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.*
Given my desire to be taken seriously when I'm offering critiques of wokeness, I should probably make more of the fact that I've actually done years of work toiling in the DEI industry, trying sincerely to improve things in terms of racial equality. I'm not just a bystander!
When I was working in public health, a colleague and I spent about a year trying to develop training for hospitals on how to develop interventions to address racial health disparities, and one of the moments that really stuck with me was when we realized, after talking to a bunch of people who were in charge of various programs, that the single intervention that anyone knew about that had meaningfully reduced racial disparities in maternal health and outcomes was the Medicaid expansion in the ACA, ie an utterly race neutral program.
I'm not mostly doing that work anymore, but I spent years in the thick of it, genuinely trying to make things better, and so much of it was crazy-making. Most people I worked with were really decent people, who in a lot of cases were doing good, but some bad ideas and some bad internal norms around open conversation were a genuine obstacle. They're not an invention of bad faith actors on the right.
I enjoyed your interview with Timothy Lensmire from a while back. It was very interesting to hear from an intelligent and open-minded person who was really trying to take the official version of anti-racism seriously. The fact that he took it seriously obliged him to do things differently. I'd love to read something from you on your public health DEI experience. In a hospital I'm sure things played out differently from the newsroom and faculty lounge versions of anti-racism initiative we're all familiar with.
My cousin is a social worker and I hear similar stories from her. Medicaid expansion and Universal Pre-K made the biggest difference by far for the families she works with. Otherwise what matters most is the general social services budget. She says that there are many anti-racism initiatives in her department (some of which she likes), but that you don't need to do anything fancy to make sure social service money gets spent on racial minorities, sadly.
Maybe I'll write it up at some point. The main complicating factor is that I still work for the university, albeit in a different position, so I can't really spill the beans. Not that I have anything terribly scandalous to report. I met some bad actors, but that had nothing to do with their politics. Mostly people were well meaning and hard working bureaucrats who wanted to support the institution and do good at the same time. Just standard issue liberal establishment types.
I was off to the side, doing the public health work, when the great awokening happened, and that's just such a different cultural space, full of type A STEM nerds, most of whom hadn't thought too much about politics prior to 2015. The intensity was much lower than I'm sure it was in my previous workplace. So my main straight DEI experience was of its pre-awokening, pretty banal equilibrium, which in my experience was mostly just a pretty benign lubricator of socialization in elite spaces.
I won’t be surprised if the left finds itself in a advantageous position a few years from now, if Trump manages to pull the plug on the American empire *and* sends the global economy into a lasting recession, all sorts of possibilities will emerge
Maybe! I think that a lot of the comrades assume that if the system falls apart the grand soir will arrive and I... don't think that.
Which is why I'm really just a boring left-liberal, I don't *want* the system (of global neoliberal hegemony or whatever you want to call it) to collapse and I would be very happy with small gradual improvements.
(a) is the most succinct way of putting the problem, especially where the problem didn't rise to the level of blatant cancellation. The thing that people like Sessions don't get is that this was not just the bottom up people on Tumblr and in YA lit. It was the academic Left, people across disciplines suddenly holding dogmas about what people in other disciplines were supposed to believe. When just doing the dissertation you planned to do could mean lack of even meagre job prospects and an end to your career. Trendy problems were already an issue, now you had to have trendy conclusions as well.
And it was part of the rest of the Left as well. I mean I would say that it was a lot of the newcomers to the left, those thousands of people who suddenly declared themselves socialists, but I was on the left before the millennials joined. There was more room to have differing views without being a persona non grata but there were also all the familiar people who would later enforce the orthodoxy.
Maybe there's something about the sheer force of irrational will that comes with the mass adoption of a belief (or belief system). You can't argue with it. But if you are caught up in it, or if you are already in agreement with the tidal wave of opinion, you just don't see this force as brute and irrational (impervious to argument). (I think woke people used to call that position one of privilege, but whereas they would use it to blame the privileged-designated for their shortcomings and call them out as implicated in the problem, I just think people like Sessions have a blindspot to what was going on.) Because they're generally reflective about their own views, they can't imagine anyone being swept away or silenced by an unreflective mob of identifiable people (sometimes people they know) some of whom should have known better but just got swept up and resigned themselves to the momentum—when they happen to be in agreement with the mob. How could this mob not be an unacknowledged source of his excitement about the state of the millennial left back then? I guess this has unfortunately made me despair that any good ideas will ever be adopted en masse in a rational way, or even in a retrospectively-rational Hegelian way.
