Opinion
The post-woke era is here
The ideologues are running out of road
BY SOHRAB
AHMARI
. Will you
be persuaded? Kiran Ridley/Getty Images
Sohrab Ahmari is a founder and editor of Compact and
the author, most recently, of The Unbroken Thread: Discovering the Wisdom of
Tradition in an Age of Chaos.
SohrabAhmari
October 20,
2022
https://unherd.com/2022/10/the-post-woke-era-is-here/
In December 2013, a PR executive named
Justine Sacco was about to fly to Cape Town when she had a flash of
inspiration. Not long before take-off, she pulled out her smartphone and tapped
out a tweet and clicked “send”. It read: “Going to Africa. Hope I don’t get
AIDS. Just kidding. I’m white!”
By the time
Sacco landed at her destination and regained access to the Internet, her life
had been turned upside-down. She had been branded a certified Bad Person by
almost the entire Anglo-Twittersphere, including a reality TV star named Donald
Trump. She was ultimately dismissed from her job.
Looking
back, Sacco’s tweet may be seen as a world-historical pivot, Ground Zero for
the cultural developments that characterised the 2010s: the return of
Nineties-style “political correctness”; the swift destruction of lives by
online mobs; the instantaneous capitulation of employers ; above all, the
obscuration of important sociopolitical and material crises by a pathological
obsession with language and offence-taking. Sacco, in short, inadvertently
called forth the Woke Moment.
Now, nearly
a decade later, the Post-Woke Moment is here. It’s a tenuous achievement, to be
sure, and the woke still wield enormous political, economic and cultural power.
Still, there are unmistakable signs of “a vibe shift”. In Britain, gender
ideologues have suffered major setbacks, as authorities crack down on the
malpractices of gender clinics. In the United States, the teaching of
ahistorical nonsense in schools has run up against a wall of parental outrage.
Even Netflix has told its censorious culture-managers to shut up or find
another job.
The
question is where we go from here. The two most plausible paths are
restorationism and radicalism. (Many of the potential “third ways” ultimately
collapse back into one of the two.) By restorationism, I mean an effort to turn
the cultural clock back to roughly where things stood before Sacco
self-destructed her life and career in 52 carelessly typed characters. The
fundamental instinct of this path is that the matrix of social, economic, and
cultural policy and practice that prevailed roughly a decade ago was sound.
Into that happy arcadia of free speech and free markets was suddenly and for no
reason injected the virus of Left-identitarianism, which conjured as a reaction
the even more dangerous virus of Right-wing populism. The battle, then, is
between individualists and “collectivists” of various stripes. Now that wokeism
is faltering, restorationists feel, individualism must reign again.
The
restorationists are essentially cautious conservatives. They believe that the
sex-liberationism and gender-nominalism that have characterised the last 20
years were fine — a healthy and organic development of classical-liberal
doctrine — but then suddenly things went too far with the “gender stuff”.
Likewise, the liberal censoriousness of that era was fine, but then the
far-Left adopted the same methods and went too far with “cancel culture”.
The
dividing line between the authentic fruits of modern society and its freakish
excesses was always blurry, and remains so to this day. The bigger problem for
the restorationists is that, to paraphrase Mitterrand on 1968, the pre-Woke
Moment contained in it many of the elements that gave rise to the Woke Moment.
Restoring 2013, even if it were possible, would mean restoring the same
internal contradictions — not least an obscenely unequal society, in material
terms, that desperately needed the fake egalitarianism of wokeness as a
legitimating ideology.
The second
path is radicalism. By this, I don’t mean extremism, but a cold appreciation
for the fact that the Woke Moment was rooted in, rather than a departure from,
the class rivalries and material conditions of modern society. The
contradictions that gave rise to wokeness, in other words, won’t be resolved
unless we work for a decent and more materially equal society — a process that
will require political confrontation and compromise between the three major
classes: the asset-rich few, the managers who service their affairs, and the
asset-less many.
