I remember you tweeting, probably in 2020, how frustrating it was going to be as this all played out, that people that were fully on board with what was going on were going to be able to slowly back away saying, "oh no, I was never saying that!". And so it has come to pass......
There is an easy explanation in that Anglosphere culture runs an unsynchronised political calendar. The only true indicator of public mood are elections since quite clearly the spectrum of views are not accurately represented by the mainstream and have balkanised into echo chambers. That may explain why eg the Jaguar fiasco still happened despite American culture having just undergone a major shift of public mood.
We just had the German, and Australia & Canada elections are soon to follow. That will send a stronger signal to the marketplace of ideas as to which ones are in demand.
There is also an element of paranoia within wokeness - the very same thought process that eg racism is worse than ever is the same one that thinks this pushback is some quasi-fascist coup.
As a left-wing person, I used to watch Novara Media, and I liked Ash and her colleagues. I stopped watching when they appeared, like many pundits, to be completely silent on the issue of women's rights in the wake of the trans phenomenon. I realised that the far left, despite all its - in my opinion - good work historically, had lost sight of its primary goals. Perhaps they are finally understanding that.
"It cannot be true both that wokeness is waning and that it is not, that left-wing politicians are doubling down on it and that they are distancing themselves from it"
IMO while it is pretty clear that we are past Peak Woke, the idea that it's waning, as opposed to merely having gone down a bit and roughly plateaued, is at minimum an open question.
Activists and universities have seen precious little signs of waning.
And looking at the recent Dem Party internal elections surely doesn't suggest meaningful waning.
Re: politicians, I can't be sure but my best guess is that those politicians in the safest blue seats and states will maintain their wokeness for a long time.
Apparently Ben Shapiro and other influential right-wingers are trying to get Trump to pardon Derek Chauvin. This seems like an attempt to galvanize the woke movement in reaction - because the anti-woke right is strengthened by having a stronger woke movement to rail against.
The way to separate the opportunists from those who've had a genuine conversion is to ask them directly why they no longer support this or that (or wokeness in general), or why they removed their pronouns. The genuinely penitent will want you to trust them and will share more honestly rather than give vague answers or, "Because I don't want any shit from my Republican congresscritters."
One of the reasons why I like working with my writing partner Anuradha Pandey at Radically Pragmatic is because she's ex-woke/SJW who's been honest about why she was 'progressive' left before and why she no longer is. She didn't change positions with the direction of the wind, she genuinely saw the folly in what she had believed in, and she asked herself *why*. A book in my reading stack (maybe my next read) is one taking a look at the failures of how we handled the pandemic. What I believed then may not have been so right after all, so the questions for myself are, if I believed something wrong, was I operating under the best possible information at the time? Did I not ask some glaringly obvious questions? Did I have good reason to disbelieve certain sources or did I believe what I wanted to believe? Did I trust the wrong people, and if so, why? And I intend to write about it.
We'll all look a lot more credible if we can admit when we were wrong and why. Many progressives and MAGAs will cling to their debunked or discredited beliefs until their dying day like an old Nazi dying in a South American jungle. It'll be too painful for them to admit how wrong they were about this or that--and, not like, wrong about *everything*, if they dare to parse that far. We need to make the world safe for being wrong again.
Or 'flip flopping' as the Republicans derisively called it during the 2004 election campaign. Which is to say, people who change their mind about something when they receive better information/evidence.
About Mill's "tyranny of prevailing opinion", I think a key factor in this case is that many people are waking up to the fact that the set of opinions that ruined many people's lives wasn't even prevailing in the first place and that the whole storm had been astroturfed into the tea cup (mixed metaphor is my middle name) by a narrow deranged cohort.
It's bad when a social sickness spreads organically, but it's especially aggravating when we all totter out of the bomb shelter squinting in the sunlight, going "Wait, wtf, you didn't believe that either?"
Has anyone yet put on The Crucible re-dressed in the modern setting with witch-hunts replaced by DEI inquiries? When I was in Y11 reading Miller in class I wondered why were reading stodgy old plays. Apologies Mr Buckley, I now understand.
