Thanks Freddie. I needed that. I'm alienated as hell by social justice politics too, but it is helpful to take a step or two back and look at the wider scope and how trends emerge, run their course, and die.
Regarding art, Quentin Tarantino appeared on Bill Maher's show recently, and he reminded us that Hollywood has gone through periods of stifling moralizing before, only for it to eventually collapse under its own weight. So the Woke stuff will burn out too. Don't know when, but it will.
I keep thinking of visiting East Berlin in July 1989 thinking, "This is gonna take decades to change"... And yet. Sometimes big change is like bankruptcy. It happens slowly and then all at once and in hindsight.... "Yeah, of course. It makes sense"
Does anyone have any links to past Freddie posts where he discusses his belief in communism? I only discovered his writing last year through the Scott Alexander community and I feel so much kinship in everything he writes, but my beliefs have never made the leap from pro Scandinavian-esque socialism to communism. Maybe he can convince me.
By the way Freddie, the post "Things I Read" was the post that finally convinced me to pay for a subscription. I need more of that in my life. Thank you.
Check out Wes Yang's just launched substack for the opposing view that these changes are poised to take over for a long time to come. He cites a number of concerning examples. I tend to agree with your general perspective on this, but I'd be curious to see you two exchange arguments (or discuss or whatever).
While I don't have the Pinker in front of me, I recall the details of the hedges significantly mattering. I'd be surprised if he really assigns probability approaching certainty that there will never be a single major war again. It's more that we can have modest confidence that trends will continue as they have (note that this one graph is a small fraction of the graphs and other evidence he provides) with a strong awareness that everything could turn south in a flash.
One of the main lessons to take from Pinker which I find people constantly ignoring is that they personally have no good evidence that wars and violence are at their worst in history, and that the strong feeling they have otherwise is due to a lifetime of sensationalist media and other pessimistic inclinations.
We'll see. I subscribed to it today, which brings my Substack subscriptions to:
Scott Alexander
Freddie deBoer
Wes Yang
Sort of a broad brush on the Culture War Analysis topics without being too bogged down in one ideological framework. Hopefully those three counterbalance to give me a good perspective.
I'm much more aligned with Yang on this. I think Freddie is greatly understating the extent to which wokeness/the successor ideology is embedded in our culture and institutions. Unlike, say, freeing Tibet, the successor ideology is hardwired into our educational system, with entire departments in colleges and universities devoted to it and its propagation. To pick but one potential consequence, what will happen when the law students marinating in the SI move on to become lawyers, then judges and politicians? The law is downstream of culture, and the privileging and protection of free speech, race- and gender-neutral equal protection, etc. can only exist under a legal culture that allows them to exist.
In the end I think John McWhorter is right, the successor ideology is a religion. How durable a religion it turns out to be is an open question, but it's way more powerful and enduring than most cultural fads or trends. I don't want to overstate the case, but it's easy to imagine Roman authorities in Judea in the first century AD saying to each other, "It's just another apocalyptic death cult, it'll blow over in a few years," little knowing that millennia later that cult would not only still exist but have a massive influence on global culture and politics. The successor ideology will never be as big as Christianity, but it will be bigger than Free Tibet, or the 60s counterculture, etc.
I don't that's true. First, I think Marxism is at least a proxy religion, and its endurance shows you don't need anything overtly supernatural. Second, the successor ideology does have supernatural elements, things such as "whiteness" and the "cisgender heteropatriarchy." Interestingly to me, the successor ideology is a religion that only has devils and demons, no gods or angels (with the possible exception of "equity," however that's defined). A religion without salvation, only varying degrees of perdition...
But they forgot to map forgiveness. That's their main Achilles heel. And since the "book" isn't a book, it's an evolving morality on Twitter and Tumblr, anyone can get cancelled whenever the teachings move out from underneath them. That's what happened to Dolezal.
I hope the lack of forgiveness is an achilles heel, but I'm skeptical. Maoism wasn't really into forgiveness as an ethos, and the Cultural Revolution proceeded on that basis. I think Huxley's quote is proven true over and over again, and certainly lives on in the current era of censoriousness and cancel culture. “The surest way to work up a crusade in favor of some good cause is to promise people they will have a chance of maltreating someone. To be able to destroy with good conscience, to be able to behave badly and call your bad behavior 'righteous indignation' — this is the height of psychological luxury, the most delicious of moral treats.”
The reason it's an Achilles heel is that the Woke Overton Window is constantly moving. In the long game, everyone, including the Woke, gets cancelled because nobody knows what the future rules of "being a decent human being" are going to be. In 10 years they could all be hyper aggressive vegans cancelling anyone who ever ate meat. We just don't know.
This is an excellent essay on a subject to which I have been giving a lot of thought lately (though of course I couldn't begin to articulate it as well). I'm old enough to have lived through the "Reagan Revolution," the cultural transition from the seventies to the eighties, which in the US was far more than a political revolution. It was a very dramatic change, an obvious reaction to the cultural excesses of the seventies, when millions of middle-class Americans sort of sheepishly looked at each other and muttered, "Whew, that got a little out of hand, didn't it?" (a visual reminder of these excesses can be found in old interior decoration manuals: http://lileks.com/institute/interiors/index.html ).
As I watch the social justice virtue signal canceling movement gradually eat its own, it's clear to me another revolution or reaction is in the cards. As you suggest, there's no telling what it will finally morph into, and of course I have no idea when it will happen, how long the current madness will last. My own response is to invest in ten or forty acres in the mountains near here and to plan the construction of a home and a shop, to which I can withdraw, feeding the quail and watering the wild horses, awaiting the return to cultural sanity, should it occur during my lifetime, which it may well won't.
The political or social zeitgeist will pass, but for the first time the wallowers in the extreme will carry around the cattle brand forever. I'm not sure when people will realize that everything they post on social media will be around the rest of their lives and a long time after. Unless the electronic storage is physically destroyed, it is impossible to 'erase' a file permanently. A ghost image always remains, even if the space is written over. Those that believe they can get by with extreme opinions and come out the other end not damaged are in for a rude shock. Many prospective employers are trolling through that information - not for the McDonald's jobs, but for anything with an income one can live from.
Those calling for moderation like FdB does here will be considered too boring to investigate.
