Woke—Who’s to blame?

Most polls are showing a virtual tie and in 2016 and 2020 Trump did better in the election than he had been doing in the polls. How can this plutocrat be within range of beating the people’s party for a second time? Answer below.

In July of 2015, I signed up for a Bernie Sanders campaign rally in Portland, Maine. Soon after, I got an email saying the rally would take place in a larger venue to accommodate the growing crowd. I think they had to move the venue a couple of times as more and more of us signed up.

Sanders eventually filled the Cross Insurance Arena with a crowd that cheered enthusiastically for his indictment of “establishment politics and establishment economics” and a laundry list of progressive policy ideas aimed at reining in Wall Street greed and restoring the middle class.

We were feeling the Bern and the fire only grew hotter over the next five years, culminating in Sanders’ victories in the first three primaries of 2020. As he delivered his victory speech in Nevada in late February of that year, it seemed like the Democratic Party was on the verge of a progressive populist revolution.

Fast forward five years.

An essay landed in my inbox last week with a title that sadly states the obvious: “The Progressive Moment Is Over.”

So, what happened?

The email, by Ruy Teixeira, blamed four “terrible ideas.” But idea #3 is particularly terrible in its effect on Democrats’ electoral prospects:

Insisting that everyone should look at all issues through the lens of identity politics was a terrible idea and voters hate it.

I didn’t take notes on Sanders’ Portland speech, but the Portland Press Herald did. According to their report, the closest he came to an identity issue was wanting to spend more tax dollars on schools and less on prisons. What stands out in my memory of the rally—and in the Portland Press Herald ’s report on it—was a relentless focus on economics and class. 

He condemned free trade agreements, Wall Street greed, the stingy minimum wage, the decline of the middle class, and growing wealth inequality.

“The greed of Wall Street and the greed of corporate America is destroying the great middle class of this country,” Sanders said. “And people are saying from coast to coast, ‘You can’t keep getting away with that.’ ”

That was what he tried to focus on throughout his two campaigns for the presidency. But promoters of terrible idea #3 made that difficult.

From the very beginning of his campaign in 2015, the press gave prominent coverage to criticism of Bernie for failing to emphasize race and other identity categories as the source of oppression.

At a conference for progressive activists the same month as the Portland rally, some in the audience were “frustrated” because he “answered questions about racial issues by pivoting back to economic ones.”

As Vox explained at the time: “Sanders believes in racial equality, sure, but he believes it will only come as the result of economic equality. To him, focusing on racial issues first is merely treating the symptom, not the disease.”

Later that summer, BLM protestors seized his microphone at campaign events in Pheonix and Seattle. To some, those spectacles suggested he was not sympathetic to the plight of African Americans, to others surrendering the podium made him look week. In Seattle, he never ended up delivering his planned remarks in defense of Medicare and Social Security and press coverage focused on the protest rather than Sanders’ class-based message.

During the 2016 presidential nomination contest, Hillary Clinton used identity politics to get an advantage over Sanders. She framed her candidacy as a bid to break the highest “glass ceiling” and defended an ally’s suggestion that there was a “special place in hell” for women who didn’t vote for her.

And she attacked Bernie’s class politics in this famous comment:

If we broke up the big banks tomorrow — and I will if they deserve it, if they pose a systemic risk, I will — would that end racism? … Would that end sexism? Would that end discrimination against the LGBT community? Would that make people feel more welcoming to immigrants overnight?

Meanwhile, when an interviewer asked Sanders if he supported open borders, he called the idea a Koch brothers scheme to lower wages. The reaction on the identity-focused left was swift and widespread, derided as “ugly” and “backward-looking.”

Sanders also got flack in 2016 from the era’s most prominent Black writer, Ta-Nehisi Coates, for opposing reparations for slavery. Class-based programs, Sanders argued, would disproportionately help Blacks and other people of color who suffer disproportionate rates of poverty.

Coates who voted for Sanders, said the candidate didn’t understand the argument for reparations and suggested that since every other part of his radical socialist agenda was pie-in-the-sky with no chance of passing through Congress, why not add another radical, divisive and unrealistic item to the list?