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.
I mean that really goes without saying. Dei never recommended academic literature on justice or equity or anything and that was well-supported by everyone. There have been more than enough leftists who said they just didn't want to punch left for political opportunism, personal opportunism or fear. The only one I was aware of was Zizek, but he got articles written against him heavily. The dishonesty is just weird because there are enough ppl who admit they were pushed away. Naomi themselves says that and they're closer to dei than zizek was.
Nice comments all round (my own views are closest to those of Caroline fwiw) which make it clear that there's little point in debating woke / anti woke or left / right without agreed-upon prior definitions of those contested terms; the problems only multiply when you try to map both pairs onto a single axis. Impossible! But while I agree with Blake Smith that nothing has been resolved in this conversation, the fact that so many people were willing to participate in it publicly suggests that it isn't 2021 any longer. Were we to revisit the underlying issues in concrete terms, and without the sinister amalgamation of social media mores and workplace discipline that characterized the COVID era, it's possible we'd find a lot to agree on--or, at the very least, some useful disagreements.
Expand on this a bit. Is the issue that we don't have a shared definition of woke/anti-woke, or is it that we don't have a shared narrative of what happened during the key period (2015-2023, give or take)? Or both?
Both. I took Naomi's emphasis to be on demands for racial justice and frustration with ongoing racial inequality (and sexual and gender inequality), while I took yours to be on the illiberalism, moralism, and pressure toward ideological conformity with which those demands were advanced in liberal institutions, especially the media, cultural spaces, and academia. Depending on which aspect you identify as the defining attribute, you end up with a different account of what happened and, especially, what constitutes "anti-woke." Perhaps this is oversimplifying, but it does seem like a pretty common dynamic when this topic is discussed.
I suppose I'm happy for David Sessions that he experienced 2015-2021 as a "left golden age," because my experience of that time was so precisely the opposite: a dark, glib, petty era of sophistry, censoriousness, and personal attacks in which "the left" seemed to sever its last few threads of connection to the grassroots pro-labor left in which I'd been raised. There seemed perhaps some hope in the initial weeks after the 2016 election, when many progressives earnestly sought to understand how people who'd twice voted for Obama could possibly vote to Trump (before settling on the easy excuses of racism, sexism and the Russians), but that was quickly superseded by resistance theater and hardline dogma. Things got even worse circa 2020-21, but I'd argue the left had already suffered a devastating intellectual collapse by that point.
At some point I'll have David on to talk this through more. I think it would be interesting to understand his experience of this time, because I just wasn't tuned in to that world at all in those years. I doubt I'll end up sharing his assessment of its merits, but it would good to grok where he's coming from.
I was also surprised to read that and my assumption is that David was much more involved in media than actual political organization, because for myself and others (people involved in DSA or DSA-adjacent organizations, labor unions and caucuses, etc), I don’t think there were any issues that couldn’t trigger a shit storm of discourse or potentially an outright organizational crisis (NYT wrote about this instance of which I have personal familiarity https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/14/us/adolph-reed-controversy.html ). A lot of individuals and even many organizations will not recover or return to the organized left after what went down during that time.
I was going to mention Adoph Reed if my comment hadn't gotten so long!
I see where David's coming from in the sense that there was a ton of sudden energy on the left, all sorts of people you wouldn't have expected were coming to meetings and calling themselves socialists. The fact that far left thought was more visible in the highbrow media was an interesting development. But the diffuse radicalism of that moment was comprehensively beaten and "wokeness" was at the very least a symptom of what was going wrong.
The material effect of this neutered radicalism and capitulation to the symptom of woke is that union leaders are more interested in what the anti-woke "right-wing" "pro-labor" people have to say about strategy and policy than the left. This is not a good thing.
There was also that long piece, I think in the Intercept, about the damage that wokeness had done to the non profit and advocacy worlds.
I think the biggest question I'd have for David, if we grant Secret Squirrel's point about a lot of new energy coming into left wing organizations and publications, is what the positive fruits of that were/are. It's kind of like what I talked to Geoff Shullenberger and Bill Deresiewicz about, on their respective episodes of my podcast, in terms of how to assess the value of all the "energy" on the right. There's surely a lot of energy there, but that doesn't necessarily equate to anything good. So much of it is toxic, destructive energy.
