Whose Lost Decade?

Woke Saturn devouring his chud son

let me in! let me in!

Nothing happened to them. There wasn’t some awful disaster. There wasn’t a war or a famine or a plague or a foreign occupation. Even the economic changes of the past few decades do very little to explain the dysfunction and negligence — and the incomprehensible malice — of poor white America. So the gypsum business in Garbutt ain’t what it used to be. There is more to life in the 21st century than wallboard and cheap sentimentality about how the Man closed the factories down.

Kevin Williamson, “The Father-Führer”, National Review, 2016

The big debate this week is about the “lost generation” of White millennial media men who couldn’t get important jobs in media or academia. The author, Jacob Savage, has written a second article on this, about the end of the White Male Novelist, also for Compact (kind of funny how the Nobel Prize and Booker Prize went to White guys this year, then). The “lost generation” article is reasonably compelling, but not particularly revolutionary: DEI or wokeness or identity politics or callout culture or whatever we’re calling it now resulted in hiring more women and minorities and fewer White guys.

I normally consider this sort of media elite on media elite discourse pretty stupid - it’s fairly unimportant whether getting a job at the Cleveland Review of Books is slightly more unfair than before. But I do think it’s a way to think somewhat rigorously about “wokeness”, whatever that is, which is at least somewhat important.

Dazed and lib-fused

What’s Savage’s case in his article for Compact? Well, basically, that over the last 10 years or so, highly selective media outlets, academic departments, and Hollywood have gone from rewarding White men overwhelmingly to rewarding people of color and women. There’s two problems here, in my opinion: first, that this isn’t really true outside of a bubble of elite professions. And second, that it doesn’t matter very much.

Savage’s claims about academia often rely on cherrypicked data. But the basic fact, as Matt Bruenig points out, is that American society has diversified significantly: the share of the population that is White men has decreased over time, and the share of White men in education has also shrank (because more women than men attend college and especially post-college education now). The number of White guys in the top of the income distribution has declined only slightly, and the representation of White men in arts and the media has also not declined - they’re still more likely to work in these industries than other people. At the same time, another problem is that DEI initiatives by and large don’t work: diversity coordinators don’t result in any improvement in actual, tangible diversity, and companies embroiled in diversity-related controversies tend to increase “diverse” hires very mildly and only, as Savage points out, in entry-level roles. And these “diverse hires” are also not retained for very long - explaining why anti-DEI legislation also marginally decreases diversity.

One of the cases Savage cites is David Austin Walsh, an academic historian and internet friend of mine. Walsh said he was “practically unemployable” due to his gender and race in his field of American history, despite writing a book on the subject. What does he think is the actual cause? It’s not wokeness - it’s the smaller number of positions at elite professional class employers. People who are somewhat tuned into the discourse can remember the topic of why it’s so hard to get a job at an elite institution - back in 2021, it was called “elite overproduction”. This theory, by friend of the blog and zany kook Peter Turchin, posits that producing too many elites relative to their employment posibilities generates societal unrest. Beyond whether this is true, is it actually true that too many elites are being produced? Well, yes. The number of college students majoring in the humanities declined significantly, and their job prospects, not-so-coincidentally, started doing a lot worse: the employment prospects of teachers, lawyers, journalists, historians, and other classic liberal professions significantly worsened in terms of headcount and/or in terms of relative pay. The reason for this is pretty simple: academia and media started doing a lot worse around 15 years ago. The number of humanities jobs has declined due to lower funding, and the skills that the humanities give students haven’t been appreciated despite their clear applicability. The University of Chicago, as an extreme example, has basically gone bankrupt and started selling its assets for cash after gambling on tech startups and crypto. In the media, the publishing industry has started faring worse and worse since the advent of the internet, which replaced print media as the main locus of advertisement¹.This whole thing reminds me a lot of the discourse about grade inflation: the problem with grade inflation isn’t necessarily a “culture of reduced expectations”, but rather, core economic phenomena and perverse incentives for professors. Christopher Lasch’s 1995 book The Revolt of the Elites makes the exact case I have made, that a culture of lowered expectations stemmed from a shift in focus in education from well, educating, to credentialism and job market boosting.

