Woke is alive and well — status without critique isn’t coming back
The five day work week and child labor laws were an inevitable result of technological progress. And now so too is “woke”.
You can give a turd unparalleled media coverage. You can even make a turd president. What you can no longer do in today’s fractured media world is make a turd popular.
Nor is being popular with a certain segment of the population at all the same as the pre-woke days popularity:
If you walk down a street and half the people loudly cheer and half the people boo, that sucks for you compared to even quite approval.
Yes media is a fire hose of information and a lot, if not most, of that information is propaganda. However woke information still gets through and to a large audience.
Both the Epstein scandal and the Catholic Church sexual abuse cases happened in this century’s world of expanded media attention. Police violence is still on the rise, but a significant portion of the population is too woke to cheer:
War on drugs incarcerations are way down
Even in a poll cited by Homeland Security as popular support 64% of Democrats oppose deporting all immigrants who are here illegally.
Even though we are swamped by pro-fascist voices, fear mongering just isn’t as easy as it used to be and it’s not just because Americans are more educated. Ben Franklin was educated but still was scared of a wave of German immigration:
Writings in their own Language, which (though I think it ought not to be) are allowed good in our Courts, where the German Business so encreases that there is continual need of Interpreters; and I suppose in a few years they will be also necessary in the Assembly, to tell one half of our Legislators what the other half say; In short unless the stream of their importation could be turned from this to other colonies, as you very judiciously propose, they will soon so out number us, that all the advantages we have will not in My Opinion be able to preserve our language, and even our Government will become precarious.
What makes the woke era different is access to numerous sources of information explaining the mechanisms that used to work on everyone.
Reading Ben Franklin saying send the Germans to other colonies immediately screams NIMBY to everyone because we have that term. For those that are more woke Franklin’s mentioning colonies brings genocide to mind.
Racists can be as critical of critical race theory as they want, but the idea of white privilege or white fragility isn’t going away. Silicon valley is still raking in the money for doing bad things, but the praise for doing these things is much harder to come by:
We are a long, long way off from the days of lionizing Steve Jobs. The problem for billionaires is that although you can buy one or even a dozen media sources, there are just too many sources to control the narrative.
So for instance widow Laurene Powell Jobs owns the Atlantic which has an article The Great (Fake) Child-Sex-Trafficking Epidemic Dispatches from a moral panic published December 9, 2021 at the same time as the trial of Epstein’s partner Ghislaine Maxwell. That article is at best tone deaf and at worst a psychopathic oligarchy attempt to get everyone back to sleep.
While the fascists pretend to be anti-woke warriors, both fascism and woke come from the same ubiquitous distrust of American institutions. Waking up and embracing anti-intellectualism or joining a Trump cult is still woke in a bizarre way.
For instance, the right has embraced critical race theory’s concept of systemic oppression — just that they think it only applies to them. Even so the right that believed in Reagan’s rugged individualism is gone; both tariffs and the power grab for the federal government are an admission of that.
Despite all of the complaints about cancel culture, almost no one is denying the misogyny and racism exists. One side leaning into it only makes patriarchy more obvious. The villains are still out of the shadows instead of being able to claim the status they wanted. Boycotts are more popular than ever and frequently effective.
Piers Morgan, author of the very recent Woke is Dead, says,
We used to have Bruce Willis and Jean Claude van Damme. Now we have Timothée Chalamet and Paul Mescal.
The problem with complaining about Timothée Chalamet, Paul Mescal, and the movie Barbie is that admitting they exist is admitting woke is anything but dead.
Bruce Willis is most famous for starring in a movie where he’s not woke enough to get along with his much more successful, Californian wife. In Jean Claude van Damme’s highest grossing film he plays a federal officer trying to save the world from technology induced time pollution. Once woke you really can’t go back to not seeing these things.