Great idea! A school would be a great setting, sort of Jean Brodie/Hester Prynne! Living through cancel culture in Massachusetts myself, I've gotten what I call the Puritan glare many times for refusing to confess my racism or post my pronouns. The righteousness hasn't changed one iota.
This is about two conflicting perceptions on whether left-wing parties are doubling down on wokeness or fleeing it at the moment.
I'm afraid I have not addressed the attitudes of younger people right now and whether this is likely to cause a resurgence of some variation of woke in the future. Sociological forecasts are not really a thing I am confident doing, although I do address the problem of indoctrination in schools and universities which is relevant. Obviously this is a separate issue though and does not have any impact on these two perceptions that exist about what is happening right now.
Thanks for your reply. The obvious worry is that the indoctrination that gave us the current crop of woke nutters will easily do the same to the next—but doubly so. But, yes, hard to predict. Some reform of schools/Uni is needed.
Wokeness will be on the run for at least the next four years. The Fragile Generation will come to the battle unable to handle the pushback or the executive order mandates. If President Musk and VP Trump want to cut serious bloat, there's the American academic university system which is swimming in money and administration but starves its students of anything resembling a genuine education.
Maybe it's as simple as a completely shattered political coalition. There is no agreed upon "platform" and everyone is pinballing about looking for a savior.
I love your writing, first and foremost, thanks, and I love the term “Critical Social Justice”.
It is quit old though as you point out. I remember mid-80’s on the Usenet forum soc.motss (Usenet the precursor to all social media) a strange thing happening. Soc.motss was a lesbian and gay forum, and quite lively. I can still find my messages from there. A friend of mine Jess Anderson (dead, almost everyone I knew is dead) mentioned there was a list circulated at University of Wisconsin with words which should not be used. It was the first “politically correct” list any of us had seen, quite risible of course.
40 years ago.
How do we know it’s “over”? There is no going back in time, much of the wording is permanently embedded in ambient language.
It’s like COVID, the thing which was ultimately had to handle was “what is the metric when we know it’s over”
I am going to side and quad down hard with BOTH those who are "facing disciplinary action right now for objecting to the idea that therapy clients can only be understood by therapists of the same rac" AND minors facing criminal prosecution for owning illegal puberty blockers. BOTH of them. I am siding with them placing their better judgment above authoritative rules and want to sabotage the consequences for their actions.
Well, I am on the left and, although I am certainly not responsible for wokeness, I think those first two points are what the left needs to do.
1) Acknowledge that what people are seeing is actually happening. There is doubling down and dishonest distancing happening rather than taking responsibility.
2) Acknowledge that people have been deeply personally impacted in their lives by this and they will need to rebuild trust and not be surprised if it takes some time before people are willing to give it.
Yes, to make people feel 'seen'. Moving on and fixing things requires acknowledgements.
The problem is this applies the other way, too. People want to say transgender is inherently illegitimate, and that is JUST as wrong and dismissive of real, lived pain as those who want to curtly talk to women who may be at the core paining from Sexual Abuse when they react uncomfortably toward trans suggestions.
What does it mean to say that BOTH realities of lived experience are equally 100% real and faithful to what their exponents are saying? That is the correct approach to these issues, not some sort of pro-or-anti- an ideological PACKAGE (e.g. "woke" or "anti-woke").
When engaging with people's experiences, feelings and perception, one should not dismiss them as dishonest or fake, certainly, but we also need to accept that these are subjective experiences and feelings and that they are relevant when considering those. We often need to consider material reality and empirical data to address issues of social importance.
As written and in isolation I see nothing objectionable about this idea at all. My question is what and how you see it as *applying*. It's the specifics that may or may not be of concern. Without saying what those are I can only guess and my guess is almost sure to be in error. That is, explain how precisely you see this as applying to an issue like transgender so I don't have to guess.
Helen is on a tear recently!
I remember you tweeting, probably in 2020, how frustrating it was going to be as this all played out, that people that were fully on board with what was going on were going to be able to slowly back away saying, "oh no, I was never saying that!". And so it has come to pass......