The other “structural” dynamic at play, which to be fair the article does address, is “gerontocracy”, the domination of elite professions and fields by the very old. Some of this is driven by improvements in medicine: lifespan and healthspan at age 60 have increased enough that senior boomers can stay on the job for longer. This had effects on younger boomers and Gen X workers, who also couldn’t advance while their even older bosses were in office, which affected millennials. This decline in upwards dynamism in most workplaces, especially the most elite and the most prestigious, is a major factor in the flattening of employment outcomes between men and women! Politics is the biggest example, both because of high profile examples of extremely old politicians doing a bad job (Joe Biden, etc) and because politicians are genuinely quite older than other important groups of people. This fact has basically two major explanations: the first is that the people who choose political leaders tend to prioritize safer, steadier, less likely to stay on indefinitely pairs of hands, and the second is money. Networks with prominent donors and powerful financial interests is very advantageous for politicians, and these relationships are oftentimes built off personal trust and rapport, which means both politicians and donors are incentivized to keep the geezers on. We can extend this loosely to other important professions: networking, contacts, and personal relationships are important in most industries and especially important in elite industries, which worsens the preexisting decline. In a very “iron law of institutions” moment, gerontocracy marches on despite being objectively bad for organizations - older CEOs are less competent and younger CEOs run more valuable companies, even though older business leaders do have some valuable skills.

One of the bigger questions in science is whether the increasing age of scientists, which is caused by the growing technical requirements of scientific jobs, is related to the decline in scientific innovation and productivity growth. This means that entering research positions requires a lot more experience, which pulls back the age of entrance into research past “peak creativity” for researchers. I don’t really know the answer, but this shows that at the same time as the number of positions shrank, and the mobility into higher positions declined, the demands for credentials grew. Jeffrey Epstein and Michael Lewis were both hired into financial roles despite not having a finance background, for instance. Meanwhile, academia has become increasingly obsessed with prestige: submissions from top authors are always more likely to be accepted, for instance. Economics, the field I’m most familiar with, is one of the worst offenders: half of economics faculty comes from the top 15 departments, and a third from the top 6, with very limited upward mobility in institutions from undegrad to grad school to teaching. This makes it an outlier among other social and natural sciences. This is especially notable because children of parents who attend elite universities are more likely to go to them themselves, and an elite education makes you more likely to be an elite yourself, which helps account for why basically all top economists com from the top of the income and education distribution. The lack of socioeconomic diversity in economics is reflective of academia more broadly, but economics is, of course, the worst offender on this metric too. This exaggerated and ballooning credentialism has led to a profession that has become more interested in in-group status rather than on real-world impact. This has led to reduced rigor: a fake paper being submitted by a Nobel Laureate rather than a few anonymous junior researchers more than tripled the paper’s chances of being accepted into journals. Publishing with top researchers, and being advised by them, results in much better outcomes - but there’s scant evidence that this is causal, and instead merely a result of prestige. In addition, networking opportunities are not equal for White men and everyone else: social networks between economists reward White men and women, the latter for ahem let’s say “social” reasons. Men are also more likely to mentor other men in academia.

This leads me to a further point: you could also point out that traditionally White guys didn’t really get their positions entirely based on merit. For instance, as I pointed out in the Great Feminization article, professional networks and selective socializing appear to be determinant, and lead to things like men being ranked as having “higher potential” than women without necessarily being more capable. If you look at fashion, for instance, the vast majority of design students are women, but the vast majority of top design positions go to men. There’s a lot of advantages in networking men have historically had that disappeared in the last 10 years, and while losing an unearned advantage sucks, it’s also true that, well, it wasn’t earned. These advantages, to be fair, mostly keep accruing to older men: the reluctance of boomers to retire has been a major factor in the flattening of the gender wage gap for younger people.

This brings me to my second point: this isn’t especially important. Whatever happens at top and elite institutions always commands a lot more attention that what happens everywhere else. Yascha Mounk pointed out that there have always been too many elites and that with a college degree you can do just fine. Of course, it’s sad and disappointing that you wanted to go into academia and have to settle for working corporate for merely decent money, especially if it was unfair. But this is also exactly why men might be abandoning elite fields: men are more motivated by money than women, who see their careers as vehicles for personal self fullfillment and purpose. Savage himself, in fact, ended up doing fine: he got a job in tech. It’s not the New Republic, but I think that in the end trading life affirmation for money isn’t the end of a life worth living. Most parents, especially mothers, have a story of the dreams they gave up on when they were young. I wanted to go to film school, in fact, but realized I would likely not make any money, so I turned to physics and then economics. And I do pretty well for myself!

