Is It Time To Move On From Anti-Woke? Part Deux: Janine Rising

Naomi and I dig deeper into the muck and murk

Part 1 of this dialogue is here. Part 3 will drop on Friday or so.

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Hi Naomi,

I think two things are going on, one in the political space and one in the cultural space, and while I mostly agree with your political conclusions, I think we have some significant disagreements about the cultural stuff.

In the political space, not only do I concede your point that the right is the greater enemy of intellectual freedom and freedom of speech, I horrifiedly affirm it. Even when the left was exerting the peak of its political influence, in 2020 and 2021, I was pretty sure that it remained the right who had the far greater potential to fundamentally attack and erode liberal democracy. Now that Trump’s in office, and unleashed in a way he wasn’t in his first term, that truth is very clear. When the jackboots come knocking on my door, for being the mouthy cosmopolitan Jew that I am, I know which colors they’ll be wearing.

I feel pretty safe. To this point, at least, Jews retain staunch support in both parties and a lot of power within the American political system. For the groups that are more vulnerable than American Jews, however, including trans people, non-citizens, and pro-Palestinian activists, the threat isn’t hypothetical. Lives are already being ruined. People are literally being snatched up by the feds for having the wrong opinions. Political freedoms are being denied. We should say this explicitly, and we should be clear that it wouldn’t be happening under a Kamala Harris presidency.

Even at a lower level of harm, where lives and political freedoms aren’t at stake, the Trump-Vance-Musk administration is rapidly outdoing what the woke left did at its worst. The number of people whose careers were damaged by the left is surely dwarfed by the careers that have been wantonly destroyed by Elon Musk and his wrecking crew in just the last few months. The federal government is the single largest employer in the United States, with about 3 million employees, and I have to assume that many of those people are now living in some fear about their jobs and also about the moral and intellectual compromises they may be expected to make in order to keep them. And that’s just the people who report directly to Trump and Musk. You also have to consider the people whose employers are dependent on federal funds, or are afraid of incurring negative attention from the state. That’s millions (tens of millions?) more.

So that’s all granted. And I don’t want to diminish it at all. I worry a lot about the political power of the right. What I don’t worry about, with the right, is their influence on serious artistic and intellectual culture in America. I’m not saying there’s none, but I can’t see any comparison between the damage that the anti-woke mind virus, or other right wing mind viruses, have done to artistic and intellectual life in America and the damage that left-wing mind viruses have done and in some cases continue to do.

This is where I think

William Deresiewicz

is coming from when he writes that “the left has made itself the enemy of the life force—of vitality, of eros. It fears it and it wants to shackle it. It feels, with a deep, instinctive revulsion, that it is incompatible with goodness, with morality. So it subordinates it to morality, or rewrites it in its terms.”

I’m less interested in the objective truth of this diagnosis, at least for the purposes of this dialogue, than I am in my subjective experience of its correctness, and in how that conditions my intellectual and artistic choices. What it feels like to me is that my tribe of people have gotten much stupider and less interesting over the past decade, and that this is almost entirely the fault of the left. The only realm of serious artistic or intellectual life in America where the right has any meaningful influence at all is journalism, and even there it’s a minority faction. When you think about every other realm of serious artistic and intellectual endeavor in America—theater, film, television, visual art, dance, fiction, poetry, academia, documentary, etc.–what I perceive is a right wing that has political and material power to threaten funding and livelihoods but negligible power to influence how people think. Our paychecks might be threatened by the right, but our minds are almost entirely free from their influence. We don’t take them seriously, because for the most part they’re not serious, and because they exert zero social power in not just the most important nodes of artistic and intellectual production—Los Angeles, New York, Boston, etc.—but in Houston, Chicago, Seattle, Athens, Birmingham, Atlanta, Lincoln, all the way down to your local bookstore, record shop, library branch, and community college campus.

