As someone who attacked Naomi's side in the last article, I want to agree with her here. I think there is space to be anti-woke and non-rascist/transphobic/etc., but 95%+ of anti-wokeness is just complaints about the inability to openly be a jerk. And as she mentions, you probably still need to be on your toes about the other 5%.
I find it interesting for Daniel to say he finds these disagreements interesting, because there's almost nothing I find more boring. Most of these conversations highlight the extreme fringes (especially of the left wing) and ignore the very real problems that minorities face. It's almost always a battle over definitions and feelings rather than talking about concrete issues. It's not that "woke" positions are always correct/incorrect, it's that the discussion is almost always better when you ignore the woke/anti-woke framing.
My basic priors are these (not that these are always true, but my general first impression)
1. If someone says they are trying to be woke, I assume they are basically a good person who is trying to listen to unrepresented voices and do more for underserved populations.
2. If someone says they are woke, I assume they are full of themselves and unaware of their own biases.
3. If someone says they are anti-woke, I assume they are a bigot.
Again, there are exceptions, but I would almost always prefer to be with someone who is 2 than someone who is 3. I may not agree with everything they say, but at least the woke recognize important issues in society and, while I may often disagree with their proposed solutions, I have to admit that there are almost never clear cut, 100% effective answers to the problems they raise.
And wokeness can help make progress. I think I personally am much more comfortable with and supportive of trans rights than I otherwise would be because of woke efforts to make these causes known. Hearing people's stories can change how you think about things. I don't even question that homosexuality is perfectly moral because the environment I grew up in made that clear. A lot of that progress was due to wokeness (or at least its spirit).
Dan, there's an impasse I feel like I come back to again and again with you and with other anti-woke figures (though I do think that's a reductive label for you; I personally have never really thought of Eminent Americans as an anti-woke podcast). It's that you equate the cultural phenomenon of wokeness with left-wing intellectualism, and essentially hold left-wing ideas and intellectuals responsible for the one-dimensional, censorious tendencies of wokeism as it was practiced *outside* of intellectual spaces. That doesn't comport with my experience of 2015-2021, which to me was a golden age of left-wing thought and public intellectualism in general, with an extraordinarily high level of public writing and debate. "Wokeness" was real, very culturally present, but it was unevenly distributed, and just did not have the deadening impact on "American intelligence” that some people seem to think it did. In fact, the peak of wokeness coincided with a renaissance of American public intellect that was the first moment in my life where it felt like ideas actually mattered.
The core of this disagreement is that we're talking about different things when we refer to "the left"; respectfully, I think you're not being precise enough. In your parts of this exchange, there is almost no distinction whatsoever between wokeness and the left. What comes through there is not so much a critique of wokeness but a pretty deep and prejudicial skepticism of the left tout court. But it doesn’t have to be this way; I think there's a way to allow for the real prominence and cultural power of wokeness, which I found bad in pretty much the same ways you did, and not to turn that into indefensible overgeneralizations about "the left" being "boring" or giving up on "thinking hard."
Naomi gets at this with this important observation: "To discuss this issue as if it’s a matter of ideology seems to, to me, incorrect." A lot of analysis of wokeness gets it the wrong way around, as if it were an intellectual phenemenon that flowed downward from elite ideas into cultural practice. But in fact I think it was a primarily *non-intellectual, non-theoretical* form of folk wisdom and practice that bubbled up in civil society before it was capitalized on by woke intellectuals and influencers like DiAngelo, Kendi, et al. Social media platforms were crucial, and the key texts of wokeness were Tumblr threads and posts on websites like Thought Catalog and Everyday Feminism—in other words, a popular phenomenon that took place largely outside the sphere of the left intelligentsia.
Obviously, the complex of notions/gestures we call "wokeness" was extremely influential in progressive institutions: digital media, non-profits, cultural institutions like museums and galleries, elite universities and private schools, etc. It's fine to call that "the left" in a loose, colloquial way. But the field of analysis of your podcast, and what you're talking about in this exchange, is the *intellectual* scene, and that is a fairly distinct sociological space. If we actually look at the intelligentsia of the left golden age (2015-2021 or so), its relationship to wokeism was quite orthagonal. The important debates about neoliberalism, fascism, etc, were often completely separate from wokeness; when they overlapped with the themes of wokeness (the race in US history debates), the left intelligentsia was frequently contextualizing, elevating, and challenging the narrow terms set by the woke influencers. I don't know how anyone could review the contents of the left-liberal intellectual scene (TNR, The Nation, Dissent, the LRB and NYRB, etc) and conclude that it was rigidly dogmatic, uncritical about its own side, overtaken by wokeness, or (least of all!) boring.
I have asked heterodox people again and again to specify: What couldn't be discussed? What debates couldn't be had? Whose ideas were blacklisted? And they never have a persuasive answer. It comes across more as a gut reaction about their own isolation or lack of a sense of importance; in a few cases, they actually mean "left-wing magazines didn't embrace right-wing ideas."
