Wokeism has peaked
Virginia has gone Republican (temporarily, because of school-related issues), San Francisco recalled its school board by a decisive margin, Joe Rogan wasn’t cancelled, and there may be a significant war in Ukraine. That is the theme of my latest Bloomberg column. Excerpt:
The turning point for the fortunes of the woke may be this week’s school board election in San Francisco, where three members were recalled by a margin of more than 70%. Voters were upset that the school board spent time trying to rename some schools in a more politically correct manner, rather than focusing on reopening all the schools. There was also considerable opposition to the board’s introduction of a lottery admissions system for a prestigious high school, in lieu of the previous use of grades and exam scores.
And:
Another trend is how relatively few immigrants are woke. Latinos in particular seem more open to the Republican Party, or at least don’t seem to have strong partisan attachments. More generally, immigrant political views are more diverse than many people think, even within the Democratic Party.
And:
Wokeism is likely to evolve into a subculture that is highly educated, highly White and fairly feminine. That is still a large mass of people, but not enough to run the country or all its major institutions. In the San Francisco school board recall, for instance, the role of Asian Americans was especially prominent.
In addition:
The woke also are likely to achieve an even greater hold over American universities. Due to the tenure system, personnel turnover is low, and currently newer and younger faculty are more left-wing than are older faculty, including in my field of economics. The simple march of retirements is going to make universities even more left-wing — and even more out of touch with mainstream America.
I hereby inscribe this prediction in The Book of Tetlock.
Comments
"It's not enough to be just not woke. We need to be actively anti-woke."
It may have peaked politically, but it’s pretty sticky in the academic and corporate environment. Most HR departments are exclusively staffed by the educated/white/female/upper middle income demographic and have fully immersed themselves in the woke end of the DEI cesspool.
People misunderstand HR. It's not a business function that has been taken over by the woke. It is gov-mandated indirect control of business operations by the federal bureaucracy and courts. The bracelet-jangling HR lady is half compliance officer, half commissar.
Phil, please meet me in my office right away.
In The Age of Entitlement, Christopher Caldwell does a nice job of drawing the straight line from certain provisions of the 1965 Civil Rights Act to the incentives driving the behavior of today's corporate HR dept, as they seek to avoid being sued by the Federal Govt.
People get hired on the ability to work with or manage others.
Do you think an HR department doesn't consider the costs of hiring someone who marginalizes women and comments on their appearance, tells racists jokes, uses slur words to describe other people. HR is the place here people go to complain about this behavior.
Wake up to that fact.
Today you are often hired on your ability to work with people of diverse backgrounds.
Motte and Bailey fallacy. Tesla paying $137 million in damages because black employees saw racial slurs scribbled on a wall made by a Hispanic janitor. DEI ideology is not just 'asking people to be nice to one another'.
The fundamental thing that conservatives need to do, but probably won't and not just because of their lack of balls, is break K-12 education. Real no strings Education Savings Accounts funded by the money that would have gone towards your local public school.
It doesn't matter how many anti-CRT bills you pass if your kids are going to a school run by the woke and funded automatically whether you like it or not.
If they can't break K-12 funding monopoly I think Woke is just a matter of time.
Correct, and the teacher's unions know this and so will fight vouchers to the death. I don't know how other states work, but here in California money is directly tied to student attendance. If a kid skips school the district loses a day's worth of money. If a student is chronically truant parents can be prosecuted. The teacher's union leviathan will fight vouchers to the death, just ask Arnold Schwarzenegger - they tore him a new one. Charter schools are not the answer either, at least not in California - they are staffed with the same species. I know because my kids went to several of them.
If it is still true that public k-12 education accounts for 50% of California's budget, then it is astounding the teacher's union controls 50% of the 5th(?).largest economy on earth.
We need to wrest control of our public schools away from the teacher's union. They belong to us.
This exactly. Even Tyler is saying it's going to get an even greater hold on universities, so how does he expect all those people with ever more useless credentials (and intense woke belief) to behave once they hit the job market?
This isn't likely to go away until there's a massive backlash or a massive collapse.
Exactly. The "job market" is the universities larger government agencies, and the large corporate HR departments. No backlash, no massive collapse, secure employment, and better than tenure .
It's peaked politically for the next election cycle, but demographics are in its favor.
I wish Tyler was right but I think he's wrong.
Wokeism is "dug in deeper than an Alabama tick". You get bonus points if you can name the movie.
If it bleeds, we can kill it. We live in the internet age the whole thing is made up and the points don't matter.
I think the trend line is still up. We may see a fall as Tyler said, and some consolidation through the 22 elections, and eventually turn up. Some of the progressive agenda will eventually prevail and bring some wokeness with it. Or some things you and I might think as woke in corporate environments will triumph and be accepted as non-woke. Like enforced diversity and indirect quotas.
A good liberal progressive friend says he wonders some times whether Republicans have infiltrated some progressive organizations and influenced their statements, given how dumb and disruptive some are. Not really seriously, but the point was clear.
"Plateaued" might be a little more realistic, although still on the optimistic side. I also have trouble with "wokeism" and "highly educated" appearing in the same sentence.
Yeah, "educated" is a misnomer. I propose we adopt the term "CAP'd" - credentialed and proselytized.
My kids still ask me about the difference between the Civil War and the Revolution. They skipped around Zinn's (the number one history textbook in the US) trash for US History - no class in civics. The first time I met my kid's social studies teacher the first thing he said to me is that he teaches the kids that Muslims are nice. Yes, I agree with that, mostly. When we did the paperwork for one public elementary school my ex checked "yes" to the question "Do you speak a language other than English in the home?" My ex is Brazilian so sure, we speak a few Portuguese words at home. They put our kids in individual instruction for "English Language Learners" even though they are obviously native speakers of English. We had to file special paperwork to get them out of it. One day I was volunteering in my son's class when a little old lady pulled my son out of class. I asked the teacher, "where is she taking him?" She said, "to ELL lessons". We had to do the paperwork a second time. If I hadn't been in class I wouldn't have known. Are these f*cking morons robots?
I read a Twitter thread written by a native SF woman who wrote she had studied Mexican history three times but never the Civil War - hard to believe but I do.
To get a teaching credential in my area through the local California State University you have to spend 2(?) years working in an underserved community public schools with a student body primarily of English language learners, but pretty soon, perhaps already, the new teacher does not need to pass the old subject matter competency tests - they are too difficult and the pass rate is too low.
This is what woke public education looks like in California.
"Relevant" history is mostly about one's ancestors.
"To me, the Civil War is as remote and irrelevant as the War of the Roses." - Norman Podhoretz
Norman Podhoretz FOUGHT in the Civil War.
The civil war is very relevant to US history and still reverberates in our politics.
So perhaps, someone like Mr Podhoretz should immigrate to a country where his proud ignorance of the US Civil War doesn’t matter.
I hope Tyler is right and good to see Asian Americans speaking up.
They believe hard work and achievement is the foundation of prosperity, an
unfashionable view these days
It's unclear if Asians are Anti-Woke or just Pro-Asian.
If Woke stays Woke but drops the whole "Asians are white adjacent" stuff would they care?
If Lowell gets back to being XX% Asian do the Asians care whether white 2nd graders are told to check their privilege?
Right now Asians do well under meritocracy and woke is anti-meritocracy, but one can imagine a meritocratic but woke system where the amount of affirmative action is kept manageable and the vitriol is directed solely at whites. In fact such vitriol would need to increase to hold the coalition together and substitute for further redistribution.
My model of ethnic minorities is that they are largely un-ideological ethnic chauvinists. So they aren't woke in the sense that they aren't ideological but they also aren't anti-woke for the same reason. If the specific ways in which the woke are shafting their ethnicity go away then they will probable just stay on the sidelines.
For a good example of this ideological maneuvering, see the recent "Stop Asian Hate" meme.
First, woke policies produce a surge in urban crime. This includes a number of attacks on Asians committed almost exclusively by black criminals. Then, through clever messaging, the phenomenon is retconned as something that white conservative Trump voters are doing to Asians. The result is a surge in Asian ethnic solidarity, little focus on the negative fruits of woke DA policies or on misbehavior by black people, and an ideological attack on a group- white conservatives- that are largely sympathetic to Asians and have nothing whatsoever to do with the crimes in question.
Expect to see more mental gymnastics tricks like this going forward.
The same thing essentially happened with anti-Semitic and transphobic attacks somewhat recently. They were a big deal in the news cycle until people start finding out that it's mostly younger Black males beating them up or robbing them and then suddenly silence. Occasionally you will get the mental gymnastics where Blacks are seen as having internalized White supremacy and are being used as proxies to commit violence so Whites don't have to. Thus, the problem is toxic White males who need to do better themselves as an example to Black and also change our systemically biased institutions.
This seems like a pretty accurate characterization of the Asians I know, but I doubt that the woke left, which has trouble keep its hatred of Jews under wraps, can keep its resentment of Asians from bubbling up enough to drive them away. The right will be much more welcoming for Asians, especially if they leave the cities for the suburbs like previous upwardly-mobile Americans.
Politically, the right has already delivered on Asians desires. It nominated enough judges to strike down affirmative action. It's not clear what the right can promise Asians going forward once that happens.
I think the real conundrum here is that Asians hate affirmative action because it keeps them out of elite leftist institutions they wish to join. If AA gets struck down they are still going to need to be accepted into and live within those institutions. They aren't going to start being conservatives.
Look, its a welcome development and all but I think it can be oversold. I actually think some hispanic groups would be easier to win over then Asians because they aren't fixated on getting into Harvard or working for Google.
The Asian American relationship with affirmative action is complicated to say the least. However, a majority still support it.* Most Asian Americans are clever in that they try not to frame the the issue as African Americans getting benefits at the expense of vs Asian Americans, but rather as non-Latino Whites getting it at the expense of Asian Americans. Personally, I think most Asian Americans are relatively conformist and being so inundated with our left leaning education system they probably feel compelled to support preferential policies for people they are told to.
Honestly, for non-Latino White Americans their best bet might be to just give up on elite colleges and send their kids to mid level state and private universities where they can get just as good an education as the Ivy League ones for a much lower price. After all, much of education is just signaling in my view.
*https://www.nbcnews.com/news/asian-america/70-asian-americans-support-affirmative-action-here-s-why-misconceptions-n1247806
Some Asian friends also care a lot about immigration, where they are waiting forever for permanent residency and additional legal STEM immigrants are kept out, while all kinds of accommodations are made for the undocumented. Besides schools, there's another vulnerability.