So if David's right that it was a golden age, what specifically was golden? New members and subscribers can't be the answer. It has to be things that are actually good on their own terms, whether it's productive thought or meaningful policy change.
I realize that complaining about this makes me sound like Statler and Waldorf, but I just didn't understand what people thought they were going to accomplish. I still don't!
If I remember rightly, many of the “class first” leftists from 2015 era were willing to jettison racial and other inequalities because fundamentally they didn’t believe in working class racial and/or minority conflicts as real or important. Adolph Reed often said this. So it makes sense that right-wing pro-labor would gain traction. There’s a reason why, say Tesla’s NorCal plant is called the Plantation, and it’s not purely because of its owner or management. Though class-first folk said they were fighting for broader goals, it was never that clear who would be welcome if they won, and outside of platitudes they never really welcomed those outside their fold.
Touché. Well it did seem at the time that the Robin Kelley, Olufemi Taiwo, Keeanga-Yamhatta Taylor side of the conversation had a different take than y’alls. But I’ll stand down.
I've got to admit, I'm a bit disappointed by what was chosen and the last part of the exchange. It's fine. I don't really expect anything important to happen from any substack. Hopefully we get a good conversation between both sides where it really gets hashed out. There really are no leaders but a borg hivemind, so there's a lot of work to do there still (and kicking and screaming the whole way), but it's necessary we get this figured out.
I did want to bring up Blake Smith's point. I know you brought it up because you're not interested in it being solved except on your terms or no terms and you wanted to look bipartisan. That being said, I thought the comment was interesting. They really do not have a meaningful historicism. That sorta goes without saying given how they say America is simply a racist country built by slaves and all that. It's definitely a subversion of everything into immediate (psychopathic) lived experience. I find that to be an interesting distinction between it and Marxism. The ideology just does not allow anything. In that sense, history will be narratized by people with a more meaningful historicism (with explanatory power).
It was mostly just comments that people sent to me directly, along with David's from the comments. Don't want you to overestimate the thoughtfulness of my curation.
Part of what was genuinely difficult about this small micro-intervention in the larger debate is that it gets so big so quickly and I didn't really have a good plan for how to bit off just the right size for us to chew on constructively. It's less that I'm invested in looking super bipartisan than that I was trying (and clearly in some ways failing) not to get sucked into a larger debate that I just don't have the time to address thoroughly.
There's nothing to overestimate. Instead, a bigger discussion is necessary and you've prevented it from actually being a stepping stone. The best you can hope for is political news of the week alignment until they forget that.
I appreciated the back and forth concluded here and found it interesting reading, but I can't see this conversation making progress unless it takes problems of solidarity seriously and focally. The word did not appear in the three main parts or in this collection of responses.
Sociologically, wokeness included a distinctive new form of Durkheimian "segmental" or "mechanical" solidarity (meaning a homogenizing and exclusionary commitment to a shared group similarity standard) and most of the critiques of wokeness in the conversation are implicitly criticisms of the expansion of this segmental solidarity at the expense of prior "organic" solidarity (meaning a specializing and inclusionary commitment to a shared cooperation-in-differences model). That simple pattern could serve as a trailhead into plenty of relevant, clarifying sociological material for the conversation, from Durkheim's own The Division of Labor in Society (1893) to Mary Douglas's Purity and Danger (1966) to the many contemporary works citing theirs.
I'm identifying that pattern in old-fashioned jargon. There are newer, in some ways better words for it today, but the newer stuff is trickier to introduce and deploy in a short comment. A lot of what we see with wokeness today (and the failure to agree on terms for and about it, especially) is downstream of the late modern or postmodern historical dynamics Rorty described and exemplified in Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity (1989), in which many intellectual groups of the late Cold War period simply gave up their prior segmental-solidaristic commitments to rational persuasion and persuadability — well before contemporary wokeness.
Regarding Caroline’s comment, I suspect that Naomi’s dismissal of class-first socialism isn’t based on any one talking point, but simply on the de facto reality that minorities don’t trust it, and its supporters don’t seem to mind enough to change.
For example, if Bernie wanted minorities to trust him, he’d become a Democrat. But he hasn’t, and likely won’t.
With all due respect, this gets at my point. You're prescribing what minorities *should* see, I'm describing what they *do* see.
Moreover, if being an independent and just caucusing with the Democrats came without any costs, then why wouldn't everyone do the same? There's necessarily a tradeoff to Bernie's approach. Standing apart from the Democratic establishment makes White people like him more. But it makes minorities like him less.
