Woke & Anti-Woke, A False Dialectic
if you want to escape the problems of the past, leave the old frames behind
Subscribers, the call for subscriber writing goes out next week. Thank you for your patience as we continue to deal with the anti-sleep terrorist cell in my home.
In 2016, a group of student activists attempted to get the campus paper defunded at Wesleyan University, where I grew up. A student there, an Iraq War veteran, had written an opinion piece in the Wesleyan Argus which he criticized the tactics and messaging of the BlackLivesMatter movement, even as he argued that a new racial justice movement was badly needed. In other words, the piece was fundamentally about political tactics and strategy, rather than a rejection of the cause of racial progress writ large. And yet still, students at that hyper-liberal liberal arts college were outraged. They organized an effort to shutter the paper (!) in response, a successful one. The student council unanimously voted to cut funding to The Argus. Under ordinary circumstances, that would have been sufficient to kill the almost 150 year-old paper; it only survived because of the intervention of the college president. Student activists continued to agitate about it but, as I’ve said many times, college students have inherent limitations as activists and eventually the people who were mad graduated out. Fin.
I pull this example out from time to time not because it was particularly important - obviously, in material terms it was not - but because it’s so indicative of the endless, rolling, on-the-nose clumsiness and strategic stupidity of what we now call the “woke” moment, and which I would much rather call the social justice movement. Your opinion will vary, I suppose. At some level, you either care about the censorship implications or you don’t. To me, the idea that you would shut down the primary publication of an educational institution because it ran a piece that some students didn’t like is obviously ugly, contrary to the basic ideas behind higher education, but then the more committed wokies will tell you that this is a vestige of racist colonizer mindset etc etc. I do feel confident, though, that most people would agree that the sort of proposed censorship was maximally destructive of basic rights for minimal political gain. And in hindsight, I’d also hope that anyone would recognize that BlackLivesMatter could have used a little more strategic controversy, a little more internal provocation. The lack of such debate helped contribute to its eventual political weakness.
The bigger issue, for me, is the relationship between the series of micro-controversies that first brought “woke” to attention and its eventual status as a Republican hate object. Because where I am truly a villain, just entirely dastardly, is in thinking that in fact the relentless drip-drip-drip of petty woke controversy during the 2010s had gradual and devastating political consequences for the American left, a true boiling frog scenario. And I thought about the Argus controversy when I read this piece by Ross Barkan, a New York journalist and writer who like many seems to be uncomfortable with a kind of anti-woke critique that he participated in quite recently himself. And, you know, I get it. The point that Trump is worse than woke is obviously correct. The reality that we’re in incredibly dark times isn’t hard to agree with. The acknowledgment that those dumb censorious college kids were never anything like as destructive as the conservative movement is not untrue. The desire to oppose this rotten moment above all things is natural. And Barkan would likely say that my example proves his point - who cares about an old controversy at a tiny liberal arts college!
But this, to me, demonstrates the trouble with being too caught up in the present political moment. Because as strange as it may sound, it was precisely those little campus moments that helped social justice politics to become the dominant discourse of America’s institutional elite, which in turn prompted the vociferous backlash we’re experiencing today. I wrote a whole book on this topic and won’t belabor the history here. It’s sufficient to say that, because of how liberal politics work, the slow drip of controversies over campus social justice norms helped spread those norms into our ideas class in media, academia, nonprofits, and government, which led to many Americans (rightly or wrongly, reasonably or not) feeling suffocated under the weight of that particular moral vision. I’ve written many times about the “that’s not happening, that’s not happening, that’s not happening, it’s happening and it’s good” progression of social justice politics. For years, liberal media types dismissed concerns about campus illiberalism as unimportant, a distraction, campus activists silly stupid kids not worth paying attention to. (“That’s not happening.”) And then, in the gradual-then-all-at-once way that political change happens, those same people embraced the very politics that they had so recently dismissed as irrelevant. (“That’s happening, and it’s good.”) Campus-style social justice politics weren’t worth talking about until, overnight, they were the assumed ideology of American liberalism.
This is why I reject frames like the one that Barkan uses in his piece, because “yes yes that’s bad but it doesn’t matter, can we focus on the important stuff” was itself an essential part of the progression that led to the dominance of “woke” among journalists, professors, and all manner of other professionals. Irrelevance wasn’t just a waystation along the path to the 2024 election, it was a necessary step as the vision of the purple-haired nonbinary BLM-supporting Brown grad became a potent organizing symbol for the Republican party. The fact that there’s an immense amount of stupidity involved in that development in partisan politics, including the fact that Democrats ran pretty much directly away from woke in 2024, doesn’t change the fact that it happened and it mattered. Because as much as a lot of motivated left-of-center types yell and whine about it, it is simply true that the perception of woke dominance played and still plays a dramatic role in American politics. Perfectly irrelevant campus micro-controversies have a habit of contributing to a chip-chip-chipping away at public perception. In the internet era, all politics is ambient; that this makes a mockery of message discipline and political strategy does not make it untrue.