Last time I checked, Republican interest in bringing skilled immigration up, and making staying here easy, died with George W Bush. 45 made it far harder for said Asian immigrants: So much that nowadays, many a tech company has at least one office in Canada filled with prospective immigrants with US degrees which didn't win the H-1B lottery.
Oye vey, this is rich.
Jews are at the center of virtually every wokeist movement and institution. Most of whom claim that limiting "white supremacy" will limit antisemitism.
And now Jews are also victims of wokeism.
Oye vey, what a conundrum! Only solution is to pity Scholomo either way, and write him checks.
Unfortunately, there are compelling reasons why so many Jews are more afraid of one Ben here than a 100 Ibram X. Kendis. That fear is misplaced, but understandable.
As an aside, there is virtually nobody named Shlomo that is woke.
" The right will be much more welcoming for Asians, especially if they leave the cities for the suburbs like previous upwardly-mobile Americans."
Two words: Kung Flu
Yeah, I think this is the most likely scenario. Asians will oppose wokeness to the extent that harms them personally, but will support it insofar as it justifies the displacement of whites, a process from which they benefit. Add to that the fact that they're extremely status oriented, and the elite universities and zip codes they want to enter are the places where wokeness is most dominant. They're not going to push back much against it.
The new Boston mayor Michelle Wu is a great example of this dynamic. Extremely woke with a side of Asian ethnic pride.
"My model of ethnic minorities is that they are largely un-ideological ethnic chauvinists"
Amy Wax was pilloried by the mainstream right for making this same observation. The future of America is racial balkanization and populist clientism. Everyone will look out for themselves and their own group while the national culture degrades into low-trust symbolic patronage. The fantasy that multiracial coalitions are substantial enough to building solid political platforms on is just coming home to roost for both left wing and right wing activists. 'Black' America is just as doomed as 'White' America.
The future of America is racial balkanization and populist clientism. Everyone will look out for themselves and their own group while the national culture degrades into low-trust symbolic patronage.
Brutal. To spell out one potential series of unfortunate events that’d lead to this:
1. Politics is about status not policy, so unstable status relations lead to unstable politics.
2. Whites going from a majority to a minority while Hispanics and Asians rise in population share will create those unstable relations and therefore an unstable politics.
3. In the absence of one unifying American culture (what used to be WASPism), nonwhite ethnic groups will either jockey for cultural dominance or fall back on their own ancestral cultures.
4. The USA will become the DSA: the Divided States of America.
From that perspective, it’s easy to see why a Han-led ethnostate (less than 0.1% foreign-born, 91% Han) would surpass the US (15.4% foreign-born, 57.8% White).
Sources:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_sovereign_states_and_dependent_territories_by_immigrant_population#UN_2019_report:_immigrant_population
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_China
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_Americans
What's fascinating about the woke phenomenon is it really doesn't have enough support to gain traction without white women. White women actually advocate for policies that put their own offspring at a disadvantage.
Another fascinating thing about woke is that it's of interest only to right-wing propagandists and their victims.
Being pro-yourself is being anti-woke for most of the woke
There were a lot of groups that opposed the Bolsheviks because of their own individual concerns, but they could never work together to stop them. They had no Anti-Bolshevik ideology to unite them. Just each group getting fed up in turn and the Bolsheviks knocking them down in turn.
I'd say that being Anti-Woke would mean opposing the ideology even when your particular ax isn't being gored.
Blacks are the least woke (i.e. the most sexist, homophobic, transphobic, antisemitic etc.) of all ethnic groups in the US, except for all the parts that benefit them.
I don't think ideology ultimately drives white views on wokeness either. White conservatives and right wingers discern it as an attack on whites, but the taboo on explicit white racialism means it tends not to be discussed in those terms and white identity is more implicit. White elites regard white non-elites, conservatives, Asians as competirion which wokeness helps suppress.
I live amongst the woke, and my impression is that they are ideological true believers. I don't think your average affluent inner-suburban NPR listener is worried that a white kid from rural Iowa is going to take her kid's spot at Dartmouth. She would laugh at the idea.
I also think you're overestimating the degree to which mainstream white conservatives realize they're being attacked on racial terms. That's starting to change, but a huge number of them remain very naive.
I live among the woke as well. I disagree that they're true believers. Their identity as affluent white libs leads them to adopt signifiers of that in-group, which increasingly happens to be wokeness right now. I would agree they're not worried about flyover whites taking elite university spots - they would be worried about Asians in that respect. They're worried about flyover whites in other respects. Wokeness by white libs is also in part a manifestation of spiteful behavior, which tends to increase with increasing diversity and the presence of out-groups.
Most white cons' racial consciousness is implicit, and their discernment of wokeness's anti-whiteness is implicit.
I've seen polls where Asians support AA more than whites, blacks or Hispanics. They probably just support AA for ADOS, it is such a sad story.
I've felt from the point that Hispanics were included that including them made so little sense that there inclusion would bring AA down.
Here is the link to the poll. Blacks are more likely to say race should be a major factor, but Asians are more likely to say it should be a factor.
https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2019/02/25/most-americans-say-colleges-should-not-consider-race-or-ethnicity-in-admissions/
Polling on AA ranges wildly based on whether the person being asks thinks their race will be benefited or punished by the policy. Blacks are clued in enough to know they will always benefit, but polling from Asians and Hispanics changes a lot based on whether they are "white adjacent" or "people of color".
That's pretty funny, but absolutely true. The woke need to be crushed.
Utterly, completely, and with great malice.
"It's not enough to be just not be racist/sexist. We need to be actively anti-everything." .. Your logic is probably exactly what made the woke go overboard.
This sort of sentiment is, I guess, for me, why "Wokeness" may not have peaked, but my desire to actually fight it with others peaked a couple years ago.
Guess my political journey was: Pretty liberal in 1990s>pretty conservative in the 2000s-2010s... because I believed that some measure of social stability was required to preserve a liberal society, and that requires slowly exchanges (of people, money, good) across borders to reduce tensions within the state. So less immigration, less globalization. The point is to preserve the ordered societies where liberalism is possible.
But allying with these guys who an actively "postliberal" society? Who want "Francoism"? Who admire the Chinese and Russian systems and their philosophical traditions? Who believe that any degree of the liberal tradition starting in perhaps 1600 should be cast out? Who want a pro-family state that heavily intervenes in personal life to force people to have children? Seek to repeal virtually all forms of civil liberties? Create a new academy that imprints "anti-woke ideology" on students?
Yeah, no thanks. At this point much of it seems not conservatism at all, it's just some form of utopianism, but a wierd, particularly implausible and dictatorial one.
Like, on this tangent, take Moldbug's 'Neoreaction'. If you want to turn off what is left of an American Conservative support base for an "anti-Woke" movement, then the absolute best way to do this would be to say "We need a tech CEO with total power, who has a kill switch on everyone's guns, and who rejects Christianity, which leads directly to American democracy and which is bad".
That basically sounds like an Evangelical voter's picture of the anti-Christ! They will conclude that Wokeism is probably not that bad by comparison, and certainly will steer clear of you as an ally.
Proposing a Catholic dictator on the lines of Francisco Franco, but still you coming back with a pro-Catholic dictator would be conclusion that is repugnant to an Evangelical Christian voter. The US is far too pluralistic for a figure like Franco to exist; there's no religious or moral centre other than commitment to your founding democracy (which is in direct contradiction to bringing a figure like Franco to power).
Yes, certainly, let's drive a stake through the heart of "wokeism". Removing statues, renaming streets and buildings, covering great art, or "cancelling" good people's contributions because some aspect of their lives may offend someone, is wrong on so many levels. Universities will sort themselves out as age always instills wisdom. Let's not forget the co-evil of the growing power of the right wingers who have gained the power to ban over 800 books in Texas schools, the Tennessee legislators who want to imprison any teacher who says anything positive about LGBT people or issues, and those in Florida who want teachers to be on camera all the time they teach so they can be monitored by anyone watching that channel. There are just as many crazies on the right as on the left. The guillotine should await any who seek to limit our ability to hear from both sides and make up our own minds at any age. Your body, as well as your mind are yours to do with as you will, but not to limit others in seeking their own path. We cannot claim that right for ourselves and deny it to others. Evil is often sold by claims that it will protect our children, our young daughters, our "wives and children". Knowledge, not ignorance, is always the best safeguard.
"...age always instills wisdom." Would that it were so. In any event, if wokeism were really a form of idealism it would fade at institutions due to the call of practicality, but its more about in-group/out-group competition than anything really intellectual. Woke will fade when it becomes difficult to earn money or get laid because of the extreme quality of your beliefs, not before. In much of America, it doesn't pay to sit on the fence.
I am too old to be woke, and I do not care about the names sports teams, etc. but anti woke seems to be just returning to the world I lived most my life, where dirty or men could feel up women in elevators, southern school boards censored history text books and derogatory terms were commonly used for every ethnic group
Yet the woke crowd mostly celebrated the Super Bowl halftime show, mostly made up of men known for their misogynistic lyrics, not to mention Dr Dre’s history of abusing women and Snoop Doggs recent rape lawsuit.
A small group of men who's wealth combines to about a billion dollars did a half time show set in Compton. It was laughable.
Naveen,
Evidently you did not read Tyler's entire column in Bloomberg which explains, contrary to your exhortation of becoming anti-woke, the origins of "woekism".
May I quote:
"In fact, wokeism is a specific set of views stemming from ideological backgrounds which incorporate values that are Christian, Protestant, Puritan, Jewish, Enlightenment and, most of all, very American. Not that there’s anything wrong with that, as Seinfeld used to say."
So, next time you say "Let's go anti-wokeism", think first about the origins. And, think about what it is to live in a multi-cultural American society where we all have to live together and act for the common good.
"what it is to live in a multi-cultural American society where we all have to live together and act for the common good"
This is why anti-wokism is so important! To live in harmony we have to treat all people as individuals, not divide them up into coarse identity groups and then treat them according to what group they are in! How has racial resentment trended as wokeism grew to power? Decreased or increased?
Yes! We must vigilantly root out any sign of wokeness whenver it appears. We must monitor TV shows, boardrooms and ivory towers for wokeness. We must search social media profiles of prospective hires for wokeness. Only by defeating wokeness entirely can we create the liberal order we hold dear.