I think Naomi's right that as time goes on, anti-wokeness increasingly appears to have been a reactive positioning that depends on stereotypes of the left as its foil. It's a realization I've had again and again talking to otherwise very smart non-left or heterodox types: "This person just isn't very familiar with the left!" I don't think we should stop talking about wokeness, because a lot of the analysis to date is still mired in baggy generalizations and personal ressentiment. We should talk about it better and more precisely.
Ok if I share this is in my round-up post? I think you’re right that there’s some real imprecision in my posts on this front. Maybe just laziness on my part. You’ll have to do some work to persuade me that the (real) left was great in the ways you’re suggesting, but I agree there’s a distinction worth making that I didn’t make. I’m feeling burnt out on the woke thing, but maybe we can figure out a way to do something on the non woke left of those years that doesn’t revolve around the wokeness wars. But quickly: who are the key figures in your golden age?
Of course! I agree my case needs more thought and evidence; this is kind of an index of my thinking at the moment, but it's going to take more time and re-reading.
Arbitrarily selected off the top of my head: Sam Adler-Bell, Tim Barker, Daniel Bessner, Jamelle Bouie, Alyssa Battistoni, Daniel Immerwahr, Matt Karp, Sam Moyn, Aziz Rana, Dylan Riley, Corey Robin, Tim Shenk, Nikil Pal Singh, Matt Sitman, Quinn Slobodian, Keeanga-Yahmatta Taylor, Ben Tarnoff, Adam Tooze, Moira Weigel, Gabe Winant
I think I'd need to know more about what you found valuable in their thinking, post 2016. I feel like I was fairly plugged when Bernie was rising, in 2016, but after Trump was elected it was so wall to wall Trump/resistance/BLM/metoo that I lost sight of what was happening on the left left.
You're right that some lefties (especially old-school lefties) pushed back against wokeness. Was it Jacobin who wrote a scathing critique of the 1619 Project, for example? Yet, look what happened next: they were excoriated as old, white racists by the likes of Nicole Hannah Jones, and the rest of the progressive elite. Who defended Carol Hooven when she got pushed out of Harvard for innocuously challenging gender ideology? Who defended Tabia Lee when she lost a job for teaching a version of anti-racism that didn't jive with Kendi's version? To name a couple.
Some did defend them, but certainly not the majority of the left (woke or not).
You ask, what couldn't be discussed? What debates couldn't be had? Then you claim that those you asked didn't have a persuasive answer and you accuse them of being motived by their own isolation (pretty condescending, btw). I'm guessing that, first, you didn't ask the right people and, second, you shifted the goal posts upon hearing the answers.
As those two aforementioned examples illustrate, what was most likely to make oneself a target was challenging left orthodoxies around identity. There is definitely research on this, from rising levels of self censorship among both faculty and students to statistics that paint a worse picture than that of the Red Scare--including double the amount of tenured professors being fired. Plus there is the documented sociological element of preference falsification that has been and still is a factor--when people see that others face consequences for challenging a progressive orthodoxy, they're less likely to challenge it themselves for fear of social consequences.
Of course, you could just call all of these people cowards. And I concede that you can technically say a lot of things. The issue, though, is in fact the consequences. An environment where you're walking on egg shells is not one that is conducive to true Socratic dialogue, which is what academia is supposed to be about. In the height of the woke madness, the consequences in more extreme cases were to be fired or professionally shunned. But if the consequences are to not be on a committee you were once head of, or even just to be seen by most on campus as a pariah, those aren't good either and do not support academic freedom.
A recent thorough report on academic freedom in higher education continues to paint a bad picture: chrome-extension://efaidnbmnnnibpcajpcglclefindmkaj/https://dgmg81phhvh63.cloudfront.net/content/user-photos/AACU_AcademicFreedomReport_010825_PUBLISHED.pdf. This particular report is interesting because it disaggregates the data by full time, adjunct, and administrators. To take just one finding, 1/4 of faculty feel significant pressure to conform their political views to that of the administrators (who are almost all far left).
So if these sorts of data and arguments are not persuasive, what would you find persuasive? And how would you distinguish wokeness from the rest of the left?
The 1619 Project is actually a good case study of I'm talking about: a vigorous debate across the liberal and left media with many critiques and different positions.
Liberal historians (including Sean Wilentz, James MacPherson, and Gordon Wood) criticized it in a letter to the NYT Magazine and elsewhere. Socialist historians like Matt Karp (a professor at Princeton) wrote a critique in Harper's, and socialist magazines like Dissent and Jacobin published strongly critical essays as well. Sure, Nikole Hannah-Jones (and plenty of others) fought back, and liberal and socialist critics of woke writing about race were sometimes called racists, brocialists, or whatever, especially in their Twitter mentions.
The point is that "wokeness" did not have some kind of absolute power to silence all criticism; you weren't ostracized or fired for disagreeing with The 1619 Project or White Fragility. The worst thing that happened to anyone is that they got angry replies on Twitter. To me, that's an example of a healthy intellectual culture.
I'm not saying no one was ever harmed by Twitter pile-ons or didn't perhaps face consequences if they, say, objected to a DEI training at their workplace. But that wasn't the fault of left-wing writers!