I don't view the big challenge to existence is the political or social, but instead the financial. How do you like that 14% inflation? (as calculated on the Shadowstats website, less lying by methodology in use until 1980). More personal destruction in that than all the wars of the last 100 years. Whatever your income, it buys only 86% of what it bought 12 months ago.
The varying definitions of freedom, including those living under repressive regimes? People will live under terrible repression and cruelty without rising up... until the food runs out. Happening now in Cuba, South Africa, etc, just as it happened during the Arab Spring 10 years ago. Othere ostensible reasons are given for the uprising, but they are often just the match that lit the vapor from the gas can. You can live under a tarp or a bridge, but you cannot do without food and water.
Frequent starvation doesn't seem to have significantly impeded North Korea's repression. Also, an absolutely horrifying number of people starved in the Great Chinese Famine (which the wiki entry says is "widely regarded as the deadliest famine"), yet China is still repressive. I'm not sure the theory holds.
In terms of how this current wave of PC culture ends I would argue that the guy most responsible for killing off the last wave was Bill Clinton. And Sista Souljah and Ricky Ray Rector.
Wokeism is the latest fad diet of the mind. "Only a sudden, all-encompassing revolution will mold us into the shape we want!" And then a year later you're back to eating bread, because the most sustainable way to change is small but consistently practiced positive habits, not an ultra-restrictive menu of bacon, butter, and starfruit.
I think what will matter from our current moment moving forward into the future are the huge changes taking place in how our culture interacts with LGBT issues. There is an explosion going on in young people adopting new sexual and gender identities, and while I'm sure the pendulum will eventually start to swing the other way, I think that a lot of what's going on in that space right now is going to stick.
I think especially the embrace of somewhat complicated nonbinary identities and the use of they/them as gender neutral pronouns are likely to stick around in some form or another (though I expect there will be an eventual move to formalize things a little bit more, which will have complicated effects). Trans people in general are IMO going to be a lot more visible for the foreseeable future, and I think this will stick even as other culture war issues start to fade away.
There have always been some number of people with various queer identities, and the current environment is a lot more friendly to that. So some of the increase is very likely driven by people who would have just stayed in the closet instead deciding to come out.
I also suspect there are others who might never have considered it, but once it became a viable option and "cool" (though there are still many disadvantages people face, especially trans people), they decided that actually they might like that and decided to go for it. I don't think this is a bad thing - if you open up a bunch of Thai places in a neighborhood, people will try out Thai food and realize they like it, and will make it part of their regular diet. That doesn't mean their love of Thai food is fake or illegitimate. It's just contingent on a certain cultural context.
And finally, I'm sure there are people who choose an identity for purely cynical reasons. I think this is probably rare, because there are still a lot of downsides in the "real world" to many forms of queer identification, but I certainly wouldn't rule it out. I would expect that as queer identities are more and more accepted, we'll see more and more people decide to go this route, though I personally doubt they'll ever make up more than a relatively small slice of the overall LGBT community.
So if some of the current population is choosing to identify as a ploy to gain popularity then when the pendulum swings back we would expect their numbers to decrease in the future. And depending on the exact mix that decrease could be substantial.
Yeah, when the pendulum swings back I expect we will see a significant decline. But not a total decline - the ideas that are being worked out right now will still be around, and a lot of the people who like their life as it is will keep living that way even as it gets a little harder. Even among the cynical, some of them will have committed too much to the bit to actually just walk away from it entirely. And with an existing base of people as a seed, younger people with queer inclinations will have an easier time finding a community, even as the overall tide of culture turns back in a harsher direction.
Yes, because society in general has gotten a lot more tolerant on the gay issue. The USSC decision on Obergefell is the perfect illustration: is there anything more mainstream than recognition by the US government? Eventually I think the numbers will align with the percentage of the population that has always identified itself as gay regardless of whatever is currently trendy, which is to say about 2-3% of the total population.
I have a friendly acquaintance who is a trans man. I knew him when he was a female teen, more than 15 years ago. He told me he didn’t realize he was trans until adulthood because the possibility was so far outside the paradigm he was raised in, the thought never even occurred to him.
I think you’re onto something: now that queer identities are more and more considered a legitimate way of being by the masses, more people will emerge who claim that identity.
Once something's a workable option, people will try it, especially to solve problems that are otherwise hard to solve. Testosterone seems to treat dysautonomia, and probably several other conditions that are more symptomatic with a typically feminine hormonal profile than a typically masculine one:
"I was a teenage girl. I had symptoms. I wasn't believed. I felt terrible in my female body. I took testosterone. It relieved symptoms. I became a boy and now life sucks less," strikes me as less cynical than as rational adaptation to available care.
I know Catholics, particularly Catholic feminists, quite alarmed at this kind of problem solving (and similarly alarmed at lack of interest in finding fertility-sparing ways to treat women's health problems now often treated by fertility suppressors' incidental effects). The rhetoric surrounding the call to live graciously with whatever God gives you, including natal sex, can be quite beautiful. But even those who idealize saintly suffering have limited bandwidth for supporting those who don't use whatever options are on hand to lessen it.
Arbery's "Heroes of the Fourth Turning" was beloved by the Catholic right. The character Emily, a "saintly sufferer", was praised for her commitment to "givenness" — not least because it opposed "the trans agenda". Emily's mother, Gina, who lived under the same roof as Emily and had to put up with the effects of that meek submission to givenness every day, was more suspicious of whether Emily's submission was even necessary, or just an excuse to suffer and not be tough and successful, like she was. On the one hand, rejecting givenness is an abomination; on the other, accepting it is malingering. People may say they hate abominations, but they tolerate malingering even less.
Yeah, I absolutely would not describe someone using hormones to solve a health problem as cynical. To me that's very much my middle group - people who may not have considered it in previous eras, but now that the option is available and viable, they find that they like it and it solves certain problems for them or offers genuine advantages they enjoy.
I have friends who teach high school; they've had problems with gay/queer students bullying straight students for their sexuality, and they're also seeing a backlash toward the queer community. Even the gay students want nothing to do with Pride or the queer community (in their words, "it's nothing but a bunch of old pervs"). They've had a bunch of trans kids desist, leading a bunch of kids to believe it's not real and is instead a bunch of attention-seeking. And in the broader world, after meteoric rises in acceptance for gender and sexual minorities, we're starting to see dropping acceptance in polls--mainly, I think, because of queer organizations overplaying their hands.