Both of the
post-woke camps — the restorationists and the far less numerous radicals — must
contend with a powerful woke remnant. Even more so than the restorationists,
the woke are fundamentally conservative. As I have argued before, by changing
how we talk about society, and altering its managerial hierarchies, they seek
to preserve the existing power structure. Only now, with a backlash brewing,
they must change tack.
Anand
Giridharadas’s new book, The Persuaders, is representative of this subtle shift
in the woke camp. In it, he aims to “reinvigorate the idea of persuasion” at a
time when too many Americans view each other as “alien, menacing, and,
therefore, unchangeable”. He says he wants to reverse these trends — but mostly
ends up replicating their logic, in page after interminable page of saccharine
prose that recalls nothing so much as a piece of corporate diversity messaging.
Giridharadas is a wokester trying to strike a restorationist-liberal pose.
The book
starts out promising enough, with a discussion of the Russian troll farms that
many liberals to this day blame for catapulting Donald Trump to the Oval
Office. For Western elites struggling to explain rising populism, it couldn’t
be that Trumpers, Brexiteers, and Gilets Jaunes revolted over legitimate grievances
with progressive rule. No, it must have been Kremlin mind-control that
propelled them. Where once it was chiefly the politically uneducated prole on
the street who unreasonably suspected elites of conniving with nefarious
foreigners, today it’s as often elites who imagine the common people are
foreign agents or automatons.
Observing
the workings of the troll farms up-close, Giridharadas draws a different
conclusion: that the Kremlin’s influence operations merely exploited existing
social discord. “As tempting as it may be to view the Russian operatives as
instigators,” he writes, “to witness these moves is to witness a mission of
amplification.” Even in 2016, this should have been apparent to anyone with
enough faith in Americans to question their susceptibility to St.
Petersburg-hatched memes depicting the Lord Jesus hugging Trump. Still, that a
former New York Times columnist is now prepared to voice the obvious signifies
something.
That
something is, in a word, weakness: the yawning sense that despite their
conquest of major institutions, progressives are alienated from broad swaths of
the public. Big Tech and Hollywood, the HR department and the Central
Intelligence Agency — all now speak in their vernacular. Yet comedians have
begun to mock their inanities with impunity, the GOP is making electoral hay of
the 1619 Project, and suburban moms are mobilising to defend the right of their
sons to become merely gay men, rather than eunuchs.
That’s
where Giridharadas comes in, bearing both a warning and a hopeful omen for
progressives. The warning is that unless the Left changes rhetorical course,
its language and purity-policing will leave it isolated from the masses, its
political causes moribund. The good news is that the Left can overcome this
obstacle by making accommodations for those less enlightened than themselves.
“Persuasion,” in other words, is just a matter of cultural progressives being a
little nicer to the benighted many.
That,
supposedly, is the great achievement of Linda Sarsour, the Palestinian-American
feminist who in the aftermath of Trump’s election helped organise the Women’s
March. Viewed through the lens of social class, the Great Pussy-Hat Uprising of
2017 was a movement of gentry wokeism, by gentry wokesters, for gentry
wokesters. I would venture to say that it “persuaded” not a single
true-believing Trumpian. So why does Giridharadas single her out as an
exemplary “persuader”? Well, you see, Sarsour and her Women’s March co-founder
Tamika Mallory made “a bet that a lot of their fellow activists and movement
allies might not have made”: namely, working with ignorant, all-too-privileged,
liberal white women.
Sarsour
& Co. had to contend with the fact that it’s “difficult to deal with these
white women”. But they did it all the same — a great sacrifice. Trump’s rise
had thrust “white supremacy” into the spotlight but, nevertheless, the
magnanimous, committed Sarsour was prepared to work with white women. In doing
so, says Giridharadas with unspeakable earnestness, she defied Audre Lorde, who
had insisted that women of colour shouldn’t seek to “educate white women… as to
our existence, our differences, our relative roles in our joint survival”.
