Good exchange, looking forward to future installments! While "wokeness" is presently on its back foot culturally and institutionally, it might not be quite as wounded as it looks -- it remains the core legitimating ideology of many leading institutions and many of the alleged cuts to DEI will turn out to be clever administrative reorganization. Most of all, Trump like Biden before him is squandering a golden opportunity to just come off as normal and middle of the road so the opposition looks wacky -- as is, we might likely see an equal and opposite blitzkrieg of reimposing DEI and general wokeness the next time a Democratic president is elected.
It may be that no one is ever going to move on from anything. To quote from a recent Geoff Shulllenberger Compact piece on the Trump administration:
"...this sort of politics, because it is entirely premised on a constant escalation of negative polarization, in which backlashes pile on backlashes pile on backlashes, seems incompatible with the achievement of any true Trumpian hegemony..."
Three months ago I imagined that the Democrats were going to have to move on from woke excesses to be competitive in 2026 and 2028, but Trump is governing so badly that now I'm not so sure. They may find themselves back in power by default, no shift in tone or policy necessary.
Not that I don't encourage people to stop criticizing the woke left, I do. But more on the grounds that it's boring to read the polemics, than that I think any of these issues have been settled.
I guess I remain as anti-woke as ever, which is to say slightly anti-woke. During peak woke I voted for Jamaal Bowman in a primary which makes me different from Bari Weiss. otoh I could see people all around me who were intimidated out of saying what they obviously thought, or who didn't dare to condemn tactics and slogans that they clearly disagreed with. That was bad! If we go through a phase of not criticizing what we think are silly or counter-productive lefty trends because Trump is worse, or because you don't want somebody to say you sound like J. D. Vance, we won't be doing anybody any favors.
That said I understand where Kanakia is coming from. The importance of woke issues was always exaggerated because they affect writers and are easy to write about. And anti-woke discourse is being used as an excuse by the Trump people to justify a bunch of crazy and dangerous policies. otoh I think we are all a bit punch-drunk from Trump II right now. It is worse than the last time, vandalizing institutions like USAID in ways that probably can't be repaired. But the whole thing is so improvised, such a tornado of bullshit (annexing Canada?) that nobody really knows what to make of it yet. After a while people will find intelligent things to say about it (beyond "this is horrifying" and "these people are idiots"), but that time hasn't come. Anyhow, I look forward to the rest of this exchange.
I thought about pushing back on Jesse Singal, but he's such a sinkhole of discourse himself. Not his fault, but it's very hard to have a sane conversation about him and his work.
For eight years Singal has earned a living writing about trans issues. He claims to support trans rights, including the ability for adults to legally transition--he merely has concerns about gender affirming care for kids. During these eight years there has been an unprecedented erosion of rights for trans adults, including bathroom bans and erasure of the possibility, both by the federal government and many states, of the ability to legally transition. He has not spoken out against any of this, even though he has the ear of many of the people who advocate policies that harm trans adults. That is cowardly. He is afraid of harming his income, so he refuses to challenge the biases of his audience. That is why I dislike him and wouldn't want to be in the same room as him.
Of course we should criticize wokeness. Liberals haven’t repudiated wokeness nearly as vigorously as they should. This is a movement that fractured our base and galvanized MAGA, it delivered us into the arms of fascists as many of us warned it would, and it still continues to hamper our ability to unite against what is a serious and growing danger from the right. Like Mayor Pete said, it makes the left sound like Portlandia, and for the right it’s the gift that keeps giving.
If we want to defeat fascism we can’t make the same mistakes again. And, respectfully, it’s not a great look to attack the people who were right to sound the alarm in the first place—the anti-woke writers. The left needs to address its failures head on and emphatically chart a new course, with the same passion that it showed for DEI, for defund the police, for “actually it’s ‘unhoused’” and on and on. This is urgent business. The left needs to be trusted again to take the reins and fix our problems and wokeness did serious damage to that trust. It won’t do to sheepishly admit that "OK maybe identity politics was a tad divisive, but we meant well so anyhoo, moving on…"
My answers to the initial three questions, which I think keep focus on what’s important:
“Does wokeness even really exist anymore, in any meaningful sense, in any important cultural or political space?”
Yes. The DNC officer elections are a clear indication of this. Further, there truly is ideological capture at universities, and further downstream via Teachers Colleges, primary education. The vital lessons on how to think, and how to apply rigor, have been denigrated as “White Supremacy”. The victim mentality of all of this is also terribly damaging even to its greatest proponents, and encouraging it to continue without rebuke is, I would argue, a moral failure.
Now, bad ideas sometimes become predominant in academia, but wokeness short circuits the normal path of self reflection by deeming any criticism of it as profane, accusing critics of racism, -phobias, etc. This sort of charge is a career death sentence when it sticks, and enough heads have been put on pikes this last decade to make it clear what the stakes are for trying to push back, even now. It will take decades of people pushing back against the broader precepts of wokeness, of the rules of engagement themselves, before genuine criticism can flourish and a true synthesis can occur.
“Even if it does still exist, and is still exerting some influence in certain spaces, is there any point to critiquing it now that Trump and Musk rule the land?”
Yes, because vacillating between two bad regimes is still bad, and as I stated above damage to rigor is continuing where wokeness holds sway. Wokeness and MAGA both believe that there is only power, with no need to allow for the dignity of the other side. Why would I want either of them to have that power?