It’s the left that has real power to influence how we think and how we approach our art in these spaces. And the results of that power, I believe, have been overwhelmingly negative and quite tangible. I feel like I woke up one day, seven or eight years ago, and discovered that so many of the people I had just assumed were fellow congregants of mine in the church of art and intellection actually had very little faith in the autonomous value of making art and thinking hard. Given an opportunity, or enough social pressure, and with barely a protest they’d subordinate the practices and values to which in many cases they’d dedicated decades of their lives to the demands of other, and often quite hostile, value systems.

For a while I couldn’t tell who who speaking as a true ideologue, who knew the truth but was too scared to say it, and who just shallowly believed whatever the people around them were saying and would flip on a dime once a new conventional wisdom coalesced. It was a mess, and it wasn’t the right that had done this to serious artistic and intellectual life in America. It was the left.

I agree with you that the right is the great threat to American democracy and freedom, but I believe the left is the great threat to American intelligence and cultural vitality. It’s better now than it was a few years ago, but it’s not where it should be. Or again, that’s how it feels to me, and if that’s how it feels, what would you have me do? What is the role of intellectuals and artists like us, in a time like this? What are my political responsibilities? What are my artistic responsibilities? How should I protect my talent and voice from the maelstrom of bullshit and ideology coming from every direction, so that I retain the capacity to say meaningful things at all? How should I balance these priorities when they’re in tension or conflict?

I assume you reached out to me, after my podcast episode, because you’re a bit frustrated with how I’ve been responding. I genuinely appreciate that, and I don’t assume that I’m getting the balance right. The onslaught of the Trump administration has been intense, and like many people I’m still processing how to respond. But I do think it’s fair to push you on how you think about the writer’s political and aesthetic responsibilities when she is faced with the kind of dynamic I’m describing here. How should I move forward? How are you moving forward?

Dan

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If you still perceive that wokeness predominates in the cultural sphere, then I guess it makes perfect sense to have a podcast where you excoriate the woke left. But I think that you and I have strong disagreements about the nature of wokeness.

To me, what made wokeness insidious was the enforced conformity. You could sense that not everyone agreed with these viewpoints, but that they were afraid to speak up, because they thought they would be ostracized or fired.

Wokeness was essentially left-populism. There was a lot of free-floating anger amongst college-educated middle-class under-employed people, and particularly amongst grad students and low-level cultural workers. These people were terminally online and looking for someone to attack. And their anger could be focused momentarily on a single point: a professor who said something ‘racist’; a Google employee who wrote a memo about women; a woman in a park who called the cops on a bird-watcher, etc. And then these targets would be harassed and their lives would be miserable for a while.

Fear of this free-floating anger became so intense that people would do anything they could in order to avoid it. And some people within institutions made use of that fear, and they became demagogues. They protested and wrote petitions and tweeted about the people in charge of their institutions, and the people in charge caved to their protests–despite not really believing in the underlying rhetoric–because they were afraid of being dog-piled online.

Wokeness consisted of attacking people online, and of forcing concessions from people in power because of their fear of being attacked online.

Now in 2025, the people who get attacked online are left-wingers and minorities. There is an account, Libs of TikTok, that exists primarily to put pressure on queer and trans people and the institutions who serve them. Earlier this month, Christopher Rufo went to the internet with chat-logs of trans NSA employees, lambasting them as perverts, and they were all fired. That is cancel culture. That is wokeness. It’s no different from what the left-wing did.

As a result, we can now see that wokeness wasn’t unique to the left. It was a sign of the times. It came about because of lack of trust in institutions, a large mass of disaffected people, and the power of social media to focus peoples’ attention.

To discuss this issue as if it’s a matter of ideology seems to, to me, incorrect. Yes, there were left-wingers who believed that free speech should get shut down and people should be fired for having bad opinions. But those left-wingers did not really have the power to fire others or to shut down free speech. They were enabled in suppressing speech by their bosses, who were too spineless to resist them, just as those same bosses are now too spineless to resist Trump.