Sandwiched in between the Bush 2000s and the Trump 2020s were the Obama era, and all three contributed in their own strange ways to the woke and anti-woke eras. The effects of any particular moment were tiny, but over time the social justice left gave conservatives a truly, profoundly unpopular symbol to attack for partisan political gain. That’s why I don’t do “yeah, this is stupid, but it doesn’t matter.” It always comes back. We might prefer to be through with the past. But the past is not through with us.
What might strike any given reader as odd, though, is that Barkan has impressed in recent years by getting some anti-woke content into generally woke-friendly publications. And it’s not hard to see why; he was pretty good at it! He has proven adept at using a kind of evenhanded framing and careful vocabulary to entertain what are typically seen as inflammatory, dangerous ideas. Here’s from a piece he published just last November.
Not long ago, I speculated on whether a Trump victory could trigger another great “awokening” in the United States. This refers to the period, from 2016 through 2020, when social justice politics were most in vogue, the anti-ump resistance was at its height, and identity concerns, often shallow, were fretted over most. It was the peak of performative radicalism…. Much of the anti-establishment fervor of the 2010s was radical chic in nature, and a lot of it, among professional class elites, amounted to a form of consciousness raising and thought management. Ibram X. Kendi and Robin DiAngelo were the icons of the age. They did not offer prescriptions for overthrowing capitalism and the military-industrial complex. They preached, rather, buying their books. DiAngelo herself was a proud capitalist.
The social justice era had a flattening effect on mainstream cinema, television, and literature. It created an oppressive purity culture in independent music....
An argument that found new credence in the Trump era was that all art must have “good” or “correct” politics and that art created by someone who is deviant or sinful in some manner should not be praised or celebrated. Fascists (Pound, Céline) and right-wingers (Eliot, Woolf in certain aspects) were not to be extolled. Those dead and famous, at least, could have their works in print, but a literary novelist or poet with openly conservative or heterodox politics had little hope in the 2010s. The elite artists of the era were fully committed to resistance-style posturing, their de facto lodestar the Pulitzer Prize-winner Viet Thanh Nguyen who argued for the full politicization of art. Good art can have good politics, but it also might not. It might have no politics at all, or one not easily discerned by the left-right binary. It might exist in its own realm, metaphysical or cosmic. Sometimes, like church must be separated from state to both ensure politics doesn’t descend into discriminatory madness and religion itself (as Roger Williams once argued) isn’t corrupted by secular matters, art must be held completely apart to better flourish. Art can be propaganda, but it won’t be very good. And propaganda won’t be art.
Slowly, slowly we have passed the peak of the resistance, of the heedless social justice era. A Trump victory could, in theory, reinvigorate those currents, and make the forced merger of arts and politics permanent.
Isn’t every word of that absolutely classic anti-woke stuff? Aren’t these all the points that have been broadly categorized under the anti-woke flag? I imagine your average New York reader would be pretty surprised that the man wrote today’s piece also wrote these words, and only about half a year ago. I get it: Barkan likely feels that none of this contradicts what he said in the new piece. And I’m not sure that I would necessarily disagree with him. The trouble is that many readers are going to throw out this baby with the bathwater of the trolling, ugly, idiot anti-wokism of the Trump 2.0 era. And that’s why accepting frames like woke and anti-woke is a mistake, even if you think you’re doing so only in the provisional attempt to define priorities and get people to care about what really matters. A lot of New York readers will look at that piece and say, you’re right, anti-woke is poison, let’s get right back onboard with the censorship and the hectoring and the language policing and the performative righteousness. And I couldn’t blame them, given the way that the magazine in particular and the industry writ large have responded to the current crisis.
Barkan is just one worker laboring in the structures his industry is creating for himself, with the most obvious and powerful structure being the ongoing collapse of professional journalism and media and subsequent panicky attempts to consolidate pre-existing readership. For that reason, I suspect that the tension in his anti-woke vs anti-anti-woke stuff are more about the vessel than the liquid that fills it. Barkan has carved out a position as a regular freelancer at New York, one of a small and shrinking handful of publications that can pay and provide a national audience, and that magazine has made its strategy absolutely clear in the Trump 2.0 era: to tell its largely college-educated, largely urban, dominantly liberal readership what it wants to hear. To party like it’s 2015, in other words. The magazine’s rapid descent from being a publication that was at least minimally interested in challenging its audience to being one that’s very reliable when it comes to basic partisan orientation. Go look at what they’ve published since the election, and identify the pieces that would be particularly challenging to your average professional-class New York liberal subscriber. Go look.