The crisis of masculinity

The worst part (or best, because I don’t agree with Savage’s politics) is that I think that anti-wokeness is starting to make the same mistakes as wokeness. Back in the day, I felt like the whole obsession with prestigious occupations in antiracism was pretty dumb: the problem wasn’t that Black people had fewer opportunities to teach in Harvard, but rather, that they had fewer opportunities to go to college, period. I feel like the focus on the Yale history department and the Sundance scholarship for whatever makes a similar mistake: it ellides the very tangible ways that men are falling behind relative to women, which has had big social and political consequences.

Boys are less ready for kindergarten than girls, and later in their education, have substantially worse grades than girls on most subjects, except math, in which they perform roughly evenly with girls. Boys make up two thirds of the lowest performing students on basically every subject. Men also enroll in higher education, complete higher education, and pursue advanced degrees at substantially lower rates than women. When looking at the fast-growing HEAL fields (healthcare, education, and literacy), men are substantially underrepresented and their representation is declining; not because of any competitive disadvantage, but because of social norms that perpetuate the idea that working in a caring profession is “unmanly”.

Why do men have these problems? Is it the specter of Wokeness haunting America?The economist Roland Fryer has some papers on whether social norms are responsible for some of the educational gap between Black and Hispanic and White boys. In particular, Fryer’s work finds that, at a given average grade, the number of friends a Black or Hispanic youth has drops as grades increase. Interestingly, Fryer finds that there’s less of a trade-off for girls than boys, and, at the same time, Richard Reeves’ (previously cited) work on the subject finds that the gender grade gap is smaller for both Black and Asian students than for White or Hispanic ones. And, also interestingly, Fryer finds a much smaller effect in less racially integrated schools, and research doesn’t find any grade improvements from switching to all-boys schools - which, I think, all together points to some gaps being part of specifically racial dynamics, but a lot of it being about social norms regarding gender and education enforced by their teachers and peers in school but also in the home, particularly given the fact that parents seem to favor girls over boys, and kids with higher autonomy and conscientiousness (which, on average, girls score more highly on); relatedly, cultures that favor boys tend to also invest more in their education, which could mean that parents are emphasizing (subconsciously) the education of girls. Mothers are also more likely to help their children with homework, which could relate to the fact that boys tend to learn more from male teachers (that you can extrapolate this to the home with any degree of validity is, to be fair, dubious).

But does that still mean that the problematic social norms of men and boys should be treated as a group problem? Well, yes, obviously - it’s their group norms. But the thing is that you can’t change group norms on an individual basis, because that sort of thing is a classic example of a coordination failure. The rules by which a group of people act are hard to change because there’s value and status, within the group, to upholding them, and even if every member of the group wants to change them, nobody wants to pay the price of being the first to speak up. For instance, most teenage boys tend to oppose the notion that “boys don’t cry” or that violence is masculine, but tend to keep those ideas to themselves in order to gain social favor with other boys. The book Righteous Men by French philosopher Ivan Jablonka touches on this point somewhat obliquely: the social norms of masculinity are not fit for a modern society, but there is no male equivalent of feminism to change them. Thus, the onus to enact cultural change is on men to be able to speak their minds freely on masculinity, and to openly state their concealed desires - and, through open deliberation, reach a new consensus on what a man can want.

Wide Awoke

Forget all your cheap theatrical Bruce Springsteen crap. Forget your sanctimony about struggling Rust Belt factory towns and your conspiracy theories about the wily Orientals stealing our jobs. Forget your goddamned gypsum, and, if he has a problem with that, forget Ed Burke, too. The white American underclass is in thrall to a vicious, selfish culture whose main products are misery and used heroin needles. Donald Trump’s speeches make them feel good. So does OxyContin. What they need isn’t analgesics, literal or political. They need real opportunity, which means that they need real change, which means that they need U-Haul.

