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.
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.
I accept the Economist. Peak Woke is past. Today for example I spoke about DEI in my philosophy class and both sides merit v need were voiced by students pretty politely. But Peak Antisemitism is yet to arrive. Coates, slithery fraud he is, slipped from woke to antisemitism. Jew baiting is the new woke, and we all now have a duty to stop it before we see it gain the sort of momentum it has gained so many times before throughout history. Jews need to start fighting back overtly. We need to "punch up" a bit. We cannot continue to hope this will pass. We have done enormous good in America; we are now 6 million strong, auspicious number to say the least. We need to fight back. This is bigger than Harris or Trump: it is life as a Jew in America. There is no safety in the ghetto whether that ghetto is in Poland or in Harvard. Happy New Year. May Pittsburgh defeat Dearborn!
I think we gentiles need to fight back against anti-semitism, it's not just for Jews but for everyone to call it out. I'm appalled by the way American academic institutions have been infected with this in a way that was sort of off the radar until the October 7 attack. I had no idea these kids had been so immersed in such drastic ideology.
Woke is going bye bye. The last gasp cling is from social media mob consumer activism that have profit and market motivated corporatists bending to their demands. But on the labor side of things, the hiring managers are dropping the woke employees like flies on the window being sprayed with a can of Raid.
I know this because I am a CEO that worked with many other business heads to discuss the problem of the toxic grievance mindset work-culture-destroying woke employee... the mistakes made over the last decade of a hiring frenzy where the indoctrinated youth of the corrupt campuses where snatched up as prizes... they have come home to roost.
The workplace is a mess with these wokesters. Musk saw it early and purged them all. The servers stayed up working fine. The consumer activist mob hurt X's advertising, but the company is much more efficient and the work culture repaired to one of productive achievement. This forced feminist experiment of DEI to replace experience, skill and demonstrated performance outcomes... this thing called merit... with victims group cred... is over... dead.
And it is easy to vet the people infected with the toxic mind virus because they have been led to believe that the ideology of Theory/woke is high status. Ask the right open-ended questions and they rat themselves out in a heartbeat.
Why woke is dying and soon to be an embarrassing footnote in our history of embarrassing footnotes is that those little campus muffins that get the bug will be unemployed. The effed up institutions of higher learning will see the number of applications plumet and they will have to purge the communist malcontents from their faculty and administration, and pledge to be a Theory and woke-free environment.
I, like many other business leaders, are working to make sure this happens. The success of all business and thus the country and world, depend on it.
That's encouraging. I hope we elect fewer neoprogressivists. Seattle is so full of them. We try to vote them out, but then they pop back up the next election.
I worked on air as a Correspondent for ABC for more than 30 years.
If I had used these phrases during and interview— “would not be out of place in the backpack of an extremist” and “What is it that so particularly offends you about the existence of a Jewish state that is a Jewish safe place"— I would have been admonished, and quite possibly suspended for injected my own views into the questions.
(I worked for decades before "woke" was a thing).
As reporters and interviewers, broadcast journalists who are not paid to give their own opinions and commentary, should strive for fairness, and act as an ombudsman or woman on behalf of the viewer. Can we achieve objectivity and avoid bias?
Of course not.
But we can approach interviews with a degree of curiosity and open-mindedness.
I'm no fan of Ta-Nehisi Coates opinions about Israel, but who cares what I think about politics?
Tony Dokoupil went over the line. He could have asked tough, skeptical questions without being being hostile.
I think Leo Francis, elsewhere in these comments, provides a strong rebuttal to your statement, Richard. In part, Leo writes,
"Suppose that the interviewer in question had interviewed a conservative Republican and/or a Trump spokesperson with the exact same tone, the exact same manner, and with the exact same type of pointed questions. Would anyone at CBS have complained? At all? "
And Richard, if you're at all honest, you know perfectly well the answer to that question is no.
That's a fair point. But it doesn't make it right. I found Martha Raddatz's Sunday morning interview of JD Vance to be discomforting. She could have asked tough questions without her thinly disguised sense of outrage.