After Sanders’ loss to Clinton, the renowned Black historian Barbara Fields lambasted the Democrats for missing a chance to build a class-based majority. Bernie, she said, had

found a way to talk about the overall inequality and injustice without trying to speak to individual designated portions of the populace as though they were separate entities.… [Democrats] decided they [would] rather keep their apparatus and apparatchiks who benefit from [the fracturing of the electorate along identity lines].… They threw away a grace we were given, and so we got instead Donald Trump.

We’ll never know if the left-populism of Sanders could have beaten right-wing populism in the general election, but we do know that Sanders did better than Clinton in polling matchups against Trump during the late primaries of 2016.  His reception at a recent rally in Pennsylvania for Harris suggests he is still popular.  “I know a lot of people that are voting for Trump that actually like Bernie Sanders,” one rally-goer told a Times reporter.

Thanks at least in part to the machinations of party leaders, the Democrats picked maybe the worst possible candidate to run in the year of Brexit and anti-establishment populist fervor.

Hillary Clinton was practically the embodiment of the unpopular and mostly-repudiated anti-worker neoliberal economic regime that both Sanders and Trump ran against that year.

The key to Sanders’ defeat in 2016 was the Southern states, where Black voters overwhelmingly chose Clinton. As he prepared for a 2020 campaign, Sanders hoped to do better with those voters. He hired more Black staffers and while he continued to emphasize economics and class, he made some concessions to the identity left.

For instance, he raised his hand during a debate in 2019 along with most of the other Democratic candidates when asked if he was in favor of decriminalizing illegal border crossings, a position that has haunted 2019 hand-raiser Kamala Harris this year.

But Bernie continued to run afoul of the identitarians in the party—now on gender issues. Liz Warran—the identitarian primary contender in Bernie’s progressive lane—attacked him for allegedly telling her, in a private conversation, that a woman couldn’t be elected president. Sanders denied the claim. Meanwhile, his followers were derided as “Bernie Bros” and condemned for sexist behavior on Twitter.

Next, Bernie was condemned by transgender activists for doing an interview with Joe Rogan and accepting his endorsement because of comments Rogan had made about transgender women.

History as prologue

The focus on identity is the fountainhead of the culture wars that have been raging with varying levels of intensity since the 1960s when the fundamental basis of political conflict shifted from class—which gave Democrats and liberals within the Republican Party an unbeatable advantage from 1932 to 1960—to race, ethnicity, and gender—which has made the Democrats very beatable and enabled conservatives to take over the Republican Party.

In Before the Storm, Rick Perlstein shows how Barry Goldwater’s 1964 presidential campaign elbowed liberals out of the Republican party. We associate Goldwater with anti-communism and laissez faire economics and an electoral college wipeout, but it was his opposition to the Civil Rights Act that enabled him to win five deep-South states—the cradle of the Confederacy—and end the Democrats’ century-long lock on the South.

What has happened to progressives and the Democratic Party since the apogee of Bernie Sanders’ presidential ambitions in 2020 after he won the first three primaries and seemed poised to capture the nomination is not all that different from the trajectory of the left after LBJ’s landslide victory in 1964.

Goldwater’s campaign showed Nixon how to use racial identity to activate white tribal instincts during a time of racial unrest and win the presidency in ’68 and ‘72. Back then Nixon stoked opposition to crime, anti-war demonstrations, urban riots, civil rights legislation, affirmative action, and busing. Lately the right has focused on affirmative action, crime and protests again, but also immigration, drag queen story hour, left-wing cancellations, DEI programing, transgender controversies, and liberal/left-wing academics (including high school history teachers).

And the right has shrewdly painted every policy idea they don’t like, including much of the Sanders economic agenda, as “woke.” But while their attack on identity politics has been successful with an electorate that leans conservative on culture, liberal Bernie-esque economic policies also remain popular.

As Teixeira has argued in his book and elsewhere (but not in the “four terrible ideas” email), the party that adopts liberal or progressive policies on class and economics along with moderate or conservative policies on culture and identity could win a commanding majority. But Republicans can’t give up on tax breaks, and Harris can’t make a clean break with the cultural left.

