Forgive me but isn't anti-woke running the US government?
Too far east has become very much west
Like many, I’ve checked out of the social media platform X in recent months. At best, it’s fash adjacent and at worst, one’s presence on the platform – even posting on matters unrelated to politics – is enabling far-right ideas. And that’s not what I do my kind of mildly self-deprecating humour for.
The state of that particular website – and I do owe a lot to old Twitter, which supplied much of my initial Substack audience – is an interesting case study in what happens when ideas are pursued beyond their logical end point or, to use an analogy, what occurs when you keep fighting a war after it has been won. The current attacks against wokeness, trans athletes and Black Lives matter have the air of the rounding up and humiliation of already defeated and bedraggled troops.
Anti-wokeness congealed around an idea. The ideas was that the social justice politics commonly-known as wokeness was illiberal and authoritarian. Both liberals and conservatives agreed on this point. This agreement created an ecosystem of podcasts, commentators, social media stars and eventually even politicians who formed expedient alliances to decry and defeat that political approach. They didn’t agree on much, but they had a common enemy for a time, and a respectful silence about what would come after it had been seen off.
First, a recap of wokeness as I saw it. In the late 2010s, there was cultural shift in liberal spaces from traditional values of tolerance, inclusivity and humour to a much more restricted definition of liberalism predicated on racial hierarchies and the avoidance of harm as a cardinal virtue. There was, for a brief but an intense time, a tendency to assert debatable and provocative sociological concepts, from white supremacy to an innate ‘gender identity’, as if these were objective facts rather than what they really were, namely items for discussion. Provocations, even.
In addition, any questioning of these ideas was responded to as only confirming the validity of the original concepts themselves or, in the worse case, demonstrating the moral failings of the questioner. It was vile, illiberal and hubristic, and has left a stain of bullying sanctimony on much of the left. Progressives must never again present their politics as a moral test electorates dare not fail.
Now, I don’t nor have ever belonged to that intellectually dishonest cadre of people who pretended wokeness didn’t exist while simultaneously practicing what could only be described as wokeness; telling people to ‘do the work’, denouncing things as ‘problematic’ and worst of all employing that weasel-worded phrase of that period, ‘I believe in free speech with consequences.’ After all, what warms you up for unfettered freedom of expression more than being reminded that your words will have ‘consequences’! Truly a definition of free speech which only a particularly officious border guard could love.
But time just keeps rolling on. Anti-wokeness is becoming what we did when we were young, or at least a bit younger. Sure, as someone still mildly adjacent to arts and academia, I see the last hold-outs of these ideas, a sort of Hiro Onadism of identitarian left politics while the rest of the world moves on to its latest pathologies. Yet strident identitarian politics aren't even the main challenge facing the humanities right now - and it is largely the humanities which has been the home, tho by no means to universal support, of this stuff – with the threat of mass redundancies and AI coming for all kinds of jobs. To the extent woke mantras still play a role now, it’s as the last words on the lips of drowning sailors, out-of-context catechisms as the whole ship of the humanities washes up on technology’s shore.