Fair enough. I think perhaps we simply have a respectful disagreement about the degree to which public figures and intellectuals should be challenged on their ideas when they consent to an interview. I personally believe interviews should be a bit more aggressive, so that they can serve as a crucible of ideas for public consideration. I think if our norms were different, that it was totally conventional to challenge ideas in interviews, that we'd be a more informed people.
Coates support for Arabs is actually sort of funny. I am current reading (listening to) one of the many translations of '1001 Arabian Nights'. A negative attitude towards blacks is pervasive in the stories. Slavery (of all kinds) is taken for granted. What else is taken for granted? Piety.
I disagree, to some extent. I reject Coates' viewpoint on Israel, but the interviewer went full-bore against him, he did attack Coates. It seemed a bit biased to me, departing from journalistic standards. I have no desire to defend the culture of progressive thought, and I don't. But the interviewer could have challenged Coates in a more professional way.
@ Christopher J William: your statement may very well be true, but I don't think it addresses the main point. Suppose that the interviewer in question had interviewed a conservative Republican and/or a Trump spokesperson with the exact same tone, the exact same manner, and with the exact same type of pointed questions. Would anyone at CBS have complained? At all? Or would they be cheering him on as a hero? I personally have no doubt that every employee and executive at CBS would be expressing their pride and admiration for the fine work of the interviewer. And, if Fox News or Elon Musk or Trump himself jumped in to complain about media bias, CBS would assert that their interviewer had behaved in an eminently professional and utterly journalistic manner.
But this wasn't an interview with a Conservative, a Republican, or a Trump spokesperson. It was an interview with one of the most famous black Leftists on the planet. And, apparently, CBS simply cannot support anything but deference to such a person. So that's the problem: not so much the behavior of the interviewer but, instead, the obvious and egregious double-standards.
And it follows a pattern seen throughout this woke era (a pattern referenced in this article): words come to mean their exact opposite in the woke dialect. So much so that it is quite often difficult or even impossible to follow what Leftist acolytes are actually saying (or trying to say). Thus, "diversity" comes to mean the actual lack of diversity (or at least the almost complete absence of diverse viewpoints). "Antiracism," an ideology which Ibram Kendi explicitly describes as the permanent practice of racial discrimination, in fact means racism. And, in this case, "objectivity" means the absence of objectivity (and the promotion of only acceptable forms of discourse). That is the problem.
The Israel-Palestine conflict strikes me as peak woke. Both sides use their historic victimization to accuse critics of bigotry, excuse their excesses and deflect attention away from their atrocities.
The bind for sensible folks who hang out on Persuasion is that supporting Israel seems mandatory, given that granting victory to their enemies, who are orders of magnitude worse, is simply unthinkable. But we should not kid ourselves about the fact that Israel uses this ethical bind to its advantage.
Tom, you write, "The bind for sensible folks who hang out on Persuasion is that supporting Israel seems mandatory". Not me. I think the establishment of Israel was a historical mistake, and I have no trouble disagreeing with Israel and its government.
Having said that, yes, I support what Israel is doing in the region today, not because I believe Israel is all wonderful, but because Israel is better than those trying to destroy it. My thinking is similar to the reasoning I've used to decide to vote for Kamala Harris, whom I believe to be a vacuous moron. She's not great, but unlike Trump and Hamas, neither is she trying to destroy a democratic state.
Announcing woke has peaked is kind of like announcing inflation is back to normal levels...yes, prices may no longer be increasing so quickly, but they are still much higher than they were and show few signs of returning to their previous levels.
I argued recently- https://james423.substack.com/p/a-house-divided -that reluctance of those disenchanted with Trump to give their support to Harris was in part their perception of Harris’s self-portrait, as presented in the primary of 2019, as a woke supportive candidate in general alignment with the other Democratic presidential contenders—with the notable exception of Biden, who astutely avoided alienation of progressives while intuitively aligning himself with the gravitational center of political power: that of the moderate center. Already the arrival of peak woke was meeting strong reaction across a spectrum that included much of the moderate majority of the electorate. Harris, while now projecting an evolved recognition of moderate positions, cannot fully disengage from her amber-like entrapment within her previously made identifications with progressive shibboleths. Nor would she not wish to avoid alienation with supporters now deeply steeped in those assumptions, though her failure to more fully establish herself as a bona fide moderate could well cost her the election
That we may hope the peak of woke to have passed does not deny its continuing vitality. As with inflation, where its rate reduced does not equate to falling prices, the decline in woke’s advancement does not indicate significant deterioration of its underlying substantiality. It is now culturally ingrained, an alternate way of thinking. We may take heart, however, in knowing that resistance is making a comeback.