There is an easy explanation in that Anglosphere culture runs an unsynchronised political calendar. The only true indicator of public mood are elections since quite clearly the spectrum of views are not accurately represented by the mainstream and have balkanised into echo chambers. That may explain why eg the Jaguar fiasco still happened despite American culture having just undergone a major shift of public mood.
We just had the German, and Australia & Canada elections are soon to follow. That will send a stronger signal to the marketplace of ideas as to which ones are in demand.
There is also an element of paranoia within wokeness - the very same thought process that eg racism is worse than ever is the same one that thinks this pushback is some quasi-fascist coup.
As a left-wing person, I used to watch Novara Media, and I liked Ash and her colleagues. I stopped watching when they appeared, like many pundits, to be completely silent on the issue of women's rights in the wake of the trans phenomenon. I realised that the far left, despite all its - in my opinion - good work historically, had lost sight of its primary goals. Perhaps they are finally understanding that.
"It cannot be true both that wokeness is waning and that it is not, that left-wing politicians are doubling down on it and that they are distancing themselves from it"
IMO while it is pretty clear that we are past Peak Woke, the idea that it's waning, as opposed to merely having gone down a bit and roughly plateaued, is at minimum an open question.
Activists and universities have seen precious little signs of waning.
And looking at the recent Dem Party internal elections surely doesn't suggest meaningful waning.
Re: politicians, I can't be sure but my best guess is that those politicians in the safest blue seats and states will maintain their wokeness for a long time.
Apparently Ben Shapiro and other influential right-wingers are trying to get Trump to pardon Derek Chauvin. This seems like an attempt to galvanize the woke movement in reaction - because the anti-woke right is strengthened by having a stronger woke movement to rail against.
The way to separate the opportunists from those who've had a genuine conversion is to ask them directly why they no longer support this or that (or wokeness in general), or why they removed their pronouns. The genuinely penitent will want you to trust them and will share more honestly rather than give vague answers or, "Because I don't want any shit from my Republican congresscritters."
One of the reasons why I like working with my writing partner Anuradha Pandey at Radically Pragmatic is because she's ex-woke/SJW who's been honest about why she was 'progressive' left before and why she no longer is. She didn't change positions with the direction of the wind, she genuinely saw the folly in what she had believed in, and she asked herself *why*. A book in my reading stack (maybe my next read) is one taking a look at the failures of how we handled the pandemic. What I believed then may not have been so right after all, so the questions for myself are, if I believed something wrong, was I operating under the best possible information at the time? Did I not ask some glaringly obvious questions? Did I have good reason to disbelieve certain sources or did I believe what I wanted to believe? Did I trust the wrong people, and if so, why? And I intend to write about it.
We'll all look a lot more credible if we can admit when we were wrong and why. Many progressives and MAGAs will cling to their debunked or discredited beliefs until their dying day like an old Nazi dying in a South American jungle. It'll be too painful for them to admit how wrong they were about this or that--and, not like, wrong about *everything*, if they dare to parse that far. We need to make the world safe for being wrong again.
Or 'flip flopping' as the Republicans derisively called it during the 2004 election campaign. Which is to say, people who change their mind about something when they receive better information/evidence.
About Mill's "tyranny of prevailing opinion", I think a key factor in this case is that many people are waking up to the fact that the set of opinions that ruined many people's lives wasn't even prevailing in the first place and that the whole storm had been astroturfed into the tea cup (mixed metaphor is my middle name) by a narrow deranged cohort.
It's bad when a social sickness spreads organically, but it's especially aggravating when we all totter out of the bomb shelter squinting in the sunlight, going "Wait, wtf, you didn't believe that either?"
Ok, so this just sent me to reading your pg for awhile;)
Awesome! What's my pg? 🤔
If I made you laugh, I consider my good deed done.
Not in New Puritan Massachusetts 🙄
https://www.masslive.com/news/2025/02/gov-healey-to-mass-schools-continue-dei-programs-despite-federal-pressure.html
Has anyone yet put on The Crucible re-dressed in the modern setting with witch-hunts replaced by DEI inquiries? When I was in Y11 reading Miller in class I wondered why were reading stodgy old plays. Apologies Mr Buckley, I now understand.
