Wokeness has peaked, thanks to some determined and intelligent pushback from the right. Campaigns to expose the hypocrisy of woke culture in business, its sheer idiocy, the basic unfairness of DEI, and the re-election of Donald Trump, among other things, have driven wokeness into a much smaller public space.
Today, you find wokeness prevalent on college campuses, certain coastal enclaves, and self-consciously liberal cities like Minneapolis and New York City. Besides that, the great majority of middle America rejected the worst of woke and embraced traditional values.
Wokeness has been defanged. Cancel culture no longer holds sway over vast swaths of culture and society, as it once did. Part of the reason is that black and Latino males saw woke as a threat to their masculine identity (it is), and for minorities to lose that identity would have emasculated them. They voted in unprecedented numbers for an alpha male whom they may not agree with on everything, but whom they saw as willing to fight against the emasculators.
Now, the idea that “speech is violence” is being replaced with something far more sinister and worrisome. “The forces behind wokeism no longer command so much public attention and respect when they argue about terms and pronouns,” writes Tyler Cowen of The Free Press. “Instead, left-adjacent movements have arisen with a contrasting emphasis on action, and often action of a terrible sort.”
The left has taken the attitude, “If we can’t beat ’em, kill ’em.”
What’s more, it is possible we are entering an era with a new culture of assassinations. There have been assassinations of Charlie Kirk, of healthcare CEO Brian Thompson, and several attempts on the life of President Trump. It can be debated how many of these killers had direct connections to the political left, but it is hard to avoid the conclusion that left-wing rhetoric about democracy destruction helped make such actions conceivable.
The social energies of the American left have moved away from the realm of speech and into plans for concrete action, whether in politics, through attempted wealth confiscations, or through organizing violence. In retrospect, wokeism, for all its problems, was a relatively harmless way of distracting activists and keeping them busy with wars over words—a less-bad allocation of social energies than what we are now seeing. So while I would not say I long for the return of high wokeism, I recognize it has been replaced by a left-adjacent movement that is worse.
“It is important to distinguish between the positive side of wokeism and the unreasonable side,” Cowen writes. “The positive side supported gay rights and discouraged racism in the public sphere.”
Indeed, “real” wokeism is nothing more than American tolerance for different races, opposing views, and different lifestyles. But the wokies weaponized woke, made cancel culture a power-mad attempt to dictate all aspects of culture, sex, and a mania for “diversity, equity, and inclusion.” As it turns out, woke was a vote loser, not a vote winner. The right didn’t kill woke as much as woke’s terrible excesses and intolerance helped it to commit suicide.
Cowen writes, “The unreasonable side [of woke] brought us cancel culture, stifled discussion, insisted on very particular views of race and gender identity, boosted DEI and other race-discriminatory policies, and generally made America a more intolerant place.”
As woke wanes as a political weapon, it’s being replaced with real weapons and a visceral hate for the left’s political opponents. Their frustration at losing at the ballot box has generated wild ideas such as expanding the Supreme Court, confiscating wealth (California’s billionaire tax), expanding Congress, and eliminating the Electoral College. If they can’t win legally, they will win by subterfuge or “lawfare.”
There’s only one outcome possible if the left continues to escalate the violence, ratchet up its hysterical rhetoric, and attempt to pull legal shenanigans to disenfranchise voters who don’t agree with them.
That outcome will not benefit anyone and could spell the end of our republic.
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