This is such a hard space in which to have a good discussion, because it's often so dependent on our subjective experience of the relative atmospheres. I mean you could point to polling data or whatever, but when you get to assessments of whether it was "healthy" or not, I don't find data as persuasive as my experience.
It *felt* really bizarre to me for a few years, where people who I knew were sane people were saying totally crazy things. That doesn't mean everyone was doing that, or that there were no dissenters, or for that matter that you didn't have an utterly different experience. But I don't know how I would be persuaded that my experience wasn't my experience.
Couldn't you say something similar about the Red Scare? I'm sure there were subjectively different experiences at that time too. I guess I am just more persuaded by data in this domain, which in this case seems to bear out many of our experiences.
It's funny too see you talk about pile-ons and angry replies on Twitter as somehow being related to a healthy intellectual culture. It'd be one thing if it was all good faith ribbing, genuine intellectual disagreement. But actually a lot of it (and yes from left wing writers too) amounted to calls for people to be de-platformed, fired, etc. A lot of it was name calling.
I will concede the the 1619 Project had a bit more vigorous cultural debate than I initially remembered, but this is just one example and I provided more substantial evidence that you didn't address. What about the increase in firings of tenured professors? And disinvitations/cancellations? What about the report I linked showing not just a rise in self censorship but a loss of academic freedom across multiple domains? How can you square this kind of statistical evidence with a healthy intellectual culture?
I wonder if part of the problem is that you work outside academia (I'm guessing) so you're more likely to see the people who have the balls to push back, people who are too powerful to cancel--such as the 1619 Project situation. Within academia, however, the consequences can be much more immediate and direct. And the less power you have, the less likely you are going to risk it. This pattern is well documented in that report regarding adjunct (part time) versus full time professors.
Yup. It was a gradual shift in what sort of discourse was allowed. I experienced a similar thing as you did regarding pronouns when a colleague was touting the importance of Kendi's ideas in a meeting. I piped up to point out that while Kendi should indeed be read, other Black authors have different views on the matter, and I mentioned people like Randall Kennedy and John McWhorter. I was accused of white fragility. I decided against piping up again on identity related topics.
A bit later, my partner at the time told me about an experience where a guy in her class at NYU questioned whether a particular disparity was due to sexism, as the prof said, and asked whether it could be due to cultural differences instead. He was roundly shamed by multiple students and never spoke in class again.
Pretty sure it's experiences like this (and worse) at colleges all over that led to the current crisis of academic freedom. Sadly it also made the left increasingly more resistant to ideas perceived as outside their bubble (which got smaller and smaller). When someone like David Brooks is treated like Charles Murray by supposedly serious academics, that's not a good sign.
I loved this immensely—both you guys were honest and forthright about where you’re coming from to a degree that is simply rare in the current landscape. I continue to feel grateful for substack, as I can’t imagine another venue where an exchange like this could take place.
I enjoyed this discussion. But I do think Naomi's and some of the commenters' urge to police the boundaries of "anti-woke" (which essentially boils down to: "how can you still care about X when Donald Trump is President?") -- is different only in degree than in kind than the attitudes that got us to Peek Woke. The idea, as one of the commenters said, that anyone who identifies as "anti-woke" is in fact a "bigot" is precisely what led to the immiseration of liberal cultural life over the past decade.
Agree of course. Also, I took the anti-woke side of this argument but I don’t at all think at all that being anti-woke is the most important political contribution one could make right now. Not at all. A bit frustrating to see my position characterized that way.
I find it interesting that Daniel's position seems to be more or less characterized as definitively anti-woke and even something adjacent to crypto-conservative... he seems to me more like a Jon Stewart-Barack Obama liberal circa 2009, to some degree left of center left? I guess I'm not a representative sample of American politics circa 2025 but as someone who still thinks of myself as a member of the mushy centrist middle I'd say Daniel should comfortably qualify as a progressive in good standing, no?
How are you using “crypto-conservative” here? Wouldn’t that imply that Daniel is secretly a conservative, not an Obama-era liberal? I feel like I’m missing something.
In my various interactions with Daniel he's struck me as an earnest progressive who wants Democrats to win elections and supports essentially the full range of progressive policy goals, but also someone willing to play devil's advocate sometimes and acknowledge certain excesses that the gentry left in particular can get itself into, in part to help Dems win more debates and elections. The exchange seems to imply that he's perhaps a bit more of a harder-edged "heterodox" figure (which would perhaps more accurately describe somebody like me, much as I'd quibble at the categorization) than I believe is quite on target for our eminent host.
Thank you! Agree 100%. I’m a totally boring center left democrat with strong sympathies with labor and general social democratic policies. I just think a lot of left cultural stuff is totally self sabotaging and illiberal.
Yes and I'm the same ;) But that's why it's time to start disaggregating, no? Because many anti-woke people are not that. They believe in something different, and maybe those differences have become more material to our present reality than their feelings about left-wing cultural stuff.
I do think some disaggregating is in order, I just don’t think the cultural stuff should be wholly ignored, both because it’s important on its own terms and because bad left cultural politics hurts the political good left politics I support. They’re not fully separable. We lost in part because of “abolish the police” and open borders and other nonserious performative cultural politics.
