used to the fact that Substack has more room for thinking out loud and expressing doubts.
Basically ... that article reads a lot like the blizzards-of-disparate-numbers I've run into in the past where someone has something they want proven ahead of time, and they will spew a cloud of small factlets from different sources that fog things up more than they clarify. I've been around long enough and done enough research to be able to smell that sort of thing, but I've also got to confess that I can't spend the time to tease that exact article apart right now. I'd like to, and I'm prepared to be proven wrong. But ... yeah, it pinged my "smoke and mirrors" radar. Pull enough small facts from different sources, all with different methodologies, and you can get it to line up with a pre-chosen conclusion fairly easily while looking incredibly erudite at first blush.
Regarding point 2: I agree that the politics you're talking about is too censorious and punitive, but there's an obvious problem with the statement that you can think of more cases of people being mercilessly purged than of people being quietly corrected: we wouldn't hear about the quiet corrections, whereas we do hear about the purges. I imagine that the quiet corrections are, whatever their merits on substance, pretty common (which doesn't excuse the too-frequent purges).
This is a nice roll up of points I've seen you making for years. You were right then, for the same reasons you're right about this now.
Great post. I would go even further and say it’s not enough for SJP folks to ignore the material plight of marginalized groups. In the rare event that an initiative to address those concerns gains momentum, they will co-opt it and make it about the plight of privileged academics and journalists.
After the murder of George Floyd, I was appalled to see elites try to make the movement about their own professional grievances. An officer of the state KILLED a black man over twenty dollars. And I saw tenured academics using the hashtag to complain about (for example) all-white panels at sociology conferences.
They saw an opportunity (lots of outrage and emotion) and instead of asking “how can I address police violence” they immediately turned to their own professional and social circles with a list of demands about things like the size of their book advances and who wins awards.
All of a sudden, it was the summer of “give me what I want or you’re a racist” in every elite or artsy or academic organization. Meanwhile, ordinary people were in the streets trying to address what actually happened. Imagine what these elites could have done if they had supported this movement instead of making it about themselves.
I remember twenty years ago, in a college class on Toni Morrison, reading a book by bell hooks about Morrison's novels. She compared the experiences of the mother in Sula (who nearly starves to death with her family and sells her leg to keep her family alive) to hooks's own stress around her tenure case. I thought it was an obscene comparison but no one else in the class seemed to see the problem.
Leaving a separate comment to discuss separate issues: I think it's far too simple, and unfair, to suggest that SJ folks uniformly rejected Tara Reade's accusations out of hand. Of course some did, but many were openly troubled by them early on, when they were at their point of maximum credibility (peaking at the C-SPAN story), and only expressed doubts as contradictions became impossible to ignore (Lindsay Beyerstein and Michelle Goldberg both wrote fair pieces that didn't attack Reade but pointed out relevant changes in her and her witnesses' statements over time and other inconsistencies). Then more reporting was done and the wheels fell off, credibility-wise; I don't think anyone can be blamed for not believing the accusation given all that's come out and how little support it has. (And yet, some SJ people *still* continued to believe the accusation, like your nemesis Noah Berlatsky!) Now, one can say that this is a totally different standard than the one the same people applied to Bret Kavanaugh, and there's something to that…but that seems like ordinary partisanship, not something specific to the SJ left.
Yeah the Tara Reade media cycle happened during the final days of the Sanders campaign. During that period the core of the social justice left - young people - was still very much on team Bernie and many of them were pushing the story as hard as they could. The accusations didn't go anyway because an overwhelming number of people (including Bernie Sanders) did not believe that the name Tara Reade belongs in the same sentence as 'credibly', not because the social justice left made a compromise.
Perhaps we just can't reconcile our perceptions of vague groups. My experience is that social justice types hate Bernie and his supporters. But that could be my idiosyncratic experience.
They certainly fit some parts of it, even if they're more materialist.
