What Eric calls the "progressive escalator" I call the Egalitarian Steamroller, and while there's no doubt that the steamroller has run out of gas and blown a gasket, I'm not ready to believe that it can't be repaired and put back into service, for 2 reasons:
1) Secular Western liberals still need meaning and purpose and the Social Justice faith provides it, there is no replacement faith on the horizon, and Egalitarianism remains maybe our last shared sacred value and people use it to socially signal their virtue much like how prior generations used a crucifix pendant; and
2) When it comes to arts and culture, everyone over say age 30 in everything from art and curation to galleries and museums to publishing and Hollywood etc is still a Social Justice true believer, the ideology remains strong and unchallenged among the people who will control our cultural and educational institutions for at least the next generation, and they more than anyone else still need to signal their exalted egalitarian morality.
So I think it's a bit too soon to say the Progressive faith is dead and buried, it's not enough that it's crashed on its own, there will need to be an enemy (a new stronger belief system) that comes along to deliver the coup de grace. We shall see...
Yes, I agree that cultural left-liberalism has hit a dead end, although I see the causes of it doing so go far beyond the recent overreach of the Woke. I also am very unsure of what comes next.
Good luck with your conference. I hope that you all help us to find a more constructive foundation for modern societies.
You and your readers might be interested in reading some articles that I have written on the topic:
I’m also not quite as optimistic. I worry the cockroaches will just re-emerge the moment we declare victory. The Democrats haven’t abandoned Wokeism and Trump’s antics have made their return to power in 2028 far more likely.
Cultural leftism is like ‘whack-a-mole’, you beat it down and it just pops right back up.
I’m demoralised because the likes of Trump in America are combining good policies on Wokeism with absolute conspiratard slop, which maximise the alienation of the very people we need and risk the Democrats getting back in again
I hate how right you are, why won’t people won’t just listen to you directly, I often wonder?
Instead Reform is destructively and pathetically hammering on about net-zero and wanting to purposely destroy the environment.
It’s honestly demoralising. You should lead the anti-Woke movement and the ‘slop’ needs to be completely cut-off. They should all have been forced to take the Covid vaccine, fuck them! They are snatching defeat out of the jaws of victory.
"zombie institutional DEI" is a great phrase but I think you underestimate the depth of the left cultural shift and how weak the right is culturally. There is no right culture that is not suits during the week and camo and mechanical bulls on the weekend. If ideas are downstream of events, the right needs to come up with a movement of its own that's more than cutting grants to Harvard.
Unfortunately the right makes a cult of gun rights, tends to be anti ecology .ironically, with their ad on energy,"all kinds", they do not include conservation, so conservatives are lukewarm on conservation and preserving the environment.
Yes the guns thing is annoying for sure. As is the ecology blindness. Yet the national parks system idea was Theodore Roosevelt's, a conservative. My money's on swinging the conservatives into things like safety and conservation for future generations. The principle is tradition, the family, restoring the things that actually do make America great.
Yeah, the left still completely controls the culture in every big city, the institutions and the media. Which is all the places where the opinions of society are formed.
Reports of the death of Woke are greatly exaggerated. Even if it has peaked, which is debatable, it has sufficient momentum to continue for a couple more decades (minimum).
Interesting thoughts. A small typo to correct: "14/ Postmodernism argued that new times required an14/ Postmodernism argued that new times required an unmasking of techno-scientific modernism."
I think that the past few years have been characterised more by the mainstreaming of NEGATIVE prejudice against certain groups (demonization), rather than by the sacralisation of 'victim' groups (positive prejudice). They are of course two sides of the same coin, but the latter was already well established in the 20th century, and has continued, especially with regard to women. It's the establishment mainstreaming of NEGATIVE prejudice (e.g. anti-male discrimination supported by establishment encouraged misandry; anti white discrimination backed up by establishment encouraged racism - I won't say 'reverse racism'!!) that's been so new in 21st century Britain. I think that's been quite a BREAK from the past in recent years, especially in terms of it becoming so mainstream. We are teaching our children to view 'masculinity' and 'whiteness' negatively, almost as something 'evil'. To my knowledge, this kind of deeply negative collective portrayal of large sections of our population has never happened before in the UK in modern times. It is quite new.