She chose a VP who had capitulated more to the woke left than the more centrist option—the Jewish Governor of the must-win state of Pennsylvania, perhaps out of fear of backlash from anti-Israel protestors.

She has moved a bit in that direction, but maybe not enough. Recently she declined an interview with Joe Rogan, probably out of fear of the same backlash that Bernie suffered. But in doing so, she missed a chance to win back some of the male voters—the Bernie Bros?—who have been leaving the party in droves.

And she hasn’t had the “Sister Souljah” moment that Bill Maher and others are calling for. If she loses on Tuesday, it will be because she didn’t make a clean break—not with the progressivism of Bernie Sanders, but with terrible idea #3—the Progressivism and liberalism of identity politics.

Scoop!

A Times article, by Jeremy Peters, Nov. 2.

I scooped the New York Times.

Between Oct. 16 and 26 I posted a series of essays about the current state of identity politics on this blog.  Then today, Nov. 2, the Times published this article noting that identity politics is losing its "grip on the country."

I agree with much of Jeremy W. Peters’ reporting but not all. For one thing, the heading should say it's losing its grip on the Democratic party. I'm not so sure the right wing is giving up on it.  More on that in a future post.

In “Wither woke?” I posed the same question that Peters is addressing—have we passed peak woke?—and came to the same general answer, pointing to some of the same contrary evidence that he mentions toward the end of his piece. 

In “DEI and the left critique,” I wrote something akin to his comment that "some of the most effective pushback to the hard left has, in fact, come from within institutions sympathetic to progressive impulses." But unlike Peters, I noted that the left-critique of identity politics is not new, and all along has been more convincing and insightful than most conservative critiques.

Throughout his piece Peters repeats an error common in the media, conflating the “progressive” with the “identitarian left.” For example in citing Yasha Mounk, who is guilty of this too, he writes: “Today, he said of progressives, ‘The brief era of their unquestioned dominance is now coming to an end.’” I’ve been working on a piece on this topic for the past week. Coming soon.

Part of the problem is that there is no one good word to describe the identity obsessions of some folks on the left.  In “Don’t say woke,” I provide a glossary of the many different terms you might use in addition to "idenity," and rather than "progressive."

Since 2020, Peters writes, “candidates who aligned themselves with progressive activists have fared poorly in many high-profile races, even in deep blue bastions.” It would be more accurate to say that candidates who align themselves with 2020-style woke activists have fared poorly. Peters points to two such House members, Corey Bush and Jamaal Bowman. But AOC and Sanders are still quite popular. She won her district primary with 82 Percent of the vote in August, and Sanders leads in his Senate re-election race 66-25%.

In “Political socialism” I pointed out how AOC and Sanders embrace politics rather than the moral grandstanding characteristic of the woke left, and that has been part of their continued success.

My next post, out tomorrow, deepens this point by showing how appeals to identity categories like race and gender are no less common on the moderate, establishment left than among those we might think of as “progressive.”

Whither woke?

Up here in the Northern New Hampshire everybody’s asking: are we past the peak?

Yesterday, driving around and gazing at the brilliant oranges and reds glowing in the sunlight I realized that, contrary to what seems true when you look out my back window, the peak is not yet behind us. I’m glad I didn’t stay at home.

Clearly, you need a broader perspective to judge if a trend has peaked, or slowed down, or had a temporary setback or whatever.

There’s a circle of people that I tend to pay some attention to who are asking a similar question about a different trend. Have we passed “peak woke”? Unlike the foliage-obsessed, most of these folks are rooting not for a nay, but for a yay in answer to their question.

(What is woke, and isn’t there a better word for it?)  

Who are these people? They write or speak in the political podcasts and columns I read—a lot of them reside in Substack-istan. A lot of them tweet:

Wokeness has not peaked. Cancellation peaked because wokeness seized control of all the institutions it sought to control and drove out all dissenters, obviating the need for further cancellations as it imposes its agenda uncontested https://t.co/vnv2fyjqgs

— Wesley Yang (@wesyang) October 9, 2024

There are strong opinions. The most critical opponents of woke—especially victims of woke-driven cancellation like Mr. Yang—are more likely to be pessimistic. If identity politics seems to be less aggressive, it’s because it's work is mostly done, having succeeded in permeating civic institutions with woke values. Ibram Kendi’s star may be setting, but the Pulitzer Center’s 1619 project has gotten a very Kendi-esque message about the “foundational role” of slavery into US history curricula in all 50 states according to a five-year report the center issued last month.