"Where can I find an objective critique of Coates and his work? By that I mean pieces that challenge his ideas and world view."
This is a difficult thing to find. Even back when he was at The Atlantic, comments on his article that sought a civil exchange on his ideas were routinely deleted. He's a great writer (in terms of his command of the language), but his followers comprise a cult and do not brook disagreement.
I applaude Persuation's commitment to speaking the truth. As someone already commented, if something took decades to build up, it is impossible to drain it overnight. Wokeism has become the defacto cultural protocol that most people operate in unconsciously at most if not all of our institutions. It is a cultural phenomenon, not merely a technical problem that business owners could swap away through simple changes to HR policies. The first task of fighting Wokeism is to develop an adeqaute understanding of what it is. Among the scholars who have studied the phenomena, including our own Yascha Monk, I find the account by the Canadian born British scholar, Eric Kaufmann, to be most persuasive. Accoding to professor Kaufmann, Wokeism is the 3rd wave of a continuous socialist movement, an deviate and overeach from the original civil rights movement, spanning more than half a century, from 1960s right through this very moment. In contrast to the classical economic socialism, this new socilism is a cultural phenomenon, Professor Kaufmann named it "cultural socialism". Step by step, this ideology has become the new religion of our secular society, dictating the moral standards at all of our institutions, from universities to governments to businesses. We are only beginning to wake up from decades of Wokeism, uncovering only tips of the iceberg. It is not only premature but down right ignorant to state that "peak wokeism" had passed. Coincidently, I just wrote a blog last night, outlining the contours of this complex and fast moving landscape for the hearts and souls of America: https://open.substack.com/pub/yansong/p/cultural-socialism-diagnosis-and?r=o1gg5&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&showWelcomeOnShare=true
Of course Woke will continue because it's cheap, safe, and non-disruptive. Lots of terminology and symbolic gestures. It doesn't address material concerns. It doesn't address ongoing occupational sex segregation. I contact the DEI office at my university to complain about the fact that there were no women blue collar occupations on campus but was brushed off. I raised a stink because for all the rhetoric my university was made no attempt to hire minority owned business for brick and mortar work, but got nowhere--even when I pointed out that the office 'team' at the firm they did hire was entirely white and only included three team members with vowels at the ends of their names, who might have been Italian American.
No one's going to go for actions that disrupt business. But Woke sells because it's window dressing. What bothers me about DEI is not the silly rubbish they do but that don't do anything that makes any real difference to address the material concerns of women and minorities who still deal with ongoing discrimination.
I agree. The Wokeism being discussed here is equivalent to corporate Greenwashing. Both are academia/media bubble political sticking plasters. In both cases the social gangrene hidden beneath is growing steadily worse. Milton may have proved to be less catastrophic than predicted but at some future time it will be seen with tragic hindsight as one in a long list of ignored warning signs.
Well written, balanced and sensible article that it is, one would like to heartily agree with the thrust of the essay, that is, Wokism has peaked. However by using a set of graphs to show several parameters that help to define Wokism is on the decline, is underwhelming. We all have witnessed what this woke cult has done to our society and stand aghast as to how this happened in such a short period of time. One therefore comes to the conclusion that these Critical Theories upon which Wokeness is founded, have been around for a lot longer that the past two decades that have been "the time of the Woke." This indicates that this Woke brain virus, has long ago infected academic elites, the university professors, and school teachers, and passd onto their students, and in this way has now tricked down to politicians, CEO's of industry, and others in the ruling classes. So there is at least a generation of the young of the western world that have been infected by this Woke virus spread from these elites. These Woke and so called Progressives are very pleased with themselves that they and their dogma, have indeed marched through the western world institutions, spreading this vile ideology of devisive identity politics, flawed racist and gender theories and unachievable social justice. The whole of this Woke cult - for it is that - started in the rarefied ivory towers of academia, and as such will not be entirely extinguished as yet another chimerical delusion, that the gaslighting by our elites insist is necessary to comply with, as they lead us on the highway to utopia. One fears another gereration will have to go by until the fundamental ideology of Wokism is shown to be just another failed delusion of the leftists, and discarded, leaving in it's wake, shattered lives and careers, increasing censorship and statism, and a widening political divide.