It is rather bizarre that the UK school curriculum can teach children about the errors of negative prejudice and group-based negative stereotyping, and yet do precisely the same thing itself! Throw transgenderism into the mix and it is no wonder that our children are confused!
The psychology behind this very simplistic division of society into sacralised and morally superior IN-groups and demonised OUT-groups surely owes at least as much to 20th century totalitarian regimes as it does to post-war liberalism. Once that dreadful path begins to be trod, authoritarianism and group-based two-tier treatment soon follow.
The other distinctive UK difference for me is that UK wokeism seemed to centre on sex initially, rather than on race. The ideological exploitation of the George Floyd tragedy was insufficient on its own to support the wholesale demonization of white people in the UK. It didn't gain as much traction over here because of the absence of any kind of precedent like Jim Crow. There was no deep seated psychological vulnerability to be exploited along the lines of 'white guilt' in the US. So here it seemed to use another deep seated psychological vulnerability - that to protect women and girls - as its primary point of entry. The Sarah Everard tragedy was exploited on exactly the same lines as that of George Floyd, only it was 'masculinity', rather than 'whiteness', that was placed in the collective accusatory firing line. What makes that work as a basis for negative prejudice is that, psychologically, both women and men are disposed and wired to think and act positively and protectively towards women, and not men. No-one is wired to stand up for men and boys, even men and boys! Negative prejudice against men can thus proceed unchallenged.
Once the notion of a morally justified, state sanctioned negative prejudice is established and accepted in relation to one form of identity, it spreads out laterally to other lines of difference using the same (emotional) arguments. Whiteness and Patriarchy are almost identical concepts.
So alien to us is the moral justification of group-based negative prejudice and discrimination, that the state-induced climate of fear and societal disorientation around COVID provided the perfect cover for its establishment. Under lockdown, men, boys and white people didn't have to be looked in the eye as they began to be demonised. By the time we all returned to work and to school, the ideas were firmly established. I still cannot believe that we are seriously in a situation in which individual innocent schoolboys can be made to feel any more connected to the murder of Sarah Everard than individual innocent schoolgirls are. But this is how negative prejudice works - negative emotion, collective demonization and dehumanisation.
For me, THIS is why the UK in particular pushed back so quickly and so stridently against transgenderism. Gender Identity Ideology harms women! And UK wokeism established itself first and foremost on the principle of protecting women. That was the psychological vulnerability that was exploited first. UK wokeism thus both overreached and undermined itself with transgenderism and this variant of it was always doomed to failure in the UK. There is just one demographic which trumps women in the UK woke victimhood hierarchy. But that's another story! I remain to be convinced that we are genuinely post-woke in respect of race, and, especially, in terms of sex, in the UK. It will probably require the widespread recognition that it is harmful to women and girls in all its forms (which it is!) to seal its fate.
I'm not sure how valid these observations are, if at all, but I do think that there are some peculiarities to UK wokeism, compared to the US and elsewhere.
Lmao it’s not dead. You’re more woke than anyone 60 years ago and as long as that’s the case it’s very alive. Call me when you support real marriage and sodomy laws. We are simply at the 2008 California gay marriage vote where wokeness has to be put away but those in power still believe
Yes. I probably always will be too much a child of modernity to think private consensual sexual behaviors should be prosecuted, but gay “marriage”? There are reasons there is are socially sanctioned arrangements incentivize men and women to come together and stay together to produce and raise children. Given the demographics crisis, it’s certainly not obsolete now, and I don’t see how it ever will be unless we get to a point where we’re producing babies in vats and raising them with AI caretakers or something.
Eric, your calm demeanour when discussing the absolute humiliation of opponents of Wokeism, with the Woke’s complete success as demonstrated by those nightmare fuel social attitude surveys, doesn’t sit right with me.
Those statistics you show just create an unbridled, paranoid rage within the deepest confines of my soul. They never should have ‘won’. They don’t ‘deserve’ to win. It is a permanent stain that we ever allowed this to happen.
You present this apocalyptic data, ‘your worst nightmares are true and more’, and then advocate for some moderate tweaks, when I’m in the mood for cold vengeance and desire to make ‘no concessions’ to the cultural left.
My goal isn’t merely to correct excesses, when I see your visual data it is all about making them suffer.