Others seem to think that while a few bitter-enders (what someone referred to as “Blue MAGA”) continue to push radical (woke) identitarianism, these are “lagging indicators” and we’re mostly done with all that. 

A few examples that the great awakening is ending: some universities have stopped requiring diversity statements from job applicants. Corporations have cut back on DEI spending. Anti-woke writings issue from all directions on the political compass. Some news outlets have backed away from the woke advocacy that had seeped in to their coverage a few years ago.

The New York Times is the prime example. After some high profile cancellations during the 2020 “reckoning” (inquisition), the Times has adjusted its application of “moral clarity”  toward a more traditional version of journalistic objectivity. Hired in the wake of those fiascos, executive editor Joseph Kahn refused to capitulate to the demands issued in open letters by woke staffers who objected to coverage of transgender issues and the conflict in Israel/Palestine. The opinion page has also hired woke-critical writers like John McWhorter and Pamela Paul, also to the chagrin of some SJW staffers. Also, word usage. The Economist counted up the number of times “white privilege” appeared in the Times —2.5 per million in 2020 and just 0.4 in 2023.

Then there's the cyclical theory.  The movement is not dead, but has retreated to the shadows, as Freddie DeBoer puts it, “to reorganize itself and come up with new arguments” that will be unveiled at some point in the future. There really is no dustbin of history, it turns out, just rehab where out-of-fashion ideas go for rest and a makeover. 

But meanwhile, some of the ideas of the movement have become so deeply embedded into our cultural norms that we aren’t even aware of them. It’s like inflation. Prices have stopped rising, but they ain’t going back to what they were.

A key question about the current state of woke involves its current standing in the Democratic Party. Some would point to the triumph of Joe Biden, the least-woke candidate in 2020 and the fact that no significant Democrat ever endorsed “abolish the police.”

After the Democrat’s most cringe-worthy woke moment in 2020 when Congressional leaders took a knee and bowed their heads while wearing African Kente stoles in a moment of silence for George Floyd, the party has de-emphasized identity politics. 2024 nominee Harris hardly mentions that she would be the first female president and she’s abandoned most of her woke positions of 2020, like de-criminalizing border crossings.

But others think the Party hasn’t gone far enough. The decision to hand the nomination to Harris and her choice of the more liberal Tim Waltz over Josh Shapiro for VP are seen as signs that the Party isn’t going far enough. And Harris has renounced her woke 2020 stands, or said they were mistaken, or really offered any rationale for the change of position.

Brianna Wu recently cited a “Musicians for Kamala” YouTube event as typical of the way that “superficial identity politics” still dominate the Democrats' messaging and argued that the Party’s supposed “course correction” has been inadequate and is why Harris hasn’t pulled far ahead of the deeply unpopular Republican nominee.

Whether or not she is right about the party’s current direction, I think she is correct about the impact on Harris’s current standing in the polls. The great awokening has done perhaps irreparable damage to the Democratic Party’s ability to win elections and especially to the prospects of progressive reform within the party’s coalition.

As I was working on this essay, a Substack post from the Democratic strategist Ruy Teixeira landed in my inbox. His piece, “The Progressive Moment is Over,” diagnosed how the great progressive movement that was personified in Bernie Sanders, has been completely discredited and abandoned even by some of its most ardent supporters. 

He blamed four “terrible” progressive ideas, at least three of which can be categorized as “woke.” 

More on that soon: "Woke-the damage done."

DEI and the left critique

 

In January, Times reporter Nicholas Confessore published the results of his investigation of what he said was a concerted effort by “conservative activists” to abolish DEI on public university campuses. They had managed to get almost half the states to at least consider banning campus D.E.I. programs “even as polling has shown that diversity initiatives remain popular.”