On the one hand I think there's probably empirical/polling support for the notion that class-first socialism doesn't have a ton of support from minority voters. On the other hand, that doesn't seem like a slam dunk argument against class first socialism. Or against Bernie's choice not to affiliate formally with the Democrats.
Of course. But this is my point. There's *only* empirical evidence to speak of, because minorities don't *really* disagree with the theoretical talking points— at least no more so than our White counterparts.
What we're really opposed to, I suspect, is how it manifests in *practice*: It tells us to join with the other side's populists against our own side's elites. But why would a minority ever do that?
It's interesting to think about that from my perspective as a Jew. My Jewish gut tells me a few conflicting things. It's hard to imagine wanting to ally with a group (the campus pro-Palestinian left) that can be so precious about language when they feel like it, vis a vis groups they care about, and so cavalier about "From the River to the Sea" when they feel like it. It signals not so much anti-Semitism as a lack of concern about how Jews might experience the phrase. So that pushes me away from the left, and for some Jewish voters it's a prod to allying with the populist right. But another quadrant of my Jewish gut looks at the populist right and says, "uh-oh, that's not a group that usually ends up being good for the Jews." Which pushes me back toward the left, and so just on that vector on its own terms I end up kind of center left.
I think for a long time Black and Hispanic voters had that ick feeling toward the Republicans, even after the Party had shed most of its overt racism. Interesting that Trump, of all people, has done a better job attracting Black and particularly Hispanic voters.
All of which is to say that it's complicated. I do think that gut feeling about who you feel more comfortable with is deeply meaningful information. It's just not always super clear which way it cuts at the end of the day, and also where to draw the line between a healthy suspicion of people who don't seem to value you and a kind of toxic suspicion or prejudice against people who simply seem different.
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.*
Given my desire to be taken seriously when I'm offering critiques of wokeness, I should probably make more of the fact that I've actually done years of work toiling in the DEI industry, trying sincerely to improve things in terms of racial equality. I'm not just a bystander!
When I was working in public health, a colleague and I spent about a year trying to develop training for hospitals on how to develop interventions to address racial health disparities, and one of the moments that really stuck with me was when we realized, after talking to a bunch of people who were in charge of various programs, that the single intervention that anyone knew about that had meaningfully reduced racial disparities in maternal health and outcomes was the Medicaid expansion in the ACA, ie an utterly race neutral program.
I'm not mostly doing that work anymore, but I spent years in the thick of it, genuinely trying to make things better, and so much of it was crazy-making. Most people I worked with were really decent people, who in a lot of cases were doing good, but some bad ideas and some bad internal norms around open conversation were a genuine obstacle. They're not an invention of bad faith actors on the right.
I enjoyed your interview with Timothy Lensmire from a while back. It was very interesting to hear from an intelligent and open-minded person who was really trying to take the official version of anti-racism seriously. The fact that he took it seriously obliged him to do things differently. I'd love to read something from you on your public health DEI experience. In a hospital I'm sure things played out differently from the newsroom and faculty lounge versions of anti-racism initiative we're all familiar with.
My cousin is a social worker and I hear similar stories from her. Medicaid expansion and Universal Pre-K made the biggest difference by far for the families she works with. Otherwise what matters most is the general social services budget. She says that there are many anti-racism initiatives in her department (some of which she likes), but that you don't need to do anything fancy to make sure social service money gets spent on racial minorities, sadly.
Maybe I'll write it up at some point. The main complicating factor is that I still work for the university, albeit in a different position, so I can't really spill the beans. Not that I have anything terribly scandalous to report. I met some bad actors, but that had nothing to do with their politics. Mostly people were well meaning and hard working bureaucrats who wanted to support the institution and do good at the same time. Just standard issue liberal establishment types.
I was off to the side, doing the public health work, when the great awokening happened, and that's just such a different cultural space, full of type A STEM nerds, most of whom hadn't thought too much about politics prior to 2015. The intensity was much lower than I'm sure it was in my previous workplace. So my main straight DEI experience was of its pre-awokening, pretty banal equilibrium, which in my experience was mostly just a pretty benign lubricator of socialization in elite spaces.
I won’t be surprised if the left finds itself in a advantageous position a few years from now, if Trump manages to pull the plug on the American empire *and* sends the global economy into a lasting recession, all sorts of possibilities will emerge
depressing thought
Maybe! I think that a lot of the comrades assume that if the system falls apart the grand soir will arrive and I... don't think that.