Another part of it relates to the third question:
“If you grant that Trump is the primary bad thing, as both of us do, why might it still be worth discussing the woke left? And if not, why are there so many people who ostensibly oppose Trump who are still talking about wokeness so much?”
Because the woke left wants to be the vanguard of the resistance, when it has actually become a huge liability for Democrats.
The 2020 Democratic Primary was a woke wet dream up until the very end. As such, a lot of proclamations were made by many candidates that have come back to bite them when running against Trump and MAGA, Harris’s response to ACLU hypotheticals just being the tip of the iceberg.
Wokeness has also, through the 1619 Project and other poorly considered articles and publications, pushed a narrative that America has always been a racist hellhole, literally founded on slavery, and only by voting for the benevolent woke can we wash ourselves of our sins (Reverend Wright’s Revenge, as it were). The question then naturally arises: If you hate America that much, why should I, an American, vote for you?
Here in Chicago I recently saw a sticker (the new grafitti) that had an upside-down crown on Trump’s head that said “Not A King. Fight Fascism”. I just thought, “you’re so close, but you can’t see what should be obvious to any American how to connect this for other Americans”. We literally founded the country with the cry “No More King”! Yet there was no American flag on the sticker, done purely in black and white, sort of an Antifa motif. I very much want to fight against Trump’s authoritarianism, but I have publicly held my tongue for the last 10 years against this idiocy. No longer.
We will have to work together, and we will also have to convince people who have voted for Trump that there’s an off-ramp. The “my way or the highway” of oral land acknowledgements (I think plaques have their place, so yes, some synthesis is possible) and prodding people to state their pronouns when introducing oneself (whose logical argument is “we should pretend our gender is unknowable until we state it, because a few people aren’t learned in the stereotypical ways of society, and instead of not caring about falling short of stereotypes we must cater to their wishes to conform”) signal to normies and undecideds that we really are for They/Them instead of the broader American populace. If we have any chance of beating back Trump, that shit has to stop yesterday.
I agree with a lot of this, particularly the point that critiquing the woke left is, or at least might be, a means of making the opposition to Trump stronger and more strategic. That in one sense at least going after Trump and his most self-sabotaging opponents are part of one endeavor. I don't really lean in to this, in my responses, because I don't feel as confident in the argument as I do making the case for pushing back against wokeness in elite artistic and intellectual spaces for the sake of improving those spaces on their own terms. ie not a strategic argument for how to do politics better, in the cultural space, but a straightforward argument for how to have better culture
It is certainly unnerving to see anti-woke arguments that I mostly agree with be exaggerated to the point of incoherent absurdity and used to justify a frontal assault on the US university system.
How is this not just cope? I think anti-woke people need to honestly reckon with the fact that a sizable contingent of the anti-woke commentariat has always been authoritarian. That should occasion some reflection, not deflection.
Trump’s attacks on Free Speech force both politics and art to be addressed simultaneously. “It’s none of your business where I work, where I live, or whether I’m a citizen or are here by other legal means. My right to speak is fully protected legally and culturally” must be forcefully said to both MAGA and the woke.
This. I was going to reply but you said everything I wanted to. I'd boil what you're saying down to 2 very strong reasons to continue to oppose wokeness:
1) It is an affront to truth. Anyone who truly cares about academia should care about this.
Regarding the second reason, while I appreciate Kanakia's willingness to talk about this and push back against some of the excesses, she still refers to people like Jesse Singal as a transphobic person who wants to roll back trans rights--as though she were stating that the sky is blue. THIS, too, is wokeness. If people like Singal, who are merely applying journalistic and scientific rigor to an issue, can be talked about this way, then we still have a long way to go.
I actually don't understand the Bari Weiss inclusion either, particularly given her centering of Wu's voice across multiple podcasts. I just don't think strong criticism of certain elements of trans/gender ideology automatically equals transphobic.
In turn, you are stating that Singal’s work is purely “journalistic and scientific” as if you were saying that the sun rises in the east. There have been numerous critical appraisals of Singal’s work that look at where he’s ignored evidence & twisted data to make a point. He’s not beyond criticism or reproach.
I do get this, but I think Singal is important to defend because unlike others who make critiques in this space I think Singal has been uniquely and unfairly maligned. He's very, very careful. Allow me to take us back to Wesley Yang! But this time I'm gonna side with you, because I would NOT defend Yang is this way. Yang, for example, is not so careful nor so scientifically rigorous.
I didn't say his work per se is purely journalistic and scientific, but rather than he is APPLYING journalistic and scientific rigor to an issue (to particular issues). I don't mean to be pedantic but the difference matters because it suggests, as you say, that the results of this application is not beyond criticism. You're right about that.
However, I'm guessing that the examples you'd choose to cite where he supposedly "ignored evidence and twisted data to make a point" would not be examples I'd accept as demonstrating that (for various reasons, including that these critics themselves are activists and are not critiquing in good faith). But I'd be happy to take a look at a source or two if you want to share them, just in case I'm wrong.
If you’re preemptively dismissing critics of Singal on the basis of their being “activists,” can I ask what counts as activism here? Why does being an activist immediately make someone’s argument “bad faith”? I ask, because “trans activist” is often thrown around as an epithet and pejorative in gender critical circles as a way to delegitimize criticism of GC talking points.
I’m happy to provide examples, but I don’t want to waste your or my time if you’re predisposed to reject criticism based on who is making it.