To go on and blame the ‘activist left’ for that issue seems, to me, to miss the point. If Columbia cannot maintain a coherent free speech policy, that is not the fault of some graduate student who is angry about genocide. If a journal is unable to stand by its authors, that is not the fault of online commenters who think the journal published a racist article.

The problem is that liberal institutions are brittle and unable to weather critique, so instead they either fold in response to critique, or they do the opposite, get angry, and lash out at the critics for raising objections in the first place.

And the anti-woke response merely replicates those same dynamics. Instead of engaging in dialogue with ideas that it disagrees with, instead it labels those ideas as absurd, out-of-touch, elite, etc. But if these ideas truly had no power, then they would be no threat. They’ve cost so many people their jobs precisely because they have power. And they can only be defeated not through name-calling, but through debate.

So let’s talk about that leftist activist, the person who supposedly hates eros and can’t handle debate.

Let’s grant that there’s a white woman named Janine who holds a position of moderate power at a university, and this woman thinks that America is irredeemably racist, that it was founded in racism, and that it’s built on Black pain and on the control of Black bodies.

Right now, in 2025, if this woman speaks up, there’s a good chance she’ll be fired and replaced, as we’re seeing with Columbia putting their Middle Eastern Studies department into receivership. But let’s say that’s not the case, and that there’s nobody who can put external pressure on her.

Let’s also say, just for the sake of debate, that Janine has a modicum of power and that she’s still able to block the promotions of people who she considers to be racist. Janine has many people amongst the students in this department who agree with her. They consider this department, this whole discipline, to be a tool of structural oppression, and they would like to transform it so that it actively focuses on combating racial disparities.

This department is focused on something that typically has few racial implications. But Janine believes in CRT. She thinks that America’s ostensibly color-blind legal regime actually encodes a deep racism.

Janine’s department has very few Black students and her field in general has very few Black students, and Janine knows that Black peoples’ lack of success in this field is used (by some people) as evidence that Black people are genetically or culturally inferior to white and Asian people. To Janine, this idea is deeply distasteful. She does not want to work any longer in a field whose existence is used as a cudgel against Black people.

What do we tell Janine? Why are there no Black people in this department or in this field?

Generally speaking, the department would attempt to say the same old things, about how there’s a pipeline problem. If not enough Black students leave high school with interest and experience in this field, then that’s not something one college department can fix.

But that’s the essence of the liberal regime. The issue is always somewhere else. Nobody can do anything, because it’s always someone else’s job to do something. And neither Janine nor her students are satisfied with that answer any longer.

You know, I often hear critical race theory mentioned as a whipping boy in anti-woke circles, but CRT arose because of the persistence of racial disparities even after many years of an ostensibly colorblind legal regime. It was an effort to explain how a colorblind legal system could produce unequal outcomes. The solution proposed by CRT was that to fix racial disparities, then you need race-conscious policies that explicitly target those disparities (e.g. reparations). If the problem is that there is a racial wealth gap, then give Black people more money. Otherwise, any policy to remedy a societal wealth gap is going to end up increasing the racial wealth gap, because most of the benefits of this program will be captured by poor white people.

Racial reparations are obviously very distasteful to many people, and I agree that race-conscious policies would destroy our democracy and are bad. But CRT grew out of a frustration with the failures of race-blind policies. These failures are not something that the anti-woke crowd really wants to reckon with.

If race-conscious policies are politically impossible, and race-blind policies have failed to solve the problem, then what’s the solution? That means there is no solution, and Black people need to accept that they’ll be on the bottom forever. And if they refuse to accept being on the bottom, then they’ll get a racist backlash (i.e. the Trump-Vance-Musk regime) that makes life even worse.

But this is exactly the Afropessimist hypothesis! The idea that America is constituted in a way where Black people must be on the bottom. That America only works when Black people are on the bottom.