I think the exact opposite is true. Sex and gender identities are not particularly interesting and I don't really believe that there's that many of them. There have always been clearly trans people in every culture, but the massive explosion in 20 year old girls who want to go by they while changing basically nothing else in their lives? It's very unlikely that that's not just a fad. Unlike gay, lesbian, bi, or trans people, it's also unique in that it doesn't relate to any kind of different behavior in the outside world. The only thing that happens when you declare yourself non-binary is that other people call you non-binary. So what?
The huge victories of the LGBT movement are all here to stay. The rest is just what happens when a movement doesn't know what to do with its victory.
I think it's really interesting watching how divergent the Woke Analysis Bloggers have become on where they think the thing is going. Lindsay and the IDW kids seem to think that Woke is on the verge of establishing permanent dominance. Wesley Yang (just launched a new substack Year Zero) goes a step further and makes the claim that Woke has already won, coins the term "Successor Ideology" for it, and states that we are undeniably moving into a new paradigm of Permanent Woke.
Then Freddie here, rightfully I think, predicts that 2021 and 2022 are going to be years of the "Great Wokelash" (great phrase btw). I agree with this in principle. The Woke way overplayed their hand in 2020 when they went after workplaces and elementary schools. They attempted a kind of ideological blitzkrieg, taking up as much Culture War Territory as they could take, but they way oustripped their supply lines and didn't expect the sort of resistance they'd get from normal people, actual immigrants, Asian dragon lady moms in schoolboard meetings, and such. I definitely think the rubber band is going to snap back on the Woke this year and the next, and the Ds in general are going to take it on the chin from that, but I don't think Woke is going away. It might get rebranded.
The reason it's not going away is that it updates itself on the feed. It's a crowdsourced, evolving ideology that flows like water and gets into cracks and cannot be punched because it's built off the words of the nameless social media masses. It's an emergent ideology not tied to a book, which makes it antifragile. It's impossible to attack at the source because it's sourceless.
The adherents of woke may never give up the cause but the movement will die when they are silenced, and they can be silenced. The problem with woke is that it is inherently political and politics in the US is by definition a mainstream endeavor. When the Democrats decide suffer enough electoral losses because of defund the police, or CRT, or whatever they will move to purge the extremists. And that will be the end of it.
I really don't think so, because the ideology evolves on the feed, and the fact that it evolves on the feed makes it antifragile in a way no other fixed ideology in history has been. Read through this so you can get a sense of what I'm saying:
How many times have you seen professional politicians state that "Twitter is not reality" or some variation thereof? They are absolutely right: the woke represent no more than 10% max of the country as a whole. Their impact is exaggerated because they are disproportionately represented in media and academia. But if their allies abandon them they make up such a small chunk of the public that it is hard to imagine how they can continue to have much of an impact.
Good links, I'd seen this Hidden Tribes one before. But I'm more curious in how many people believe wokeist sacred cows, including:
Trans women are women. There’s no such thing as IQ. Healthy at any size. All whites are racist. Gender is a social construct. Silence is violence. Front Holes. Believe all women. Hormone blockers in children. Fragility. All politics is identity politics. ACAB. Cultural appropriation. Safe spaces. Punch Nazis. Toxic masculinity. Unconscious bias. Intersectional Matrix of Oppression. Sit down and listen. Lived Experience. Patriarchy.
I'd like to see an objective poll that hit those splash ideologies and quantified how many people buy each of them, what the overlap is, and figure out a true Woke Census.
The successor ideology may be inherently political, but its victories are not in the electoral sphere. All those fully staffed DEI offices at every corporation and university and govenment agency (including the military!) are not going away, and they cannot be silenced. They have the full backing of the 1%, who are very happy to have race/gender be the issue of debate among us commoners, rather than class.
Once the Democrats suffer enough losses they will move to stifle the movement. All of those corporate offices will get the message and shut up. The true believers may soldier on but there are so few of them how can they do anything without allies?
I think the Great Awokening played out differently in different parts of society and the Wokelash will too. The world of politics already seems to be going through a bit of a reversal - maybe the left will need to lose another big election first. There's already more hesitancy about shouting 'defund the police' than there was a year ago. NYC leftists now get to read about mayor Eric Adams for 8 years.
The Great Awokening in the social realm will last a little longer. How long can my gf's rich white friends walk around with their 'Black Lives Matter' purses before it becomes uncool in their circles? (Or possibly cancelled due to some new rule in the rulebook?) I dunno, but I think it's safe to assume these people will be into something else at some point.
Where I don't see this going away anytime soon is in the workplace. Corporate HR departments claimed a lot of power in the last few years and created all kinds of new 'reasons you need the HR department'. They're not going to be giving up this hard earned territory.
Corporate and educational culture is very fad driven. Tech companies are realizing they don't really want employees to bring their whole selves to work. It's entirely possible that a "work is just for work" ideology will take over, which is probably what most employees and bosses want anyway. That would totally sideline HR.
Woke is a culture of cool. It crowdsources morality by reducing it to fashion. You're true that it'll latch onto something else sooner or later, but it latching on to something else doesn't mean it goes away, it just means it's evolving. Think about gender.
2011: 2 genders
2014: 3 genders
2016: 37 specific genders, each with their own pronoun and their own symbol, and not memorizing the pronoun/symbol chart means you're transphobic, and Tinder has to code it into the dating app or else they'll get cancelled
2018: infinite genders
2020: trans women are women (a soft return to 2) and the only people claiming pronouns are blue check heterosexuals virtue signaling.
If your Woke Operating System wasn't up to date at any point in this cycle you were transphobic. Claiming 37 genders in 2018 was transphobic. We don't know where this will go, but the fact that it keeps going places means that it won't go away.
I think the bit about big wars and civilization is important. I see so many claims about human nature that weirdly don't take into account the ~200k years that anatomically modern humans existed *before* what we could call civilization arose. Taking the last couple thousand years as representative of what humans are like is just blitheringly stupid, but that's all I see. In my experience, looking at things with pre-history in mind clarifies my thinking and inspires me take more control of my own life
If you have never been to a strip club a common prop is a shower on the dance floor. The strippers climb in and get doused while dancing around and being showered with tips.