That's fair to ask for clarification. I wasn't suggesting an ad hominem. Activism, I think, generally refers to behavior that is primarily motivated by a commitment to a social/moral cause over truth (and over other values for that matter). It's not just the fact that someone is an activist that's the problem; it's what that (predictably) tends to do to their argument and their interpretation of the data. It becomes almost purely motivated reasoning, which is what I meant by bad faith. The so-called evidence based critique of the Cass Review from Yale is a great example of this, for reasons that I could go into (I'm guessing we may disagree on this, which probably suggests that further conversation won't be fruitful).
I should make it clear that I'm not just talking about gender affirming care related research. This same problem has happened many times in the history of academia. The creationism (contra evolution) movement in the early 2000s is another example. Although they often claimed to be academics genuinely concerned about truth, they were all Christians and had a pre-commitment to believing in a monotheistic God. To my knowledge, there were literally no other academics who believed in creationism who weren't also Christians.
That's a red flag. When something is true, it is usually found to be true by different people of different academic persuasions and certainly not ONLY by people who's priors are confirmed by it being true. The same analysis applies to critics of Singal, I'm guessing. But if you've got something that you think might still stand, I'll check it out--especially if you can provide at least some critics of Singal who are not linked to activism at all.
I’ll be honest: I think the comparison between people in support of gender-affirming care and creationists is kinda offensive and unserious. However, I can appreciate that you were trying to find a comparable analogue and I don’t think you’re intending to be inflammatory.
The problem I have with your assessment is that it implies that there are two and only two sides: one “side” has truth-denying activists and the other “side” has people who are just interested in telling the unvarnished truth. What about all of the people who are simply and unequivocally anti-trans? Where do they fit in? Setting Singal aside, there are plenty of people who are deeply critical of GAC that are absolutely “primarily motivated by a commitment to a social/moral value over truth (and over other values for that matter).”
I must admit that while it's boring to tell other (unwoke) people what they should be talking about or how freaked out about Trump they should be (although i think the answer is "extremely"!), it was disconcerting to hear Deresiewicz (whose appreciation of me I ofc appreciate) place me (along with some company I'm very skeptical of) in the assemblage of the "non-left" where vitality, playfulness, beauty etc is supposedly happening, when indeed--in perhaps a rare moment when I agree entirely with Kanakia--I don't see the vitality and more importantly to the extent that I myself am a representative of the purported playfully vital erotic non-left (💅), that assemblage was coconut-pilled last summer and is horrified now!
We're playful! We're vital! But I see substack discourse imagining (and reacting against imaginings of) some wave of liberated postwoke cultural energy... which I not only don't see and don't see myself as part of, but also seems deeply at odds with my own dread about the present...
Yeah, the vibe may have shifted but one thing I'm not worried about is being disoriented by suddenly interesting right-wing films and novels and cultural criticism.
Right I mean I have like written on the French Theory girls and their disorientation by Céline, Heidegger etc, and written myself thus on Marc Edouard Nabe, BAP etc... but ultimately right-wing cultural/intellectual stuff, and especially its contemporary products, is not interesting enough to justify either the endless left-wing discourse from guys who didn't get enough grad school comparing obscure Strausso-integrists like boys with bug collections or conversely the breathless substacker hype about Arx-han's awful novel or whatever is said to be vitalizing the discourse...
The only recent-ish fiction I've read that I'm convinced is genuinely good was written by extremely celebrated octogenarians. (Marilynne Robinson and Alice Munro really are good, but I'm not some savant for figuring this out.) And the pretentious theory that I like best comes from mid-tier Europeans like Marcel Gauchet and Dieter Henrich (my slightly more exotic beetles) who didn't make it big over here mostly because they are boring. So I'm in no position to throw stones. But I don't think the discourse (on this website? in general?) is that vital or that I'll do much to vitalize it when I finally start posting....
Still, in many times and places right-wing intellectual production is as interesting as what comes from the left and center, but in spite of everything wrong with the left and center that just isn't the case now. They are back to "irritable mental gestures."
Babylon Bee headlines mostly elicit a chuckle from me, when they don’t veer into pure Dominionism.
You might need to give it some time. The Smoke ‘Em girls just had on Aaron Gwyn, and he mentioned a Vanity Fair article about Cormack Mccarthy’s very young girlfriend, who has no apologies for going with McCarthy. Gwyn said “could you imagine this piece being published in 2020?”
I don’t quite follow the very last part (playful non-left/non-woke was coconut pilled and is now horrified…at having been coconut pilled, or at Trump 2.0?), but yes, you didn’t deserve being lumped in like that. I think Deresiewicz got taken in by the Dimes Square thing.
I don't think we can "move on" from a significant portion of the population especially one that is engendered in major American institutions. I don't mean criticize, but we can't just pretend the last decade didn't happen. Ik anti-woke belies some outrage or anger, but, tbh, this is a form of communication. There's not really a way to organically move beyond it. There's a decade of nonsense on every social medium and it's not like dnc has moved on from it. That's just the breadth. The depth is insane. You have constitutional crises, a lot of domestic and foreign policy issues which are things people in and outside USA interacted with. For some people, a lull in the more outward dei stuff means there's an easier way to settle back into social situations that weren't present before, but that's not true for the vast majority of people. A lot of people don't watch films, they don't go to college. There are a lot of reasons for these but until there's some sort of social medium between them and the rest of America, it's not something that can be swept up. I don't think outrage is necessarily appropriate, but I do feel like the idea of switching so we can criticize Trump more just seems to lose a lot of what's happened. I feel like the broader issue is going through this as if we learned nothing at all and grew not at all. I'm still for socializing with dei until there's clearly a new standard for social relations between us. Dei was way too self-absorbed to substantiate any discussion between anyone. If that looks like more "not-woke" professors, if it's better run institutions — I have no idea — but I consider the last decade to be a dead space for America.