The problem that I have is that people do not have a common definition of woke, so what happens is that it is an empty bag which people fill with their own beliefs of what it is. Some define it as being aware. Others associate it with oversensitivity. But, no one enters the conversation with a meaning of the term they are talking about and what they are referring to.
So,
I believe in gezorbnaplatz.
And, I believe there will people who will rail against gezorbnaplatz.
Even though it is a word I just made up and has no meaning without a definition.
Don't be led by others and think by yourself and demand definitions first so you can have a clear discussion.
"I believe in gezorbnaplatz."
We know that, and vote accordingly.
I think people have a sufficient grasp of wokeism to know it's BS.
Most people don't need to know the history of post modernism, critical theory, of the Frankfurt School to realize that unfair and unfounded accusations of racism are wrong, that 2+2= 4, or that meritocracy is racist are toxic ideas.
They may not be able to define wokeism but they know it when they see it.
Be serious.
Maybe you think you do know the meaning, but maybe you don't.
Merriam Webster defines as: " aware of and actively attentive to important facts and issues (especially issues of racial and social justice)"
And, here is another from an article that discusses the definition:
"Woke nowadays refers to being aware or well informed in a political or cultural sense, especially regarding issues surrounding marginalised communities - it describes someone who has "woken up" to issues of social injustice.
Merriam-Webster says: "Stay woke became a watch word in parts of the Black community for those who were self-aware, questioning the dominant paradigm and striving for something better."
https://www.nationalworld.com/whats-on/arts-and-entertainment/what-does-woke-mean-definition-of-woke-culture-in-2021-and-what-critics-mean-by-woke-police-3215758
But, maybe you don't use the same dictionary that I do.
Or, use language that requires one to define the word first to have a discussion.
Or maybe you are just led by others or hope to lead others blindly.
I think there can be discussions about specific examples of oversensitivity, or even lack of due process, but, that extreme applies to Florida and Texas legislation to protect students from discussing history or controversial issues.
Sorry but wokeism stems from illiteracy and resentment. Don't mix semi elaborate cultural doctrines like occidental religions
Tyler also predicted COVID would spell the death of progressivism back in 2020 and that ended up being about the most woke year on record.
https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2020-03-20/coronavirus-killed-the-progressive-left
My guess is that wokeism is here to stay. I base this off everything I have seen in my relatively short lifetime so far. Every conservative prediction I have ever seen about the left "eating their own", liberals going too far, a right wing backlash, or some kind of peak progressivism have never actually panned out. The left continues to double down and basically most Democrats have always just gone along with it and they gradually get more progressive. Ask yourself honestly in what way is the median/mean liberal less progressive on any issue relative to the median/mean liberal in 1980, 2000, or even 2015? Especially on issues of culture and social policy.
If you told me back in 2010 or 2012 that feminists would be pushing to make sure naked men could walk around women's locker rooms I would have stared at you blank faced and shocked. Feminists are now diligently urging that pre-operation transpeople born as males but who identify as female must be given access to women's private spaces. There appears to be no sign that women are suddenly going to become conservatives and try to ban this. It's pretty clear to me that the more the left pushes the more they ultimately win, sometimes they just have to wait.
Agreed. Wokeism is too embedded in the institutions and among the elites. I don't think it would stop unless there were some sort of violent backlash (military coup, populist leader who forcefully and violently replaces the professional class). That's not going to happen.
I hope you are correct. I fear that even if it's peaking, the peaking may be temporary.
I recall Christina Hoff Summers description of how the 'rational feminists' won the sex/gender wars decades ago, but the losers didn't fade away -- they moved into academia and kept at it, leading to people like her being shut out. The Long Marchers never stop marching.
It is temporary. Too many people have invested far too much personal and political and psychological capital into this for it to go quietly into 'that good night'.
It's a strange phenomenon. You could almost call them, 'bitter clingers'.
I fear you're correct, but reality sometimes is able to intrude. Look how quickly "Defund the police" went from moral imperative eighteen months ago to flushed down the memory hole once people realized there was no mathematical law that prevented urban violence rates from returning to their early '90's highs.
Not only fear of urban violence. I have four white nephews who have spent time in the penitentiary because of making and selling meth, among other crimes. They are very unpleasant people, and their family members and others know exactly what they would go back to doing if police presence in their communities (rural) were diminished.
mathematical violence prevention algorithms are huge right now, especially if enhanced blockchain's decentralized data economies. It's gold.
This is correct. It is not as though the woke are going to acknowledge their excesses and hold back. They're going to keep up the fight because they are True Believers and that's what True Believers do. Losing a school board fight in San Francisco doesn't change their stranglehold on power on academia and business. The American Political Science Review now publishes critical theory analysis of superhero shows. The madness is here to stay.
The woke are a minor fraction of the population (6-8% in most surveys). As long as the mass of people aren't paying much attention to them they can get their way. Once the rest of us notice they are shut down-- there's just not enough of them to matter. Their position is precisely similar to that of rightwing religious extremists.
" Their position is precisely similar to that of rightwing religious extremists."
Your correct about the percentages but overall you are wrong. The woke have a much higher fraction in journalism and universities than religious extremists and therefore greater power.
Corporate America has no commitment to woke at all. They are just responding to their marketing people, who think that the right pronouncements will boost their market share. Do you remember when marketing people decided that advertising had to show long haired people in tie-dyed T-shirts (for a nanosecond) in the '70's?
I disagree. To the people in control of corporate america, the most important thing is their personal standing wrt the global elite. It's let's them fail upward repeatedly, gives them access to woke capitol, helps them win lucrative government contracts/sinecures, etc.
Wokeism will still have total control of academica, journalism and popular media - that's literally all that matters to drive culture (the latter two especially).
Controlling the federal bureaucracy and having successfully introduced all kinds of BS into case law makes a pretty strong case that the situation is more ratchet than pendulum.
Do not underestimate the importance of the 1st item. It feeds the 2nd two through hiring. Where else will they go?
I don't know, I think it's a fad for most people and most people will grow sick of it especially in it's current form. That will trickle up one way or the other to those cultural drivers. New people will appear that have new ideas which the current dominant culture is blind to and people find more enthralling so the new ideas will win out in the marketplace. The most influential wokeists will die.
Have you ever wondered why if the public is not woke why is their media popular?
For the same reason most of the food I see in the grocery store is kosher even though few people are Jewish: Jews won’t eat non-kosher, while he times don’t really care, so everything is kosher. A small minority that cares a lot dictates what’s put out more than a majority that doesn’t care that much.
I think it's popular because its literally the only choice for prestige TV. It's hard to say what a counterfactual would look like. One data point is that foreign , non-Anglo shows are at their most popular ever. As a whole they're far less "woke" than U.S./UK shows - so there's clearly demand.
It ain't over til the fat purple-haired lady in the BLM t-shirt screams.
Far as I can see, the wokesters may be delusional fanatics, but they are pretty good at hijacking institutions (including conservative ones like the military) and at then embedding their ideas in those institutions by e.g. baking DIE doctrines into organizational criteria for who gets hired & fired. Laugh at the woke ladies if you want, but once they've taken over your local HR department, you may discover that they're a far more formidable foe than you thought. This is going to be a long fight.
This is Tyler's method of supporting wokism. He has done it for years.
He continually downplays the power of the woke to dissuade people from opposing it. After the woke gain more power he attempts to normalize that power.
He is one of the most staunch allies of the woke. Make no mistake.
"He is one of the most staunch allies of the woke. Make no mistake."
I don't agree with that exact statement, because he has criticized it many times here on MR, but you're right overall. Tyler does support Wokeism and downplays its power.
Yeah. I was once under the impression that Tyler was a "libertarian", but I've come to realize that his views on all the big issues are roughly those of the average Davos attendee.
Tyler will play out the string doing softball interviews with famous people and writing clever blog posts about his avant-garde dining experiences in NOVA strip malls. He will never suffer any personal effects from the brazilification of American that he endorses.
Judging from the comments, it seems that I'm not alone in this assessment. For my own part, I wonder how much value I will gain from continuing to read him. Probably I won't for much longer.
It is a mistake to look at elections as the barometer. The woke do not win via elections. They engage in entryism, "the long march through the institutions", particularly taking over HR departments (assisted by elaborations on our civil rights laws, as Caplan, Hanania & Rossman have discussed). There is no serious movement to change our civil rights laws (in contrast to right-wing activists on abortion & guns). The anti-woke are not engaging in entryism to take over institutions. A small minority of people can wield power as long as they seize the commanding heights, and the people of undemocratic eras were entirely aware of this.
In the past week we have had a BLM leader bailed out of jail by a non-profit after attempting to assassinate a politician. News articles barely mention his affiliation.
On the other hand, we have Canadian protestor contributors doxed by journalists after their government has declared martial law and seized their finances. This is all based on the pretense that they're some kind of white supremacist evil menace, a fabricated off the shelf woke narrative repeatedly coopted by the center-left to smear working political organization that happens to be largely white.
Not a great week to claim wokeism has peaked.
On a planet of 7.8 billion people, probably 7 billion find the doctrine incomprehensible, because it was specifically designed only to be intelligible to an "inside" group.
Anyway, Tyler doing a kind of straddle here:
https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2021/09/learning-to-live-with-woke.html
>and they [sic] may be a significant war in Ukraine.
What does Ukraine have to do with wokeism?
More generally, I remain unconvinced. The problem is the institutions, and the woke remain in complete control of every significant one. Given that commanding position, there are really no defeats; if ever pressed, the woke can just wait the opposition out.
"In fact, wokeism is a specific set of views stemming from ideological backgrounds which incorporate values that are Christian, Protestant, Puritan, Jewish, Enlightenment and, most of all, very American."
What the hell are you talking about Tyler? Wokeism is so muddled, self-contradictory and utterly insane......to associate it Christianity, Protestantism, Puritanism, Judaism, and the Enlightenment would be to give Wokeism too much credit and to insult those other movements.
"There are a variety of reasons he is continuing his podcast with Spotify, even in light of some serious verbal transgressions."
Are you seriously saying that Rogan used the N-word in a racist or derogatory way? Did you ACTUALLY LISTENT to what he said? C'mon, Tyler. You're better than that!
"Puritanism is the haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be having fun" (Mencken). And Wokeism is the haunting fear that someone, somewhere may be saying, thinking or doing something that is Incorrect.