Kevin Williamson, “The Father-Führer”, National Review, 2016

One of the more baffling responses I have seen to the Savage piece, especially among left-leaning people, is that he’s simply resentful and bitter about his own personal failing, and that he simply needed to be more talented and work harder. I feel like the fact that many “woke” people (such as, as Savage mentions, Nikole Hannah Jones of the 1619 Project dunking on David Austin Walsh) immediately tell White guys to “pull themselves up by their bootstraps” is actually somewhat revealing about wokeness as an intellectual project. The responses are basically the Father Fuhrer article but about getting featured in The Baffler instead of the gypsum factory shutting down.

Before getting into what I think the “self-help wokecraft” reveals, I want to point out that it’s stupid for two reasons: first, it’s intellectually dishonest, with few of the people saying that sort of thing being willing to make a similar case about, say, the gender wage gap. The second is that this sort of casting of aspersions is extremely intellectually unproductive: in a recent piece for the London Review of Books, philosopher Amia Srinivasan points out, channeling John Rawls’s hatred of psyschoanalysis, that the “hermeneutics of suspicion” (Marx, Foucault, and Freud, basically) make any sort of shared conversation impossible. Trying to find the economic, ideological, or personal reason behind why someone believes something is interesting, but it doesn’t really tell you much about the ideas themselves.

Last week, Matt Yglesias put out an article about “wokeness” in The Argument I considered very thought provoking and that did big numbers. The TL;DR is that it’s about “wokeness”, which has snuck in racially essentialist and culturally relativistic principles into policymaking, leading to bad outcomes - for example, worse education policies. He claims this comes from wokeness being a non-liberal an ideology built off postmodernism that replaces liberal individual-based rights with liberal-agnostic or outright illiberal groups-based ideas. Yglesias’s take is pretty similar to Yascha Mounk’s book The Identity Trap, where he details the parentage of this illiberal framework and its many pitfalls, follies, and excesses.

Critiquing Mounk is, I think, fairly straightforward. The authors that are frequently cited as the “fathers of wokeness” usually disagreed with the very ideas that they allegedly inspired: Marx and progressivism, Marcuse and bureaucracy, Foucault and monitoring others, and Said in abandoning the canon. You could also disagree with Yglesias’s framework of liberalism as an individual-centric project, which is more or less what (liberal) philosopher Elizabeth Anderson does in What is the Point of Equality? and The Imperative of Integration. And there’s plenty to disagree with on his political narrative, which focuses on outside progressive entryism but not on liberal self-flattery. But I think the fundamental problem is a lot simpler: wokeness isn’t about collectivism. It’s, instead, about hyper-individualism. Woke, rather than being excrement from the anus of Foucault, Frankfurt, and Fanon, can be said to come from the healthy liberal body of Romanticism. Back in the day, the Romantics emphasized self-expression, authenticity, and self determination in the face of a hopeless and oppressive world. The criticism that wokeness is “narcissistic” and about the self-expression of egotistical grievances is perfectly compatible with Woke being a liberal, and not illiberal, ideology. Just like the Romantics toiled for the hopeless cause of liberal nationalism, the Wokeists toiled for the hopeless cause of racial equality. The thing is that understanding Wokeness as a newfound manifestation of the old Romantic ethos of self-expression, authenticity, and true essence is that it even explains the connection Yglesias makes between Woke essentialism and groyper essentialism: Romanticism’s emphasis on the true and authentic nature aligned it with the pastoral critics of urban modernity which, over time, led to it providing some of the central imagery of the early 20th century Völkisch movement, which added to its association with mid-century liberal nationalism provided fertile ground for early 20th century reactionary politics - including, most notably, the influence of Richard Wagner on the Nazi Party. In Spain, both Federico Garcia Lorca and Rafael Sanchez Mazas were influenced by Romanticism - with traditional, medieval, and Catholic themes being valorized in their highly emotional work. However, that was where the similarities end: Garcia Lorca was executed by a Francoist firing squad for being gay, republican, and vaguely anticapitalist, while Sanchez Mazas defined himself as “the first fascist in Spain” to a trio of small-town goat herders to secure food and shelter while fleeing his own botched execution by his republican captors.