Interesting start! Really looking forward to seeing where this goes.
I think if there's a criticism to be levied against the Andrew Sullivans and the Jesse Singals, it's not that they don't acknowledge Trump is worse than Harris would have been. They explicitly *do* say that, and Sullivan went so far as to endorse Harris over Trump and explain his thinking in detail.
Their "failure" as I see it is more that -- in jumping time and again on the anti-woke, anti-leftist crusade, they never offer an affirmative vision of what advocating for trans rights or racial justice *should* look like. What do centrists *want* out of our government when it comes to making progress on these issues? Sullivan all but insists there is no need for a trans rights movement at all in the wake of Bostock. But that's absurd. Trans rights *are* under attack, and if the anti-woke mob is unsatisfied with the war the far left is waging, they need to articulate a version of trans rights *that would be persuasive to centrists* such as themselves. Instead, Sullivan, Singal et al. seem awfully content to just return to the "wokesters are at it again" well for more clicks.
It feels like a significant source of this conflict is that two questions are being wrestled with simultaneously.
1) What political tactics are most effective in the project of opposing Trump? Some people think effective opposition requires more full throated opposition and solidarity which means reasserting our commitments to marginalized communities . Other people are focused on fixing the Democrats “Brand” among people who didn’t go to college, which probably means being less “woke”.
2)How should we live as educated non right wing Americans after wokeness came to so totally dominate our cultural landscape and then subsequently exhaust itself? If we can never go back to 2013, and the project that culminated with 2020 has totally failed in its bid for cultural hegemony, how should we go forward? Where the first question was primarily political, this question is primarily cultural- about what the world of arts and letters should look like, and what our cultural narrative about the 2010s should be.
A lot of frustration comes from people trying to answer the second question being interpreted as trying to answer the first question and vice versa. I suspect Naomi is asking us to table this second question and just man the barricades until 2028 given the severity of the situation, and although I sympathize it seems to me that message discipline at that scale is absolutely impossible to achieve.
I want to dispute Naomi's framing that it is "actually the right that is the enemy of freedom" as if there cannot be anti-freedom forces on both the left and the right. For queer people, the authoritarian impulses of the right might look more dangerous than the authoritarian impulses on the left, but this is also historically contingent. It's not like Fidel's Cuba was a haven for queer people.
ETA:
Like other commenters have mentioned: if the goal is to articulate a viable alternative to Trumpism, it is worth considering how previous attempts have failed. The fact that the right, centre and post-left have all overreacted to wokeness does not change the fact that it took all the political oxygen out of the room. That’s why I think it is worth spelling out how liberalism differs from wokeness. It’s not about settling scores, it’s about clearer thinking.
Oh come one… I’ve been in the same room as Jesse Singal and I’m way more based than Brianna Wu! I write Poundian Christian sonnets, so you know… pretty anti-woke.
I appreciate this exchange. But the woke that the right weaponizes (bc they’re not and will never be folk in the know making a metaphor about having awakened knowledge) is still not accessed in this dialogue.
It’s not 20 somethings, though it is. It’s more like tastemakers and thought guerillas going now is actually slavery still because colonial legacy but nothing else bad in history is that sticky. It’s so angry and thinks pure anger helps and its intervention is so divinely inspired it needs no human tactics. It’s the sincere conflation of emotions as universalist history that justifies they have state power but can’t confess it desires powers of state to flex in ways those without their emotional reaction are welcome to never understand through anything but confusion or infuriation.
It’s fuck conditional allies because infuriating for direct confrontation is somehow more productive than subversion, despite what has it achieved lately? And bearing in mind I actually expect it’s achieved something, why limit the tactical plurality of your engagement as if your perspective simply contains the singular progress achieving mode in a state you call an unjust and lopsided guerilla war.
“That all these critiques Bill D. made of the left, as being the enemy of freedom, fun, and eros and playfulness–they are exactly wrong, they are exactly inverted, and it’s actually the right that is the enemy of freedom. Why not say what we all know to be true?”
We will need to walk and chew gum at the same time. What if I think art from this woke decade has been terrible because it *hasn’t* been free, fun or playful? Does she really believe Nanette is better than even an anti-woke Chappelle?
Good exchange, looking forward to future installments! While "wokeness" is presently on its back foot culturally and institutionally, it might not be quite as wounded as it looks -- it remains the core legitimating ideology of many leading institutions and many of the alleged cuts to DEI will turn out to be clever administrative reorganization. Most of all, Trump like Biden before him is squandering a golden opportunity to just come off as normal and middle of the road so the opposition looks wacky -- as is, we might likely see an equal and opposite blitzkrieg of reimposing DEI and general wokeness the next time a Democratic president is elected.