I won’t write anything I’ll regret under my own name. Just that whilst you’re quite a moderate guy, the language you use, and the way you express it, is what drives me towards some very dark thoughts indeed.
I don't really buy this narrative. 60s left liberalism and woke identity politics are not a single movement. Liberalism - including that of the centre right - is under threat. The lessons of WW2 are being lost in the collective memory. Focusing on the left as a continuous entity obscures a lot.
Eric, like most academics, you are virtue-signaling to your elite circle. If you don’t denounce the 'Orange Man,' you risk excommunication - which, of course, reinforces your belief. My-side-bias (Stanovich) right?
You so easily call Trump illiberal, corrupt, narcissistic. Yet his fight against DEI resonates with you. No one else has tackled what he’s attempting. Illiberal? Are you referring to a few deportations? Compare that to the millions deported under Clinton, Bush, and Obama, with no outrage from the left. Radically reindustrializing the US? It’s challenging but necessary. List of positive goals goes on, what left has to offer aside from tax the rich and spend, and woke racism and intersectionality? Of course, he’s not a liberal-lefty - he’s a conservative. Narcissist? Look at Biden, Clinton, Obama, Buttigieg, Kamala, or any top politician. Name one who isn’t.
We have been given a fortunate opportunity, so why not be grateful for the unlikely hero trying to save civilization, rather than displaying your superiority? What would you do, infallible one? After all, as a Canadian who moved to England, you have no dog in this fight.
Regarding wokeness in retreat - sadly, this is far from reality. Not yet, and not anytime soon.
There has certainly been a "vibeshift" in the USA and a wrench rightwards of the Overton Window in the UK over the last half year with e.g. the Supreme Court decision on the meaning of "woman", Reform's success and the "island of strangers" comment. Like many others in these comments, I think we have a long way to go and a lot of nonsense to root out.
What Eric calls the "progressive escalator" I call the Egalitarian Steamroller, and while there's no doubt that the steamroller has run out of gas and blown a gasket, I'm not ready to believe that it can't be repaired and put back into service, for 2 reasons:
1) Secular Western liberals still need meaning and purpose and the Social Justice faith provides it, there is no replacement faith on the horizon, and Egalitarianism remains maybe our last shared sacred value and people use it to socially signal their virtue much like how prior generations used a crucifix pendant; and
2) When it comes to arts and culture, everyone over say age 30 in everything from art and curation to galleries and museums to publishing and Hollywood etc is still a Social Justice true believer, the ideology remains strong and unchallenged among the people who will control our cultural and educational institutions for at least the next generation, and they more than anyone else still need to signal their exalted egalitarian morality.
So I think it's a bit too soon to say the Progressive faith is dead and buried, it's not enough that it's crashed on its own, there will need to be an enemy (a new stronger belief system) that comes along to deliver the coup de grace. We shall see...
Yes, I agree that cultural left-liberalism has hit a dead end, although I see the causes of it doing so go far beyond the recent overreach of the Woke. I also am very unsure of what comes next.
Good luck with your conference. I hope that you all help us to find a more constructive foundation for modern societies.
You and your readers might be interested in reading some articles that I have written on the topic:
https://frompovertytoprogress.substack.com/p/the-left-has-hit-a-historical-dead
https://frompovertytoprogress.substack.com/p/why-the-left-undermines-progress
https://frompovertytoprogress.substack.com/p/the-central-moral-dilemma-of-the
https://frompovertytoprogress.substack.com/p/why-progress-and-upward-mobility
I’m also not quite as optimistic. I worry the cockroaches will just re-emerge the moment we declare victory. The Democrats haven’t abandoned Wokeism and Trump’s antics have made their return to power in 2028 far more likely.
Cultural leftism is like ‘whack-a-mole’, you beat it down and it just pops right back up.
I’m demoralised because the likes of Trump in America are combining good policies on Wokeism with absolute conspiratard slop, which maximise the alienation of the very people we need and risk the Democrats getting back in again
I hate how right you are, why won’t people won’t just listen to you directly, I often wonder?
Instead Reform is destructively and pathetically hammering on about net-zero and wanting to purposely destroy the environment.
It’s honestly demoralising. You should lead the anti-Woke movement and the ‘slop’ needs to be completely cut-off. They should all have been forced to take the Covid vaccine, fuck them! They are snatching defeat out of the jaws of victory.