Which is why I'm really just a boring left-liberal, I don't *want* the system (of global neoliberal hegemony or whatever you want to call it) to collapse and I would be very happy with small gradual improvements.
(a) is the most succinct way of putting the problem, especially where the problem didn't rise to the level of blatant cancellation. The thing that people like Sessions don't get is that this was not just the bottom up people on Tumblr and in YA lit. It was the academic Left, people across disciplines suddenly holding dogmas about what people in other disciplines were supposed to believe. When just doing the dissertation you planned to do could mean lack of even meagre job prospects and an end to your career. Trendy problems were already an issue, now you had to have trendy conclusions as well.
And it was part of the rest of the Left as well. I mean I would say that it was a lot of the newcomers to the left, those thousands of people who suddenly declared themselves socialists, but I was on the left before the millennials joined. There was more room to have differing views without being a persona non grata but there were also all the familiar people who would later enforce the orthodoxy.
Maybe there's something about the sheer force of irrational will that comes with the mass adoption of a belief (or belief system). You can't argue with it. But if you are caught up in it, or if you are already in agreement with the tidal wave of opinion, you just don't see this force as brute and irrational (impervious to argument). (I think woke people used to call that position one of privilege, but whereas they would use it to blame the privileged-designated for their shortcomings and call them out as implicated in the problem, I just think people like Sessions have a blindspot to what was going on.) Because they're generally reflective about their own views, they can't imagine anyone being swept away or silenced by an unreflective mob of identifiable people (sometimes people they know) some of whom should have known better but just got swept up and resigned themselves to the momentum—when they happen to be in agreement with the mob. How could this mob not be an unacknowledged source of his excitement about the state of the millennial left back then? I guess this has unfortunately made me despair that any good ideas will ever be adopted en masse in a rational way, or even in a retrospectively-rational Hegelian way.
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.
I mean that really goes without saying. Dei never recommended academic literature on justice or equity or anything and that was well-supported by everyone. There have been more than enough leftists who said they just didn't want to punch left for political opportunism, personal opportunism or fear. The only one I was aware of was Zizek, but he got articles written against him heavily. The dishonesty is just weird because there are enough ppl who admit they were pushed away. Naomi themselves says that and they're closer to dei than zizek was.
Nice comments all round (my own views are closest to those of Caroline fwiw) which make it clear that there's little point in debating woke / anti woke or left / right without agreed-upon prior definitions of those contested terms; the problems only multiply when you try to map both pairs onto a single axis. Impossible! But while I agree with Blake Smith that nothing has been resolved in this conversation, the fact that so many people were willing to participate in it publicly suggests that it isn't 2021 any longer. Were we to revisit the underlying issues in concrete terms, and without the sinister amalgamation of social media mores and workplace discipline that characterized the COVID era, it's possible we'd find a lot to agree on--or, at the very least, some useful disagreements.
Expand on this a bit. Is the issue that we don't have a shared definition of woke/anti-woke, or is it that we don't have a shared narrative of what happened during the key period (2015-2023, give or take)? Or both?
Both. I took Naomi's emphasis to be on demands for racial justice and frustration with ongoing racial inequality (and sexual and gender inequality), while I took yours to be on the illiberalism, moralism, and pressure toward ideological conformity with which those demands were advanced in liberal institutions, especially the media, cultural spaces, and academia. Depending on which aspect you identify as the defining attribute, you end up with a different account of what happened and, especially, what constitutes "anti-woke." Perhaps this is oversimplifying, but it does seem like a pretty common dynamic when this topic is discussed.
I suppose I'm happy for David Sessions that he experienced 2015-2021 as a "left golden age," because my experience of that time was so precisely the opposite: a dark, glib, petty era of sophistry, censoriousness, and personal attacks in which "the left" seemed to sever its last few threads of connection to the grassroots pro-labor left in which I'd been raised. There seemed perhaps some hope in the initial weeks after the 2016 election, when many progressives earnestly sought to understand how people who'd twice voted for Obama could possibly vote to Trump (before settling on the easy excuses of racism, sexism and the Russians), but that was quickly superseded by resistance theater and hardline dogma. Things got even worse circa 2020-21, but I'd argue the left had already suffered a devastating intellectual collapse by that point.