I think maybe the problem here is in trying to identify SJ types (again, I really want a noun here) as a coherent faction. It might be more accurate to describe SJ politics as a *tendency* that's common among educated young people and applied in different ways within different factions. So of course we all know the ride-and-die for Biden SJs (Joy Reid, etc.); there are also plenty who loathed Biden but grimly went with him after the primary (elsewhere I mentioned Berlatsky), and some red rose SJ types who still have never reconciled themselves to Biden. The fact that SJ is so prevalent on campuses, and so dangerous to run afoul of, means that people in all factions of the young left are trained to speak and practice it.
The intra-SJW distinctions are important, and yet I can't think of a person who'd I'd classify as "SJW" or "woke" or "intersectionally radical" who's a credible defection threat from the existing Biden-Harris ruling coalition. Any Berniecrat who defects is probably of the staunchly class-first, SJ-skeptical, intersectionality-critical variety (whom all the SJWs will instantly demonize as "crypto alt right" the instant the defection happens).
I think you can draw some subgroup of SJ Warrenites who hated Bernie, but in reality that's a microscopic demographic. Sanders absolutely dominated with young people who are the driving force in everything you're talking about in this article. That his campaign was in some ways captured by that demographic and in the process had such a different flavor than his 2016 campaign likely played a role in him going from the guy who won Michigan to the guy who lost it.
Yes, that's an important point—Biden, in many people's analyses, won the primary by being the only candidate who *didn't* take all his cues from Twitter and try to court campus activists.
"take all his cues from Twitter and try to court campus activists."
"Twitter" and "campus" are different things, and this gets at my enduring frustration with the "campus activism" theory of social justice: the internet is the far more plausible culprit in cultivating a lot of these anxieties and tendencies.
yes, a lot of the ppl who express these anxieties and tendencies are overeducated. but they're also ppl who in many cases adapted to social justice before they set foot on campus. but no sooner than they set foot on the internet.
That’s fair! Though I would note that as a Sarah Lawrence student at the turn of the millennium, I saw a fair amount of the same tendencies, even though the internet was comparatively nascent. So there’s probably a chicken and egg problem here.
Well done, sir. Perfectly laid out. And the Knuckles stuff had me crying laughing. Indeed it seems like fandom is neatly divided into Wokesters and Gamergaters now. It's sad.
Also, this school of politics is also why I've given up on paying attention to the Oscars even though I love movies and have a very eclectic taste. Every year since 2016 there's been a new moral panic about how harmful Movie X is.
Oh and the ratings keep going down the more elitist and woke the ceremony gets. This year will be a disaster of Hindenburg proportions for them.
How DARE you say racial discussions about Sonic the Hedgehog aren't important? If you're saying this doesn't matter, it implies all of the conversations I've witnessed about Godzilla and social justice don't matter, and that cuts DEEP.
/s
I’m surprised that more people don’t view these beliefs as alarming. To believe oneself to be in possession of the whole truth and total moral goodness is historically the shortest way towards committing massacres. The other side is no longer human. Nevermind that their post modern theories were actually on their way out in academia because they’ve more holes than Swiss cheese. The race card saved these people and now they got to turn it into an endless Maoist struggle with no discernible goals.
I do wonder how the market pressures will impact things. I have been a consistent consumer of left of center journalism for some time but the SJ takeover of some of these institutions in a way that allows me to predict the content of an article before I read it has me reconsidering my budget allocations. I can't quite imagine not getting my paper NYT, but I am repeatedly struck by how many NYT stories are accompanied by comments that run 2 or 3 to 1 against the thesis of the story because it is too knee jerk SJ oriented. At some point some of those commenters, who are subscribers, are going to decide that they can just read their substacks and give up the NYT and I just don't think there are enough SJ millenials to make up for their dollars, but maybe I underestimate their buying power?
Going off your 'Politics in everything' point - I think there's a certain social prestige to doing 'important work' as a writer and I get the sense that the Kotaku, Deadspin, Teen Vogue, etc writers really just don't want to be doing the job that they've been hired to do. They see themselves as temporarily displaced activists and political thinkers. It's embarrassing to tell people at Brooklyn parties that you - a prestigious college graduate - just churn out video game content for the internet for starvation wages. And for obvious reasons that you've touched on in previous articles, I don't see the future of working in the increasingly-bleak content mines as ever gaining more social prestige, which means this problem won't be disappearing.