"zombie institutional DEI" is a great phrase but I think you underestimate the depth of the left cultural shift and how weak the right is culturally. There is no right culture that is not suits during the week and camo and mechanical bulls on the weekend. If ideas are downstream of events, the right needs to come up with a movement of its own that's more than cutting grants to Harvard.
Any ideas on what can be explored?
Unfortunately the right makes a cult of gun rights, tends to be anti ecology .ironically, with their ad on energy,"all kinds", they do not include conservation, so conservatives are lukewarm on conservation and preserving the environment.
Yes the guns thing is annoying for sure. As is the ecology blindness. Yet the national parks system idea was Theodore Roosevelt's, a conservative. My money's on swinging the conservatives into things like safety and conservation for future generations. The principle is tradition, the family, restoring the things that actually do make America great.
Yeah, the left still completely controls the culture in every big city, the institutions and the media. Which is all the places where the opinions of society are formed.
Reports of the death of Woke are greatly exaggerated. Even if it has peaked, which is debatable, it has sufficient momentum to continue for a couple more decades (minimum).
Interesting thoughts. A small typo to correct: "14/ Postmodernism argued that new times required an14/ Postmodernism argued that new times required an unmasking of techno-scientific modernism."
From a UK perspective...
I think that the past few years have been characterised more by the mainstreaming of NEGATIVE prejudice against certain groups (demonization), rather than by the sacralisation of 'victim' groups (positive prejudice). They are of course two sides of the same coin, but the latter was already well established in the 20th century, and has continued, especially with regard to women. It's the establishment mainstreaming of NEGATIVE prejudice (e.g. anti-male discrimination supported by establishment encouraged misandry; anti white discrimination backed up by establishment encouraged racism - I won't say 'reverse racism'!!) that's been so new in 21st century Britain. I think that's been quite a BREAK from the past in recent years, especially in terms of it becoming so mainstream. We are teaching our children to view 'masculinity' and 'whiteness' negatively, almost as something 'evil'. To my knowledge, this kind of deeply negative collective portrayal of large sections of our population has never happened before in the UK in modern times. It is quite new.
https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=toxic+masculinity&year_start=1980&year_end=2019&corpus=26&smoothing=3
https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?
It is rather bizarre that the UK school curriculum can teach children about the errors of negative prejudice and group-based negative stereotyping, and yet do precisely the same thing itself! Throw transgenderism into the mix and it is no wonder that our children are confused!
The psychology behind this very simplistic division of society into sacralised and morally superior IN-groups and demonised OUT-groups surely owes at least as much to 20th century totalitarian regimes as it does to post-war liberalism. Once that dreadful path begins to be trod, authoritarianism and group-based two-tier treatment soon follow.
The other distinctive UK difference for me is that UK wokeism seemed to centre on sex initially, rather than on race. The ideological exploitation of the George Floyd tragedy was insufficient on its own to support the wholesale demonization of white people in the UK. It didn't gain as much traction over here because of the absence of any kind of precedent like Jim Crow. There was no deep seated psychological vulnerability to be exploited along the lines of 'white guilt' in the US. So here it seemed to use another deep seated psychological vulnerability - that to protect women and girls - as its primary point of entry. The Sarah Everard tragedy was exploited on exactly the same lines as that of George Floyd, only it was 'masculinity', rather than 'whiteness', that was placed in the collective accusatory firing line. What makes that work as a basis for negative prejudice is that, psychologically, both women and men are disposed and wired to think and act positively and protectively towards women, and not men. No-one is wired to stand up for men and boys, even men and boys! Negative prejudice against men can thus proceed unchallenged.
Once the notion of a morally justified, state sanctioned negative prejudice is established and accepted in relation to one form of identity, it spreads out laterally to other lines of difference using the same (emotional) arguments. Whiteness and Patriarchy are almost identical concepts.
So alien to us is the moral justification of group-based negative prejudice and discrimination, that the state-induced climate of fear and societal disorientation around COVID provided the perfect cover for its establishment. Under lockdown, men, boys and white people didn't have to be looked in the eye as they began to be demonised. By the time we all returned to work and to school, the ideas were firmly established. I still cannot believe that we are seriously in a situation in which individual innocent schoolboys can be made to feel any more connected to the murder of Sarah Everard than individual innocent schoolgirls are. But this is how negative prejudice works - negative emotion, collective demonization and dehumanisation.