A while back one of these clubs got their shower shut down by a government enforcement agency. The complaint? The shower wasn't handicapped accessible, meaning that any strippers who were confined to wheelchairs would be unable to use it.
Here's the thing though: that story is from the 1990's. Everything we are seeing now is just a replay of the last PC wave. And if we are curious as to how this one will end we should probably examine how that one sputtered out.
For the narrow question of the relationship of the Democrats to the woke social media crowd you already see the squawking from DNC political operatives regarding the "defund the police" argument. After the GOP gained seats in 2020 they screamed bloody murder that AOC was being used to paint the party as a whole and that middle America was abandoning the party because the consensus is that abolishing the police is crazy.
If Trump had won I feel confident that the DLC would have moved to purge the wokesters from the ranks of the party. That reckoning has only been postponed however. Combine the normal cycle of US electoral politics with what appears to be an incipient backlash and I think it's plausible that you could see a GOP wave (a genuine wave) in 2022. Once the woke crowd has been isolated from both sides of the aisle who are their allies? They represent a tiny slice of the country.
Have you read Martin Gurri's "The Revolt of the Public"? Covers this exact topic. He doesn't have any idea how it will all turn out but he has some very good observations.
And how would the wokesters get purged, exactly? There is simply no mechanism for the DNC to do this. True for the right as well: the RNC did not want Trump in 2016, but there was nothing they could do.
The oligarchy that runs the DNC was taken over by the DLC and they selected Bill Clinton as their candidate. He went on to attack Sista Souljah in a deliberately calculated political maneuver. And he pulled the lever on Ricky Ray Rector. They were the martyrs sacrificed at the altar of electing a Democratic President.
By measures both large and small the party will move from the top down to marginalize dissenting voices.
LOL! Dude, the VOTERS (one of them me) selected Bill Clinton as their candidate. BILL CLINTON made the Sister Souljah speech. Your social theory that absolutely everyone is just a puppet being manipulated by the Dark Forces of the DLC (I don't even know what that is, or, for that matter, who this Rector dude is) is ludicrous.
Ricky Ray Rector was so profoundly mentally damaged that he saved his pecan pie dessert from his last meal for after the execution. Clinton still threw the switch on him. The definitive account of the whole mess is Marshall Frady's in The New Yorker.
The DLC is the Democratic Leadership Council, the pro-business, moderate wing of the DNC. The background to 1992 was Democratic desperation after Carter, Mondale and Dukakis. The answer in their minds was that nobody was going outflank their candidate on the right. That's why Clinton was the guy they eventually settled on: he was willing to run on populist, working class themes. And he was willing to execute somebody with the mental capacity of a five year old to prove that he was tough on crime.
When was the last time you heard about a strip club shower being shut down for failing to accommodate wheelchair bound strippers? It might be conceivable now but in the 20 years between the 1990's and 2010?
Having been involved with various building renovations throughout that period, I can assure you that various ludicrous wheelchair-access rules were fully in place and enforced. And they were also ineffective at doing anything for people in wheelchairs. I spent some time in a wheelchair myself with a leg injury in 1998, and, post-renovation, the one restroom in my building with wheelchair access could only be reached through a building entry door that could not be opened from a wheelcahir. Meanwhile, useful spaces were destroyed to provide wheelchair access to areas visited in practice only by maintenance workers.
″If an able-bodied person could have been up there doing it, a disabled person should have been able to, also,″ said Ron Shigeta, chief of the Department of Building and Safety’s disabled access division.
My point is that nobody has shut down the Disabled Access Division of the Los Angeles Department of Building and Safety since then. It's politically impossible to do so.
"If Biden’s child credit were to somehow be made permanent, it would change the country more than every expression of social justice politics ever made. Yet no one within that movement seems even to think in these terms."
In my more sanguine moments I think this is how the more materialist left can take advantage of the Woke moment. The right sees (accurately) that the most vocal and visible elements of the left are motivated by symbolic fights over wokeness or whatever. They also understand (accurately) that their own constituents on the right are primarily motivated by owning the libs in those largely symbolic fights. So both sides engage in the symbolic battle over meaningless bullshit like Neera Tanden's nomination and critical race theory, while a hugely important benefit for children gets slipped into the ARP with surprisingly little publicity or controversy.
What I'm saying is, it's a nice time to have Bernie as the chairman of the Senate Budget Committee.
"If Biden’s child credit were to somehow be made permanent ..."
"somehow"???
How the child credit could be made permanent is not a mystery. It works like this: get a majority of votes in the House, a majority of votes in the Senate, and then be signed into law by POTUS.
That's how it works. There is no other way that it works. Ditto for pretty much every progressive goal.
In an environment like the current one, where the only things getting through the Senate are done via budget reconciliation, the individual who chairs the Budget Committee wields a lot of power. I assure you that if Joe Manchin were in that seat, the ARP would have looked a lot different.
And, even if Manchin (who comes from a state where it's something of a miracle that they have a Democrat senator in the first place) was the stubling block, the solution would be to ELECT MORE DEMOCRATS.
Don’t forget to have the tattooist write it mirror image or you’ll regret your choice.
Thanks Freddie. I needed that. I'm alienated as hell by social justice politics too, but it is helpful to take a step or two back and look at the wider scope and how trends emerge, run their course, and die.
Regarding art, Quentin Tarantino appeared on Bill Maher's show recently, and he reminded us that Hollywood has gone through periods of stifling moralizing before, only for it to eventually collapse under its own weight. So the Woke stuff will burn out too. Don't know when, but it will.
*abolition
Great article, analysis like this is why I subscribed.
I keep thinking of visiting East Berlin in July 1989 thinking, "This is gonna take decades to change"... And yet. Sometimes big change is like bankruptcy. It happens slowly and then all at once and in hindsight.... "Yeah, of course. It makes sense"
Does anyone have any links to past Freddie posts where he discusses his belief in communism? I only discovered his writing last year through the Scott Alexander community and I feel so much kinship in everything he writes, but my beliefs have never made the leap from pro Scandinavian-esque socialism to communism. Maybe he can convince me.
By the way Freddie, the post "Things I Read" was the post that finally convinced me to pay for a subscription. I need more of that in my life. Thank you.
Check out Wes Yang's just launched substack for the opposing view that these changes are poised to take over for a long time to come. He cites a number of concerning examples. I tend to agree with your general perspective on this, but I'd be curious to see you two exchange arguments (or discuss or whatever).