In the long term, what you’re calling for necessitates that those “anti-woke” & “heterodox” people whose broad sympathies align with left-liberalism start articulating the parts of progressive, social justice-oriented thinking that they CAN get behind. I do think that there needs to be some compromise that finds common ground on ethics, values, and first principles. For example, I would probably describe my politics as “slightly to the left of democratic socialist” but I deeply value center-left liberalism’s commitment to free speech & expression, its support for civil liberties, and its pragmatic approach to politics.
Anti-woke people have largely been taking to task the polarizing extremes of social justice thought. In our social media echo chambers, that has led to a wide swath of contradictory ideas & tactics getting collapsed into the category of “woke” in overly simplistic ways. I often see woke being defined as a “pathological focus on identity, race, gender, and sexuality.” For me, that’s always raised the question, “What level of focus on those issues *would* be acceptable to you?” Are we supposed to just drop them entirely? Are those topics just utterly unimportant to you? Do you think they aren’t really problems?
Like, we can disagree about leftist political concepts & tactics, but I’m personally not going to be in coalition with people who support the Trump regime’s attacks on trans people’s right to bodily autonomy & our civil liberties. If you write off all woke ideas as entirely illegitimate, you end up saying that racial inequality, misogyny, and anti-queer and trans animus are not actually real problems, or, if they are, they’re just not all that important or politically-relevant. If that’s someone’s stance, I’m not sure how we can productively actually bridge that gap. I may value pragmatism, but I (and many others) will not prioritize expediency and efficiency over fighting for the rights of queer & trans people.
But are the intentions the important thing? I myself don't think I can /really/ know people's intentions. (People often don't even know their own.) It seems that what matters is if people are saying stuff that is true or persuasive or well argued or interesting. Sometimes terrible people, or people with bad intentions, say stuff that's true or persuasive, and being in the same camp as them is the price of doing business. Sure, some people who are free-speech near-absolutists like me are that way for right-wing reasons. So what? We make coalitions where we can. By the same token, bad policy is bad policy even if people pushing it have good intentions. It doesn't matter if Chris Rufo is racist in his heart--the dismantling of New College was terrible and stupid.
That seems like it's switching up the conversations, no? If this is purely about policy, instead of about feelings and vibes and styles, then anti-wokeness has won, and the conversation is over. Whatever they want, they have. Tell me what concrete thing they'd like from the academy to make this discussion go away. They have won, comprehensively. Whatever policy they'd like, they can get it.
This whole conversation is not about policies. It's about peoples' feelings that they are being silenced, and their feelings that they are not being heard. Okay, I agree they shouldn't be silenced--they should be heard. But what exactly do they want to say? What ideas exactly are not being heard?
The anti-woke point is not particularly persuasive to me, because it just seems like Bill is scared to say what he believes. He's not being silenced. Nobody can come after him. He's just afraid. And a lot of people believe ugly things, and they're just afraid to say what they truly believe. And...that's anti-wokeness to me.
Question for Naomi: Did you find anti-woke ideology more persuasive, less hypocritical during 2016-2020? It was still, then, the ideology of the US government with its full force and power. Is it just that it is more accepted now, that the opposition is weaker? Just trying to understand if woke or anti-woke can exist by themselves w/o reference to the power of the government. Otherwise, feels like we are just defining eros/life force as whatever is not the current ruling theory.
Part of the reason is that “anti-woke” discourse has solidified into a significantly powerful cultural and political force in the time since then. You have multiple doggedly “anti-woke” publications, like Compact and Bari Weiss’s The Free Press, that didn’t exist during Trump’s first term. “Anti-woke” has become its own durable, money-making institution.
As such, it’s also become much more stale, monomaniacal, and poisonous. It’s become less about offering a vision of what cultural and political discourse *should* be and more about how “woke” ideas are *the* premier threat to a liberal society and the pursuit of intellectual endeavor. You have former liberals like Bill D. embracing outright conservative and right-wing ideas that, with their purported values, they should be deeply opposed to, while ignoring the ways in which those ideas are being used as cudgels against some of the most disempowered, vulnerable people in our society.
And, quite frankly, I’m still not sure what “woke” is. A lack of a clear definition as to which ideas are acceptable vs. which are nothing but smooth-brained, liberal censoriousness has led to “woke” becoming an epithet (it reminds me a lot of how Zionist is used as a pejorative among certain far-left & anti-Zionist elements, though I’m not sure I can yet pin down why that is).
As such, “anti-woke” critique has come to encompass an unwieldy coalition that means someone like Daniel is, unfortunately, sharing an umbrella with someone like Michael Knowles saying that “transgenderism must be eradicated from public life.” The fault lines have revealed that a lot of “anti-woke” thinking is not primarily concerned with how certain ideas about race, gender, ability, sexuality, etc. have created stifling and illiberal conditions for thought, art, and cultural production, but opposition to the very premise that, say, racial inequality & anti-trans prejudice, are problems in the first place.