The “cult of authenticity” is a very strange force in modern thought. In his 1979 book The Culture of Narcissism, Christopher Lasch makes a similar case: the rise of “privatism” and the imposition of market logic over moral and community values has led to excessive, pathological levels of individualism in an increasingly permissive culture. This also reflects the case put forward by a favorite book of yours truly, David Brooks’s Bobos in Paradise²: Brooks details how a certain sect of the population, the professional upper class of the 1980s and 1990s, merged the Protestant work ethic of the old aristocratic elite with the self-expression and authenticity of the New Left counterculture. In particular, according to Brooks, this “Bohemian Bourgeoisie” (or BoBo, duh) emphasized self expression and living “authentically” above all else. The perfect manifestation of this trend is best shown by the somewhat conspiratorial 2016 documentary HyperNormalisation: Jane Fonda, who moved past her far left “Hanoi Jane” politics in the 1960s and 1970s to sell exercise tapes in the 1980s. Fonda, though, continued funding her activism with the tapes - what changed was an understanding that activism was not about mass political action, but rather, about individual self-expression and communicating an inner truth.

So, in a pretty clear way, “wokeness” isn’t actually an outside attacker on liberalism: it’s a pathological form of the left that is wholly subjugated by what’s coloquially, if hollowly, called neoliberalism. In a (pretty famous) 2013 essay titled “Exiting the Vampire Castle”, (the “Vampire Castle” is what people would call the SJW Left) left wing thinker Mark Fisher says: “The first law of the Vampires’ Castle is: individualise and privatise everything. While in theory it claims to be in favour of structural critique, in practice it never focuses on anything except individual behaviour. (…) Remember: condemning individuals is always more important than paying attention to impersonal structures.” The claim that “woke” or whatever it’s called at any time is a parasitic entity³ glomming onto genuine energy for change isn’t very novel: Olufemi Taiwo makes such a case in his book Elite Capture (which is an extension of an article on the Boston Review of Books); Musa Al-Gharbi describes them as “symbolic capitalists” who use progressive jargon to advance their own position without actually living by their values; a different article criticizes liberal “Groups” for engaging in similar behavior. Even David Brooks himself eventually came around to seeing “wokeness” as yet another stupid rule in social posturing within wealthy people.

Of course, some of this is just the same old, same old heremeneutics of suspicion that are so counterproductive. But I do think that there’s something interesting in the pretty simple idea that wokeness didn’t fail because it was an imposition of strange illiberal values concocted by European socialists and foreign Islamists - it was the same old, same old self-promoting neoliberal individualism most people have come to detest in some way or another.

Pumper Nic feminism

The best example of this dynamic comes, ironically enough, from feminism. In her 2021 book The Right to Sex, Amia Srinivasan discusses the failures of the feminist movement after the 1970s. Even though there was a transitory backlash in the 1980s, by the next decade and especially in the 2000s and 2010s feminist ideas were in the upswing again - so why did they not get anywhere? In Srinivasan’s telling, feminism had the same fate of elite capture and neoliberal self-promotion: the main usage of feminist thinking was to advance the interests of a strange combination of Third Way globalists and professional-class women. The apotheosis of this last trend was, of course, Sheryl Sandberg’s Lean In, a 2013 book about how women can use feminist insights to advance their careers. Srinivasan, sadly, did not foresee any problems when she immediately went on to say that the late 2010s and 2020 impetus for social justice wouldn’t suffer the same fate because it remained focus on economic justice and material issues. Her book came out in August of 2021; by October, the New York Times ran an article titled “What Killed the Blue-Collar Struggle for Social Justice” by editorial board member Farah Stockman - which argued that the “identity politics” movement was using, inadvertently, the language of “white privilege” as a cudgel between White and Black employees fighting for their right to unionize.