While I don't have the Pinker in front of me, I recall the details of the hedges significantly mattering. I'd be surprised if he really assigns probability approaching certainty that there will never be a single major war again. It's more that we can have modest confidence that trends will continue as they have (note that this one graph is a small fraction of the graphs and other evidence he provides) with a strong awareness that everything could turn south in a flash.
One of the main lessons to take from Pinker which I find people constantly ignoring is that they personally have no good evidence that wars and violence are at their worst in history, and that the strong feeling they have otherwise is due to a lifetime of sensationalist media and other pessimistic inclinations.
That is a hell of an essay that Yang wrote to introduce his Substack.
It was, and I'll be interested to see where he goes with it.
We'll see. I subscribed to it today, which brings my Substack subscriptions to:
Scott Alexander
Freddie deBoer
Wes Yang
Sort of a broad brush on the Culture War Analysis topics without being too bogged down in one ideological framework. Hopefully those three counterbalance to give me a good perspective.
I'm much more aligned with Yang on this. I think Freddie is greatly understating the extent to which wokeness/the successor ideology is embedded in our culture and institutions. Unlike, say, freeing Tibet, the successor ideology is hardwired into our educational system, with entire departments in colleges and universities devoted to it and its propagation. To pick but one potential consequence, what will happen when the law students marinating in the SI move on to become lawyers, then judges and politicians? The law is downstream of culture, and the privileging and protection of free speech, race- and gender-neutral equal protection, etc. can only exist under a legal culture that allows them to exist.
In the end I think John McWhorter is right, the successor ideology is a religion. How durable a religion it turns out to be is an open question, but it's way more powerful and enduring than most cultural fads or trends. I don't want to overstate the case, but it's easy to imagine Roman authorities in Judea in the first century AD saying to each other, "It's just another apocalyptic death cult, it'll blow over in a few years," little knowing that millennia later that cult would not only still exist but have a massive influence on global culture and politics. The successor ideology will never be as big as Christianity, but it will be bigger than Free Tibet, or the 60s counterculture, etc.
Happily the Successor Ideology does not have a supernatural element, which is a pre-requisite for the long-term survival of a religion.
I don't that's true. First, I think Marxism is at least a proxy religion, and its endurance shows you don't need anything overtly supernatural. Second, the successor ideology does have supernatural elements, things such as "whiteness" and the "cisgender heteropatriarchy." Interestingly to me, the successor ideology is a religion that only has devils and demons, no gods or angels (with the possible exception of "equity," however that's defined). A religion without salvation, only varying degrees of perdition...
They mapped Protestantism and they're using it as a carrier signal, in the same way Christians mapped Euro Paganism.
Heretical = Problematic
Blasphemy = Not Politically Correct
Excommunicated = Cancelled
Original Sin = Privilege
Church = Safe Space
Born Again = Woke
etc.
https://hwfo.substack.com/p/social-justice-is-a-crowdsourced
But they forgot to map forgiveness. That's their main Achilles heel. And since the "book" isn't a book, it's an evolving morality on Twitter and Tumblr, anyone can get cancelled whenever the teachings move out from underneath them. That's what happened to Dolezal.
https://hwfo.substack.com/p/a-detailed-look-at-woke-update-mechanics
I hope the lack of forgiveness is an achilles heel, but I'm skeptical. Maoism wasn't really into forgiveness as an ethos, and the Cultural Revolution proceeded on that basis. I think Huxley's quote is proven true over and over again, and certainly lives on in the current era of censoriousness and cancel culture. “The surest way to work up a crusade in favor of some good cause is to promise people they will have a chance of maltreating someone. To be able to destroy with good conscience, to be able to behave badly and call your bad behavior 'righteous indignation' — this is the height of psychological luxury, the most delicious of moral treats.”
The reason it's an Achilles heel is that the Woke Overton Window is constantly moving. In the long game, everyone, including the Woke, gets cancelled because nobody knows what the future rules of "being a decent human being" are going to be. In 10 years they could all be hyper aggressive vegans cancelling anyone who ever ate meat. We just don't know.
You should read the wiki entry on non-theistic religions. Buddhism is generally regarded as one, for example, and it's neither marginal nor new.
I think it's very durable because it's the world's first crowdsourced religion.
More on that here:
https://www.jimruttshow.com/currents-bj-campbell/
This is an excellent essay on a subject to which I have been giving a lot of thought lately (though of course I couldn't begin to articulate it as well). I'm old enough to have lived through the "Reagan Revolution," the cultural transition from the seventies to the eighties, which in the US was far more than a political revolution. It was a very dramatic change, an obvious reaction to the cultural excesses of the seventies, when millions of middle-class Americans sort of sheepishly looked at each other and muttered, "Whew, that got a little out of hand, didn't it?" (a visual reminder of these excesses can be found in old interior decoration manuals: http://lileks.com/institute/interiors/index.html ).
As I watch the social justice virtue signal canceling movement gradually eat its own, it's clear to me another revolution or reaction is in the cards. As you suggest, there's no telling what it will finally morph into, and of course I have no idea when it will happen, how long the current madness will last. My own response is to invest in ten or forty acres in the mountains near here and to plan the construction of a home and a shop, to which I can withdraw, feeding the quail and watering the wild horses, awaiting the return to cultural sanity, should it occur during my lifetime, which it may well won't.
The political or social zeitgeist will pass, but for the first time the wallowers in the extreme will carry around the cattle brand forever. I'm not sure when people will realize that everything they post on social media will be around the rest of their lives and a long time after. Unless the electronic storage is physically destroyed, it is impossible to 'erase' a file permanently. A ghost image always remains, even if the space is written over. Those that believe they can get by with extreme opinions and come out the other end not damaged are in for a rude shock. Many prospective employers are trolling through that information - not for the McDonald's jobs, but for anything with an income one can live from.
Those calling for moderation like FdB does here will be considered too boring to investigate.
I don't view the big challenge to existence is the political or social, but instead the financial. How do you like that 14% inflation? (as calculated on the Shadowstats website, less lying by methodology in use until 1980). More personal destruction in that than all the wars of the last 100 years. Whatever your income, it buys only 86% of what it bought 12 months ago.