In both cases it is not necessary to actyakk see or hear the transgression in order to become distressed: all that’s necessary to produce this intolerable stress is just knowing that someone might be doing, saying or thinking what’s been declared to be Wrong.
The parallels are the demands for near-total perfection (as defined by the Woke or Puritan) combined with a near-total lack of redemption for those who have transgressed.
Where Woke differs (but is similar to other radical political movements) is in it's willingness to pivot on a dime in response to new directives and enthusiasms.
(Eastasia has always been at war with Oceana; The USA should stay out of/get into WWII before/after German invasion of USSR.)
+1
Good explanation about puritanism.
"Where Woke differs (but is similar to other radical political movements) is in it's willingness to pivot on a dime in response to new directives and enthusiasms."
"differs" is a huge understatement! Its multiple pivots and reverse-pivots make it impenetrable and unpredictable as a movement. This terrorizes its own disciples and creates enemies from former disciples. I don't think that the other movements cast this much fear on their own people.
CRT activist and pioneer Richard Delgado on The Enlightenment.
"enlightenment-style Western democracy is ... the source of black people's subordination"
"racism and enlightenment are the same thing."
"Enlightenment is to racism," . . . "as sexuality is to women's oppression--the very means by which we are kept down."
"if you are black or Mexican, you should flee Enlightenment-based democracies like mad, assuming you have any choice."
https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/books/first/f/farber-reason.html
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Delgado
Thanks for the references, Luka.
This is batshit crazy. How the hell do these people even get jobs spewing this drivel? Did people every push back against Delgado?
Regarding Rogan, probably a bit of Peter Turchinesque elite competition going on here. Tyler is far less interested in his beloved 'context' here and more in indulging his 'status lowering' impulse when it comes to a competitor. I don't think he'd write this if Rogan wasn't immensely popular and Tyler was our only source of info about his utterances.
It's only a couple of steps from "in Christ, there is neither Jew nor Greek, neither slave nor free," to "all men are created equal," to "Diversity Inclusion Equity." The ratchet only goes one way.
Wokeism drives the recruitment policies and research of all the institutions; its adherents are on fire with the convert's zeal. It sates the desire for meaning and people just don't walk away from religious belief.
Yeah. That one surprised me too. Gotta keep those conference invites coming I guess. Also, there's the long game. From Rational wiki: "Roko's basilisk is a thought experiment about the potential risks involved in developing artificial intelligence. Its conclusion is that an all-powerful artificial intelligence from the future might retroactively punish those who did not help bring about its existence" The way Tyler thinks, if there is only a 2% chance of retroactive punishment of his family/grad students etc, wouldn't he feel compelled to hedge a bit?
Maybe wokism is the fourth/fifth great awakening. The previous great awakenings were just as muddled, self-contradictory and gave rise to utterly insane beliefs and belief systems. Not all of them persisted and many were tempered by time. The same could be said for the earlier days of the reformation. You don't think the apostolic-age wasn't as crazy to the median observer. What about the Infancy Gospel of Thomas?
Wokeism will have peaked when all woke institutions have been purged or shut down, this post is absurdly naive and seriously calls into question Tyler's cognitive ability.
Whew, glad to hear it. I sure was worried there for a moment.
You're five months late. Chappelle's the Closer was woke's high water mark.
I watched that for the first time recently and I couldn't help but notice a couple of really dour, heavy-set women seated right up front who never once seemed to crack so much as a smile. It looked like they were only there for MediaMatters reconnoitering and were suffering the whole time for their work.
Yes, that's right. Your political enemies are less attractive members of the opposite sex. Keep fighting the good fight!
In all fairness, most people are "heavy-set". This is a statistical reality in the USA where the average woman has a BMI of 26.5 according to the CDC. It might feel insulting but that doesn’t make it untrue.
A related point is that people making nonsense claims like white racism is in the Ether or that men can become women with a thought are not part of any Academic or Hegelian dialectic where there can be an accommodation that allows everyone to move forward. The Woke are waging a war of ideological extermination of their enemies and just managing them is not really an option.
The author N.S. Lyons refuted this argument before Tyler wrote it.
https://theupheaval.substack.com/p/no-the-revolution-isnt-over?utm_source=url
I don’t think woke ever meant anything. The left has been pushing its beliefs to absurdity, normal people laughed at them until they realized they were serious. I credit Rush Limbaugh for pointing that out. It’s taken awhile but the masses are fully awake and in counterattack mode.
People thought the same when Democratic resistance to gay normalization began. Look at us now. Institutions are powerful.
"Wokeism is likely to evolve into a subculture that is highly educated, highly White and fairly feminine. That is still a large mass of people, but not enough to run the country or all its major institutions. In the San Francisco school board recall, for instance, the role of Asian Americans was especially prominent."
Hmm... I wonder. Migrants seem to believe in the stuff about the Wicked Western White Patriarchy... But less so the bits where socialism (either in Nordic SocDem or more extreme flavours) and quota bureaucracy is the remedy.
For Asian migrants it seems very much "Oh, yes, the Whites were certainly bad in keeping the Asian man down, and keeping others down is the reason for the success of the backwards culture, which isn't committed to education and learning like we are, and particularly White men are bad... But don't let's have bureaucracies where African-Americans or Native Americans or Mexican-Americans take slots from us please, and since we earn good market income, we'd like to keep it".
(Like, that is to say, lots are onboard with the Sontag sentiment that "The white race is the cancer of human history", but the sort of remedies Wokedom prescribes would actually get in the way of them being market dominant minorities who can rig economies in favour of co-ethnics, so aren't preferred).
I’m not sure I’ve ever seen a more obviously wrong prediction in my life. Demographics is destiny, Tyler. As long as ‘wokeness’ is inversely correlated with age, it’s going to keep getting worse.
Wokeism will have peaked when we see a generation of kids that is more pro-free speech and anti-‘corrective racism/sexism’ than the last generation. Given that immigrants mostly assimilate in one generation, they won’t save us. Republicans may win elections - they still do sometimes - but winning in 2012 and 2016 didn’t even slow things down; the next Democratic admin will be more extreme than this one, and the one after it more so.
"That is still a large mass of people, but not enough to run the country or all its major institutions"
How mistaken you are. Every institution is currently predicated on propagating woke ideology. The American Bar Association has now made accreditation contingent on "commitment to anti-racism." Every large corporation has a Diversity, Inclusion, Equity (DIE) branch of their HR, which serves no purpose but to rent-seek and cause racial resentment.
Once you stop viewing woke as a political movement and view it instead as a cult of Marx that replaces class with race, then you will understand that "woke has peaked," is to declare very premature victory. We can't start measuring progress until the cancer cells, DIE, have been abolished.
With DEI statements overriding competence in STEM area facility hiring decisions, where will we get the technical capabilities we need as China is progressing?
At some Universities, they have been using adjuncts and lectures to cover the lack of tenure track, competent people in STEM, not allowed by the woke social scientists running our Universities. However, I know some who are now quitting as Ph.D.'s in computer science have options and have had some very competent friends quit tenured positions when they got fed up with mandatory DEI training (they could officially retire).
To become really at the top in STEM areas means you do not have the time to become properly WOKE, as you dream in differential equations, not hypothetical micro-aggressions. The concept that reality is socially constructed seems like magical thinking at its worst as you calculate orbits of mercury. When you think of "power" you think of thermodynamics not social relationships.
When you do take time to look at the social science, you find that they don't reproduce and most of their hypothesis appear to be nonsense and "p" hacking games. However, they now have the "Power" they crave and what are they doing with it?
What's typically on my mind here is I expect institutions that go full-woke(universities, sure) to inevitably become incompetent and slowly lose their power. Are those Republican-leaning immigrant families really going to send kids off to schools that are seen to have lost their marbles?
I would also expect that state funding of universities is going to become less of an automatic and generous blank check as the universities become even more extreme and bizarre.
I stopped donating to my university (private) about 15 years ago.
Immigrants, especially, are extremely status conscious. As long as the woke are hate keepers, like anyone looking to enter or currently insecurely in the professional class, they'll burn the incense.
F'in LOL. *Gate* keepers
So far, the woke have done a pretty good job converting recent immigrants via their 'white supremacy' pitch.
At some point, the sub-groups in their coalition probably start infighting. But, it hasn't happened yet to any significant degree.
For upwardly mobile immigrants that will surely continue to be the case. A few Asians are explicitly taking on the grift angle but most just recognize that it's a class marker and wear the pin on the lapel, so to speak.
It's a very different dynamic in the working class and underclass, of course. They're quickly coming to hate our preening oligarchs as much as white rednecks do.
I wouldn't put too much store in the school board election. The antidote to narrow self-interest is more narrow self-interest. This may work well in some contexts, but I can't see how it aids preservation - whether of culture, of ideas, or the great 19th-20th century melding of those two, environmental conservation.
That's right. It was a landslide (70-30) but largely driven by how difficult it was to justify seeing most white kids in school (private institutions) while their colored cohorts stayed home...or hung out at the mall. Look at the Jennifer Sey saga. https://bariweiss.substack.com/p/yesterday-i-was-levis-brand-president. She's not giving up woke any time soon.
A tangent: I never thought that women would give up the childcare provided by public schools. I fully expected the demands of feminism to *automatically* lead to their swift re-opening. I've thought about how I could have been so wrong about that. Mostly, I suppose, I failed to reckon with the teachers, a huge block of women, pushing in the other direction. I may have been misled by long residence in an "excellent" school district where the veteran teachers at least, actually seemed to enjoy hanging out with kids, benignly - if not brilliantly - ruling their little classroom fiefdoms.
But I also think that if it weren't for the use of screens in education - if parents [or the subset of fairly conscientious parents] had had to open textbooks and go through lessons and compel finished assignments, with their kids - that it never would have gone as far as it did.
It does seem like the start of a breach in the hegemony of public school. Some groups made it plain they could turn their backs completely on education - and I don't expect the Asian-Americans who demand the most of public school, to exercise any paternalism in that regard.
I am a product of an indifferent public school education. Still, it would have been easy to defend the idea of public school, for the average kid, when I attended. I sometimes asked to go to private school - I remember this reached an acute stage when my friend across the street was playing the Fox in a French-language production of the "Little Prince" at her Catholic girls' school; I was also captivated by the ways those girls despite uniforms subtly altered or accessorized their appearance to maintain a hierarchy of fashionableness - and my mother would reply that public school reflected the "real world", which prepared you for real life. ("Prepared for it to suck!" I now see was the obvious rejoinder to this piety, but I wasn't so coarse then.)