At some point I'll have David on to talk this through more. I think it would be interesting to understand his experience of this time, because I just wasn't tuned in to that world at all in those years. I doubt I'll end up sharing his assessment of its merits, but it would good to grok where he's coming from.
I was also surprised to read that and my assumption is that David was much more involved in media than actual political organization, because for myself and others (people involved in DSA or DSA-adjacent organizations, labor unions and caucuses, etc), I don’t think there were any issues that couldn’t trigger a shit storm of discourse or potentially an outright organizational crisis (NYT wrote about this instance of which I have personal familiarity https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/14/us/adolph-reed-controversy.html ). A lot of individuals and even many organizations will not recover or return to the organized left after what went down during that time.
I was going to mention Adoph Reed if my comment hadn't gotten so long!
I see where David's coming from in the sense that there was a ton of sudden energy on the left, all sorts of people you wouldn't have expected were coming to meetings and calling themselves socialists. The fact that far left thought was more visible in the highbrow media was an interesting development. But the diffuse radicalism of that moment was comprehensively beaten and "wokeness" was at the very least a symptom of what was going wrong.
The material effect of this neutered radicalism and capitulation to the symptom of woke is that union leaders are more interested in what the anti-woke "right-wing" "pro-labor" people have to say about strategy and policy than the left. This is not a good thing.
There was also that long piece, I think in the Intercept, about the damage that wokeness had done to the non profit and advocacy worlds.
I think the biggest question I'd have for David, if we grant Secret Squirrel's point about a lot of new energy coming into left wing organizations and publications, is what the positive fruits of that were/are. It's kind of like what I talked to Geoff Shullenberger and Bill Deresiewicz about, on their respective episodes of my podcast, in terms of how to assess the value of all the "energy" on the right. There's surely a lot of energy there, but that doesn't necessarily equate to anything good. So much of it is toxic, destructive energy.
So if David's right that it was a golden age, what specifically was golden? New members and subscribers can't be the answer. It has to be things that are actually good on their own terms, whether it's productive thought or meaningful policy change.
Defund the police was the breaking point for me. There's a lot wrong with the police, but abolition is a fantasy and reform costs money. Yet the energized left was marching for... municipal budget cuts! (Often allied with the fantasy that social workers could do police work.) Here it still is on the Planned Parenthood website: https://www.plannedparenthoodaction.org/blog/defunding-the-police-what-it-means-and-why-planned-parenthood-supports-it
I realize that complaining about this makes me sound like Statler and Waldorf, but I just didn't understand what people thought they were going to accomplish. I still don't!
Yeah that one was nuts. Also how no one agreed on whether it actually meant what it said.
If I remember rightly, many of the “class first” leftists from 2015 era were willing to jettison racial and other inequalities because fundamentally they didn’t believe in working class racial and/or minority conflicts as real or important. Adolph Reed often said this. So it makes sense that right-wing pro-labor would gain traction. There’s a reason why, say Tesla’s NorCal plant is called the Plantation, and it’s not purely because of its owner or management. Though class-first folk said they were fighting for broader goals, it was never that clear who would be welcome if they won, and outside of platitudes they never really welcomed those outside their fold.
It sounds like you don’t remember rightly.
Touché. Well it did seem at the time that the Robin Kelley, Olufemi Taiwo, Keeanga-Yamhatta Taylor side of the conversation had a different take than y’alls. But I’ll stand down.
I'm sure every Bernie Sanders fan was just having a great time in 2016 and 2020 (and the people who voted for Trump? Who cares?).
I've got to admit, I'm a bit disappointed by what was chosen and the last part of the exchange. It's fine. I don't really expect anything important to happen from any substack. Hopefully we get a good conversation between both sides where it really gets hashed out. There really are no leaders but a borg hivemind, so there's a lot of work to do there still (and kicking and screaming the whole way), but it's necessary we get this figured out.
I did want to bring up Blake Smith's point. I know you brought it up because you're not interested in it being solved except on your terms or no terms and you wanted to look bipartisan. That being said, I thought the comment was interesting. They really do not have a meaningful historicism. That sorta goes without saying given how they say America is simply a racist country built by slaves and all that. It's definitely a subversion of everything into immediate (psychopathic) lived experience. I find that to be an interesting distinction between it and Marxism. The ideology just does not allow anything. In that sense, history will be narratized by people with a more meaningful historicism (with explanatory power).