For me, THIS is why the UK in particular pushed back so quickly and so stridently against transgenderism. Gender Identity Ideology harms women! And UK wokeism established itself first and foremost on the principle of protecting women. That was the psychological vulnerability that was exploited first. UK wokeism thus both overreached and undermined itself with transgenderism and this variant of it was always doomed to failure in the UK. There is just one demographic which trumps women in the UK woke victimhood hierarchy. But that's another story! I remain to be convinced that we are genuinely post-woke in respect of race, and, especially, in terms of sex, in the UK. It will probably require the widespread recognition that it is harmful to women and girls in all its forms (which it is!) to seal its fate.
I'm not sure how valid these observations are, if at all, but I do think that there are some peculiarities to UK wokeism, compared to the US and elsewhere.
Lmao it’s not dead. You’re more woke than anyone 60 years ago and as long as that’s the case it’s very alive. Call me when you support real marriage and sodomy laws. We are simply at the 2008 California gay marriage vote where wokeness has to be put away but those in power still believe
Yes. I probably always will be too much a child of modernity to think private consensual sexual behaviors should be prosecuted, but gay “marriage”? There are reasons there is are socially sanctioned arrangements incentivize men and women to come together and stay together to produce and raise children. Given the demographics crisis, it’s certainly not obsolete now, and I don’t see how it ever will be unless we get to a point where we’re producing babies in vats and raising them with AI caretakers or something.
Eric, your calm demeanour when discussing the absolute humiliation of opponents of Wokeism, with the Woke’s complete success as demonstrated by those nightmare fuel social attitude surveys, doesn’t sit right with me.
Those statistics you show just create an unbridled, paranoid rage within the deepest confines of my soul. They never should have ‘won’. They don’t ‘deserve’ to win. It is a permanent stain that we ever allowed this to happen.
You present this apocalyptic data, ‘your worst nightmares are true and more’, and then advocate for some moderate tweaks, when I’m in the mood for cold vengeance and desire to make ‘no concessions’ to the cultural left.
My goal isn’t merely to correct excesses, when I see your visual data it is all about making them suffer.
I won’t write anything I’ll regret under my own name. Just that whilst you’re quite a moderate guy, the language you use, and the way you express it, is what drives me towards some very dark thoughts indeed.
I still see no evidence that black nationalism has been confronted
I don't really buy this narrative. 60s left liberalism and woke identity politics are not a single movement. Liberalism - including that of the centre right - is under threat. The lessons of WW2 are being lost in the collective memory. Focusing on the left as a continuous entity obscures a lot.
Congratulations on all the Twitter likes
If anyone is interested in a Christian form of this story check this out
https://substack.com/@jeffcaldwell/p-159102042
Eric, like most academics, you are virtue-signaling to your elite circle. If you don’t denounce the 'Orange Man,' you risk excommunication - which, of course, reinforces your belief. My-side-bias (Stanovich) right?
You so easily call Trump illiberal, corrupt, narcissistic. Yet his fight against DEI resonates with you. No one else has tackled what he’s attempting. Illiberal? Are you referring to a few deportations? Compare that to the millions deported under Clinton, Bush, and Obama, with no outrage from the left. Radically reindustrializing the US? It’s challenging but necessary. List of positive goals goes on, what left has to offer aside from tax the rich and spend, and woke racism and intersectionality? Of course, he’s not a liberal-lefty - he’s a conservative. Narcissist? Look at Biden, Clinton, Obama, Buttigieg, Kamala, or any top politician. Name one who isn’t.
We have been given a fortunate opportunity, so why not be grateful for the unlikely hero trying to save civilization, rather than displaying your superiority? What would you do, infallible one? After all, as a Canadian who moved to England, you have no dog in this fight.
Regarding wokeness in retreat - sadly, this is far from reality. Not yet, and not anytime soon.
How do you say events derive ideas when you describe post progressivism as simply (a reverse to) postmodernism?
There has certainly been a "vibeshift" in the USA and a wrench rightwards of the Overton Window in the UK over the last half year with e.g. the Supreme Court decision on the meaning of "woman", Reform's success and the "island of strangers" comment. Like many others in these comments, I think we have a long way to go and a lot of nonsense to root out.