Based on “thousands of documents obtained by The New York Times” including “casual correspondence” among “like-minded allies around the country,” full of “unvarnished views on race, sexuality and gender roles” in private emails, the report left the impression of a sinister right-wing conspiracy among racist homophobes against blameless and popular diversity programing.

After that report, Confessore decided he “needed to see D.E.I. programs up close,” so he traveled to the campus of the University of Michigan, home of a particularly extensive and longstanding DEI program.

It turns out that it’s not just far right, politically motivated conspirators who have a problem with Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion programs.

Some excerpts from his very long piece, published Wednesday in the Times Magazine, which I assume gets into today’s print edition.

Programs across the university are couched in the distinctive jargon that, to D.E.I.’s practitioners, reflects proven practices for making classrooms more inclusive, and to its critics reveals how deeply D.E.I. is encoded with left-wing ideologies….

Some researchers argue that teaching students to view the world chiefly through the lens of identity and oppression can leave them vulnerable instead of empowered. Psychologists have questioned whether implicit bias can be accurately measured or reduced through training. The notion that microaggressions are not only real but ubiquitous in interracial encounters is widespread in D.E.I. programs; a 2021 review of the microaggressions literature, however, judged it “without adequate scientific basis.”...

Some evidence suggests that the steady expansion of D.E.I. into campus life is actually constraining student interaction across political and cultural divides. One recent analysis by the political scientist Kevin Wallsten found that the larger the D.E.I. bureaucracy at a university, the more discomfort students felt expressing their views on social media and in informal conversations with other students....

Even some liberal scholars believe D.E.I. looms too large. Amna Khalid, a historian at Carleton College in Minnesota, argues that modern D.E.I. is not, as some on the right hold, a triumph of critical theory or postcolonialism but of the corporatization of higher education, in which universities have tried to turn moral and political ideals into a system of formulas and dashboards. “They want a managerial approach to difference,” Khalid said. “They want no friction. But diversity inherently means friction.”

According to Confessore, UMich has spent a quarter of a billion dollars on DEI programs and expanding administrative positions and has had profound effects—largely negative—on campus culture and politics.

These growing bureaucracies represented a major — and profoundly left-leaning — reshuffling of campus power. Administrators were even more politically liberal than faculty members, according to one survey, and far more likely to favor racial preferences in admissions and hiring. They promulgated what Lyell Asher, a professor of English at Lewis & Clark College in Oregon, has called “an alternate curriculum,” taught not in classrooms but in dorms, disciplinary hearings and orientation programs.

Some administrators discovered that student activists could be a potent campus constituency. The former president of one top research institution recalled for me how students once came to his office with demands, presented in a kind of theatrical performance, to enhance the university’s D.E.I. program. The former president, who asked for anonymity for fear of risking his present job, later learned that some of the program’s senior staff members had worked with and encouraged the students to pressure the administration on their behalf. “That was the moment at which I understood that there was a whole part of the bureaucracy that I didn’t control,” he said.

When I read Confessore’s January piece, I knew he was leaving something out. It’s true that conservatives have used DEI and other examples of what they call the woke ideology to discredit any policy or politician they don’t like. While some of their criticism is affirmed by this new reporting, much of it is cynical and dishonest.

The more incisive, measured, and accurate criticisms of both woke ideology and diversity programs have come from the left or the center—or from non-politicized subjects of DEI programming.

For example:

* Back in June of 2020, journalist/podcaster Katie Herzog interviewed with Shannon Loys, a graphic designer who participation in DEI training at the Seattle Repertory Theater, run by none other than Robin DiAngelo, the “Patron saint of DEI.” At the end of the interview, Loys and Herzog, both progressives, concluded that the training did more harm than good. Loys said she became “more cautious” in her interactions with Black co-workers, more likely to avoid interactions rather than risk causing offense.

