Comments from Is It Time to Move On from Anti-Woke?
The respondents have their day.
Thanks again to
for being my sparring partner. And thanks to the commenters below for responding. You can read parts one, two, and three, if you haven’t already. Overall, this has felt like a worthwhile but surprisingly vulnerable process for reasons I’m still trying to untangle. -DanDan, there's an impasse I feel like I come back to again and again with you and with other anti-woke figures (though I do think that's a reductive label for you; I personally have never really thought of Eminent Americans as an anti-woke podcast). It's that you equate the cultural phenomenon of wokeness with left-wing intellectualism, and essentially hold left-wing ideas and intellectuals responsible for the one-dimensional, censorious tendencies of wokeism as it was practiced *outside* of intellectual spaces. That doesn't comport with my experience of 2015-2021, which to me was a golden age of left-wing thought and public intellectualism in general, with an extraordinarily high level of public writing and debate. "Wokeness" was real, very culturally present, but it was unevenly distributed, and just did not have the deadening impact on "American intelligence” that some people seem to think it did. In fact, the peak of wokeness coincided with a renaissance of American public intellect that was the first moment in my life where it felt like ideas actually mattered.
The core of this disagreement is that we're talking about different things when we refer to "the left"; respectfully, I think you're not being precise enough. In your parts of this exchange, there is almost no distinction whatsoever between wokeness and the left. What comes through there is not so much a critique of wokeness but a pretty deep and prejudicial skepticism of the left tout court. But it doesn’t have to be this way; I think there's a way to allow for the real prominence and cultural power of wokeness, which I found bad in pretty much the same ways you did, and not to turn that into indefensible overgeneralizations about "the left" being "boring" or giving up on "thinking hard."
Naomi gets at this with this important observation: "To discuss this issue as if it’s a matter of ideology seems to, to me, incorrect." A lot of analysis of wokeness gets it the wrong way around, as if it were an intellectual phenemenon that flowed downward from elite ideas into cultural practice. But in fact I think it was a primarily *non-intellectual, non-theoretical* form of folk wisdom and practice that bubbled up in civil society before it was capitalized on by woke intellectuals and influencers like DiAngelo, Kendi, et al. Social media platforms were crucial, and the key texts of wokeness were Tumblr threads and posts on websites like Thought Catalog and Everyday Feminism—in other words, a popular phenomenon that took place largely outside the sphere of the left intelligentsia.
Obviously, the complex of notions/gestures we call "wokeness" was extremely influential in progressive institutions: digital media, non-profits, cultural institutions like museums and galleries, elite universities and private schools, etc. It's fine to call that "the left" in a loose, colloquial way. But the field of analysis of your podcast, and what you're talking about in this exchange, is the *intellectual* scene, and that is a fairly distinct sociological space. If we actually look at the intelligentsia of the left golden age (2015-2021 or so), its relationship to wokeism was quite orthagonal. The important debates about neoliberalism, fascism, etc, were often completely separate from wokeness; when they overlapped with the themes of wokeness (the race in US history debates), the left intelligentsia was frequently contextualizing, elevating, and challenging the narrow terms set by the woke influencers. I don't know how anyone could review the contents of the left-liberal intellectual scene (TNR, The Nation, Dissent, the LRB and NYRB, etc) and conclude that it was rigidly dogmatic, uncritical about its own side, overtaken by wokeness, or (least of all!) boring.
I have asked heterodox people again and again to specify: What couldn't be discussed? What debates couldn't be had? Whose ideas were blacklisted? And they never have a persuasive answer. It comes across more as a gut reaction about their own isolation or lack of a sense of importance; in a few cases, they actually mean "left-wing magazines didn't embrace right-wing ideas."
I think Naomi's right that as time goes on, anti-wokeness increasingly appears to have been a reactive positioning that depends on stereotypes of the left as its foil. It's a realization I've had again and again talking to otherwise very smart non-left or heterodox types: "This person just isn't very familiar with the left!" I don't think we should stop talking about wokeness, because a lot of the analysis to date is still mired in baggy generalizations and personal ressentiment. We should talk about it better and more precisely.