Now, who will defend it? Where it occasionally functions - magnet schools - it's attacked. When it attempts to restore an orderliness that would make regular schools at least more closely resemble those elite schools, reducing the obvious gap between them, it's attacked.
The hegemony of public school has been breached, just a little, in some way. It feels like some groups may turn their backs completely on education - and I don't expect Asian-Americans who demand the most of school, to exercise any paternalism in that regard, nor, with as much fervor as they once would have, liberal whites, who've had it placed in their minds that there's an alternative, even if it was messy and ill-executed during the pandemic.
Don't be so quick to get rid of football, if you love the idea of American public school.
Wokeism is in some sense a superficial manifestation of a sharply leftist cultural shift.
The much deeper and more serious manifestation is of course the relentless collapse in fertility across the developed world. What are some recent numbers (lifetime births per woman / 2.1 is "replacement" level): USA 1.59; Scandinavia ~1.55; England 1.52; Scotland 1.32; Australia 1.64; Japan 1.3; South Korea 0.82, every one on a downward trend. Fertility among US-born Asian Americans, the most highly educated ethnicity in the US, was all the way down to about 1.3 births per woman in 2020 and likely fell another 0.05 or so since. See the @BirthGauge twitter feed for a huge trove of birth and fertility data.
This is not a separate phenomenon but is tightly connected with wokeism:
* Political affiliation has become extremely correlated with fertility: See
https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/pressroom/sosmap/fertility_rate/fertility_rates.htm (choose 2020 as the year to get the latest data)
https://www.aei.org/articles/the-conservative-fertility-advantage/
But this didn't used to be so true in the past. Before the leftist cultural revolution of the last few decades, fertility of Democrats and Republicans were much more similar.
* Some 21% of generation Z identifies as LGBT, up from 4% of gen X, 2.6% of boomers and 0.8% of pre-boomers (!!)
https://news.gallup.com/poll/389792/lgbt-identification-ticks-up.aspx
That surely is manifesting in the collapsing fertility rates we are seeing concentrated in the youngest cohorts. (Links are necessary because this seems unbelievable.)
So the most significant effect of the cultural triumph of leftism is not wokeism but something much deeper, a dramatic collapse fertility (which we have seen is tightly tied to political affiliation).
And the effect of fertility driven demographic collapse may be the stiffest economic and civilizational headwind history has seen.
(Even Korea's extreme fertility collapse is related to similar cultural shifts: religiosity in Korea has sharply declined and no country has more completely absorbed Western pop-culture -- to the point where Korea has become a leading exporter in that market.)
Wokeism will only die when the Democratic Party stops thinking they can use it to win elections. At least a couple elections away, yet.
Peaked? That's not even worth taking seriously.
It's more like wokeism has entered a new phase, where it has succeeded enough to be recognized as a target, characterized in terms recognizable to enough people to be politically and institutionally opposed. We've just turned the corner from the "nothing to see here" phase of public discussion. That doesn't signify a peak, it signifies the beginning of a battle.
If Tyler is correct this time (as noted above, he has also said the opposite, so one of his columns is bound to seem prescient), what does this portend for the universities? Will they fall into senectitude and irrelevance, like the Episcopal church? Or will their institutional power as the gatekeepers to corporate power permit their continuing relevance?
Genuinely curious, Tyler, to hear how you understand this prediction in relation to a very similar previous one, from March of 2020:
https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2020-03-20/coronavirus-killed-the-progressive-left
Was that previous one falsified by, e.g., the explosion of Woke-ism in the summer of 2020? (If so: is the evidence for the claim stronger, or somehow categorically different, this time around?) Do you stand by the March 2020 analysis, with the caveat that the peak (& subsequent descent) of Woke-ism just turned out to be a couple years further out than you'd first anticipated? Etc.
The Jesuits used to boast that "give me a child for his first seven years and I will account for the rest of his life." Another way of saying the hand that rocks the cradle, rules the world.
If the woke control elementary schools, they will control the future.
But there is cause for some optimism. The CPUSSR had total control of schools in the USSR, but the Soviet Union still collapsed and the Communists tossed out of power. (Putin isn't a Marxist, just a thug.) The woke can be defeated, but it will take a Long March through the institutions to do it.
Lol no https://theupheaval.substack.com/p/no-the-revolution-isnt-over
If wokeism wins, it’ll be a hollow victory because they will have smashed everything to pieces by the time they get control of gov’t. The defund police movement has just led to increasing violence in inner cities, yet the nebulous goal of "social justice" is no closer. Also, you can’t crap all over a country and a good chunk of its citizens then tell them "we’re all in this together".
Tenure is gradually going away in academia; a lot of younger faculty will never be eligible for tenure and gradually professors will become just another credentialed profession.
During the Trump administration, it was commonly argued that the growth of wokism was largely fueled by a reaction against Trump.
When the woke revolution didn't immediately fall apart after the 2020 election, Trump fans generally considered that theory debunked. I think it's looking much stronger now.
Personally, I'd date wokeism to 2012. Going into that election, things looked bleak for President Obama under conventional PolySci models: the economy sucked, foreign policy was one unmitigated disaster after another, and "It's Bush's fault" wasn't working anymore. The campaign responded by leaning into longstanding racial divisions/resentments.
"the growth of wokism was largely fueled by a reaction against Trump."
The theory is that it was increased by a reaction against Trump. However, nobody disputes that wokeism clearly proceeds Trump or that it was growing well before he was significant in politics.
We will see how popular wokeism is after COVID has been over for awhile and inflation gets more controlled.
Right now masses of people have switched sides simply so their kid doesn't have to wear a mask all day. When that is forgotten we'll see where things stand.
"Wokeism has peaked"
That's a brave prediction Tyler. However, I can't help but see this as mostly a Wild Assed Guess (WAG) more than a carefully calculated piece. I don't really see how the minor setbacks you listed are really enough to slow down, let alone stop the momentum that woke racism currently has. It's firmly embedded in universities. It's been fighting hard to establish itself in K-12. It's firmly embedded in many larger corporations and the one's that aren't in the bed with woke racism don't seem to have the courage to actively stand up to it.
We'll see, but currently your prediction doesn't seem to have any attached benchmarks to indicate success or failure. What benchmarks would clearly indicate success or failure in the next 4 years?
Another data point in favor of this conclusion: Amazon suspended BLM from its charity platform yesterday.
I live in San Francisco, and I voted to recall all three, but it was not because I was "upset that the school board spent time trying to rename some schools in a more politically correct manner" at all. That would have been fine if they did that **in addition to** actually improving the educational situation as well.
Agreed that the school board recall was about the pandemic response. What does it mean when there is this kind of gap between local and national news? For large parts of the country, "San Francisco" refers to a cautionary fable more than the real place, a fable too good to fact-check.
On your last point, I'd just like to ask more conservatives to pursue PhD's. Stop whining so much and fight back. If you think higher ed is an important cultural institution, then become professors and change the institution. It turns out that most work in the social sciences and hard sciences is completely unrelated to one's partisanship.
I think many outside of academia, including nearly all undergrads, think that political scientists spend all of their time arguing for why Democrats are better than Republicans, when actually, they're mostly arguing about whether some obtuse theory is a better explanation for political behavior than another. Is the information theory or distributive theory or party-centered theory of committee organization in Congress more accurate? Is lobbying vote-buying, information signaling, or legislative subsidy? You can be a Republican or a Democrat or neither and have great success in your research. And if you are wanting to fight the partisan fight, then let loose once you get tenure.
Yes, you'll be one of only a few Republicans in your grad program. And yes, if you turn everything into a partisan fight, your colleagues will be annoyed with you, but it's not impossible to get through the gauntlet by being civil and biting your tongue every now and then. Along the way, you'll learn that a lot of the professors have beef with wokeism gone wild. Indeed, you may also find some fellow conservatives. But if you're going to tell women that they should suck it up and pursue higher paying jobs and stop whining about the gender gap in pay, then put on your big boy pants and do the same, and it would be better for higher education in the end if you did so.
Conservatives (or even just non-leftists) are generally unable to obtain positions in academia. They won't even make it past the DEI loyalty oaths which go well beyond what was required during the McCarthy era. The mere swearing of allegiance is not enough -- candidates must be able to show a history of DEI activism to be considered.
Well, I got through as did my many coauthors who are also non-leftists. But what do I know? Please tell me more about the profession I work in and have had success in.
How recently were you hired? In what sort of institution? Was a diversity statement required? Did the search committee know what your politics were?
Hired in the last 5 to 10 years. Interviewed at a top 10 place. A top 20 and couple competing to be in the top 20. No diversity statement required, but I don't know why that matters. They all know my race, ethnicity, and gender (white dude), so if that helps or hurts, it doesn't matter whether I submit a diversity statement, too. If someone wanted to guess my politics, it wouldn't be hard to do so given my work experience, which was on my resume. Plus, if they cared enough and asked my advisers, they'd know a bit, too, but I don't think anyone asked because that's not how it works. Political scientists doing quantitative work are apolitical in many ways and eccentric in their policy views. We generally think both parties suck though the majority agree that the Republican party sucks more, but it turns out that there some Republicans on some of the search committees at these places. I'm not saying that to say they snuck me in or something. I'm just saying that there's more diversity than people realize. The picture people paint in the comments here is based on the extreme cases. And sure, if I came into the interview and said things like "Lefties are crazy, amirite?" They wouldn't hire me. But why would I do that? I wouldn't even hire someone who did that because I'd question their decision-making skills on all sorts of levels. Again, I said conservatives should pursue PhD's. I didn't say they should do that AND offend all of their partisan enemies while they did it. Have some discretion, people.
P.S. At most jobs, you don't go around spouting all of your political views to all your coworkers.
5-10 years is a while. Do you think those top 10-20 schools no longer require DEI statements? Do you think advice like this about how to write a diversity statement is unnecessary?
No diversity statement required, but I don't know why that matters.
