Why Has Social Justice Yelling Lost Steam?

Even before publication of my new book, I was trying to do some preemptive correction of the inevitable narrative that it’s about “wokeness.” In fact the term “woke” appears three times, the first two times in the context of describing someone else’s attitudes towards the concept, the other in the process of defining what the book is not. The term “cancel culture” does not appear. Of course, much of the critical response has simply proceeded from the assumption that my book must be about those things, and I’ll write about the response someday. For now though it’s enough to say again that the book is about social justice movements and why they fail. It’s true that most people within those movements are the kind of people who are called “woke,” but my orientation is fundamentally different.

Still, I am interested in the growing sense that there’s been some sort of a shift in how people think and talk about the project of social liberalism, particularly as it pertains to the tactics of aggressive and emotional engagement, shunning of those who step out of line, and the attempt to get designated enemies fired or otherwise formally punished by institutions. As I said recently, there are really no “vibe shifts,” as different eras of political life live comfortably next to each other for a long while before one gives way to another, and a cursory investigation reveals that there are many people on social media who are proceeding the way they have for more than a decade, insisting on a consensus aligned with social justice mores, denying that there are any complications or exceptions associated with those mores, and using intense social pressure and threats of consequences to pressure dissenters into silence. And some of them will still be successful; I have absolutely no interest in wading into Russell Brand discourse, but it is the case that he’s facing professional and social sanction due to accusations of sexual misconduct in exactly the way that people did in 2017. People still get cancelled and will go on getting cancelled. Things change but they stay the same. And yet I do think there’s more and more recognition of a certain cultural evolution.

This New York Times podcast is one of many bits of commentary that reflects a belief that the social justice norms that colonized American institutions in the past 15 years have slowly lost steam. There have been several prominent arguments that we’ve passed “peak woke,” some of them empirical. Major professional diversity czars have seen their influence contract or their positions eliminated. The New York Times rebuking its staff for an identity-based uprising, just a few years after bowing to internal pressure following the Tom Cotton op/ed, suggests that some elite institutions are developing a backbone. After endless rumors, Boston University has finally begun to investigate Ibram X. Kendi’s center. Here’s a piece in The Atlantic about a new book that reflects growing disdain for the concept of standup comedy as a political tool rather than as a form of entertainment. Or you could look at Ron DeSantis’s anemic candidacy, its strategy derived from the false belief that Republican voters will inevitably reward whoever says the word “woke” the most; if the opposition is less invested in opposing the social justice tendency than they once were, it suggests that the overall salience has declined. For the best overall view on all of this, I would consider this piece in Compact from Ryan Zickgraf, which does the best job of situating all this in historical context and pointing out what’s happening without overstating the case.