* Like many self-identified Marxists, Freddy De Boer, has been a frequent critic of the woke left for its focus on racial and gender identity (what fellow socialist Adolph Reed refers to as “ascriptive” categories) to the exclusion of class. His book “How Elites Ate the Social Justice Movement,” is a scathing and revealing explanation of how Woke identity politics like DEI serve the interests of elites at the expense of the truly disadvantaged. DeBoer and Reed see DEI as essentially a conservative effort to coopt progressive movements. These critiques are nothing new. Reed has been sounding the alarm for decades, and in 2001, Elisabeth Lasch-Quinn published Race Experts claiming that the race relations consultants that proceeded DEI had “hijacked the Civil Rights Revolution.”

* In 2022, Maurice Mitchell, national director of the very progressive Working Families Party, which touts him as “a nationally-recognized social movement strategist, a visionary leader in the Movement for Black Lives, and a community organizer for racial, social, and economic justice,” wrote an essay, “Building Resilient Organizations,” in which he revealed how identity politics like DEI had hampered the progressive organizations he has served in.

* Other critics from the left that come to mind at the moment include Tyler Austin Harper, Michael Powell, Jonathan Haidt, Greg Lukianoff, Yasha Mounk, Sam Harris, Matt Yglesias, Catherine Liu, the socialist magazine, Jacobin (sometimes), and Musa al-Gharbi. 

* I wrote this piece in 2021 about how one staple of DEI training, getting white people to “check their privilege,” does more harm than good to the cause of racial justice.

And then there are very quiet critics, like those quoted in Wednesday's article, who work or study at the institutions where these programs have proliferated. One Michigan professor who had been investigated for causing offense in his class said the school has created a “gotcha culture,” in which students scrutinize their teachers’ comments for offensive words or comments and the “Bias Response Team” launches investigations based anonymous complaints, often for “offensive” or “disrespectful” word choices.

Unlike the conservative anti-woke activists or the many left-leaning critics outlined above, these mostly left-leaning folks keep reservations about diversity programs to themselves to avoid conflict or  discipline imposed by administrators whose job is to enforce DEI cultural norms.

Michigan may be an extreme example, but based on my own experience, and the research Confessore did beyond Michigan, the problems catalogued in the article seem to be typical of institutions that have introduced these programs. 

But Confessore's expose seems to be an indication that DEI and other elements of identity politics are on the wane at institutions like the Times itself.  A burning question among observers: have we passed "peak woke?" 

Also, isn't there a better word for woke?

Political socialism

"Some on the left see Ms. Ocasio-Cortez’s endorsement of Mr. Biden as a betrayal of progressive values"

 A reader of this blog (yes there is one) read my “Bernie won” post (Aug. 22) and asked why Sanders has been “less prominent” of late and if I thought his supposed victory had actually made things better for American workers.

Part of my response was to say that Bernie is more of a pragmatic politician than his socialist label and his refusal to join the Democratic Party would suggest.

It would be hard to show that any of the concessions he won from Biden and that have resulted in legislation during the last four years has had a significant impact on the life of workers. And of course his “victory” doesn’t represent an ultimate triumph of socialism, but a socialist might be pleased. 

Sanders is not one of those socialists that Bernard Crick says are “grossly unrealistic, often in too much of a hurry” and often “impatient of political means.” (If you don’t know who BC is, I’ve explained it here). “Great changes can only come in stages,” Crick writes, and politically oriented socialists should pursue “short-term tactical reforms within the system to build a basis of popular confidence for advance.”

It is not selling out to work within existing institutions, contrary to what AOC’s vociferous critics (eg, like DSA) are saying about her.  Bernie Sanders did not abandon his larger goals by endorsing Biden, and now Harris, and refraining from loud criticism of the administration.

As Crick says, socialists (and you might say this about any ideologues without representation among viable political parties) can push for incremental reforms within the current system and simultaneously work on “long-term persuasion” that might “change the climate of expectation,” leading to more dramatic changes down the road. FDR’s New Deal, for example, led to a sea change in Americans’ expectations of what the government would do to assure prosperity.

Sanders seems to have nudged the Democrats away from neoliberal policies toward more worker-oriented policies or at least poses, like Biden walking on a picket line, which might change voters' expectations for future policies.