It may be that no one is ever going to move on from anything. To quote from a recent Geoff Shulllenberger Compact piece on the Trump administration:
"...this sort of politics, because it is entirely premised on a constant escalation of negative polarization, in which backlashes pile on backlashes pile on backlashes, seems incompatible with the achievement of any true Trumpian hegemony..."
Three months ago I imagined that the Democrats were going to have to move on from woke excesses to be competitive in 2026 and 2028, but Trump is governing so badly that now I'm not so sure. They may find themselves back in power by default, no shift in tone or policy necessary.
Not that I don't encourage people to stop criticizing the woke left, I do. But more on the grounds that it's boring to read the polemics, than that I think any of these issues have been settled.
That's a depressing, and unfortunately plausible, thought, that we'll just go round and round.
Since about 1966, really.
I guess I remain as anti-woke as ever, which is to say slightly anti-woke. During peak woke I voted for Jamaal Bowman in a primary which makes me different from Bari Weiss. otoh I could see people all around me who were intimidated out of saying what they obviously thought, or who didn't dare to condemn tactics and slogans that they clearly disagreed with. That was bad! If we go through a phase of not criticizing what we think are silly or counter-productive lefty trends because Trump is worse, or because you don't want somebody to say you sound like J. D. Vance, we won't be doing anybody any favors.
That said I understand where Kanakia is coming from. The importance of woke issues was always exaggerated because they affect writers and are easy to write about. And anti-woke discourse is being used as an excuse by the Trump people to justify a bunch of crazy and dangerous policies. otoh I think we are all a bit punch-drunk from Trump II right now. It is worse than the last time, vandalizing institutions like USAID in ways that probably can't be repaired. But the whole thing is so improvised, such a tornado of bullshit (annexing Canada?) that nobody really knows what to make of it yet. After a while people will find intelligent things to say about it (beyond "this is horrifying" and "these people are idiots"), but that time hasn't come. Anyhow, I look forward to the rest of this exchange.
Could Naomi explain what her beef with Jesse Singal is? I wouldn’t lump him in with Sullivan and Weiss, for one.
Side note: The Sullivan interview with Mike White is very good, and should be very much of interest to the readership here.
I thought about pushing back on Jesse Singal, but he's such a sinkhole of discourse himself. Not his fault, but it's very hard to have a sane conversation about him and his work.
I liked that interview. White is interesting.
As I posted on another thread below:
For eight years Singal has earned a living writing about trans issues. He claims to support trans rights, including the ability for adults to legally transition--he merely has concerns about gender affirming care for kids. During these eight years there has been an unprecedented erosion of rights for trans adults, including bathroom bans and erasure of the possibility, both by the federal government and many states, of the ability to legally transition. He has not spoken out against any of this, even though he has the ear of many of the people who advocate policies that harm trans adults. That is cowardly. He is afraid of harming his income, so he refuses to challenge the biases of his audience. That is why I dislike him and wouldn't want to be in the same room as him.
Of course we should criticize wokeness. Liberals haven’t repudiated wokeness nearly as vigorously as they should. This is a movement that fractured our base and galvanized MAGA, it delivered us into the arms of fascists as many of us warned it would, and it still continues to hamper our ability to unite against what is a serious and growing danger from the right. Like Mayor Pete said, it makes the left sound like Portlandia, and for the right it’s the gift that keeps giving.
If we want to defeat fascism we can’t make the same mistakes again. And, respectfully, it’s not a great look to attack the people who were right to sound the alarm in the first place—the anti-woke writers. The left needs to address its failures head on and emphatically chart a new course, with the same passion that it showed for DEI, for defund the police, for “actually it’s ‘unhoused’” and on and on. This is urgent business. The left needs to be trusted again to take the reins and fix our problems and wokeness did serious damage to that trust. It won’t do to sheepishly admit that "OK maybe identity politics was a tad divisive, but we meant well so anyhoo, moving on…"
We can’t anyhoo our way out of this.
My answers to the initial three questions, which I think keep focus on what’s important:
“Does wokeness even really exist anymore, in any meaningful sense, in any important cultural or political space?”
Yes. The DNC officer elections are a clear indication of this. Further, there truly is ideological capture at universities, and further downstream via Teachers Colleges, primary education. The vital lessons on how to think, and how to apply rigor, have been denigrated as “White Supremacy”. The victim mentality of all of this is also terribly damaging even to its greatest proponents, and encouraging it to continue without rebuke is, I would argue, a moral failure.
Now, bad ideas sometimes become predominant in academia, but wokeness short circuits the normal path of self reflection by deeming any criticism of it as profane, accusing critics of racism, -phobias, etc. This sort of charge is a career death sentence when it sticks, and enough heads have been put on pikes this last decade to make it clear what the stakes are for trying to push back, even now. It will take decades of people pushing back against the broader precepts of wokeness, of the rules of engagement themselves, before genuine criticism can flourish and a true synthesis can occur.
“Even if it does still exist, and is still exerting some influence in certain spaces, is there any point to critiquing it now that Trump and Musk rule the land?”
Yes, because vacillating between two bad regimes is still bad, and as I stated above damage to rigor is continuing where wokeness holds sway. Wokeness and MAGA both believe that there is only power, with no need to allow for the dignity of the other side. Why would I want either of them to have that power?
Another part of it relates to the third question:
“If you grant that Trump is the primary bad thing, as both of us do, why might it still be worth discussing the woke left? And if not, why are there so many people who ostensibly oppose Trump who are still talking about wokeness so much?”