Well, here's what UC Davis now requires. There appear to be the same req's for other UC schools. Do you think the UC system is outlier? Do you think that a diversity statement that described your commitment to Liberal enlightenment values of treating all equally regardless of race, ethnicity, or gender would pass muster?
if I came into the interview and said things like "Lefties are crazy, amirite?" They wouldn't hire me
Sure. But what if you came in with a history of participating in conservative or libertarian organizations? Or is making sure there's nothing like that on your record (or discoverable by a Google search) all part of having some discretion?
At my job (quasi-academic, institutional rather than research), my leftist co-workers do go around spouting all their views to their co-workers. My previous boss occasionally went on unhinged anti-white rants, and flat out asked me who I voted for in a meeting. I would have to be a moron to admit to holding right of center political views in that context.
I've known a decent amount of humanists/social scientists, especially in grad school. The majority were socialists, the rest progressives; I never knew a single Republican or libertarian. I don't doubt they exist, but they don't talk about it. Note that there have been enough verified instances of academics being sanctioned or fired for opposing affirmative action even in the politest terms that I don't know how anyone can still deny it happens. This is such obvious gaslighting, insisting that if you suffer consequences for right of center views it must be because you were being deliberately offensive. Your faith in the moral perfectness of progressives probably does garner you some sympathy from them I guess.
Why would a rational ~18-22 year old want to devote the next ~40+ years of their life to an environment that dislikes them, where they'd mostly be on the outside looking in?
On your last point, I'd just like to ask more conservatives to pursue PhD's. Stop whining so much and fight back. If you think higher ed is an important cultural institution, then become professors and change the institution.
One has to be hired in order to become a professor.
This is the big difference here between the liberal professoriate and the conservative one: the few conservatives in the academy, for the most part, are in denial about how bad it's gotten.
You cannot do this kind of non-political research in political science anymore and expect to get a job (see: the many, many white males on the political science job market this year with sterling publication records and no jobs; this is part of an open "Correction" leftist professors and admins have been happily trumpeting as payback). You now must justify the DEI aspect for admissions into graduate program, for grants, for jobs, and for publications. There's an enormous excess of interest and very few slots at every stage, so that creates plenty of cut points for those with wrongthink to get filtered out. And it's getting worse every year.
Even if you succeed in scaling those hurdles and enter the academy as a professor, there are land mines and litmus tests everywhere, everyday. It's no longer just good enough to be friendly and avoid "partisan fight," it's "you must be actively anti-racist at all stages or else." Hope that you put your land acknowledgements on your syllabi, conduct DEI audits of all the citations in your papers, state your pronouns at every meeting, and sign on to every petition from the liberal groups on campus, and make sure you do it with a smile and genuine enthusiasm! And even then, that may not be enough if you aren't countable as a POC by the racial bean-counters who increasingly run everything; perhaps they need a few more white people to fail tenure review to even-out the numbers.
Also, those "moderate liberals" who secretly don't like wokeism will be the first to turn on you publicly. It will help burnish their credibility with the wokesters and when push comes to shove they will never stand with you.
The academy is a lost cause and you will be committing career suicide if you try to go in now. Until conservative politicians get their heads out of the ground and learn how to effectively handle the academy (hint: overbroad anti-CRT laws are not going to be effective when every person in HR, the admin, and hiring committees is "committed to anti-racist hiring practices"), it's a recipe for disaster. Stay away.
You are entirely correct. My father was a professor of biology in an Eastern bloc Soviet satellite state. He faced virtually no discrimination or barriers in his career advancement (he was eventually promoted to full professor) despite not being a member of the communist party and never having done anything to support the regime or communist ideology. The academic freedoms under Soviet rule were far greater than what goes on in American universities today.
Where have you been the last 2 years? Conservative or just non-leftist professors often get fired or sanctioned just for sterilely stating left of center views; articles get retracted for reaching a inconvenient conclusions. You’re being unbelievably disingenuous here: it’s not just ‘making everything into a partisan fight’ that can get you in trouble; it’s publicly disagreeing with orthodox views at all. And if you have to pretend to be a progressive, what’s the point? You may as well be asking Protestants to try to change the Catholic Church by becoming priests. How would they do that if, once becoming priests, they can get defrocked for saying or doing something Protestant?
In California public universities - many of the largest and most prestigious schools in the country - you literally have to profess progressive views and activism in order to a tenure track job. It’s not even implicit as a job requirement.
Join academia and be brave like this guy:
https://quillette.com/2022/02/17/a-student-sleuth-found-evidence-that-our-university-practices-reverse-racism-heres-why-i-advised-him-not-to-publish-it/
To be fair, the professor is absolutely right. If that student wanted a job anywhere besides the right-wing think tank ghetto these days, better to just stay quiet. That student would not want to apply for jobs with multiple front-page hits of "RACIAL INSENSITIVITY AT COLLEGE X" from the local campus newspaper or activists on Twitter, which would almost certainly be forthcoming if such a study were promulgated.
The student's "solution" is clever. It's what you have to do to survive in academia these days. Leftists are happy to make up Native American ancestry or lie about their racial background since they know that this is what ultimately matters the most. Just ask E. Warren.
Sure. But we're responding to this upthread:
"On your last point, I'd just like to ask more conservatives to pursue PhD's. Stop whining so much and fight back."
I think the honors program was previously non-racial and masquerading as being still merit-based- the discrimination was not open as it so often is.
And? By "fighting back", I mean go get a PhD. And, yes, like I said, you're probably going to have to bite your tongue, so don't publish the piece on reverse racism and focus on the hundreds of other topics that aren't blatantly partisan.
And by the way, that link and the project revealing reverse racism seemed silly. If reverse racism means favoring racial minorities in hiring and college acceptance, then yes, any college with affirmative action policies or programs that give help to racial minorities is reverse racism by that definition. Shocker! I don't think you need to be a "sleuth" to figure that out. Like that's the whole point of these programs is to give a leg up to racial minorities.
Counterpoint:
"Obstacles to Estimating Voter ID Laws’ Effect on Turnout"
Widespread concern that voter identification laws suppress turnout among racial and ethnic minorities has made empirical evaluations of these laws crucial. But problems with administrative records and survey data impede such evaluations. We replicate and extend Hajnal, Lajevardi, and Nielson’s 2017 article, which concludes that voter ID laws decrease turnout among minorities, using validated turnout data from five national surveys conducted between 2006 and 2014. We show that the results of their article are a product of data inaccuracies, the presented evidence does not support the stated conclusion, and alternative model specifications produce highly variable results. When errors are corrected, one can recover positive, negative, or null estimates of the effect of voter ID laws on turnout, precluding firm conclusions. We highlight more general problems with available data for research on election administration, and we identify more appropriate data sources for research on state voting laws’ effects.
https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/full/10.1086/696618?casa_token=F0ibRMDU4BgAAAAA%3AM8T_lza8yWp03hAYTMTgVqmHXjqX7XCjGKY8zENKIsflnGVTCqqobAQt5Q5Pb_G_CehWtduf6BEe
It is the case that these authors got some nasty emails and social media comments for publishing this, but they have their jobs and are generally highly respected among political scientists and this was published at one of the top journals in poli sci. It was solid empirical work, and that still (generally) counts more than bad analyses coming to woke conclusions.
"but they have their jobs"
With tenure, I hope.
Of course the woke mobbing is unpredictable -- some things fly under the radar while other's don't. (Note the archive.org link -- the original page has been memory-holed by MSU). Steven Hsu no longer has HIS job after citing that research. And ultimately the authors were forced to retract the paper -- not because of errors, but because of political pressures that arose after it was being mentioned by the 'wrong' (e.g. conservative) people.
If there are only two possible paths - replicate the study and find it flawed, overturning its conclusions about "suppressing turnout", or get the same result and find for the prosecution, guilty of suppressing turnout - then the narrow matter is probably not one that would ever lend itself to a conservative, to take up. You can't eliminate "this is a matter of total indifference" and not establish your domain in firmly ideological territory. Some fields probably should be, categorically, just as ideologically-bound as they are, and stand or fall that way.
Counterpoint:
"Do Anti-Union Policies Increase Inequality? Evidence from State Adoption of Right-to-Work Laws"
The distribution of income lies at the intersection of states and markets, both influencing and responding to government policy. Reflecting this reality, increasing research focuses on the political origins of inequality in the United States. However, the literature largely assumes—rather than tests—the political mechanisms thought to affect the income gap. This study provides a timely reassessment of one such mechanism. Leveraging variation in labor laws between states and differences in the timing of adoption of right-to-work (RTW) legislation, I examine one political mechanism blamed by many for contributing to inequality. Using a variety of panel designs, I find little evidence that RTW laws have been a major cause of growing income inequality, pointing to the importance of grounding theoretical arguments about the interrelationships between states and markets in a sound empirical reality.
https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/state-politics-and-policy-quarterly/article/abs/do-antiunion-policies-increase-inequality-evidence-from-state-adoption-of-righttowork-laws/D6F32ECC9D7B0D576224F9A41FABDC61
Great idea in theory except for the fact that academia is the most discriminatory institution in the US, anyone who isn't completely onboard ideologically is precluded from joining, unless you are asking conservatives to become adjunct slaves to fatten the coffers of their ideological enemies.
>precluded from joining
Or if you do, they just decline to publish your papers, and others always seem to win the grants, etc. "Big Academia" will be a tough nut to crack; circumvention via creative destruction seems more likely to succeed.
Counterpoint: I'm a conservative-leaning academic and have co-authored with plenty of other non-leftist academics. Again, in lots of the social sciences, the vast majority of work has nothing to do with one's partisan or ideological preferences.
For every paper you mention leading to a conclusion convenient for conservatives, there are 50 going in the opposite direction; you're burning a strawman. Obviously, some conservatives exist in academia (though I'd add that most of the authors of papers with right-of-center conclusions are still usually progressives). I don't know who is arguing that there are literally none.
And if you follow the minutes of the meetings of cardinals in the Vatican, you'll find most of what they discuss isn't that theologically contentious. Doesn't imply they don't have a pretty severe bias against protestants in their selection process.
"I don't know who is arguing that there are literally none."
Look at many of the replies to my admonition that more conservatives pursue PhD's -- they're claiming it's impossible. I'm trying to say it isn't and that you can even publish research that comes to conservative conclusions. And no wonder academia is full of liberals as conservatives have convinced themselves it's impossible for them to even pursue it, but that's simply not true.
