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Peter Schaeffer's avatar

Dokoupil committed a grave crime. The crime of blasphemy. To SJWs, Coates is a god. One does not ask questions of a god. You get down on your knees and worship (genuflect before) a god. Dokoupil failed to workship Coates. That is a grave crime to SJWs.

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David Link's avatar

While I can agree with you in part that The Economist was mistaken, it's only because in my opinion they jumped the gun. A charitable read of their thesis is that we appear to be passing "peak woke," not that woke is over.

You're right (also in part) that there is plenty of woke still in our system, but we don't know yet from the data cited that peak woke is behind us. That'll take time. Not weeks or months, but years, and it's possible it may take a generation or so.

Having worked in state politics for a long time, I know that the political -- and thus the media -- dynamics encourage statements of immediate solutions to problems, and it's my theory that this is one of the things that leads to public cynicism about both important institutions. I sat in many meetings with my bosses working hard to find problems that needed solutions, sometimes going out of our way to construct problems out of vague and thin rationales because we had to have a health care issue on our legislative agenda, or a labor issue, or some of-the-moment occurrence, a squirrel that had captured every dog's attention for a minute and a half.

Woke is worse than that, but its solution will be as multivariate as its causes. It's hard to have to wait for things that took a while to build up to decline, and we are an impatient people, built to be deluded by shiny objects and disappointed by solutions that address one data driven aspect of them, but are indifferent to other, more difficult conditions of the problem.

Sometimes we have to wait. And sometimes it does take generations, even several of them, to work out the poisons. That's not a happy fact, but it does seem to be a true one.

I don't blame The Economist and Ms. Goldberg for wish casting. I do it myself sometimes. But they're not wrong to see some good signs. Those of us who live in California see reasons to be hopeful: San Francisco, for heaven's sake, going moderate; voters statewide rebuking their legislature on issues like crime and affirmative action. There will be backsliding, unexpected twists and turns, and god knows what else.

In all of the normal chaos of life in a very populous country, I don't want to be too hard on the folks whose rhetoric of hope is wrong only in that it may be a little premature. I tend to root for hope, and give it a long lead time.

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