'A new report from Republican members of the U.S. Senate Committee on Commerce, Science & Transportation made available to The Free Press says that DEI considerations now profoundly shape NSF grant decisions.'
'“DEI: Division. Extremism. Ideology,” analyzed all National Science Foundation grants from 2021 through April 2024. More than 10 percent of those grants, totaling over $2 billion, prioritized attributes of the grant proposals other than their scientific quality, according to the report.
'In 2021, before the Biden task force report came out, they were less than 1 percent of the total number of grants. By 2022, that number had risen to more than 16 percent, and was at 27 percent between January and April 2024.
I know two people, a lawyer and scientist, at NSF. Last year, I asked them about the implementation of the DEI policy. They both said it was a good idea. Yikes! Woke is here to stay.
Yes, this article was frightening to me. I'm very centrist, deeply opposed to Trumpism and Republicans who bow to his insanity, but there's no denying that the "progressive" left presents a near equal challenge to rational social discourse.
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.
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.
I agree, we don't want to be too hard on them, but we still need to point out when they are wishcasting rather than analyzing.
I accept the Economist. Peak Woke is past. Today for example I spoke about DEI in my philosophy class and both sides merit v need were voiced by students pretty politely. But Peak Antisemitism is yet to arrive. Coates, slithery fraud he is, slipped from woke to antisemitism. Jew baiting is the new woke, and we all now have a duty to stop it before we see it gain the sort of momentum it has gained so many times before throughout history. Jews need to start fighting back overtly. We need to "punch up" a bit. We cannot continue to hope this will pass. We have done enormous good in America; we are now 6 million strong, auspicious number to say the least. We need to fight back. This is bigger than Harris or Trump: it is life as a Jew in America. There is no safety in the ghetto whether that ghetto is in Poland or in Harvard. Happy New Year. May Pittsburgh defeat Dearborn!
I think we gentiles need to fight back against anti-semitism, it's not just for Jews but for everyone to call it out. I'm appalled by the way American academic institutions have been infected with this in a way that was sort of off the radar until the October 7 attack. I had no idea these kids had been so immersed in such drastic ideology.
Woke is going bye bye. The last gasp cling is from social media mob consumer activism that have profit and market motivated corporatists bending to their demands. But on the labor side of things, the hiring managers are dropping the woke employees like flies on the window being sprayed with a can of Raid.
I know this because I am a CEO that worked with many other business heads to discuss the problem of the toxic grievance mindset work-culture-destroying woke employee... the mistakes made over the last decade of a hiring frenzy where the indoctrinated youth of the corrupt campuses where snatched up as prizes... they have come home to roost.
The workplace is a mess with these wokesters. Musk saw it early and purged them all. The servers stayed up working fine. The consumer activist mob hurt X's advertising, but the company is much more efficient and the work culture repaired to one of productive achievement. This forced feminist experiment of DEI to replace experience, skill and demonstrated performance outcomes... this thing called merit... with victims group cred... is over... dead.
And it is easy to vet the people infected with the toxic mind virus because they have been led to believe that the ideology of Theory/woke is high status. Ask the right open-ended questions and they rat themselves out in a heartbeat.
Why woke is dying and soon to be an embarrassing footnote in our history of embarrassing footnotes is that those little campus muffins that get the bug will be unemployed. The effed up institutions of higher learning will see the number of applications plumet and they will have to purge the communist malcontents from their faculty and administration, and pledge to be a Theory and woke-free environment.
I, like many other business leaders, are working to make sure this happens. The success of all business and thus the country and world, depend on it.
That's encouraging. I hope we elect fewer neoprogressivists. Seattle is so full of them. We try to vote them out, but then they pop back up the next election.