Great idea! A school would be a great setting, sort of Jean Brodie/Hester Prynne! Living through cancel culture in Massachusetts myself, I've gotten what I call the Puritan glare many times for refusing to confess my racism or post my pronouns. The righteousness hasn't changed one iota.
What about Eric Kaufmann’s claim that the coming generations are uber woke?
This is about two conflicting perceptions on whether left-wing parties are doubling down on wokeness or fleeing it at the moment.
I'm afraid I have not addressed the attitudes of younger people right now and whether this is likely to cause a resurgence of some variation of woke in the future. Sociological forecasts are not really a thing I am confident doing, although I do address the problem of indoctrination in schools and universities which is relevant. Obviously this is a separate issue though and does not have any impact on these two perceptions that exist about what is happening right now.
Thanks for your reply. The obvious worry is that the indoctrination that gave us the current crop of woke nutters will easily do the same to the next—but doubly so. But, yes, hard to predict. Some reform of schools/Uni is needed.
Wokeness will be on the run for at least the next four years. The Fragile Generation will come to the battle unable to handle the pushback or the executive order mandates. If President Musk and VP Trump want to cut serious bloat, there's the American academic university system which is swimming in money and administration but starves its students of anything resembling a genuine education.
Maybe it's as simple as a completely shattered political coalition. There is no agreed upon "platform" and everyone is pinballing about looking for a savior.
I love your writing, first and foremost, thanks, and I love the term “Critical Social Justice”.
It is quit old though as you point out. I remember mid-80’s on the Usenet forum soc.motss (Usenet the precursor to all social media) a strange thing happening. Soc.motss was a lesbian and gay forum, and quite lively. I can still find my messages from there. A friend of mine Jess Anderson (dead, almost everyone I knew is dead) mentioned there was a list circulated at University of Wisconsin with words which should not be used. It was the first “politically correct” list any of us had seen, quite risible of course.
40 years ago.
How do we know it’s “over”? There is no going back in time, much of the wording is permanently embedded in ambient language.
It’s like COVID, the thing which was ultimately had to handle was “what is the metric when we know it’s over”
I am going to side and quad down hard with BOTH those who are "facing disciplinary action right now for objecting to the idea that therapy clients can only be understood by therapists of the same rac" AND minors facing criminal prosecution for owning illegal puberty blockers. BOTH of them. I am siding with them placing their better judgment above authoritative rules and want to sabotage the consequences for their actions.
Well, I am on the left and, although I am certainly not responsible for wokeness, I think those first two points are what the left needs to do.
1) Acknowledge that what people are seeing is actually happening. There is doubling down and dishonest distancing happening rather than taking responsibility.
2) Acknowledge that people have been deeply personally impacted in their lives by this and they will need to rebuild trust and not be surprised if it takes some time before people are willing to give it.
Yes, to make people feel 'seen'. Moving on and fixing things requires acknowledgements.
The problem is this applies the other way, too. People want to say transgender is inherently illegitimate, and that is JUST as wrong and dismissive of real, lived pain as those who want to curtly talk to women who may be at the core paining from Sexual Abuse when they react uncomfortably toward trans suggestions.
What does it mean to say that BOTH realities of lived experience are equally 100% real and faithful to what their exponents are saying? That is the correct approach to these issues, not some sort of pro-or-anti- an ideological PACKAGE (e.g. "woke" or "anti-woke").
When engaging with people's experiences, feelings and perception, one should not dismiss them as dishonest or fake, certainly, but we also need to accept that these are subjective experiences and feelings and that they are relevant when considering those. We often need to consider material reality and empirical data to address issues of social importance.
As written and in isolation I see nothing objectionable about this idea at all. My question is what and how you see it as *applying*. It's the specifics that may or may not be of concern. Without saying what those are I can only guess and my guess is almost sure to be in error. That is, explain how precisely you see this as applying to an issue like transgender so I don't have to guess.