In the 2020s, feminism is in an even worse state in the US of A: the women’s movement has been highly diminished since “peak woke”, having lost not just its recent gains, but far older ones: abortion legalization was rolled back by judicial fiat in 2022. The only positive for feminists in not just my lifetime but the lifetimes of people twice my age was MeToo, and the backlash to the latter being particularly vicious. Even in ultra progressive Hollywood, the norms of sexual safety aren’t what they used to be; the film industry has seemingly turned on intimacy coordinators, the professionals that keep sex scenes safe and respectful for performers. In fact, the only people who really call themselves feminists anymore are, well, conservative women trying to own “empowerment” for themselves, and claim that true equality is actually submission. Leah Libresco Sargeant, of “bodying Helen Andrews the one time” fame, wrote a quote unquote feminist book titled The Dignity of Dependence where she argues for “feminine virtues” and to recognize “women as women”, that is, to package up traditional gender hierarchies with a bunch of schmaltzy communitarian bromides. At the same time, the main message of affirmation for women is a strange mix of borderline redpill content about “high value men” and rebranding reckless consumerism as “self care”; the I’m Just A Girl feminism bankrolled by Peter Thiel is largely composed of claims that the true value of women is in not working and chasing a wealthy man that can provide. The defeat of feminism is such that the only people claiming to be for women’s rights are astroturf influencers and viciously transphobic conservative aunts; its relationship to women’s rights are the same as the Wendigo of Native American folklore has to human beings when it eat them and wears their skin to lure others to the same fate.

In this sense, a lot of the discourse in Argentina feels very very foreign to these trends. One of the most discussed tv shows in Argentina this year has been Viudas Negras (“black widows”) a show starring Malena Pichot (who’s basically Argentina’s Lena Dunham) and actress Pilar Gamboa. The tagline, “putas y chorras” (“sluts and thieves”) gives it all away: the two play a pair of women who pretend to seduce men in order to rob them. The show was successful in terms of ratings, but it also provoked further discourse a few months after it came out for a simple reason: prominent far right commentators blamed the show’s glorification of the “black widow” lifestyle for the murder of three teen sex workers by a Peruvian drug trafficker. In fact, the whole thing was such an outrage (particularly after the Security Minister, Patricia Bullrich, blamed femicides like this on feminism for “riling men up”) that it managed to reawake the country’s moribund feminist movement, which staged its largest protests since the pandemic demanding a government response to the killings.

The interesting thing about Argentine feminism wasn’t that it had subsided over the last five years - feminism basically everywhere did. It’s how it went out and why it hasn’t come back. In particular, feminist action only really started coalescing in 2015, during the original NiUnaMenos (“Not One Woman Less”) protest against what’s euphemistically known as “intimate partner violence”. Over the next 5 years, the movement saw extraordinary victories one after another: the concept of “femicide” was enshrined into law and widely recognized as legitimate; street harassment was outlawed and mostly went away; the “feminist agenda” made its way to most of the political spectrum and, after a failed vote in 2018, abortion was legalized in 2020. Since then, though, feminism has mostly been dormant, without the capacity to put together mass protests like it used to and without many tangible or rhetorical achievements. The country’s openly feminist then-president, Alberto Fernández, is now thoroughly disgraced not just because of his incompetence (he was, by a wide margin, the worst democratically elected head of state in the country’s history), but also because he beat and insulted his wife while in office.

It wouldn’t really surprise anyone that I think the main change wasn’t just “the backlash” but that the ideas within feminism changed. In particular, from the 1980s (which saw the legalization of divorce, feminism’s last major win until the 2010s) until the present the country’s activists had focused mostly on concrete and tangible policy reforms, particularly to public safety, healthcare, education, and reproductive choice. This meant remaining grounded in the factors that affected both working and upper class women - for instance, the concept of “femicide” was legitimized in public opinion by applying it to high-profile cases of violence faced by White, middle class women, rather than its main victims, who were poor and nonwhite. This proved to be a highly effective political coalition, which dovetailed nicely with other groups making similar demands regarding public safety, social services, or individual freedoms.

To understand the following years you first need to grasp one of the oldest dynamics in Argentine culture, best explained by the book “Auge Y Caída de Pumper Nic” (“Rise and Fall of Pumper Nic”). In it, journalist Solange Levinton chronicles what a podcast I like describes as “the invasion of Fordist cholesterol”: how the Lowenstein family founded Pumper Nic, a national burger chain modeled after McDonald’s. To build their fast food empire, the Lowensteins traveled to Miami and took extensive pictures of the restaurants, the menus, the food, and even finagled some of the kitchen layouts. Pumper Nic was a big success in the 70s and 80s, but fell apart after actual American chains entered the country in the 1990s; it was also not suited for the new production and business organization techniques of the “post-Fordist” era. Import substitution developed by just copying part by part what a foreign business is doing is not limited to Pumper Nic: Mercado Libre, the country’s largest company, is a cross of eBay and Amazon; multiple of the most important businesses of the 20th century were industrial ventures that followed the same template.