Doing so, the great intersectional sage taught, “is a diversion of our energies
and a tragic repetition of racist, patriarchal thought”. Nevertheless, Sarsour
& Co. persisted.
Likewise,
we are supposed to cheer Sarsour for mildly questioning her fellow activists’
ruthless enforcement of gender pronouns. She told them:
“Everyone’s
pronouns should be respected. But [for some of the activists] who are here,
English is not their first language, and this is a very new concept for them.
So I would ask for forgiveness, and I would ask if that would be something that
maybe we’ll do next time when we’re together as we get these women through this
process.”
Note that
the pronouns themselves aren’t up for debate — or even a matter of persuasion.
Everyone should adhere to the linguistic demands of gender ideology. It’s just
that some people are new to these norms, and Sarsour’s great persuasive act
lies in asking “for forgiveness” as she helps the ignorant “through this process”
of mastering them.
Everyone is
on a “journey” — a word that appears so frequently in Giridharadas’s text, it
made me never want to leave home again. The destination is the same for all,
but the author and his cast of characters are generous enough to allow that,
for some, the “journey” might take longer or more circuitous paths.
Giridharadas’s great persuaders are those brave few prepared to guide lesser
beings to the higher gnosis of current Left commitments. Yet the rightness of
the gnosis itself is never up for questioning. Thus, we meet another Left-wing
activist who declares that masks are about keeping “my neighbours safe”
(Giridharadas implicitly agrees, since he never introduces the slightest
critical distance from his subjects). The activist’s “persuasiveness”, we are
made to understand, lies in trying to find common ground with even those who
don’t share this (unscientific) view of masking.
Another
activist, a proponent of police abolition, encounters a woman of colour who
wants more policing in her neighbourhood. She is not unusual: wider polling
data shows that very few black and brown Americans want less policing in their
neighbourhoods. Our activist, however, is held up as a model of persuasion
because, rather than writing off the woman, she badgers her relentlessly, until
she comes around to the view that maybe policing is bad.
Again,
persuasiveness lies in “educating” the benighted, rather than genuinely
listening to what they might have to say. Setting out to persuade progressives
to be more persuasive, Giridharadas merely ends up ratifying the movement’s
unbearable smugness. So much of what the author characterises as
“persuasiveness” involves Left-liberals offering something like political-cum-psychological
therapy to other Left-liberals. There is a camp, for instance — called
Transracial Journeys, naturally — which offers guilt-ridden white parents a way
to navigate their hang-ups over adopting black children (“I like to tell people
that I’m a recovering racist,” confesses one mom).
Giridharadas’s
account of persuasiveness reinforces the progressive tendency towards
depoliticisation: contests over material conditions give way to therapeutic
journeys for those at the top, with working-class people cast as the oafs and
bigots in need of being coerced — if gently, as the author would have it — into
enlightenment. It all ends up benefitting the culture-war Right and the
restorationists, who are equally uninterested in improving the oiks’ material
conditions, but at least don’t condescend to the many and call it persuasion.
This leaves
it to the radicals to pursue a different politics, one that pays due attention
to material reality and breaks through the culture-war deadlock. As one of the
proponents of this approach, I admit that it is by far the more arduous
alternative to merely restoring the status quo of 2013. Tech bros who think
chief restorationist Bari Weiss talks good sense might be alienated and angry,
but they’re not going to agitate against their own material interests. The
suburban moms who are lacerating their woke school boards will never sign up
for economic populism.
At best,
the Post-Woke moment will be defined by a messy and unstable admixture of
restorationism and radicalism, now countervailed by the regnant woke, now able
to return the pressure with the help of pseudo-populist politicians — who would
discipline Disney for pushing gender ideology, but not for underpaying its
workers. As Justine Sacco no doubt did before her fateful flight, we would all
be wise to buckle up.
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