"A Student Sleuth Found Evidence that Our University Practices Reverse Racism. Here’s Why I Advised Him Not to Publish It"
https://quillette.com/2022/02/17/a-student-sleuth-found-evidence-that-our-university-practices-reverse-racism-heres-why-i-advised-him-not-to-publish-it/
Totally agree with you. I dont know social sciences per se but in medicine people largely dont know or care about your politics unless it is really important to bash people over the head with it. It is striking how much conservatives whine about unfairness but unwilling to risk even a bit of being uncomfortable to change things. For decades we had gays who knew that if they came out of the closet they would be fired. Maybe even beaten for that matter but they still pursued careers where they would be unwanted. Minorities were willing to risk death threats and harassment at work to advance. Women for years knew that no matter how hard they worked or how smart they weren't advancing. Tell a conservative someone might not like them and you get non stop whining.
Steve
Tyler, we love you but a prediction only goes on the Book of Tetlock if it has a probability attached.
I hope Tyler is right and I also think we could be near peak woke. I think politics and corporate America are downstream of cultural shifts. The median voter is sick of the excesses of wokism as demonstrated by the elections Tyler mentioned. Democratic politicians have realized this, and are rolling back mask mandates and pursuing other, non woke agendas like refunding police. Corporations, including corporate media, will probably catch on next. If this is peak woke, there will be a long tail as those who went along with wokeism to be "cool" and "forward thinking" slowly adjust.
As for identify politics, that only works when white men are the common enemy. White men will over time eventually be less disproportionally in positions of power and the other races and genders will catch up. Asians are already breaking away as are Latinos. I project gays are next. Once identity politics dies, the non-white racial coalitions will break up and start fighting amongst themselves and new coalitions will form around things other than race.
I applaud TC's desire to be graded in Tetlockian fashion, but these predictions don't seem to be subject to any kind of clairvoyance test. What metrics and thresholds should we used to judge your predictions?
I consider the SF BoE recall, Virginia’s anti-CRT push, and Rogan getting away w/N-word montage a come-down from the 2020 summer wokeness high, but not a trend deviation.
December 2020 rough sketch of wokeness over time:
I think it’s like an increasing stepwise function where peaks are moral panics like Floyd that only partly recede, creating newer, higher normals.
Over decades, all cultural centers of power were captured and the ideology was institutionalized. The backlash will take decades too.
(I know this graph has no units and the y-axis doesn’t start at 0. I just want to show how the spurts may create new normals.)
https://twitter.com/_AlastairX_/status/1375982532206993425?s=20&t=BFWXcrUaYBoLQ--_KNEHtg
Any successful trend-deviating backlash will take more than a few elections and a failed cancellation of the most popular podcaster in America. Our captured institutions are much too resilient to democratic opposition.
"Don’t tell me what you think, just show me your portfolio."-NNT
What bets should we be making then? Short university, or just current universities? Is U of Austin such a short?
I agree that, when even San Francisco turns against wokeness, the peak has been reached. What does war in Ukraine have to do with wokeness though? I did not see Ukraine mentioned in Tyler's column.
It has to do with the fact that his tribe is obsessed with war against Russia, and the driving force behind wokeism.
This is the third iteration. The 70's which saw many of the ideas BLM represent get expressed. As well as a cross cultural challenge to convention.
Then the 90's. Cultural appropriation was a thing for a while.
They fizzle out but never go away. These ideas in full are profoundly unpopular except in isolated cloisters, the people who represent them are profoundly unpractical.
And plonkingly boring. 70's earth color boring.
A good chronicle on why people are leaving California
Goodbye California - Nerdrotic
https://youtu.be/1za-9VAA_Gs?t=159
Your logic on the universities becoming more woke makes sense, unless schools are forced to change due to consumption choices, which I think is highly likely.
IMHO It peaked with the Floyd protests and have gone down amazingly fast. Part of decline might be due to the rise in the number of black murder victims. That'll turn people away from defund the police and fast.
I think what Tyler is trying to say is that wokeism has peaked at the aggregate level. He is explicitly saying that academia and few other areas will get even more woke. The thing is that society overall is likely to become tired of wokeism and will pay less attention to hyperwoke institutions (media, academia, federal agencies).
I share this view and think that we are moving towards Big Divergence. Some parts of society will get hyperwoke, while the rest will simply walk away. Media consumption will move from legacy media to podcasts/substacks or something entirely new. Online education will slowly replace universities and maybe even K-12. In business nobody outside HR departments and few tech firms will care about wokeism.
>In business nobody outside HR departments and few tech firms will care about wokeism.
"It's over Anakin! I have the high ground!" And somewhat surprisingly, HR departments appear to be the high ground of the corporate world.
This may be true for a while, but I do not expect this to last. Unlike places like academia, corporate world is still mostly meritocratic and results-driven. Firms, which go too far in woke craze will end up attracting workers who will never get anything done. In business world, there is strong pressure to deliver results. Firms, which cannot deliver, will lose market share and go out of business. It is that simple.
Of course, this argument does not apply to parts of business world, where generating outrage is a business model. That's why I think that legacy media will go even further in woke rabbit hole. The thing is that fewer and fewer people will care about them anyway.
>In business world, there is strong pressure to deliver results.
YMMV. De facto, managers control corporate assets, not the shareholders. And the managers mostly care mostly about their standing with the global elite...as they will have moved on to a different role in 2-3 years, long before the consequences of their decisions are apparent.
IMHO, the managers used to have more skin-in-the-game back when most of their compensation came via 5 year vesting options. But nowadays? They have zero skin-in-the-game.
C-suite executives move around every 2-3 years? I don't think so. Some middle managers may but then these are not the people hobnobbing with "the global elite." By and large, middle managers do what HR tells them when it comes to diversity, anti-sexual harassment or affirmative action initiatives. And, contrary to popular belief, HR makes these decisions mostly to create a paper trail so that, if the company gets sued, they have a very strong defense and can get the case dismissed or settled for a small amount.
Yeah, I think this is an accurate take. I'd expect some sort of "devolution" at all levels of our society. Not just in terms of media and academia, but also in terms of governance, where people will move away from bloated "one size fits all" national policies and will be more accepting of state level solutions on a case by case basis. You can already see this happening with Biden allowing states to determine their own Covid policies.
" More generally, immigrant political views are more diverse than many people think, even within the Democratic Party"
Swap "even" with especially.
Legitimate question. Am I wrong to think that woke ideology is good in theory but bad in practice?
Yes. It's bad in theory too. Anything that self-contradictory is.
Is time to get a little more specific on what one means by woke. In some ways (but certainly not others) I think economics could benefit from being a little more woke (e.g. sexism on econjobrumors is an embarrassment).
"Wokeism is likely to evolve into a subculture that is highly educated, highly White and fairly feminine" - bold prediction, professor!
True enough, though I wonder if his last point is right that younger will remain more left. People don’t always stay the same.
As for woke generally, eh. Surely the expectation in 2020 when the recent wave got going should have been that a hot item for a while before settling down and accepting modest gains. That seems to be more or less what is happening.
The casual empiricism that derives predictions from the latest election results doesn't cut it when we are talking about massive movements of ideas.
Ideas circulate in a top-down manner from the more intellectually adept to the less. It's a trickle-down process. but it works, and nothing can reverse it except a countermovement of ideas at the top.
This is why the world religions' myths perpetuate themselves generation after generation. The relatively adept (priests, teachers) indoctrinate children who go on to be parents who participate in the indoctrination of their own children.
A common error is to assume that there's some reality check that can reverse this process if the ideas are bad ones. But this ignores the fact that reality is always interpreted through ideational/ideological lenses. Control education and the media (news and entertainment, low culture, and high culture) and you control how people see reality.
That doesn't mean that when this process gets underway, there won't be political reverses for the hegemonic ideas. Reverses occur because the entire population isn't evenly educated (in this case, in woke ideas). The woke revolution has thus far mainly affected the ideas of children and recent college graduates, who in turn have seized control of virtually all institutions. But they will sometimes get ahead of their skis, not because reality is disproving their ideas but because their ideas are not yet hegemonic among those who are older, who outnumber the young. But that is just a matter of time.
So optimism triggered by electoral victories is foolish. Elections are lagging indicators because even the undereducated, and the older college educated, can vote. (And even at that, Youngkin nearly lost in Va.!) But the massive woke ideological revolution proceeds to indoctrinate more and more people, regardless of who is the governor of Virginia or the president of the United States.
Perhaps of interest: I attempted to summarize the foundations of the progressive-woke movement in this essay:
https://medium.com/p/d0c74656602f
Wokeness = Proressivism (same old American leftism)
... you are correct on that, but totally wrong that Progressivism seeks Equality.
Progressivism is an elitist quasi religious collectivist/socialist ideology-- and always has been since its origins with the New England Puritans.
your reference essay is way too long and not worth the time to read fully.
> Latinos in particular seem more open to the Republican Party,
Well, when you realize books in our schools are showing boys putting their mouths on the penis of another boy....and we're supposed to accept this as. Imagine if there was a book in school showing a boy (under 12) performing oral sex on or digitally penetrating a girl (under 12). Would we consider it a good and beautiful thing?
Worse, parents "of color" have decided they don't like their kids writing explicit stories to be shared with teachers. Or drawing a picture of a pizza where ingredients mean certain things (black olives means you like to "give oral" was written in the assignment...the principal assured it the assignment was created, copied, and handed out by mistake).
Or, parents "of color" have decided they don't want unqualified strangers (aka teachers) leading their kids down a path of sexual preference while keeping it secret from parents. That used to be called grooming.
Or, maybe, a fat, sweaty single 40 year old male has zero business talking in private about sex to a 12 year old and keeping it secret from the parents. Yes, even if he's a teacher.
We learned yesterday a teacher was charged with baking cupcakes for her class, and using her husbands semen as an admix in the cupcakes. And the kids ate them.
How have people like this been put in charge of our kids?
Woke Dems are less than 14% of the party base. Yet how much time is spent maligning them. running them out won't turn them red...it will only make them martyrs to the cause. Instead how can we make the economy accessible to everyone and not the few? I know work hard, get an education, play by the rules, don't do drugs, and everything works out...but it doesn't always. There are people scrapping by who did everything right. There are kids who have mediocre grades but could be the next billionaire if given the opportunity. In this current system how many potential successes are we failing.
It's not about everyone getting the same. But everyone getting the same chance which isn't happening currently for all Americans. There are many barriers to entry and I don't think the will is there to address any of them because...why let in more competition....