I worked on air as a Correspondent for ABC for more than 30 years.
If I had used these phrases during and interview— “would not be out of place in the backpack of an extremist” and “What is it that so particularly offends you about the existence of a Jewish state that is a Jewish safe place"— I would have been admonished, and quite possibly suspended for injected my own views into the questions.
(I worked for decades before "woke" was a thing).
As reporters and interviewers, broadcast journalists who are not paid to give their own opinions and commentary, should strive for fairness, and act as an ombudsman or woman on behalf of the viewer. Can we achieve objectivity and avoid bias?
Of course not.
But we can approach interviews with a degree of curiosity and open-mindedness.
I'm no fan of Ta-Nehisi Coates opinions about Israel, but who cares what I think about politics?
Tony Dokoupil went over the line. He could have asked tough, skeptical questions without being being hostile.
I think Leo Francis, elsewhere in these comments, provides a strong rebuttal to your statement, Richard. In part, Leo writes,
"Suppose that the interviewer in question had interviewed a conservative Republican and/or a Trump spokesperson with the exact same tone, the exact same manner, and with the exact same type of pointed questions. Would anyone at CBS have complained? At all? "
And Richard, if you're at all honest, you know perfectly well the answer to that question is no.
That's a fair point. But it doesn't make it right. I found Martha Raddatz's Sunday morning interview of JD Vance to be discomforting. She could have asked tough questions without her thinly disguised sense of outrage.
Fair enough. I think perhaps we simply have a respectful disagreement about the degree to which public figures and intellectuals should be challenged on their ideas when they consent to an interview. I personally believe interviews should be a bit more aggressive, so that they can serve as a crucible of ideas for public consideration. I think if our norms were different, that it was totally conventional to challenge ideas in interviews, that we'd be a more informed people.
Coates support for Arabs is actually sort of funny. I am current reading (listening to) one of the many translations of '1001 Arabian Nights'. A negative attitude towards blacks is pervasive in the stories. Slavery (of all kinds) is taken for granted. What else is taken for granted? Piety.
Is it possible that you were woke before woke was known? I was woke for decades before wokeism became a word
Possible, but not likely. I'm not woke today. The progressive left's culture wars have been harmful to liberalism.
I disagree, to some extent. I reject Coates' viewpoint on Israel, but the interviewer went full-bore against him, he did attack Coates. It seemed a bit biased to me, departing from journalistic standards. I have no desire to defend the culture of progressive thought, and I don't. But the interviewer could have challenged Coates in a more professional way.
@ Christopher J William: your statement may very well be true, but I don't think it addresses the main point. Suppose that the interviewer in question had interviewed a conservative Republican and/or a Trump spokesperson with the exact same tone, the exact same manner, and with the exact same type of pointed questions. Would anyone at CBS have complained? At all? Or would they be cheering him on as a hero? I personally have no doubt that every employee and executive at CBS would be expressing their pride and admiration for the fine work of the interviewer. And, if Fox News or Elon Musk or Trump himself jumped in to complain about media bias, CBS would assert that their interviewer had behaved in an eminently professional and utterly journalistic manner.
But this wasn't an interview with a Conservative, a Republican, or a Trump spokesperson. It was an interview with one of the most famous black Leftists on the planet. And, apparently, CBS simply cannot support anything but deference to such a person. So that's the problem: not so much the behavior of the interviewer but, instead, the obvious and egregious double-standards.
And it follows a pattern seen throughout this woke era (a pattern referenced in this article): words come to mean their exact opposite in the woke dialect. So much so that it is quite often difficult or even impossible to follow what Leftist acolytes are actually saying (or trying to say). Thus, "diversity" comes to mean the actual lack of diversity (or at least the almost complete absence of diverse viewpoints). "Antiracism," an ideology which Ibram Kendi explicitly describes as the permanent practice of racial discrimination, in fact means racism. And, in this case, "objectivity" means the absence of objectivity (and the promotion of only acceptable forms of discourse). That is the problem.
🎯
Very well said.