Last year’s deeply dumb Andrew Huberman piece reflects that sort of commitment to the commercial value of pleasing your readership; Huberman is genuinely a dink and seemingly a snake oil salesman, but a MeTooing is more in this media-ideological wheelhouse, and so absent sufficient evidence for the real thing he was quasi-MeeToo’d. Liberal magazines with liberal readerships MeToo powerful men, and if those men are neither actually powerful nor actually guilty of actual sexual misconduct, such problems can be fixed in the edit. The subscribers aren’t going to complain.
Even more indicative of the magazine’s turn was its truly pointless, endlessly-long Andrea Long Chu takedown of Pamela Paul, on the occasion of, well, of Paul losing the position that had made her a hate object in the first place, I guess. I have no interest in exonerating Paul here, that’s not the point. (She was, for the record, very good indeed at running books coverage at the NYT, which should be understood to be entirely non-ideological praise but of course won’t be.) The point is that it seems utterly perverse to commission a massive brickstop of a sneer job against a woman who now has less baked-in institutional influence than she has had in fourteen years. It’s just bizarre and inexplicable, even setting aside the fact that hating Paul as much as the average New York editor does makes very little sense in a world where Ben Shapiro and Laura Loomer exist. (You see, such logic goes both ways.) I am up and down on the Andrea Long Chu experience; she’s very talented but has received far too much praise as a takedown artist, which has ruined a lot of writers before her. Like a lot of people who see their careers take off thanks to publishing vicious reviews, she has come to put viciousness in front of sense, meaning, and truth (not a big deal for me, I suppose) and ahead of control of her prose (a very big deal). Writing to be provocative inevitably leaves writers who are merely provoking, and people lovingly screengrabbing your biting remarks to be admired on Twitter leads to pretty baubles of prose that have no earthly business in the context in which they appear. (In this, she reminds me of Lauren Oyler and her doozies, another skilled and talented writer whose career demonstrates the perils of being praised for the wrong things at the wrong time.) Whatever the truth, it’s bizarre to waste Chu’s efforts, the magazine’s space, or the reader’s time with a book-length treatise on the vagaries of a departing New York Times columnist. It only makes sense when you realize that this is picking the very lowest of the low-hanging fruit, and that this is the business New York is now in.
What does this digression have to do with anti- (anti-anti-anti-) woke attitudes in 2025? The point is that in all cases, instrumentalizing the audience’s perceived approval of what you put out there is a surefire way to fall into the kinds of misguided thinking that Barkan criticizes. Publishing an anti-anti-woke Pamela Paul takedown in 2025 is the exact picture of the pointlessness and bad priorities that Barkan skewers in his own piece. Going after Paul right now fails for exactly the same reason going after Robin DiAngelo now might fail. If either is stupid, they both are, to exactly the same degree, and in exactly the same direction. Indeed, were it the case that Barkan’s argument was meant to be read as a matter of logic and political sense, Chu’s piece might be the perfect one to illustrate wasting our time in the way Barkan disdains. Anyone incapable of understanding that cannot be trusted on this issue. But while Barkan might write towards that ideal, New York is publishing him because it’s what they think their readers want to hear, panic-stricken liberals intent on hearing that not only are they right about Trump now, they were always right, including during the very brief and ultimately inconsequential period in which left-leaning people momentarily considered whether they had gotten anything wrong from 2009 to 2022.
Of course, the line between an ideological commitment to punching right and a fiscal commitment to pleasing your readership can appear very thin.
Yes, we’re in a horrific moment in American politics. Yes, Donald Trump is a monster who breeds other monsters. And yes, ostensibly independent media like The Free Press finds itself utterly adrift as its leadership looks around and observes a world where the cultural forces they rail against have no power to challenge real political force. A vast world of anti-woke media built itself on the assumption that woke would rule forever, and that was stupid when they dreamt it up and is even more stupid now. All of that is true. I’m just not sure it matters, if we have a longer time horizon in mind than next month’s issue. Yes, a 2016 woke Wesleyan controversy seems quaint now. But then, the politics of 2004 seemed anachronistic in 2016, and the PCU-era campus politics of 1993 seemed like a distant fairytale then… You see, it does go round in circles, and the man who hyperfixates on the momentary turns of today’s politics will soon enough find himself right where he thought he’d never wind up again.