Because the woke left wants to be the vanguard of the resistance, when it has actually become a huge liability for Democrats.
The 2020 Democratic Primary was a woke wet dream up until the very end. As such, a lot of proclamations were made by many candidates that have come back to bite them when running against Trump and MAGA, Harris’s response to ACLU hypotheticals just being the tip of the iceberg.
Wokeness has also, through the 1619 Project and other poorly considered articles and publications, pushed a narrative that America has always been a racist hellhole, literally founded on slavery, and only by voting for the benevolent woke can we wash ourselves of our sins (Reverend Wright’s Revenge, as it were). The question then naturally arises: If you hate America that much, why should I, an American, vote for you?
Here in Chicago I recently saw a sticker (the new grafitti) that had an upside-down crown on Trump’s head that said “Not A King. Fight Fascism”. I just thought, “you’re so close, but you can’t see what should be obvious to any American how to connect this for other Americans”. We literally founded the country with the cry “No More King”! Yet there was no American flag on the sticker, done purely in black and white, sort of an Antifa motif. I very much want to fight against Trump’s authoritarianism, but I have publicly held my tongue for the last 10 years against this idiocy. No longer.
We will have to work together, and we will also have to convince people who have voted for Trump that there’s an off-ramp. The “my way or the highway” of oral land acknowledgements (I think plaques have their place, so yes, some synthesis is possible) and prodding people to state their pronouns when introducing oneself (whose logical argument is “we should pretend our gender is unknowable until we state it, because a few people aren’t learned in the stereotypical ways of society, and instead of not caring about falling short of stereotypes we must cater to their wishes to conform”) signal to normies and undecideds that we really are for They/Them instead of the broader American populace. If we have any chance of beating back Trump, that shit has to stop yesterday.
I agree with a lot of this, particularly the point that critiquing the woke left is, or at least might be, a means of making the opposition to Trump stronger and more strategic. That in one sense at least going after Trump and his most self-sabotaging opponents are part of one endeavor. I don't really lean in to this, in my responses, because I don't feel as confident in the argument as I do making the case for pushing back against wokeness in elite artistic and intellectual spaces for the sake of improving those spaces on their own terms. ie not a strategic argument for how to do politics better, in the cultural space, but a straightforward argument for how to have better culture
It is certainly unnerving to see anti-woke arguments that I mostly agree with be exaggerated to the point of incoherent absurdity and used to justify a frontal assault on the US university system.
See, I never considered those “anti-woke”, as authoritarianism is just woke by different disposition.
How is this not just cope? I think anti-woke people need to honestly reckon with the fact that a sizable contingent of the anti-woke commentariat has always been authoritarian. That should occasion some reflection, not deflection.
Trump’s attacks on Free Speech force both politics and art to be addressed simultaneously. “It’s none of your business where I work, where I live, or whether I’m a citizen or are here by other legal means. My right to speak is fully protected legally and culturally” must be forcefully said to both MAGA and the woke.
This. I was going to reply but you said everything I wanted to. I'd boil what you're saying down to 2 very strong reasons to continue to oppose wokeness:
1) It is an affront to truth. Anyone who truly cares about academia should care about this.
2) MAGA won in part because of the excesses of wokeness. This is even shown in some swing state voter exit polls (https://blueprint2024.com/polling/why-trump-reasons-11-8/).
Regarding the second reason, while I appreciate Kanakia's willingness to talk about this and push back against some of the excesses, she still refers to people like Jesse Singal as a transphobic person who wants to roll back trans rights--as though she were stating that the sky is blue. THIS, too, is wokeness. If people like Singal, who are merely applying journalistic and scientific rigor to an issue, can be talked about this way, then we still have a long way to go.
I actually don't understand the Bari Weiss inclusion either, particularly given her centering of Wu's voice across multiple podcasts. I just don't think strong criticism of certain elements of trans/gender ideology automatically equals transphobic.
In turn, you are stating that Singal’s work is purely “journalistic and scientific” as if you were saying that the sun rises in the east. There have been numerous critical appraisals of Singal’s work that look at where he’s ignored evidence & twisted data to make a point. He’s not beyond criticism or reproach.
This is why I tend to avoid discussing Singal. It so quickly spirals off into an argument about a whole other topic.
I do get this, but I think Singal is important to defend because unlike others who make critiques in this space I think Singal has been uniquely and unfairly maligned. He's very, very careful. Allow me to take us back to Wesley Yang! But this time I'm gonna side with you, because I would NOT defend Yang is this way. Yang, for example, is not so careful nor so scientifically rigorous.
Sorry, how am I bringing up a whole other topic?
I didn't say his work per se is purely journalistic and scientific, but rather than he is APPLYING journalistic and scientific rigor to an issue (to particular issues). I don't mean to be pedantic but the difference matters because it suggests, as you say, that the results of this application is not beyond criticism. You're right about that.
However, I'm guessing that the examples you'd choose to cite where he supposedly "ignored evidence and twisted data to make a point" would not be examples I'd accept as demonstrating that (for various reasons, including that these critics themselves are activists and are not critiquing in good faith). But I'd be happy to take a look at a source or two if you want to share them, just in case I'm wrong.
If you’re preemptively dismissing critics of Singal on the basis of their being “activists,” can I ask what counts as activism here? Why does being an activist immediately make someone’s argument “bad faith”? I ask, because “trans activist” is often thrown around as an epithet and pejorative in gender critical circles as a way to delegitimize criticism of GC talking points.