The Israel-Palestine conflict strikes me as peak woke. Both sides use their historic victimization to accuse critics of bigotry, excuse their excesses and deflect attention away from their atrocities.
The bind for sensible folks who hang out on Persuasion is that supporting Israel seems mandatory, given that granting victory to their enemies, who are orders of magnitude worse, is simply unthinkable. But we should not kid ourselves about the fact that Israel uses this ethical bind to its advantage.
But Israel is looking like the best hope for combatting Islamism. I'm for that.
Yes me too. Jihad is a cancer at the heart of Islam and they must heal themselves. Theology is becoming ever more important.
Tom, you write, "The bind for sensible folks who hang out on Persuasion is that supporting Israel seems mandatory". Not me. I think the establishment of Israel was a historical mistake, and I have no trouble disagreeing with Israel and its government.
Having said that, yes, I support what Israel is doing in the region today, not because I believe Israel is all wonderful, but because Israel is better than those trying to destroy it. My thinking is similar to the reasoning I've used to decide to vote for Kamala Harris, whom I believe to be a vacuous moron. She's not great, but unlike Trump and Hamas, neither is she trying to destroy a democratic state.
I would argue that the Democrats and I’m saying this as a Democrat are a much bigger threat to Democracy at this point.
Announcing woke has peaked is kind of like announcing inflation is back to normal levels...yes, prices may no longer be increasing so quickly, but they are still much higher than they were and show few signs of returning to their previous levels.
Good analysis of the Economist article.
In general, this tells me not to stop fighting against wokeism.
I argued recently- https://james423.substack.com/p/a-house-divided -that reluctance of those disenchanted with Trump to give their support to Harris was in part their perception of Harris’s self-portrait, as presented in the primary of 2019, as a woke supportive candidate in general alignment with the other Democratic presidential contenders—with the notable exception of Biden, who astutely avoided alienation of progressives while intuitively aligning himself with the gravitational center of political power: that of the moderate center. Already the arrival of peak woke was meeting strong reaction across a spectrum that included much of the moderate majority of the electorate. Harris, while now projecting an evolved recognition of moderate positions, cannot fully disengage from her amber-like entrapment within her previously made identifications with progressive shibboleths. Nor would she not wish to avoid alienation with supporters now deeply steeped in those assumptions, though her failure to more fully establish herself as a bona fide moderate could well cost her the election
That we may hope the peak of woke to have passed does not deny its continuing vitality. As with inflation, where its rate reduced does not equate to falling prices, the decline in woke’s advancement does not indicate significant deterioration of its underlying substantiality. It is now culturally ingrained, an alternate way of thinking. We may take heart, however, in knowing that resistance is making a comeback.
Where can I find an objective critique of Coates and his work? By that I mean pieces that challenge his ideas and world view.
Thomas Chatterton Williams has been one of his more pointed critics.
"Where can I find an objective critique of Coates and his work? By that I mean pieces that challenge his ideas and world view."
This is a difficult thing to find. Even back when he was at The Atlantic, comments on his article that sought a civil exchange on his ideas were routinely deleted. He's a great writer (in terms of his command of the language), but his followers comprise a cult and do not brook disagreement.
No. The Free Press is worth reading, but it's far from being objective.
Thank you Sam Kahn and Co. for your hard work and your many intellectually stimulating articles. Congratulations on your second birthday.
Long may you prosper.