As someone who attacked Naomi's side in the last article, I want to agree with her here. I think there is space to be anti-woke and non-rascist/transphobic/etc., but 95%+ of anti-wokeness is just complaints about the inability to openly be a jerk. And as she mentions, you probably still need to be on your toes about the other 5%.
I find it interesting for Daniel to say he finds these disagreements interesting, because there's almost nothing I find more boring. Most of these conversations highlight the extreme fringes (especially of the left wing) and ignore the very real problems that minorities face. It's almost always a battle over definitions and feelings rather than talking about concrete issues. It's not that "woke" positions are always correct/incorrect, it's that the discussion is almost always better when you ignore the woke/anti-woke framing.
My basic priors are these (not that these are always true, but my general first impression)
1. If someone says they are trying to be woke, I assume they are basically a good person who is trying to listen to unrepresented voices and do more for underserved populations.
2. If someone says they are woke, I assume they are full of themselves and unaware of their own biases.
3. If someone says they are anti-woke, I assume they are a bigot.
Again, there are exceptions, but I would almost always prefer to be with someone who is 2 than someone who is 3. I may not agree with everything they say, but at least the woke recognize important issues in society and, while I may often disagree with their proposed solutions, I have to admit that there are almost never clear cut, 100% effective answers to the problems they raise.
And wokeness can help make progress. I think I personally am much more comfortable with and supportive of trans rights than I otherwise would be because of woke efforts to make these causes known. Hearing people's stories can change how you think about things. I don't even question that homosexuality is perfectly moral because the environment I grew up in made that clear. A lot of that progress was due to wokeness (or at least its spirit).
Dan, there's an impasse I feel like I come back to again and again with you and with other anti-woke figures (though I do think that's a reductive label for you; I personally have never really thought of Eminent Americans as an anti-woke podcast). It's that you equate the cultural phenomenon of wokeness with left-wing intellectualism, and essentially hold left-wing ideas and intellectuals responsible for the one-dimensional, censorious tendencies of wokeism as it was practiced *outside* of intellectual spaces. That doesn't comport with my experience of 2015-2021, which to me was a golden age of left-wing thought and public intellectualism in general, with an extraordinarily high level of public writing and debate. "Wokeness" was real, very culturally present, but it was unevenly distributed, and just did not have the deadening impact on "American intelligence” that some people seem to think it did. In fact, the peak of wokeness coincided with a renaissance of American public intellect that was the first moment in my life where it felt like ideas actually mattered.
The core of this disagreement is that we're talking about different things when we refer to "the left"; respectfully, I think you're not being precise enough. In your parts of this exchange, there is almost no distinction whatsoever between wokeness and the left. What comes through there is not so much a critique of wokeness but a pretty deep and prejudicial skepticism of the left tout court. But it doesn’t have to be this way; I think there's a way to allow for the real prominence and cultural power of wokeness, which I found bad in pretty much the same ways you did, and not to turn that into indefensible overgeneralizations about "the left" being "boring" or giving up on "thinking hard."
Naomi gets at this with this important observation: "To discuss this issue as if it’s a matter of ideology seems to, to me, incorrect." A lot of analysis of wokeness gets it the wrong way around, as if it were an intellectual phenemenon that flowed downward from elite ideas into cultural practice. But in fact I think it was a primarily *non-intellectual, non-theoretical* form of folk wisdom and practice that bubbled up in civil society before it was capitalized on by woke intellectuals and influencers like DiAngelo, Kendi, et al. Social media platforms were crucial, and the key texts of wokeness were Tumblr threads and posts on websites like Thought Catalog and Everyday Feminism—in other words, a popular phenomenon that took place largely outside the sphere of the left intelligentsia.
Obviously, the complex of notions/gestures we call "wokeness" was extremely influential in progressive institutions: digital media, non-profits, cultural institutions like museums and galleries, elite universities and private schools, etc. It's fine to call that "the left" in a loose, colloquial way. But the field of analysis of your podcast, and what you're talking about in this exchange, is the *intellectual* scene, and that is a fairly distinct sociological space. If we actually look at the intelligentsia of the left golden age (2015-2021 or so), its relationship to wokeism was quite orthagonal. The important debates about neoliberalism, fascism, etc, were often completely separate from wokeness; when they overlapped with the themes of wokeness (the race in US history debates), the left intelligentsia was frequently contextualizing, elevating, and challenging the narrow terms set by the woke influencers. I don't know how anyone could review the contents of the left-liberal intellectual scene (TNR, The Nation, Dissent, the LRB and NYRB, etc) and conclude that it was rigidly dogmatic, uncritical about its own side, overtaken by wokeness, or (least of all!) boring.
I have asked heterodox people again and again to specify: What couldn't be discussed? What debates couldn't be had? Whose ideas were blacklisted? And they never have a persuasive answer. It comes across more as a gut reaction about their own isolation or lack of a sense of importance; in a few cases, they actually mean "left-wing magazines didn't embrace right-wing ideas."
I think Naomi's right that as time goes on, anti-wokeness increasingly appears to have been a reactive positioning that depends on stereotypes of the left as its foil. It's a realization I've had again and again talking to otherwise very smart non-left or heterodox types: "This person just isn't very familiar with the left!" I don't think we should stop talking about wokeness, because a lot of the analysis to date is still mired in baggy generalizations and personal ressentiment. We should talk about it better and more precisely.