Dan,
I found your exchange with Naomi very stimulating and a highlight of last week, though with that being said I also thought you were both talking past each other just a bit, and not really about the same thing. I have some very real sympathies with both of your positions. I am in complete agreement with Naomi that anti-wokeness often seems to be a cover or a synonym for a turning away from a commitment to equality, particularly racial equality.
On the other hand, I know what you mean when you argue that the culture now (I think perhaps by this you mean that of 2013-22ish) is worse than it was in 2010 or so. Taking into consideration that these things are always subject to opinion, I think some of what you are talking about can be separated from the unduly broad and in general loathsomely misused moniker of "woke" and be discussed as what it really is, which is poptimism of a particularly vulgar sort.
It is worth stating up front that there was nothing wrong with the original aims of poptimism as set forth in the years before it became hegemonic in the 21st century. When people like Dave Hickey or Camille Paglia argued for the value of camp, of pop, of trash, there was a charge, a thrill to their provocations. There really was something a little silly about the attempt to claim that any given form of popular culture was something "more authentic" than what were after all at bottom simply *other forms* of mass culture. To acknowledge, for instance, that the best pop could stand on the same footing as the best rock was not itself unreasonable. On the other hand, this quickly shifted in the mass cultural sphere into the infamous slogan "let people enjoy things" which became a cudgel against the idea of asserting any hierarchy whatsoever in the realms of aesthetics besides that informed by the wallet of the consumer and the thumb of the culture industry.
That was what made art in the last decade so often miserable, not the presence in this or that beloved franchise film of actors of black, asian, latino or other descent, or the presence of female leads or IGBTQ characters. The cynical conflation of vulgar poptimism with "good" left-liberal/progressive politics by the culture industry, and the subsequent embrace of that idea by elements of said progressive sphere, is surely one of the more pernicious cultural-aesthetic developments of the last decade. In this sense I am sympathetic to your argument
On the other hand this is not exactly what Naomi means by anti-wokeness, and her point that it is now the governing ideology of the American regime certainly seems correct. The last four years are littered by writings from intelligent and perceptive thinkers who seemed to assume that the state of affairs in Blue states during the pandemic and then Biden administration was more or less perpetual, and that their interventions should only target that arrangement. Some of them now appear to be realizing that they spent those years presupposing a congruence between their interests and those of the right that simply does not exist. It is worth being vigilant regarding deformations of the aesthetic and intellectual sphere coming from the other side of the aisle.
Certainly one wants the opposition (whether such an opposition is necessarily of the left or whether these categories perhaps no longer describes the reality on the ground is a fascinating debate that is beyond the purview of this response) to have the best arguments, and some level of public argumentation against the worst tendencies of these is necessary in order to offer corrections. On the other hand, one should always be aware of the tactical situation in which one is making these arguments. The temptation to settle scores, to speak that which felt unspeakable for so much of the last decade, is a very real thing, and one which I feel myself. Perhaps in the long run it will prove impossible to resist, perhaps not. One certainly doesn’t want to self-censor, but at the same time it seems not unreasonable to think about whether these words will deliver themselves as weapons in the hands of one’s opponents.