Crick’s political socialism is informed by the failure of past revolutions that failed. He concludes in his note to impatient socialists:

From a base camp established amid representative or parliamentary institutions, the time needed for the establishment of a socialist society may appear desperately long. But the built-in political necessity of socialist governments having to carry with them an enfranchised public opinion, as well as an already organized trade-union movement, guarantees that each move of the camp further and further up the mountain will be on solid ground, less likely to slip backwards or simply to get stuck… great changes can only come in stages.

---

(Crick quotes: 241, 239) 

Source of the quote under the picture: New York Times

There were a lot of unrealistic and impatient socialists after Bernie lost the 2020 Democratic nomination. 

Don't say "Woke"

Since right-wing politicos appropriated “woke” as a cudgel to bash all things left (Ron DeSantis thought he could ride to the presidency on this strategy), more thoughtful critics, many of them liberal or leftist themselves, have felt a need to apologize whenever they use the term and to acknowledge its limitations. Some have tried to come up with a better word or phrase.

After hearing Lawrence Summers, in an interview, refer to the “social-justice-proclaiming left,” I decided to start collecting these. Here is surely an incomplete list, in no particular order, along with who I think coined the term.

1. The Great Awokening. Matt Yglesias. This might be my favorite, with its historical allusion to religion.

2. Successor Ideology. Wesley Yang. It points to a world-historic intellectual paradigm replacing the Western enlightenment. Yikes!

3. Critical Social Justice. James Lindsey et al. Interested in how he and the coauthors of his book, Cynical Theories, arrived at this term? Read this. Lindsey waged a contentious social media campaign against “cynical theories”—which exposed him to the worst defenders of woke and seems to have unhinged him. He started out as a liberal but his interactions with rabid wokesters turned him into a Trump voter and got him thrown off Twitter.

4. Identity Synthesis. Yasha Mounk coined this term for his recent book, The Identity Trap, explaining the intellectual and historical roots of Woke.

5. Cultural Marxism. Chris Rufo. More below. 

6. Performative Social Justice. I’m not sure who came up with this apt term, but Bates College professor Tyler Austin Harper uses it his critique of woke from the left (it is loud but toothless and not redistributive) in an Atlantic article on campus radicalism.

7. Identitarian Moral Panic. Sam Harris. Harris also likes to add the suffix “-istan” to movements he hates: hence, Trumpistan and Wokistan.

8. Luxury Beliefs. Rob Henderson. This term covers the whole woke spectrum (and then some) that you might encounter on any college campus.

9. Third Wave Antiracism. John McWhorter. In his book Woke Racism,” the title of which could also be considered a term for woke. The book frames the phenomenon as a religion.

10. The Shadow Party. Ruy Tuxiera and John Judis, in their book Where Have all the Democrats Gone. Woke attachment undermines the Democratic Party's support. 

11. Racial Reckoning. For a while, everyone was having one of these. The Washington Post had a link to a standing Racial Reckoning page on its website for quite a while. And on June 11, 2022, the American Nurses Association Assembly, “took historic action to begin a journey of racial reckoning by unanimously voting ‘yes’ to adopt the ANA Racial Reckoning Statement.”  Why is everything a journey these days?

It would be interesting to look at the subtle and not-so-subtle differences among these terms and discuss how they reflect different critiques of the Woke Left.

I’m not doing that here, but for a revealing look at the difference between the anti-woke right and the anti-woke left, listen to this Free Press debate between Mounk and Rufo, the right’s anti-woke tribune who was whispering in Gov. DeSantis’ ear in the lead-up to his presidential run.

Rufo tried to get the world to use the term “Critical Race Theory” or CRT as a substitute for “woke” but then gender identity became more salient than race in Wokistan. More telling was “Cultural Marxism” which he used in his book, America's Cultural Revolution: How the Radical Left Conquered Everything, which tries to paint everyone left of The Donald as a woke radical aiming to destroy civilization. Mounk sees identitarians as a heretical element of the left that betrays its fundamental values and undermines its purpose.

Lies, damned lies, and politics

There’s been a lot of commentary in the press this past week about the role of lies in politics.