The varying definitions of freedom, including those living under repressive regimes? People will live under terrible repression and cruelty without rising up... until the food runs out. Happening now in Cuba, South Africa, etc, just as it happened during the Arab Spring 10 years ago. Othere ostensible reasons are given for the uprising, but they are often just the match that lit the vapor from the gas can. You can live under a tarp or a bridge, but you cannot do without food and water.
Our magnificent primate brains can do and create an incredible, complex reality; they can't do a damn thing without glucose.
Frequent starvation doesn't seem to have significantly impeded North Korea's repression. Also, an absolutely horrifying number of people starved in the Great Chinese Famine (which the wiki entry says is "widely regarded as the deadliest famine"), yet China is still repressive. I'm not sure the theory holds.
There are decades where nothing happens; and there are weeks where decades happen
In terms of how this current wave of PC culture ends I would argue that the guy most responsible for killing off the last wave was Bill Clinton. And Sista Souljah and Ricky Ray Rector.
Wokeism is the latest fad diet of the mind. "Only a sudden, all-encompassing revolution will mold us into the shape we want!" And then a year later you're back to eating bread, because the most sustainable way to change is small but consistently practiced positive habits, not an ultra-restrictive menu of bacon, butter, and starfruit.
I think what will matter from our current moment moving forward into the future are the huge changes taking place in how our culture interacts with LGBT issues. There is an explosion going on in young people adopting new sexual and gender identities, and while I'm sure the pendulum will eventually start to swing the other way, I think that a lot of what's going on in that space right now is going to stick.
I think especially the embrace of somewhat complicated nonbinary identities and the use of they/them as gender neutral pronouns are likely to stick around in some form or another (though I expect there will be an eventual move to formalize things a little bit more, which will have complicated effects). Trans people in general are IMO going to be a lot more visible for the foreseeable future, and I think this will stick even as other culture war issues start to fade away.
Is the growth in the self identified LGBT population due to sexual preference? Or is it people latching on to the next big cultural bandwagon?
I think it's a mix!
There have always been some number of people with various queer identities, and the current environment is a lot more friendly to that. So some of the increase is very likely driven by people who would have just stayed in the closet instead deciding to come out.
I also suspect there are others who might never have considered it, but once it became a viable option and "cool" (though there are still many disadvantages people face, especially trans people), they decided that actually they might like that and decided to go for it. I don't think this is a bad thing - if you open up a bunch of Thai places in a neighborhood, people will try out Thai food and realize they like it, and will make it part of their regular diet. That doesn't mean their love of Thai food is fake or illegitimate. It's just contingent on a certain cultural context.
And finally, I'm sure there are people who choose an identity for purely cynical reasons. I think this is probably rare, because there are still a lot of downsides in the "real world" to many forms of queer identification, but I certainly wouldn't rule it out. I would expect that as queer identities are more and more accepted, we'll see more and more people decide to go this route, though I personally doubt they'll ever make up more than a relatively small slice of the overall LGBT community.
So if some of the current population is choosing to identify as a ploy to gain popularity then when the pendulum swings back we would expect their numbers to decrease in the future. And depending on the exact mix that decrease could be substantial.
Yeah, when the pendulum swings back I expect we will see a significant decline. But not a total decline - the ideas that are being worked out right now will still be around, and a lot of the people who like their life as it is will keep living that way even as it gets a little harder. Even among the cynical, some of them will have committed too much to the bit to actually just walk away from it entirely. And with an existing base of people as a seed, younger people with queer inclinations will have an easier time finding a community, even as the overall tide of culture turns back in a harsher direction.
Yes, because society in general has gotten a lot more tolerant on the gay issue. The USSC decision on Obergefell is the perfect illustration: is there anything more mainstream than recognition by the US government? Eventually I think the numbers will align with the percentage of the population that has always identified itself as gay regardless of whatever is currently trendy, which is to say about 2-3% of the total population.
I have a friendly acquaintance who is a trans man. I knew him when he was a female teen, more than 15 years ago. He told me he didn’t realize he was trans until adulthood because the possibility was so far outside the paradigm he was raised in, the thought never even occurred to him.
I think you’re onto something: now that queer identities are more and more considered a legitimate way of being by the masses, more people will emerge who claim that identity.
Once something's a workable option, people will try it, especially to solve problems that are otherwise hard to solve. Testosterone seems to treat dysautonomia, and probably several other conditions that are more symptomatic with a typically feminine hormonal profile than a typically masculine one:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6868651/
"I was a teenage girl. I had symptoms. I wasn't believed. I felt terrible in my female body. I took testosterone. It relieved symptoms. I became a boy and now life sucks less," strikes me as less cynical than as rational adaptation to available care.
I know Catholics, particularly Catholic feminists, quite alarmed at this kind of problem solving (and similarly alarmed at lack of interest in finding fertility-sparing ways to treat women's health problems now often treated by fertility suppressors' incidental effects). The rhetoric surrounding the call to live graciously with whatever God gives you, including natal sex, can be quite beautiful. But even those who idealize saintly suffering have limited bandwidth for supporting those who don't use whatever options are on hand to lessen it.
Arbery's "Heroes of the Fourth Turning" was beloved by the Catholic right. The character Emily, a "saintly sufferer", was praised for her commitment to "givenness" — not least because it opposed "the trans agenda". Emily's mother, Gina, who lived under the same roof as Emily and had to put up with the effects of that meek submission to givenness every day, was more suspicious of whether Emily's submission was even necessary, or just an excuse to suffer and not be tough and successful, like she was. On the one hand, rejecting givenness is an abomination; on the other, accepting it is malingering. People may say they hate abominations, but they tolerate malingering even less.
Yeah, I absolutely would not describe someone using hormones to solve a health problem as cynical. To me that's very much my middle group - people who may not have considered it in previous eras, but now that the option is available and viable, they find that they like it and it solves certain problems for them or offers genuine advantages they enjoy.
But even this will be hard to guess at!
I have friends who teach high school; they've had problems with gay/queer students bullying straight students for their sexuality, and they're also seeing a backlash toward the queer community. Even the gay students want nothing to do with Pride or the queer community (in their words, "it's nothing but a bunch of old pervs"). They've had a bunch of trans kids desist, leading a bunch of kids to believe it's not real and is instead a bunch of attention-seeking. And in the broader world, after meteoric rises in acceptance for gender and sexual minorities, we're starting to see dropping acceptance in polls--mainly, I think, because of queer organizations overplaying their hands.