The answer that the university wants Janine to accept is: “This is just the way things are.” But they’re afraid to say so out loud, because they don’t want to sound racist. Janine has power precisely because she has located that unwillingness on the part of the university. The university has depended, for years, on people not calling out their racial equality rhetoric for being empty. They do not genuinely believe that they can find a significant number of Black people who can succeed in this department, but…they’re afraid to say so.

And that fear is why wokeness exists. It exists because the university is unwilling to accept the principles that it lives by.

For my part, I have accepted that if we want good governance, then we need to cater to the racial paranoia of white people. That means we cannot have race-conscious policies. But that is far cry from believing that America is not racist–it’s exactly the opposite of that belief, in fact.

Instead what I see anti-woke people doing, to the extent that they address race at all, is talk about hereditarian or race-realist ideas, essentially the notion that Black people are (for either cultural or genetic reasons) simply stupider than white people. I don’t think the science bears out these ideas, but if that’s what people believe, then they really do believe that Black people are doomed to be on the bottom forever. How is that going to work out? Can we really have an intellectual class, in the 21st century, that believes in a racial caste system? Is that intellectual class really going to have a mandate to govern a country that, very soon, will be majority non-white?

Anti-woke people are frustrated with woke orthodoxies about race because anti-woke people don’t really have any satisfying answers. They’re afraid of stating either the truth of what they believe or in addressing the limitations of their own beliefs, so instead they rail about other peoples’ closemindedness.

But I really don’t think there’s any way forward if it’s predicated on the idea that Janine has to stop holding her deeply-felt beliefs. Surely Janine is just as entitled to her beliefs as anyone. And, contrary to what anti-woke people are saying, Janine doesn’t impose her opinions on anyone. The university is free to ignore her or sideline her. Janine only has power because she’s offering answers to questions that the university refuses to address.

And anti-woke people don’t address those questions either. Right now, when the fear of losing your job has abated, right now is the moment to genuinely engage with Janine’s ideas, but anti-woke people don’t do that. And it’s because those ideas are still too dangerous.

Now you might answer that Janine’s ideas aren’t worth addressing, because they have failed in the marketplace of ideas. They haven’t really taken root outside elite, highly-educated circles. This is something like Rob Henderson’s “Luxury Beliefs” notion–the idea that elites tend to gravitate to ideas that non-elites find ridiculous. But the whole point of an educated elite is that you’re able to understand ideas that uneducated people can’t–that’s what education consists of. If there is an idea that is so unusually compelling to educated people that, as you say, it apparently dominates the cultural sphere, then the content of that idea ought to be addressed.

Personally, I would say that Janine’s beliefs have an element of truth to them. They cannot be dismissed out of hand. They’re unpalatable to most people, but so what? Many true ideas are unpalatable. What was a mistake was for Janine to think that if she imposed her ideas on her department, then somehow her department could impose them on the general populace. Janine and the entire cultural apparatus have realized the limits of their power. They cannot persuade the populace merely by shouting down opposing views. If they’re going to sell people on their ideas, then they have to actually sell them.

It seems like nowadays anti-woke people want some kind of apology from Janine, and yet…they refuse to speak to her. They refuse to see how her ideas have changed. Perhaps, in 2025, now that we’ve seen the way both sides can benefit from free speech, some new coalition can form around the idea of intellectual freedom. But that coalition can never be created if it starts, a priori, from the notion that the left is evil, which is basically what Bill D. said. I do not think the left is evil. I have many friends who have beliefs like Janine, and they do not seem evil to me. If there’s any evil from the last ten years, it’s not from genuine believers like Janine, but from spineless liberals who refused to defend the rights that they apparently valued so deeply, and who are now hoping on some level that before Trump goes, he’ll use raw political power to crush the Janines of the world.

That being said, I personally do not think there are many Janines left. Yes, there are some, but maybe one fifth as many as there were in 2020. That’s why, if I was doing a podcast, I wouldn’t spend a lot of time worrying about her. Instead I would worry about the underlying structural mechanics, whatever those might be, that make it so difficult for liberal institutions to stay true to their mission.

Best,

Naomi