In his Tuesday column https://www.nytimes.com/2024/10/08/opinion/helene-trump-vance-fema.html on Donald Trump’s lies about the federal response to Hurricane Helene, Jamelle Bouie wrote: “Politics is not the place for perfect honesty, but some measure of truth telling is necessary to the project of collective self-government.”

We all know that politicians bend the truth in making their case. Joe Biden and Tim Waltz, to name two prominent examples on the other side of the isle, have gotten caught in some whoppers.

If lying is an unavoidable part of politics, where is the line between what Bouie refers to as “some measure of truth” and lying that could destroy “collective self-government.”

It's a question that has become particularly urgent this hurricane season as Trump-flavored politicians circulate lies as brazen as Margorie Taylor Greene’s suggestion that the government is somehow causing catastrophic weather events.

Bouie vaguely suggests the line between acceptable and unacceptable lying is whether politicos “strive for some correspondence to reality when they make their case to the public.”

You-tuber Vlad Vexler is more precise. He defines the unacceptable liars as “post-truth populists” who “have consciously given up on trying to make their lies internally consistent,” so that it becomes impossible to tell the difference between truth and lies.” Their goal, he argues, is to destroy faith in institutions and politics itself and to foster the feeling that leaders “prioritize others over you.”

Vexler said this before Trump started claiming that FEMA disaster relief money was being channeled to illegal immigrants.

Where Bouie argues that brazen lies are anti-democratic, Vexler suggests instead that they are anti-political. They lead citizens to believe that “there is nothing you can do to inflect the political process.”

I think that’s a better explanation.

Bouie writes that without access to the truth, we can’t perform what he says is an essential part of democracy : reasoning and deliberating with fellow citizens.

In his book, In Defence of Politics, Bernard Crick separates democracy from politics, and the book includes a chapter with the title “A Defence of Politics Against Democracy.”

The democratic concept of “sovereignty of the people”—the right of “the people to choose the government they want”—suggests that in democracy, the people get their way.   In theory, “all power is supposed to stem from an undivided and indivisible ‘people,’” Crick writes.

But another essential concept of democracy—“majority rule”—means that minorities—the losers in elections—do not get their way.

“Sovereignty of the people” doesn’t address Crick’s incisive question: “which people?” (Crick, 59-60).

A key feature of populism is to define “The people” against an enemy. Trump has referred to journalists as “enemies of the people”; Bernie Sanders’ to “billionaires.” Enemies like that must be suppressed, populists say, but Crick defines politics as “the activity by which differing interests within a given territory are conciliated,” not suppressed.

But if democracy is elevated over politics, democracy is at risk. Tocqueville spoke of "democratic despotism" and worried that if ever the free institutions of America are destroyed, that event may be attributed to the omnipotence of the majority."

Hannah Arendt, a survivor of totalitarianism, was quoted in my local newspaper last week on how the destruction of politics in a democratic system leads to authoritarian government: “Keeping listeners constantly trying to defend what is real from what is not destroys their ability to make sense of the world. Many people turn to a strong man who promises to create order. Others will get so exhausted they simply give up.” Established authoritarian dictatorships, Anne Applebaum wrote in the June Atlantic, suppress citizens yearning for democracy not by discrediting the notions of popular sovereignty or majority rule, but by promoting apathy and cynicism about the potential of political action to create a better world. “Their goal is to persuade people to stay out of politics.”

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Leftovers

Hannah Arendt was quoted by Lynn Wurzburg of St. J. Oct. 9, 2024, Caledonian Record Crick talks about the problem of sovereignty on pp. 59-60 of Defence of Politics. Danielle Allen also confronts this problem in her book on citizenship, which I wrote about elsewhere on this blog:

One of the most important lessons students need to learn to become democratic citizens is that in spite of the individual freedom and sovereignty that democracies promise their citizens, we don’t always get our way even in a well-functioning democracy and are often asked to sacrifice our personal preferences and interests for the good of the whole, the survival of democracy, and the maintenance of peace. When our candidate loses the election, when we are drafted and sent into battle, and when policies favored by the majority disadvantage us or go against what we think is good, we are sacrificing something. https://www.billjordan.net/2022/08/teaching-citizenship-in-polarized.html