I think the exact opposite is true. Sex and gender identities are not particularly interesting and I don't really believe that there's that many of them. There have always been clearly trans people in every culture, but the massive explosion in 20 year old girls who want to go by they while changing basically nothing else in their lives? It's very unlikely that that's not just a fad. Unlike gay, lesbian, bi, or trans people, it's also unique in that it doesn't relate to any kind of different behavior in the outside world. The only thing that happens when you declare yourself non-binary is that other people call you non-binary. So what?
The huge victories of the LGBT movement are all here to stay. The rest is just what happens when a movement doesn't know what to do with its victory.
I think it's really interesting watching how divergent the Woke Analysis Bloggers have become on where they think the thing is going. Lindsay and the IDW kids seem to think that Woke is on the verge of establishing permanent dominance. Wesley Yang (just launched a new substack Year Zero) goes a step further and makes the claim that Woke has already won, coins the term "Successor Ideology" for it, and states that we are undeniably moving into a new paradigm of Permanent Woke.
Then Freddie here, rightfully I think, predicts that 2021 and 2022 are going to be years of the "Great Wokelash" (great phrase btw). I agree with this in principle. The Woke way overplayed their hand in 2020 when they went after workplaces and elementary schools. They attempted a kind of ideological blitzkrieg, taking up as much Culture War Territory as they could take, but they way oustripped their supply lines and didn't expect the sort of resistance they'd get from normal people, actual immigrants, Asian dragon lady moms in schoolboard meetings, and such. I definitely think the rubber band is going to snap back on the Woke this year and the next, and the Ds in general are going to take it on the chin from that, but I don't think Woke is going away. It might get rebranded.
The reason it's not going away is that it updates itself on the feed. It's a crowdsourced, evolving ideology that flows like water and gets into cracks and cannot be punched because it's built off the words of the nameless social media masses. It's an emergent ideology not tied to a book, which makes it antifragile. It's impossible to attack at the source because it's sourceless.
The adherents of woke may never give up the cause but the movement will die when they are silenced, and they can be silenced. The problem with woke is that it is inherently political and politics in the US is by definition a mainstream endeavor. When the Democrats decide suffer enough electoral losses because of defund the police, or CRT, or whatever they will move to purge the extremists. And that will be the end of it.
I really don't think so, because the ideology evolves on the feed, and the fact that it evolves on the feed makes it antifragile in a way no other fixed ideology in history has been. Read through this so you can get a sense of what I'm saying:
https://hwfo.substack.com/p/a-detailed-look-at-woke-update-mechanics
How many times have you seen professional politicians state that "Twitter is not reality" or some variation thereof? They are absolutely right: the woke represent no more than 10% max of the country as a whole. Their impact is exaggerated because they are disproportionately represented in media and academia. But if their allies abandon them they make up such a small chunk of the public that it is hard to imagine how they can continue to have much of an impact.
Your 10% figure feels right to me but I'd really like to see a Pew Poll on the topic.
This got some press recently:
https://hiddentribes.us/
Also this:
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/20/opinion/polarization-politics-americans.html
Good links, I'd seen this Hidden Tribes one before. But I'm more curious in how many people believe wokeist sacred cows, including:
Trans women are women. There’s no such thing as IQ. Healthy at any size. All whites are racist. Gender is a social construct. Silence is violence. Front Holes. Believe all women. Hormone blockers in children. Fragility. All politics is identity politics. ACAB. Cultural appropriation. Safe spaces. Punch Nazis. Toxic masculinity. Unconscious bias. Intersectional Matrix of Oppression. Sit down and listen. Lived Experience. Patriarchy.
I'd like to see an objective poll that hit those splash ideologies and quantified how many people buy each of them, what the overlap is, and figure out a true Woke Census.
The successor ideology may be inherently political, but its victories are not in the electoral sphere. All those fully staffed DEI offices at every corporation and university and govenment agency (including the military!) are not going away, and they cannot be silenced. They have the full backing of the 1%, who are very happy to have race/gender be the issue of debate among us commoners, rather than class.
Once the Democrats suffer enough losses they will move to stifle the movement. All of those corporate offices will get the message and shut up. The true believers may soldier on but there are so few of them how can they do anything without allies?
I think the Great Awokening played out differently in different parts of society and the Wokelash will too. The world of politics already seems to be going through a bit of a reversal - maybe the left will need to lose another big election first. There's already more hesitancy about shouting 'defund the police' than there was a year ago. NYC leftists now get to read about mayor Eric Adams for 8 years.
The Great Awokening in the social realm will last a little longer. How long can my gf's rich white friends walk around with their 'Black Lives Matter' purses before it becomes uncool in their circles? (Or possibly cancelled due to some new rule in the rulebook?) I dunno, but I think it's safe to assume these people will be into something else at some point.
Where I don't see this going away anytime soon is in the workplace. Corporate HR departments claimed a lot of power in the last few years and created all kinds of new 'reasons you need the HR department'. They're not going to be giving up this hard earned territory.
Corporate and educational culture is very fad driven. Tech companies are realizing they don't really want employees to bring their whole selves to work. It's entirely possible that a "work is just for work" ideology will take over, which is probably what most employees and bosses want anyway. That would totally sideline HR.
Woke is a culture of cool. It crowdsources morality by reducing it to fashion. You're true that it'll latch onto something else sooner or later, but it latching on to something else doesn't mean it goes away, it just means it's evolving. Think about gender.
2011: 2 genders
2014: 3 genders
2016: 37 specific genders, each with their own pronoun and their own symbol, and not memorizing the pronoun/symbol chart means you're transphobic, and Tinder has to code it into the dating app or else they'll get cancelled
2018: infinite genders
2020: trans women are women (a soft return to 2) and the only people claiming pronouns are blue check heterosexuals virtue signaling.
If your Woke Operating System wasn't up to date at any point in this cycle you were transphobic. Claiming 37 genders in 2018 was transphobic. We don't know where this will go, but the fact that it keeps going places means that it won't go away.
Haha their big mistake was going after the SAT's.
The biggest mistake was going after the elementary schools.