Ok if I share this is in my round-up post? I think you’re right that there’s some real imprecision in my posts on this front. Maybe just laziness on my part. You’ll have to do some work to persuade me that the (real) left was great in the ways you’re suggesting, but I agree there’s a distinction worth making that I didn’t make. I’m feeling burnt out on the woke thing, but maybe we can figure out a way to do something on the non woke left of those years that doesn’t revolve around the wokeness wars. But quickly: who are the key figures in your golden age?
Of course! I agree my case needs more thought and evidence; this is kind of an index of my thinking at the moment, but it's going to take more time and re-reading.
Arbitrarily selected off the top of my head: Sam Adler-Bell, Tim Barker, Daniel Bessner, Jamelle Bouie, Alyssa Battistoni, Daniel Immerwahr, Matt Karp, Sam Moyn, Aziz Rana, Dylan Riley, Corey Robin, Tim Shenk, Nikil Pal Singh, Matt Sitman, Quinn Slobodian, Keeanga-Yahmatta Taylor, Ben Tarnoff, Adam Tooze, Moira Weigel, Gabe Winant
I think I'd need to know more about what you found valuable in their thinking, post 2016. I feel like I was fairly plugged when Bernie was rising, in 2016, but after Trump was elected it was so wall to wall Trump/resistance/BLM/metoo that I lost sight of what was happening on the left left.
Open to being educated, though.
You're right that some lefties (especially old-school lefties) pushed back against wokeness. Was it Jacobin who wrote a scathing critique of the 1619 Project, for example? Yet, look what happened next: they were excoriated as old, white racists by the likes of Nicole Hannah Jones, and the rest of the progressive elite. Who defended Carol Hooven when she got pushed out of Harvard for innocuously challenging gender ideology? Who defended Tabia Lee when she lost a job for teaching a version of anti-racism that didn't jive with Kendi's version? To name a couple.
Some did defend them, but certainly not the majority of the left (woke or not).
You ask, what couldn't be discussed? What debates couldn't be had? Then you claim that those you asked didn't have a persuasive answer and you accuse them of being motived by their own isolation (pretty condescending, btw). I'm guessing that, first, you didn't ask the right people and, second, you shifted the goal posts upon hearing the answers.
As those two aforementioned examples illustrate, what was most likely to make oneself a target was challenging left orthodoxies around identity. There is definitely research on this, from rising levels of self censorship among both faculty and students to statistics that paint a worse picture than that of the Red Scare--including double the amount of tenured professors being fired. Plus there is the documented sociological element of preference falsification that has been and still is a factor--when people see that others face consequences for challenging a progressive orthodoxy, they're less likely to challenge it themselves for fear of social consequences.
Of course, you could just call all of these people cowards. And I concede that you can technically say a lot of things. The issue, though, is in fact the consequences. An environment where you're walking on egg shells is not one that is conducive to true Socratic dialogue, which is what academia is supposed to be about. In the height of the woke madness, the consequences in more extreme cases were to be fired or professionally shunned. But if the consequences are to not be on a committee you were once head of, or even just to be seen by most on campus as a pariah, those aren't good either and do not support academic freedom.
A recent thorough report on academic freedom in higher education continues to paint a bad picture: chrome-extension://efaidnbmnnnibpcajpcglclefindmkaj/https://dgmg81phhvh63.cloudfront.net/content/user-photos/AACU_AcademicFreedomReport_010825_PUBLISHED.pdf. This particular report is interesting because it disaggregates the data by full time, adjunct, and administrators. To take just one finding, 1/4 of faculty feel significant pressure to conform their political views to that of the administrators (who are almost all far left).
So if these sorts of data and arguments are not persuasive, what would you find persuasive? And how would you distinguish wokeness from the rest of the left?
The 1619 Project is actually a good case study of I'm talking about: a vigorous debate across the liberal and left media with many critiques and different positions.
Liberal historians (including Sean Wilentz, James MacPherson, and Gordon Wood) criticized it in a letter to the NYT Magazine and elsewhere. Socialist historians like Matt Karp (a professor at Princeton) wrote a critique in Harper's, and socialist magazines like Dissent and Jacobin published strongly critical essays as well. Sure, Nikole Hannah-Jones (and plenty of others) fought back, and liberal and socialist critics of woke writing about race were sometimes called racists, brocialists, or whatever, especially in their Twitter mentions.
The point is that "wokeness" did not have some kind of absolute power to silence all criticism; you weren't ostracized or fired for disagreeing with The 1619 Project or White Fragility. The worst thing that happened to anyone is that they got angry replies on Twitter. To me, that's an example of a healthy intellectual culture.
I'm not saying no one was ever harmed by Twitter pile-ons or didn't perhaps face consequences if they, say, objected to a DEI training at their workplace. But that wasn't the fault of left-wing writers!
This is such a hard space in which to have a good discussion, because it's often so dependent on our subjective experience of the relative atmospheres. I mean you could point to polling data or whatever, but when you get to assessments of whether it was "healthy" or not, I don't find data as persuasive as my experience.