I’m happy to provide examples, but I don’t want to waste your or my time if you’re predisposed to reject criticism based on who is making it.
That's fair to ask for clarification. I wasn't suggesting an ad hominem. Activism, I think, generally refers to behavior that is primarily motivated by a commitment to a social/moral cause over truth (and over other values for that matter). It's not just the fact that someone is an activist that's the problem; it's what that (predictably) tends to do to their argument and their interpretation of the data. It becomes almost purely motivated reasoning, which is what I meant by bad faith. The so-called evidence based critique of the Cass Review from Yale is a great example of this, for reasons that I could go into (I'm guessing we may disagree on this, which probably suggests that further conversation won't be fruitful).
I should make it clear that I'm not just talking about gender affirming care related research. This same problem has happened many times in the history of academia. The creationism (contra evolution) movement in the early 2000s is another example. Although they often claimed to be academics genuinely concerned about truth, they were all Christians and had a pre-commitment to believing in a monotheistic God. To my knowledge, there were literally no other academics who believed in creationism who weren't also Christians.
That's a red flag. When something is true, it is usually found to be true by different people of different academic persuasions and certainly not ONLY by people who's priors are confirmed by it being true. The same analysis applies to critics of Singal, I'm guessing. But if you've got something that you think might still stand, I'll check it out--especially if you can provide at least some critics of Singal who are not linked to activism at all.
I’ll be honest: I think the comparison between people in support of gender-affirming care and creationists is kinda offensive and unserious. However, I can appreciate that you were trying to find a comparable analogue and I don’t think you’re intending to be inflammatory.
The problem I have with your assessment is that it implies that there are two and only two sides: one “side” has truth-denying activists and the other “side” has people who are just interested in telling the unvarnished truth. What about all of the people who are simply and unequivocally anti-trans? Where do they fit in? Setting Singal aside, there are plenty of people who are deeply critical of GAC that are absolutely “primarily motivated by a commitment to a social/moral value over truth (and over other values for that matter).”
I must admit that while it's boring to tell other (unwoke) people what they should be talking about or how freaked out about Trump they should be (although i think the answer is "extremely"!), it was disconcerting to hear Deresiewicz (whose appreciation of me I ofc appreciate) place me (along with some company I'm very skeptical of) in the assemblage of the "non-left" where vitality, playfulness, beauty etc is supposedly happening, when indeed--in perhaps a rare moment when I agree entirely with Kanakia--I don't see the vitality and more importantly to the extent that I myself am a representative of the purported playfully vital erotic non-left (💅), that assemblage was coconut-pilled last summer and is horrified now!
Do you not find yourself playful and vital? Or me?
We're playful! We're vital! But I see substack discourse imagining (and reacting against imaginings of) some wave of liberated postwoke cultural energy... which I not only don't see and don't see myself as part of, but also seems deeply at odds with my own dread about the present...
Yeah, the vibe may have shifted but one thing I'm not worried about is being disoriented by suddenly interesting right-wing films and novels and cultural criticism.
Right I mean I have like written on the French Theory girls and their disorientation by Céline, Heidegger etc, and written myself thus on Marc Edouard Nabe, BAP etc... but ultimately right-wing cultural/intellectual stuff, and especially its contemporary products, is not interesting enough to justify either the endless left-wing discourse from guys who didn't get enough grad school comparing obscure Strausso-integrists like boys with bug collections or conversely the breathless substacker hype about Arx-han's awful novel or whatever is said to be vitalizing the discourse...
If I bury John Ganz’s name here, do you think he’ll notice, or will it be more like Obi-Wan sensing a disturbance in The Force?
Lol. We’ll see.
The only recent-ish fiction I've read that I'm convinced is genuinely good was written by extremely celebrated octogenarians. (Marilynne Robinson and Alice Munro really are good, but I'm not some savant for figuring this out.) And the pretentious theory that I like best comes from mid-tier Europeans like Marcel Gauchet and Dieter Henrich (my slightly more exotic beetles) who didn't make it big over here mostly because they are boring. So I'm in no position to throw stones. But I don't think the discourse (on this website? in general?) is that vital or that I'll do much to vitalize it when I finally start posting....
Still, in many times and places right-wing intellectual production is as interesting as what comes from the left and center, but in spite of everything wrong with the left and center that just isn't the case now. They are back to "irritable mental gestures."
Gonna start calling myself a Straussian bug collector. (I don’t feel implicated by the remark really, but what a delightful phrase)
you are, no shade, implicated by the remark
Babylon Bee headlines mostly elicit a chuckle from me, when they don’t veer into pure Dominionism.
You might need to give it some time. The Smoke ‘Em girls just had on Aaron Gwyn, and he mentioned a Vanity Fair article about Cormack Mccarthy’s very young girlfriend, who has no apologies for going with McCarthy. Gwyn said “could you imagine this piece being published in 2020?”
I don’t quite follow the very last part (playful non-left/non-woke was coconut pilled and is now horrified…at having been coconut pilled, or at Trump 2.0?), but yes, you didn’t deserve being lumped in like that. I think Deresiewicz got taken in by the Dimes Square thing.
Horrified by Trump... I have no regret for having been coconut-pilled!