It was mostly just comments that people sent to me directly, along with David's from the comments. Don't want you to overestimate the thoughtfulness of my curation.
Part of what was genuinely difficult about this small micro-intervention in the larger debate is that it gets so big so quickly and I didn't really have a good plan for how to bit off just the right size for us to chew on constructively. It's less that I'm invested in looking super bipartisan than that I was trying (and clearly in some ways failing) not to get sucked into a larger debate that I just don't have the time to address thoroughly.
There's nothing to overestimate. Instead, a bigger discussion is necessary and you've prevented it from actually being a stepping stone. The best you can hope for is political news of the week alignment until they forget that.
I appreciated the back and forth concluded here and found it interesting reading, but I can't see this conversation making progress unless it takes problems of solidarity seriously and focally. The word did not appear in the three main parts or in this collection of responses.
Sociologically, wokeness included a distinctive new form of Durkheimian "segmental" or "mechanical" solidarity (meaning a homogenizing and exclusionary commitment to a shared group similarity standard) and most of the critiques of wokeness in the conversation are implicitly criticisms of the expansion of this segmental solidarity at the expense of prior "organic" solidarity (meaning a specializing and inclusionary commitment to a shared cooperation-in-differences model). That simple pattern could serve as a trailhead into plenty of relevant, clarifying sociological material for the conversation, from Durkheim's own The Division of Labor in Society (1893) to Mary Douglas's Purity and Danger (1966) to the many contemporary works citing theirs.
I'm identifying that pattern in old-fashioned jargon. There are newer, in some ways better words for it today, but the newer stuff is trickier to introduce and deploy in a short comment. A lot of what we see with wokeness today (and the failure to agree on terms for and about it, especially) is downstream of the late modern or postmodern historical dynamics Rorty described and exemplified in Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity (1989), in which many intellectual groups of the late Cold War period simply gave up their prior segmental-solidaristic commitments to rational persuasion and persuadability — well before contemporary wokeness.
Regarding Caroline’s comment, I suspect that Naomi’s dismissal of class-first socialism isn’t based on any one talking point, but simply on the de facto reality that minorities don’t trust it, and its supporters don’t seem to mind enough to change.
For example, if Bernie wanted minorities to trust him, he’d become a Democrat. But he hasn’t, and likely won’t.
Bernie ran as a democrat in presidential elections, twice
With all due respect, this gets at my point. You're prescribing what minorities *should* see, I'm describing what they *do* see.
Moreover, if being an independent and just caucusing with the Democrats came without any costs, then why wouldn't everyone do the same? There's necessarily a tradeoff to Bernie's approach. Standing apart from the Democratic establishment makes White people like him more. But it makes minorities like him less.
On the one hand I think there's probably empirical/polling support for the notion that class-first socialism doesn't have a ton of support from minority voters. On the other hand, that doesn't seem like a slam dunk argument against class first socialism. Or against Bernie's choice not to affiliate formally with the Democrats.
Of course. But this is my point. There's *only* empirical evidence to speak of, because minorities don't *really* disagree with the theoretical talking points— at least no more so than our White counterparts.
What we're really opposed to, I suspect, is how it manifests in *practice*: It tells us to join with the other side's populists against our own side's elites. But why would a minority ever do that?
It's interesting to think about that from my perspective as a Jew. My Jewish gut tells me a few conflicting things. It's hard to imagine wanting to ally with a group (the campus pro-Palestinian left) that can be so precious about language when they feel like it, vis a vis groups they care about, and so cavalier about "From the River to the Sea" when they feel like it. It signals not so much anti-Semitism as a lack of concern about how Jews might experience the phrase. So that pushes me away from the left, and for some Jewish voters it's a prod to allying with the populist right. But another quadrant of my Jewish gut looks at the populist right and says, "uh-oh, that's not a group that usually ends up being good for the Jews." Which pushes me back toward the left, and so just on that vector on its own terms I end up kind of center left.
I think for a long time Black and Hispanic voters had that ick feeling toward the Republicans, even after the Party had shed most of its overt racism. Interesting that Trump, of all people, has done a better job attracting Black and particularly Hispanic voters.
All of which is to say that it's complicated. I do think that gut feeling about who you feel more comfortable with is deeply meaningful information. It's just not always super clear which way it cuts at the end of the day, and also where to draw the line between a healthy suspicion of people who don't seem to value you and a kind of toxic suspicion or prejudice against people who simply seem different.