It *felt* really bizarre to me for a few years, where people who I knew were sane people were saying totally crazy things. That doesn't mean everyone was doing that, or that there were no dissenters, or for that matter that you didn't have an utterly different experience. But I don't know how I would be persuaded that my experience wasn't my experience.
Couldn't you say something similar about the Red Scare? I'm sure there were subjectively different experiences at that time too. I guess I am just more persuaded by data in this domain, which in this case seems to bear out many of our experiences.
It's funny too see you talk about pile-ons and angry replies on Twitter as somehow being related to a healthy intellectual culture. It'd be one thing if it was all good faith ribbing, genuine intellectual disagreement. But actually a lot of it (and yes from left wing writers too) amounted to calls for people to be de-platformed, fired, etc. A lot of it was name calling.
I will concede the the 1619 Project had a bit more vigorous cultural debate than I initially remembered, but this is just one example and I provided more substantial evidence that you didn't address. What about the increase in firings of tenured professors? And disinvitations/cancellations? What about the report I linked showing not just a rise in self censorship but a loss of academic freedom across multiple domains? How can you square this kind of statistical evidence with a healthy intellectual culture?
I wonder if part of the problem is that you work outside academia (I'm guessing) so you're more likely to see the people who have the balls to push back, people who are too powerful to cancel--such as the 1619 Project situation. Within academia, however, the consequences can be much more immediate and direct. And the less power you have, the less likely you are going to risk it. This pattern is well documented in that report regarding adjunct (part time) versus full time professors.
Yup. It was a gradual shift in what sort of discourse was allowed. I experienced a similar thing as you did regarding pronouns when a colleague was touting the importance of Kendi's ideas in a meeting. I piped up to point out that while Kendi should indeed be read, other Black authors have different views on the matter, and I mentioned people like Randall Kennedy and John McWhorter. I was accused of white fragility. I decided against piping up again on identity related topics.
A bit later, my partner at the time told me about an experience where a guy in her class at NYU questioned whether a particular disparity was due to sexism, as the prof said, and asked whether it could be due to cultural differences instead. He was roundly shamed by multiple students and never spoke in class again.
Pretty sure it's experiences like this (and worse) at colleges all over that led to the current crisis of academic freedom. Sadly it also made the left increasingly more resistant to ideas perceived as outside their bubble (which got smaller and smaller). When someone like David Brooks is treated like Charles Murray by supposedly serious academics, that's not a good sign.
I loved this immensely—both you guys were honest and forthright about where you’re coming from to a degree that is simply rare in the current landscape. I continue to feel grateful for substack, as I can’t imagine another venue where an exchange like this could take place.
I enjoyed this discussion. But I do think Naomi's and some of the commenters' urge to police the boundaries of "anti-woke" (which essentially boils down to: "how can you still care about X when Donald Trump is President?") -- is different only in degree than in kind than the attitudes that got us to Peek Woke. The idea, as one of the commenters said, that anyone who identifies as "anti-woke" is in fact a "bigot" is precisely what led to the immiseration of liberal cultural life over the past decade.
Agree of course. Also, I took the anti-woke side of this argument but I don’t at all think at all that being anti-woke is the most important political contribution one could make right now. Not at all. A bit frustrating to see my position characterized that way.
Some very powerful writing from Naomi.
Naomi eviscerated Bill. That was a performance for the ages.
I find it interesting that Daniel's position seems to be more or less characterized as definitively anti-woke and even something adjacent to crypto-conservative... he seems to me more like a Jon Stewart-Barack Obama liberal circa 2009, to some degree left of center left? I guess I'm not a representative sample of American politics circa 2025 but as someone who still thinks of myself as a member of the mushy centrist middle I'd say Daniel should comfortably qualify as a progressive in good standing, no?
How are you using “crypto-conservative” here? Wouldn’t that imply that Daniel is secretly a conservative, not an Obama-era liberal? I feel like I’m missing something.
In my various interactions with Daniel he's struck me as an earnest progressive who wants Democrats to win elections and supports essentially the full range of progressive policy goals, but also someone willing to play devil's advocate sometimes and acknowledge certain excesses that the gentry left in particular can get itself into, in part to help Dems win more debates and elections. The exchange seems to imply that he's perhaps a bit more of a harder-edged "heterodox" figure (which would perhaps more accurately describe somebody like me, much as I'd quibble at the categorization) than I believe is quite on target for our eminent host.
Thank you! Agree 100%. I’m a totally boring center left democrat with strong sympathies with labor and general social democratic policies. I just think a lot of left cultural stuff is totally self sabotaging and illiberal.
Yes and I'm the same ;) But that's why it's time to start disaggregating, no? Because many anti-woke people are not that. They believe in something different, and maybe those differences have become more material to our present reality than their feelings about left-wing cultural stuff.
I do think some disaggregating is in order, I just don’t think the cultural stuff should be wholly ignored, both because it’s important on its own terms and because bad left cultural politics hurts the political good left politics I support. They’re not fully separable. We lost in part because of “abolish the police” and open borders and other nonserious performative cultural politics.