Hello Daniel,
I appreciated the conversation that you had with Naomi Kanakia about whether or not the era of the “woke/anti-woke” distinction is over. I wanted to raise a significant point of disagreement I have with Naomi, though, that came towards the end of the conversation, because I think that it is monumentally important to illustrate why this debate over where this woke/anti-woke dichotomy on the left is important and remains so. Her claim that socialism both does not have a solution to racial (or gender) inequality is theoretically highly mistaken, and the claim that we don’t have socialism because of some kind of entrenched racism in white society is historical and empirically incorrect. The only societies in the advanced world which have made strides against all forms of racial and gender inequality are the ones in which a labor movement (this is what the left is—which is not something I think Naomi understands) has been able to gain enough structural, political, and institutional power relative to capital. Class-first socialism isn’t about leaving identity issues by the wayside, it’s the only project whose strategy gives it the inherent ability to tackle identity-based inequalities. I was truthfully kind of stunned by this error, because this is something that the left, Marxists, and socialists have been arguing for a very long time. There is substantial scholarship to back this argument up, as well (in fact there is so much historical and theoretical work on these arguments I wouldn’t know where to begin listing them). This is what I think is the real, fundamental disagreement that people like myself (a long-time “anti-woke” leftist) have been having with people who want to defend the woke party line for many years. It’s not because we don’t care about identity and racial inequality, it’s because we believe our theory of how society works (which is against the race reductionism that woke thinkers are most associated with) is not only correct, but carries with it profoundly radical theories of change that will get us out of this faux political battlefield of woke and anti-woke—a vacuum of a place that has only gotten us to the point where freedom of speech and knowledge is being systematically attacked by the powers that be.
I have so much more to say on this disagreement (I am a graduate student in political theory after all), but I will keep it brief because I think it’s important to get this point out there.
I thought about pulling the below after reading Shreeharsh Kelkar's impressive analysis of the flaws of 'Janinism'—what could be left to say? But then I decided that after all I was making a slightly different point. Rather than responding to Janine's beliefs, I want to propose that one should not, when applying for a job, fellowship, etc., have to respond to them. If Janine interviews me I would like to be able to say to her, "this is above my pay grade," and not be dismissed as a candidate.
In her conclusion she writes, "Wokeness, for all its faults, was organized around genuine societal issues–racial disparities in wealth, income, and criminal justice–that we all know are unacceptable, unjust, and unsustainable."
It's pretty rhetoric, but look what happens if I switch out a few words to change the subject: "The tariffs, for all their faults, were enacted to address genuine societal issues–declining working class wages, limited job prospects for those without undergraduate degrees, and widespread hopelessness and addiction–that we all know are unacceptable, unjust, and unsustainable."
It does not follow, from one's opposition to the tariffs, that one is in favor of perpetuating these problems. You don't have to have your own solution to think someone else's will do more harm than good.
I agree with her statement that the Trump administration has been driven by "hatred and grievance," and I want to add another word, "revenge." Judging from the opening months, these instincts seem unlikely to lead to sensible or popular policymaking, so I think she's right that "woke ideas will come back," that nothing is being settled now. But even if they outlive us all, anyone could make a list of ideas that are powerful and persistent, whose merits are forever in dispute.
It’s dispiriting to see, between your 3-part conversation with Kanakia and David Sessions’ with John Baskins, that there seems to be no way of agreeing what the last several years were like, let alone how things stand culturally/politically now… but I guess good on all involved for doing the work of documenting that this is the case!
The period 2020-22 especially felt like such a distinct, obvious, crazy-making moment to me and many of my friends, such that it feels very ‘gaslighting’ as they say, for that time to now be retrospectively framed as hardly having been anything at all—I worry that the left is never going to get itself in order as long as it can neither convincingly narrativize the recent past’s excesses and mistakes, nor, in part by doing so, restore to people the sense that we do in fact live in a common world of communicable experiences (rather than one in which individuals can only make vibe-ological impressionistic reports that fail to convince interlocutors of anything except their own bamboozlement, and can be met with “but no, that’s not what it was like at all…”)
I understand the urge to separate “the left” from the more embarrassing expressions of the currents of diffuse radicalism that sprang up in the wake of the financial crisis. It is correct in many ways, and I sometimes think of myself as being a leftist non-liberal. I almost half-buy Matt Brunig’s conspiracy theory that “woke” was invented or at least weaponized by Hillary Clinton so that her supporters could claim to be more radical than racist, sexist, phobic Bernie Bros. (https://mattbruenig.com/2022/06/29/the-origins-of-the-recent-dei-infused-liberal-politics-stuff/.) It was a way for liberals and liberal institutions to channel this radical energy in directions that they could tolerate, and that were often unimportant or self-defeating.