From an epidemiology standpoint, topics of debate spread on social media based on how easily debatable they are, independent of their importance. Since replies and reshares are so easy, trivia spreads as easily as important news.
Trivia may even have the advantage due to accessibility. In programming circles this is called “bikeshedding.” Debate over the color of a bike shed is something everyone can voice an opinion on, because it’s something everyone understands and doesn’t really matter. A complicated project that requires technical expertise will get approved without debate because nobody feels qualified to have an opinion and people assume the experts know what they’re doing.
Is there really much of a barrier to entry for a debate over a Sonic character? Finding out more about it is likely a search away, not that I’ve bothered. The jargon isn’t that obscure; people can pick it up without study, and if they use it wrong, that just fuels more debate. And much like sports, people can have passionate opinions safely because we all know it doesn’t really matter. So the conditions seem pretty favorable to social media debate?
And so, trivia competes with more important subjects and wins.
An example of an important subject that was too technical to make it in social media is the FDA’s inexcusable delay in approving cheap COVID tests for mass screening. It’s likely that the death toll could have been reduced by hundreds of thousands if cheap, rapid tests were approved by last summer, so that everyone who needs to work or go to school could get tested twice a week.
Even going by racial justice considerations alone, the death toll of black people from COVID was far higher than wrongful deaths from the police last year, but most people never even heard of the rapid testing and still don’t know about the lost opportunity squandered by bureaucratic delay.
Imagine a world where everyone had been protesting for COVID testing last summer?
"You’re left with a group of people who will excoriate someone who uses the word “crazy” as a hater of the disabled but who went to war on behalf of a man who was a key part of perpetuating the myth of the welfare queen. It’s bizarre."
The calculus is to align with power. Biden has power. The Gawker comment section poster who got yelled at in 2012 for writing "crazy" probably has no power. The desire to align with power seems pretty straightforward and not-weird. It is certainly weird, though, for a movement which is planning to align with power and to make compromises with power to *also* use interactions with the non-powerful as an opportunities to develop a brand of being "uncompromising." Why develop that brand in the first place if the only possible outcome is hypocrisy?
Great piece! One small gripe-like point: "The personal is political" as a slogan may have taken on the connotation you're talking about, e.g. video games are "political," but the term is a feminist one and is much more narrow. The phrase itself is actually meant to critique the distinction between public/private life, political/domestic as artificial. "The personal is political" is really just a way to say that the *domestic* realm is a part of the public/political realm. The current usage of the term seems to be an extension of its original meaning, but it's ultimately a lot less helpful (imo) when stretched to this degree.
Isn't the slogan perfectly applied to the video game controversy though? The whole idea was, the way those games present the "princess as prize" is inherently political, or at least that's what the Sarkeesian position was, as I understood it.
The "princess as prize" trope is political, though the application here of the specific slogan, "the personal is political" seems off to me. "Personal is political" is used to imply that the domestic realm is a part of the political realm.
Gamers play games in the domus, I suppose.
I've nothing substantive to add but there's a depressive effect of these articles. It's like someone is taking my thoughts, clarifying them in ways I haven't, and expressing them in ways I couldn't.
That said, this deserved some more space dedicated to the appalling levels of hypocrisy of the social justice politics. These people think everyone else is dumb, but we’re definitely not. It’s blindingly obvious to everyone else that these people - coincidentally - never actually have to sacrifice. It’s in part why usually completely unfunny conservatives keep scoring zingers. The August National member who thinks we need to boycott Georgia. The Yale grads who want to rename everything related to slavery. There’s people in here screeching about Tara Reade not being “credible” when anyone who even broached the topic of credibility during the previous five years was a monster for doing so. People aren’t stupid. They pick up on this.
Meanwhile, for those of us to the left of the social justice movement, it’s hard to take seriously people who consider words to be literal violence but also repeatedly try to get me to vote for war criminals. Words aren’t violence. An American bomb tearing apart the chest of an Iraqi boy so he bleeds to death is violence. There’s garden variety hypocrisy and then there’s “this is a completely intellectually vapid movement” level of hypocrisy. People can forgive the former, the latter not so much.