The “Pumper Nic feminism” of the 2020s was, of course, similarly unaccomplished to the inept, alienating, and undisciplined American feminists of the same period. After getting more or less all their main demands and becoming institutionalized as political actors, the country’s leading feminists had to choose a next thing to ask for; what they decided was to focus on stupid language games and making everyone attend idiotic mandatory seminars. Some of this is from the “utopian” variety of social engineering as defined by Karl Popper⁴: utopian social projects focus on restructuring the whole of society and not on “piecemeal” reforms, and usually devolve into attempting to directly modify mindsets and beliefs by forcing everyone into, you guessed it, mandatory seminars. But a lot of it is just irreflective copying of whatever is happening abroad and assuming it must be good, without actually verifying whether there’s a real social basis for those ideas - mimicking, of course, the same errors of American progressives.

Conclusion

New York Times columnist Ross Douthat uses Savage’s article to make the case that the alleged discrimination against White men explains the shift to the right in younger men. This is, of course, false: the men in question were all in their 30s during the 2010s, putting them closer to their 50s than their 20s now, and White Gen Z men moved to the right less than White Gen Z women, even. An eagle eyed reader might be realizing that’s the same case I made in my Vox piece in May - it is, but my case is materialist, and Douthat’s, even if he claims to be a materialist in this one, is still an idealist; his explanation still comes from “incorrect ideas”.

I was reading Simone Weil’s Oppression and Liberty lately, and one of the ideas that struck me the most was how little she cared for that distinction. Without social action, material factors can’t turn themselves into social change; this requires a movement, which requires ideas. However, it’s not like any idea can come to fruition at the right time - there has to be an adequate social basis for it. I feel like social media and the particular cultural norms of the elites can make sense of why they adopted certain, rather stupid, ideas; however, why these ideas led them to embrace complete political paralysis for half a decade is another question altogether. I think that this comes from the main problems in American liberalism, which its critics point out to no end: that it’s not teleological, meaning that it doesn’t have a picture of The Good or a good life; that it’s too wedded to a Whiggish conception of history (the whole “the right side of history” “the moral arc of the universe” pablum that gets trotted out by the likes of Stephen Pinker), and that it depends too much on utopian social reform. The main issue is that the three are incompatible with doing anything: without dropping any of these principles, you end up believing that you have to change everything and everyone, but not in any specific direction, and also that everything will get there on its own eventually. With friends like that, the left doesn’t really need any enemies.

Back in 2023 I wrote an article on “Go Woke, Go Broke” for Liberal Currents. My take was, basically, that corporate wokeness was a marketing gimmick - “most woke corporations aren’t following the tenets of some sinister sounding ideology, they’re just chasing good publicity or media attention—woke capitalism is, after all, just capitalism.” I think that, in the end, that’s what all wokeness was, marketing. That’s the shameful part of all of it. There was a lot of social momentum behind a more progressive society. Some movements managed to work with it.Others, like wokeness, didn’t. A big portion of 2010s progressivism ended up being just a colossal waste of time that got immediately sidetracked away from actual, tangible gains in real material issues into a bunch of stupid status games among a small sliver of ultra educated people.

Claudia Sheinbaum, the President of Mexico, recently went viral for calling to rebrand the term “patria” (the fatherland) to “matria” (the motherland). I felt like it was stupid not because trying to get her supporters to call themselves “matriots” is inherently bad, but because that comes approximately 30 seconds before you decide that “matriotism” is more important than, say, protecting women from an epidemic of violence. That’s the whole thing about “wokeness”: it ended up subtracting a lot of attention from addressing the actual issues. The focus on word games and elite spaces is why so many left wing governments elected in the “Woke Era” now find themselves with 0 accomplishments to sell voters on.

1. This also explains why the media focuses so much on the “culture war” relative to more substantive topics: people click on those articles more.

2. Brooks’ case also comes weirdly close to the arguments made by Bill Clinton’s favorite professor, Carroll Quigley of Georgetown University.

3. In fact, anti-woke discourse has the exact same relationship to wokeness itself: anti-woke thinking is just another cash cow for intellectually dishonest clickbaiters.

4. I have an extremely low opinion of Popper, to be fair.