I think the bit about big wars and civilization is important. I see so many claims about human nature that weirdly don't take into account the ~200k years that anatomically modern humans existed *before* what we could call civilization arose. Taking the last couple thousand years as representative of what humans are like is just blitheringly stupid, but that's all I see. In my experience, looking at things with pre-history in mind clarifies my thinking and inspires me take more control of my own life
If you have never been to a strip club a common prop is a shower on the dance floor. The strippers climb in and get doused while dancing around and being showered with tips.
A while back one of these clubs got their shower shut down by a government enforcement agency. The complaint? The shower wasn't handicapped accessible, meaning that any strippers who were confined to wheelchairs would be unable to use it.
Here's the thing though: that story is from the 1990's. Everything we are seeing now is just a replay of the last PC wave. And if we are curious as to how this one will end we should probably examine how that one sputtered out.
For the narrow question of the relationship of the Democrats to the woke social media crowd you already see the squawking from DNC political operatives regarding the "defund the police" argument. After the GOP gained seats in 2020 they screamed bloody murder that AOC was being used to paint the party as a whole and that middle America was abandoning the party because the consensus is that abolishing the police is crazy.
If Trump had won I feel confident that the DLC would have moved to purge the wokesters from the ranks of the party. That reckoning has only been postponed however. Combine the normal cycle of US electoral politics with what appears to be an incipient backlash and I think it's plausible that you could see a GOP wave (a genuine wave) in 2022. Once the woke crowd has been isolated from both sides of the aisle who are their allies? They represent a tiny slice of the country.
Have you seen "Eighth Grade"?
Have you read Martin Gurri's "The Revolt of the Public"? Covers this exact topic. He doesn't have any idea how it will all turn out but he has some very good observations.
There is a pretty good interview on bari weis's podcast from a few weeks ago
And how would the wokesters get purged, exactly? There is simply no mechanism for the DNC to do this. True for the right as well: the RNC did not want Trump in 2016, but there was nothing they could do.
The oligarchy that runs the DNC was taken over by the DLC and they selected Bill Clinton as their candidate. He went on to attack Sista Souljah in a deliberately calculated political maneuver. And he pulled the lever on Ricky Ray Rector. They were the martyrs sacrificed at the altar of electing a Democratic President.
By measures both large and small the party will move from the top down to marginalize dissenting voices.
LOL! Dude, the VOTERS (one of them me) selected Bill Clinton as their candidate. BILL CLINTON made the Sister Souljah speech. Your social theory that absolutely everyone is just a puppet being manipulated by the Dark Forces of the DLC (I don't even know what that is, or, for that matter, who this Rector dude is) is ludicrous.
Ricky Ray Rector was so profoundly mentally damaged that he saved his pecan pie dessert from his last meal for after the execution. Clinton still threw the switch on him. The definitive account of the whole mess is Marshall Frady's in The New Yorker.
The DLC is the Democratic Leadership Council, the pro-business, moderate wing of the DNC. The background to 1992 was Democratic desperation after Carter, Mondale and Dukakis. The answer in their minds was that nobody was going outflank their candidate on the right. That's why Clinton was the guy they eventually settled on: he was willing to run on populist, working class themes. And he was willing to execute somebody with the mental capacity of a five year old to prove that he was tough on crime.
How can you not know this stuff?
A story so good I'm bound to steal it!
My pleasure! Glad that I could offer up something of value given how much I enjoy your writing.
But did it sputter out? Handicapped access rules are still in place, and still making silly things happen (several in the building I work in).
When was the last time you heard about a strip club shower being shut down for failing to accommodate wheelchair bound strippers? It might be conceivable now but in the 20 years between the 1990's and 2010?
Having been involved with various building renovations throughout that period, I can assure you that various ludicrous wheelchair-access rules were fully in place and enforced. And they were also ineffective at doing anything for people in wheelchairs. I spent some time in a wheelchair myself with a leg injury in 1998, and, post-renovation, the one restroom in my building with wheelchair access could only be reached through a building entry door that could not be opened from a wheelcahir. Meanwhile, useful spaces were destroyed to provide wheelchair access to areas visited in practice only by maintenance workers.
Also: I thought the stripper thing was likely an urban myth, but no! It's real! From 1994:
https://apnews.com/article/591253d95877b83536a5483fc8b5a7e9
″If an able-bodied person could have been up there doing it, a disabled person should have been able to, also,″ said Ron Shigeta, chief of the Department of Building and Safety’s disabled access division.
My point is that nobody has shut down the Disabled Access Division of the Los Angeles Department of Building and Safety since then. It's politically impossible to do so.
My point is how many more showers have they cited for not being accessible for wheelchair confined strippers?
That’s why I stopped going to strip clubs. Too much politics. And hepatitis probably.
"If Biden’s child credit were to somehow be made permanent, it would change the country more than every expression of social justice politics ever made. Yet no one within that movement seems even to think in these terms."
In my more sanguine moments I think this is how the more materialist left can take advantage of the Woke moment. The right sees (accurately) that the most vocal and visible elements of the left are motivated by symbolic fights over wokeness or whatever. They also understand (accurately) that their own constituents on the right are primarily motivated by owning the libs in those largely symbolic fights. So both sides engage in the symbolic battle over meaningless bullshit like Neera Tanden's nomination and critical race theory, while a hugely important benefit for children gets slipped into the ARP with surprisingly little publicity or controversy.
What I'm saying is, it's a nice time to have Bernie as the chairman of the Senate Budget Committee.
"If Biden’s child credit were to somehow be made permanent ..."
"somehow"???
How the child credit could be made permanent is not a mystery. It works like this: get a majority of votes in the House, a majority of votes in the Senate, and then be signed into law by POTUS.
That's how it works. There is no other way that it works. Ditto for pretty much every progressive goal.
And, by the way, what does Bernie have to do with it? Any Democrat in that position would do the same.
In an environment like the current one, where the only things getting through the Senate are done via budget reconciliation, the individual who chairs the Budget Committee wields a lot of power. I assure you that if Joe Manchin were in that seat, the ARP would have looked a lot different.
Manchin supports the child tax credit, which was the topic of discussion:
https://www.manchin.senate.gov/newsroom/press-releases/manchin-provides-update-on-american-rescue-plan-direct-aid-to-west-virginians
And, even if Manchin (who comes from a state where it's something of a miracle that they have a Democrat senator in the first place) was the stubling block, the solution would be to ELECT MORE DEMOCRATS.