I applaude Persuation's commitment to speaking the truth. As someone already commented, if something took decades to build up, it is impossible to drain it overnight. Wokeism has become the defacto cultural protocol that most people operate in unconsciously at most if not all of our institutions. It is a cultural phenomenon, not merely a technical problem that business owners could swap away through simple changes to HR policies. The first task of fighting Wokeism is to develop an adeqaute understanding of what it is. Among the scholars who have studied the phenomena, including our own Yascha Monk, I find the account by the Canadian born British scholar, Eric Kaufmann, to be most persuasive. Accoding to professor Kaufmann, Wokeism is the 3rd wave of a continuous socialist movement, an deviate and overeach from the original civil rights movement, spanning more than half a century, from 1960s right through this very moment. In contrast to the classical economic socialism, this new socilism is a cultural phenomenon, Professor Kaufmann named it "cultural socialism". Step by step, this ideology has become the new religion of our secular society, dictating the moral standards at all of our institutions, from universities to governments to businesses. We are only beginning to wake up from decades of Wokeism, uncovering only tips of the iceberg. It is not only premature but down right ignorant to state that "peak wokeism" had passed. Coincidently, I just wrote a blog last night, outlining the contours of this complex and fast moving landscape for the hearts and souls of America: https://open.substack.com/pub/yansong/p/cultural-socialism-diagnosis-and?r=o1gg5&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&showWelcomeOnShare=true
Of course Woke will continue because it's cheap, safe, and non-disruptive. Lots of terminology and symbolic gestures. It doesn't address material concerns. It doesn't address ongoing occupational sex segregation. I contact the DEI office at my university to complain about the fact that there were no women blue collar occupations on campus but was brushed off. I raised a stink because for all the rhetoric my university was made no attempt to hire minority owned business for brick and mortar work, but got nowhere--even when I pointed out that the office 'team' at the firm they did hire was entirely white and only included three team members with vowels at the ends of their names, who might have been Italian American.
No one's going to go for actions that disrupt business. But Woke sells because it's window dressing. What bothers me about DEI is not the silly rubbish they do but that don't do anything that makes any real difference to address the material concerns of women and minorities who still deal with ongoing discrimination.
I agree. The Wokeism being discussed here is equivalent to corporate Greenwashing. Both are academia/media bubble political sticking plasters. In both cases the social gangrene hidden beneath is growing steadily worse. Milton may have proved to be less catastrophic than predicted but at some future time it will be seen with tragic hindsight as one in a long list of ignored warning signs.
Well written, balanced and sensible article that it is, one would like to heartily agree with the thrust of the essay, that is, Wokism has peaked. However by using a set of graphs to show several parameters that help to define Wokism is on the decline, is underwhelming. We all have witnessed what this woke cult has done to our society and stand aghast as to how this happened in such a short period of time. One therefore comes to the conclusion that these Critical Theories upon which Wokeness is founded, have been around for a lot longer that the past two decades that have been "the time of the Woke." This indicates that this Woke brain virus, has long ago infected academic elites, the university professors, and school teachers, and passd onto their students, and in this way has now tricked down to politicians, CEO's of industry, and others in the ruling classes. So there is at least a generation of the young of the western world that have been infected by this Woke virus spread from these elites. These Woke and so called Progressives are very pleased with themselves that they and their dogma, have indeed marched through the western world institutions, spreading this vile ideology of devisive identity politics, flawed racist and gender theories and unachievable social justice. The whole of this Woke cult - for it is that - started in the rarefied ivory towers of academia, and as such will not be entirely extinguished as yet another chimerical delusion, that the gaslighting by our elites insist is necessary to comply with, as they lead us on the highway to utopia. One fears another gereration will have to go by until the fundamental ideology of Wokism is shown to be just another failed delusion of the leftists, and discarded, leaving in it's wake, shattered lives and careers, increasing censorship and statism, and a widening political divide.
The Free Press today had an article about the National Science Foundation and DEI. https://www.thefp.com/p/dei-national-science-foundation-grants-report
Here are three lines from the article:
'A new report from Republican members of the U.S. Senate Committee on Commerce, Science & Transportation made available to The Free Press says that DEI considerations now profoundly shape NSF grant decisions.'
'“DEI: Division. Extremism. Ideology,” analyzed all National Science Foundation grants from 2021 through April 2024. More than 10 percent of those grants, totaling over $2 billion, prioritized attributes of the grant proposals other than their scientific quality, according to the report.
'In 2021, before the Biden task force report came out, they were less than 1 percent of the total number of grants. By 2022, that number had risen to more than 16 percent, and was at 27 percent between January and April 2024.
I know two people, a lawyer and scientist, at NSF. Last year, I asked them about the implementation of the DEI policy. They both said it was a good idea. Yikes! Woke is here to stay.
Yes, this article was frightening to me. I'm very centrist, deeply opposed to Trumpism and Republicans who bow to his insanity, but there's no denying that the "progressive" left presents a near equal challenge to rational social discourse.