A sort of Marxist conscience informs me that my objective class status is “pmc” and that calling yourself a socialist is great cover for expressing what would otherwise sound like the odd center-right opinion or unreconstructed attitude. I’ve always liked Matt Yglesias’ quip that Clinton is liberal, Sanders is more liberal and Mao was even more liberal. We were all part of the same moment, including NLR subscribers.
(a) One of the most annoying thinks about peak-woke was the way in which people either kept their mouths shut or deliberately avoided thinking consistently about a subject when they sensed that they’d come to the wrong conclusion. You didn’t want to become one of those tedious anti-woke people, and if you stepped out of line a little bit and didn’t apologize you had to be ready for a new career as a “heterodox” thinker. It is healthy for people who aren’t tediously anti-woke not to avoid the subject, which hasn't gone away.
(b) This diffuse radicalism has been decisively defeated. The defeat includes the politics of the Real Left or left populism, but also the politics of the sort of people who thought that Gen X liberals made their workplace unsafe. Like Caroline, I believe that socialism or social democracy is the only thing that could meaningfully reduce racial inequality in this country. MLK ended his career working on the Poor People’s Campaign and protesting against the Vietnam War, not bothering about who got admitted to Harvard. This doesn’t mean revolution, the Universal Pre-K program that Bill DeBlasio implemented in New York made more of a difference than all the DEI programs in the country, as far as I’m concerned. But do we self-proclaimed socialists have any idea how to implement the sort of politics we believe in? DEI is as likely to solve racism as the current American left is to establish a Nordic-style welfare state. In *this* sense we don’t have a solution to racial disparity. Everyone is disoriented by the current political situation in a way that calls for introspection. Debating wokeness is perhaps a sort of comfort blanket: at least we all know what we think about *that.*
Not sure if it'd be better to make this comment on the original thread, but here seems as good as any place. My point is for @DavidSess : I agree that the main topics on the left -- Jacobin, Corey Robin's Substack, The Nation, etc etc -- for those years were largely other things, and when they tackled, say, race, it was often from a class-based perspective that was clearly impatient with woke. What this misses -- and I am not sure how important this is, but it feels worth saying -- is the extent of the denialism in that world about what woke was doing, how it was functioning, on the ground -- AND the unwillingness to use class-based principles to really call it out. So, for example, whenever a public figure lost a job for something they did on their own time -- say, a stupid, even racist, social media post -- I kept waiting for the labor-rights leftists to say, "This is really bad--the boss shouldn't have surveille your social media and then fire you for what you do when not on company time--this is a major labor concern." I even called a few of the Major Figures on the Left to ask if I was missing something. And they would say, basically, "Yeah, I can see how that analysis works. But we have bigger fish to fry." But of course if what you're worried about is the power of the employer over labor, that kind cancel culture based on social media surveillance (which can bite employees of the left and the right in the butt -- going to a pro-choice rally, when the boss is a pro-lifer, then posting about it...) has been in some ways a major new topic of the century. I think, David, you'd also be hard-pressed to find the intellectual Left willing to take on the weakness of certain sacred-cow woke thinkers, just as a matter of intellectual honesty. For example, Ibram Kendi was never a major figure among academic-left historians -- he was hardly reviewed until he won a major (popular) book award, and the reviews were often tepid (cf Matthew Frye Jacobson in the JAH: "Breathtaking though the book may be in scope, its pace is necessarily breathless, leaving little room for interpretation, analysis, or contemplation.") Then he was a fact on the ground. But the left historians never went and read or re-read it, or owned up to the fact that they hadn't thought much of the book. That is, David, you are right, the two worlds went on in parallel, and didn't touch each other much. But that could be its own form of dishonesty.