I don't think we can "move on" from a significant portion of the population especially one that is engendered in major American institutions. I don't mean criticize, but we can't just pretend the last decade didn't happen. Ik anti-woke belies some outrage or anger, but, tbh, this is a form of communication. There's not really a way to organically move beyond it. There's a decade of nonsense on every social medium and it's not like dnc has moved on from it. That's just the breadth. The depth is insane. You have constitutional crises, a lot of domestic and foreign policy issues which are things people in and outside USA interacted with. For some people, a lull in the more outward dei stuff means there's an easier way to settle back into social situations that weren't present before, but that's not true for the vast majority of people. A lot of people don't watch films, they don't go to college. There are a lot of reasons for these but until there's some sort of social medium between them and the rest of America, it's not something that can be swept up. I don't think outrage is necessarily appropriate, but I do feel like the idea of switching so we can criticize Trump more just seems to lose a lot of what's happened. I feel like the broader issue is going through this as if we learned nothing at all and grew not at all. I'm still for socializing with dei until there's clearly a new standard for social relations between us. Dei was way too self-absorbed to substantiate any discussion between anyone. If that looks like more "not-woke" professors, if it's better run institutions — I have no idea — but I consider the last decade to be a dead space for America.
Interesting start! Really looking forward to seeing where this goes.
I think if there's a criticism to be levied against the Andrew Sullivans and the Jesse Singals, it's not that they don't acknowledge Trump is worse than Harris would have been. They explicitly *do* say that, and Sullivan went so far as to endorse Harris over Trump and explain his thinking in detail.
Their "failure" as I see it is more that -- in jumping time and again on the anti-woke, anti-leftist crusade, they never offer an affirmative vision of what advocating for trans rights or racial justice *should* look like. What do centrists *want* out of our government when it comes to making progress on these issues? Sullivan all but insists there is no need for a trans rights movement at all in the wake of Bostock. But that's absurd. Trans rights *are* under attack, and if the anti-woke mob is unsatisfied with the war the far left is waging, they need to articulate a version of trans rights *that would be persuasive to centrists* such as themselves. Instead, Sullivan, Singal et al. seem awfully content to just return to the "wokesters are at it again" well for more clicks.
I’m really looking forward to the rest of this.
It feels like a significant source of this conflict is that two questions are being wrestled with simultaneously.
1) What political tactics are most effective in the project of opposing Trump? Some people think effective opposition requires more full throated opposition and solidarity which means reasserting our commitments to marginalized communities . Other people are focused on fixing the Democrats “Brand” among people who didn’t go to college, which probably means being less “woke”.
2)How should we live as educated non right wing Americans after wokeness came to so totally dominate our cultural landscape and then subsequently exhaust itself? If we can never go back to 2013, and the project that culminated with 2020 has totally failed in its bid for cultural hegemony, how should we go forward? Where the first question was primarily political, this question is primarily cultural- about what the world of arts and letters should look like, and what our cultural narrative about the 2010s should be.
A lot of frustration comes from people trying to answer the second question being interpreted as trying to answer the first question and vice versa. I suspect Naomi is asking us to table this second question and just man the barricades until 2028 given the severity of the situation, and although I sympathize it seems to me that message discipline at that scale is absolutely impossible to achieve.
Looking forward to this!
I want to dispute Naomi's framing that it is "actually the right that is the enemy of freedom" as if there cannot be anti-freedom forces on both the left and the right. For queer people, the authoritarian impulses of the right might look more dangerous than the authoritarian impulses on the left, but this is also historically contingent. It's not like Fidel's Cuba was a haven for queer people.
ETA:
Like other commenters have mentioned: if the goal is to articulate a viable alternative to Trumpism, it is worth considering how previous attempts have failed. The fact that the right, centre and post-left have all overreacted to wokeness does not change the fact that it took all the political oxygen out of the room. That’s why I think it is worth spelling out how liberalism differs from wokeness. It’s not about settling scores, it’s about clearer thinking.
Very interesting! Nice exchange.
Oh come one… I’ve been in the same room as Jesse Singal and I’m way more based than Brianna Wu! I write Poundian Christian sonnets, so you know… pretty anti-woke.
I appreciate this exchange. But the woke that the right weaponizes (bc they’re not and will never be folk in the know making a metaphor about having awakened knowledge) is still not accessed in this dialogue.
It’s not 20 somethings, though it is. It’s more like tastemakers and thought guerillas going now is actually slavery still because colonial legacy but nothing else bad in history is that sticky. It’s so angry and thinks pure anger helps and its intervention is so divinely inspired it needs no human tactics. It’s the sincere conflation of emotions as universalist history that justifies they have state power but can’t confess it desires powers of state to flex in ways those without their emotional reaction are welcome to never understand through anything but confusion or infuriation.
It’s fuck conditional allies because infuriating for direct confrontation is somehow more productive than subversion, despite what has it achieved lately? And bearing in mind I actually expect it’s achieved something, why limit the tactical plurality of your engagement as if your perspective simply contains the singular progress achieving mode in a state you call an unjust and lopsided guerilla war.
“That all these critiques Bill D. made of the left, as being the enemy of freedom, fun, and eros and playfulness–they are exactly wrong, they are exactly inverted, and it’s actually the right that is the enemy of freedom. Why not say what we all know to be true?”
We will need to walk and chew gum at the same time. What if I think art from this woke decade has been terrible because it *hasn’t* been free, fun or playful? Does she really believe Nanette is better than even an anti-woke Chappelle?