In the long term, what you’re calling for necessitates that those “anti-woke” & “heterodox” people whose broad sympathies align with left-liberalism start articulating the parts of progressive, social justice-oriented thinking that they CAN get behind. I do think that there needs to be some compromise that finds common ground on ethics, values, and first principles. For example, I would probably describe my politics as “slightly to the left of democratic socialist” but I deeply value center-left liberalism’s commitment to free speech & expression, its support for civil liberties, and its pragmatic approach to politics.
Anti-woke people have largely been taking to task the polarizing extremes of social justice thought. In our social media echo chambers, that has led to a wide swath of contradictory ideas & tactics getting collapsed into the category of “woke” in overly simplistic ways. I often see woke being defined as a “pathological focus on identity, race, gender, and sexuality.” For me, that’s always raised the question, “What level of focus on those issues *would* be acceptable to you?” Are we supposed to just drop them entirely? Are those topics just utterly unimportant to you? Do you think they aren’t really problems?
Like, we can disagree about leftist political concepts & tactics, but I’m personally not going to be in coalition with people who support the Trump regime’s attacks on trans people’s right to bodily autonomy & our civil liberties. If you write off all woke ideas as entirely illegitimate, you end up saying that racial inequality, misogyny, and anti-queer and trans animus are not actually real problems, or, if they are, they’re just not all that important or politically-relevant. If that’s someone’s stance, I’m not sure how we can productively actually bridge that gap. I may value pragmatism, but I (and many others) will not prioritize expediency and efficiency over fighting for the rights of queer & trans people.
But are the intentions the important thing? I myself don't think I can /really/ know people's intentions. (People often don't even know their own.) It seems that what matters is if people are saying stuff that is true or persuasive or well argued or interesting. Sometimes terrible people, or people with bad intentions, say stuff that's true or persuasive, and being in the same camp as them is the price of doing business. Sure, some people who are free-speech near-absolutists like me are that way for right-wing reasons. So what? We make coalitions where we can. By the same token, bad policy is bad policy even if people pushing it have good intentions. It doesn't matter if Chris Rufo is racist in his heart--the dismantling of New College was terrible and stupid.
That seems like it's switching up the conversations, no? If this is purely about policy, instead of about feelings and vibes and styles, then anti-wokeness has won, and the conversation is over. Whatever they want, they have. Tell me what concrete thing they'd like from the academy to make this discussion go away. They have won, comprehensively. Whatever policy they'd like, they can get it.
This whole conversation is not about policies. It's about peoples' feelings that they are being silenced, and their feelings that they are not being heard. Okay, I agree they shouldn't be silenced--they should be heard. But what exactly do they want to say? What ideas exactly are not being heard?
The anti-woke point is not particularly persuasive to me, because it just seems like Bill is scared to say what he believes. He's not being silenced. Nobody can come after him. He's just afraid. And a lot of people believe ugly things, and they're just afraid to say what they truly believe. And...that's anti-wokeness to me.
Question for Naomi: Did you find anti-woke ideology more persuasive, less hypocritical during 2016-2020? It was still, then, the ideology of the US government with its full force and power. Is it just that it is more accepted now, that the opposition is weaker? Just trying to understand if woke or anti-woke can exist by themselves w/o reference to the power of the government. Otherwise, feels like we are just defining eros/life force as whatever is not the current ruling theory.
I'm sorry so Donald Trump's government was woke...?
No I meant the opposite. Just trying to understand why push back against anti-woke discourse is happening now instead of 2016.
Part of the reason is that “anti-woke” discourse has solidified into a significantly powerful cultural and political force in the time since then. You have multiple doggedly “anti-woke” publications, like Compact and Bari Weiss’s The Free Press, that didn’t exist during Trump’s first term. “Anti-woke” has become its own durable, money-making institution.
As such, it’s also become much more stale, monomaniacal, and poisonous. It’s become less about offering a vision of what cultural and political discourse *should* be and more about how “woke” ideas are *the* premier threat to a liberal society and the pursuit of intellectual endeavor. You have former liberals like Bill D. embracing outright conservative and right-wing ideas that, with their purported values, they should be deeply opposed to, while ignoring the ways in which those ideas are being used as cudgels against some of the most disempowered, vulnerable people in our society.
And, quite frankly, I’m still not sure what “woke” is. A lack of a clear definition as to which ideas are acceptable vs. which are nothing but smooth-brained, liberal censoriousness has led to “woke” becoming an epithet (it reminds me a lot of how Zionist is used as a pejorative among certain far-left & anti-Zionist elements, though I’m not sure I can yet pin down why that is).
As such, “anti-woke” critique has come to encompass an unwieldy coalition that means someone like Daniel is, unfortunately, sharing an umbrella with someone like Michael Knowles saying that “transgenderism must be eradicated from public life.” The fault lines have revealed that a lot of “anti-woke” thinking is not primarily concerned with how certain ideas about race, gender, ability, sexuality, etc. have created stifling and illiberal conditions for thought, art, and cultural production, but opposition to the very premise that, say, racial inequality & anti-trans prejudice, are problems in the first place.