Yes, It's Easy to Defend Social Justice Politics if You Pretend Social Justice Politics Are Just Liberalism

but, as the practitioners of those politics have always insisted, they aren't

As I’ve been saying for some time, we have moved pretty well past peak woke. Awhile back I pointed to one little parenthetical in one mundane NYT op/ed, and the lack of outrage about it, as a minor but telling signpost of our evolving times. People sometimes like to act as if this post-woke development amounts to some sort of rebuke of my position, that to criticize social justice politics is to insist that they’re eternal. But in fact I’ve always said that this approach to politics is deeply fragile and would not survive in their conventional form. This was, indeed, a core theme of my last book. Three years ago I wrote that we could see

a Great Wokelash, and it could lead to genuinely conservative cultural politics (80%) or a redefined and newly-serious left-wing society (20%). This may very well come to pass. But I think it may be more likely that our elite institutions will just quietly get tired of it and gradually move on, in much the same way as those who spend their adolescence doing yelling social justice activism and then go on to get their MBAs, become less strident, and eventually just become absentminded flavorless Democrats. There will still be an identitarian left, but it will develop new fixations and likely lose influence. When I was in high school Free Tibet and sweatshops were huge concerns with the kind of people who make up the woke armies now, but you never hear a single word about those causes from the new generation. Politics is faddish. In five years the 27 year old passionate midlevel nonprofit workers who yell about CRT for six hours a day will have become overtired soccer moms whose executive positions and executive paychecks dull that old fire inside. The new kids will be too busy livestreaming their prescribed ketamine treatments to do all that social justice stuff.

That’s what’s happening, what’s happened: most people who have been committed to social justice haven’t had any big public conversions. That would entail admitting that they were wrong, and people don’t do that. No, the sign that we’re in a post-woke moment is not that people like me criticize that style of political performance but that the types who were once the most enthusiastic about it have gingerly stepped away. It’s not lefties turned Republicans, it’s a mass evolution in the behavior of the educated white liberals who have always been the true foot soldiers of woke politics: a communal sense that a lot of the typical vocabulary and tactics of the social justice era are destructive and, worse, cringey. And so we’ve seen meaningful change in the default presentation of the American left-of-center in a handful of years, change that has developed the same way this kind of change always does - slowly, slowly, slowly, then all at once.

So here’s an Atlantic podcast, hosted by Jerusalem Demsas with Michelle Goldberg as guest, in which they discuss the possibility that we might miss social justice politics once they’ve fully receded. I’m not at all unsympathetic to that overall position; most of the above-the-fold goals of the social justice movement have been good ones, at least in the abstract. I do think that their general stance is a good example of a fairly common way to defend wokeness: by watering it down, referring to a much less intense and uncompromising theoretical version of it in order to view it more sympathetically. I also think that there’s a tendency, with this topic, to identify incrementalist social reforms as achievements of woke politics when of course late-stage woke politics tended to reject all types of reformism in social and cultural issues. So let’s take a look at some excerpts.

[Demsas] “Wokeness” has few defenders. Too many embarrassing episodes of language policing have eroded support for the term. It’s too bad, because the progressive shift of the 2010s—when attitudes on issues such as race and immigration moved markedly left—brought about many broadly popular developments. Take the convictions of Harvey Weinstein and Larry Nassar, or that many states banned nondisclosure agreements from covering sexual harassment.

Perfect example, right off the top: Weinstein and Nassar were convicted of crimes that were already illegal prior to MeToo or the modern social justice movement. This reflects a core part of the problem with fighting sexual misconduct - almost always, the predatory behavior is already illegal or, at the very least, banned under workplace policy. The problem lies in enforcement, not in the law itself, and this condition follows us into the future. The fact that some states have banned nondisclosure agreements for sexual harassment cases might genuinely be a useful development, and if so I’m glad, but it’s the very definition of reform rather than revolution. The major problems remains the fact that many women still feel that the only way to get any kind of justice is to pursue a monetary settlement.

Or how about the growing awareness of the unjust killings of civilians by police—a political shift that resulted in widespread state-level policy changes?

I have argued that these policy changes are small potatoes, but let’s say that they’re meaningful - what they certainly do not amount to is defunding the police or anything the whole anti-carceral set would have accepted four years ago. No one marching in the streets in 2020 was demanding small-bore piecemeal state-level changes; they were very explicitly demanding a complete change in society’s relationship with law and order. I think some of those reforms are great, but then I’ve always been a big fan of comprehensive criminal justice reform. (A congenital problem in political argument is that people insist on treating reform and revolution as ends rather than means; reform and revolution are not value-bearing in and of themselves, but become hung with values by the specifics of any given issue and moment.) And again, this is how politics actually gradually evolves, not through people explicitly rejecting their old politics but through strategically softening them over time. It’s a form of face-saving through motte and bailey, which you can’t stop seeing once you notice the basic pattern.