Boring.
I don’t know many, maybe no, woke people. I know a lot of boring people who want to regale me with "can you believe it?" stories from Woke world.
Yawn.
When are people going to realize that the middle is where it’s at? Political extremes in this country drive people from one extreme to the other. How about we settle on the middle at some point?
Trump was called a racist and was considered extreme and was an effect of the right. The left went extreme as a response with all the woke stuff and went too far. Now there’s backlash to that movement. Hopefully this time it swings back to the middle and stays there.
But you know that people will be using the term woke just like they have used PC for decades, since it is impossible to stop kicking hippies once you start.
This is a bad column. You are making broad sociological generalizations without bothering to define your terms or offer any evidence. That smells like BS. And your usage of the term "woke" is just fantastical. As we all should know by now, and can learn through 10 minutes of Googling, "woke" is an African American vernacular term that describes a person who is aware of or alert to injustice. It became popular with non-African Americans for a few years after Ferguson but outside of its original African American context is now mostly used to sneer at white progressives for being pretentious and self-righteous bores. There is no organization of "the woke", no "woke" church or party, and no set of agreed upon "woke" principles. All of which is to say your reference to "the woke" is a reference to a made up group of people who, while they may exist in your imagination, do not exist in real life.
US citizens who are black are worried they'll be shot by police for no reason. (No good reason.) Trivializing their concerns by using the term "woke" to refer to piss poor rubbish is bloody shameful.
I realize over 90% of the use term "woke" is now done by people who aren't black to refer to piss poor rubbish. But maybe you should stop. Just to be nice.
I think this is probably correct. We dont have woke issues where I work and generally dont in our entire area. It has been funny listening to my wife, the Fox viewer in the family, trying to explain what woke means to my younger, liberal staff since they didnt have much exposure to the concept.
Woke as much of the right wants to define it is largely limited to some expensive liberal arts schools and some enclaves on the coasts with a few others sprinkled around. Most people on the left dont support it and big chunks laugh at it. Woke in the sense that there is a belief that some racism still exists, that the alphabet gender people still face a lot of prejudice, etc is still going to linger, because it is true.
Steve
You must work in a very small company.
The *people* where I work say things that would get them fired if the HR department got involved.
The *corporation* where I work is fairly activist. There were several emails in support of BLM protests but absolutely nothing about the Trucker protests or the January 6th protests. Along with many, many HR emails about promoting diversity or supporting and promoting women in the workforce.
If you're promoting diversity or women in the workforce you might as well advocate for Christians or Muslims or one legged farmers. You're advocated making business decisions on things unrelated to business.... That's partisan/religious/.... woke.
Not very big. Just 17,000 employees. We had one email I can recall about the BLM protests. My staff asked if we should send out something. I thought the one from our CEO was adequate so I didnt. We also had emails supporting the police during that time. We are pretty pro police and pro military. Nothing about 1/6 and nothing about the truckers. Nothing about promoting for diversity. I guess I should concede that since my admin lead for our APs is female but all of her assistants are male there has been some grumbling amongst the employees that we should have more female leaders, but that is from the bottom not from leadership. I am sure that if I were chairing a program at UCSF it would be different but Also know from talking with friends that if I were chairing a department outside of most East and West Coast programs it wouldnt be such a big deal.
Steve
The swing back to sanity among the center left is welcome, but will the right relent on the culture war nonsense? Probably not. Expecting more books to be banned and continued death threats against school boards for teaching the Civil War.
"Woke" in the sense of "being aware of ongoing racial inequities" is not going anywhere, but perhaps the excessive zeal has peaked and moved into a new phase. This was going to happen since Trump is out of office anyway, and a Democratic president is in power, so the Democrats have a lot less interest in rabble-rousing. People generally seem pretty ignorant of how much the rhetoric tends to ratchet up at all levels in a presidential election year. When you've "won" in an electoral sense you're not going to spend as much time yelling at people on Twitter. Not withstanding a few local and state elections, control of the federal government is in Democratic hands, and they are naturally interested in moving to the center to maintain their hold on power.
That's like defining Christianity as the belief that God is Love.
"Woke" in the sense of "being aware of ongoing racial inequities" is not going anywhere, but perhaps the excessive zeal has peaked and moved into a new phase.
-------------------------------
Hazel Meade is a big fan of the soft cultural conquest of the Europeans by Islamic hordes such as the grooming gangs.
"Woke" in the sense of "being aware of ongoing racial inequities" is not going anywhere, but perhaps the excessive zeal has peaked and moved into a new phase.
------------------------
Racial iniquities such as racial differences in IQ, temperament and neurological development are not going anywhere so neither are differences in wealth, social status and social outcomes. So this leads us to conclude that the racial grifting must continue because the anti-intellectuals pushing an anti-scientific house of cards must continue as well.
Trouble is their ideology motivates them to turn out and dominate elections normal people don’t participate in. School boards. That sort of thing. So people point to a few fluke elections. We’ll all the Woke have to do is recalibrate a little. My sister’s third grade class came top in the testing for literacy and math. Some district people observed her for a whole day—which she found very stressful because this is only her second full year teaching. It was funny what their contents cared about. Not enough group work. Etc. (Remember we’re in the middle of social distancing restrictions that make group work practically impossible.) And my sister is leaving. Because the school district only cares if a kid brigs a large weapon to school. Nice thing for my sister is she has enough math and science from university to make a good transition.
Just as they ban books,
The site now
Bans comments.
Two taken down today,
One yesterday.
Any site that wants to keep its comments section alive and readable deletes some comments. Go read 538 comments if you want an endless parade of work-from-home garbage.
This site is much better now that the endless Bolsanaro and similar junk has been thinned out.
My experience has been that actual constructive comments, reasonable germaine to the OP, are not removed, even when they are sometimes critical of and/or mocking the authors (Tyler and Alex). Kudos to them for running a good comments section - better now than it was ~a year ago, I think.
You'll never know
What you aren't supposed
To know, or
Have your views challenged
In a bubble of true believers.
Pointing out intolerance of other views on the right is not accepted, is it. Nor can it be criticized or even discussed, much less seen. Avert your eyes if it bothers you.
I'm a contrarian here and have never had a comment deleted. Try saying something smart, on point, or at least interesting.
The amount of attention this blog gives to Wokeism is not commensurate at all with how prevalent it really is/how widely held the excessive elements of it really are. The loudest more distorted voices of 'the woke' are typically more reflective of just people with larger social media presence and not widely-held perspective. Can we find a new drum to beat?
Not only that, but ask yourself this question:
If you taught black history in a grade school as part of a history, would you worry about parents using a hotline.
Would you worry about books being banned from the school library, or would those books never appear to begin with.
This is about right wing authoritarianism using a false flag operation if claims of wokeism to control the teaching of civics and history.
Read the American Historical Associations joint statement on this subject here:
" Joint Statement on Legislative Efforts to Restrict Education about Racism in American History (June 2021)
The American Association of University Professors, the American Historical Association, the Association of American Colleges & Universities, and PEN America have authored a joint statement stating their "firm opposition" to legislation, introduced in at least 20 states, that would restrict the discussion of "divisive concepts" in public education institutions. It is not possible to address divisions that exist, however, without an honest reckoning with their histories."
Here is the link: https://www.historians.org/divisive-concepts-statement
Let's see if this is regarded as woke and will be taken down as two others today on one yesterday were taken down. Am saving the ones that were taken down to circulate to some academic friends for later discussion elsewhere on this subject.
"If you taught black history in a grade school as part of a history, would you worry about parents using a hotline."
I wouldn't. But then I would teach actual Black history rather than woke propaganda. Black History month has been around since the 70s mostly with little controversy. It has become controversial only relatively recently when it has become a vehicle for promoting the stew of CRT / anti-racism / anti-whiteness / 1619 project / intersectionality BS.
Do you really think your academic "friends" care if a couple of your idiotic blog comments got deleted? I'll bet they'd stay friends longer if you spared them the ordeal of having to pretend to give a $@#%. Seriously, buy an effing clue, dude.
"This is about right wing authoritarianism using a false flag operation"
Quite the opposite! Your comment is part of a left-wing false flag operation where they try to convince people that right-wing opposition to racism (wokeism) is actually opposition to teaching history. You don't want to have to defend the blatant racism so you pretend it isn't happening.
Why don’t you make like Neil You g and take your comments elsewhere?
You and Moses are not the audience but do provide illustrative examples of some in the audience.
You’re posting about tattling to your "friends" about your Trump poem being deleted. Comedy gold!
If you're going to insist on the dichotomy where either you teach racial collectivism and anti-whiteness, or you just avert the topic of race entirely, I think it's fair for people to say fine, we'll just do the latter. It's entirely possible to teach about slavery and segregation without having it in the context of left wing racial revanchism. Why not try that instead?
Woke is the new communism: are you now or have you ever been a member of woke. While I don't doubt that the population on college campuses is more aware of sexism and racism, the hostile reaction to that awareness is all one needs to know about the pervasiveness of sexism and racism. "Woke" is a pejorative intended to ridicule awareness of sexism and racism. "Woke" replaces "feminism" as the threat to a white male dominated power structure, serving double duty to refer to threats to both white and male dominance. As for the faint praise of the Latino community as anti-woke, it's code for the Latino male role characterized by machismo and patriarchal authority without actually endorsing it. An aside, "woke" is the past tense of awake, which means to emerge from a state of sleep or to become alert to or aware of reality. Can't have that in America.
The progressives running universities (and, of course, the search committees) are the ones demanding political loyalty oaths in the form of diversity statements -- which include not not just oaths but also require an actual history of DEI activism. That's taking it up a notch from the red scares in the 50s. Professors then were required to sign the loyalty oaths but AFAIK, they weren't required to show they had a history of participating in 4th-of-July parades and other patriotic activities.
And who exactly is it that you think is A) in a position of power and B) denying employment opportunities to the woke?
"to threats to both white and male dominance"
Yes, wokeism is racist. That's always been clear. Woke people are bigots. They generally explicitly want people of specific races punished, made to feel guilty and pushed into an outgroup.
"Woke" certainly is a pejorative for some people.
So is "Communist".
It is exceptionally ironic for someone to criticize an anti-woke crown for McCarthyism with "are you now or have you ever been a member of woke"
Are you capable of seeing the irony here? If you aren't I don't think spelling it out will help.
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