Richard Hanania on the Future of Woke
A letter exchange
Dear Richard,
Given that your latest book, The Origins of Woke, examines the history of the movement, I thought it would be interesting for us to look at its future. I will tip my hand and say up front, I think it’s going to get much worse before it gets better. Too many have bought into the ideology, invested in the industry, and built careers off the movement. Kids on social media are high on woke while Russia and China are using algorithms to jam it through the breastplate of American youth like Vincent Vega.
Besides, nothing ever really dies. We defeated the South yet Confederate flags still fly in Southern skies. We defeated the Nazis yet neo-Nazi terrorists are still active on American soil. Even if we push back the flood of woke progressivism, our grandchildren will still be dealing with the mud of waterlogged soil left behind.
But like I said, though the water is receding, we’ve got a second flood peak coming. This is an election year and Donald J. Trump has a decent shot at winning. If he does, blue-haired baristas and alphabet-gendered pronoun police will become so triggered they’ll begin to glow and we may get an entirely new wave of woke.
The far-left runs on a grievance operating system and the GrievanceOS is written entirely in the Victim programming language. It reminds me of a computer programming interrupt, in which one suspends activities, executes an interrupt service routine to deal with some issue, then restores the code. Woke is an interrupt service routine initially intended to flag injustice, then the code became corrupted, and now it’s time to restore the code, otherwise known as Western Civilization.
In other words, woke began as a needed correction. For example, critical race theory emerged from critical legal studies, which addressed analytical flaws in legal formalism. But every correction is an over-correction. What began as debunking formalist fallacies soon became transactional and racist. Now we’re neck-deep, but I believe we are entering a post-woke era. Even San Francisco passed its tough-on-crime Proposition E ballot measure, allowing police to use drones even in non-violent crimes, with a whopping 60% support. No surprise given the city’s ugly crime trends.
Nationwide, abolitionist city council members are facing recalls over crime spikes. There’s a recall effort in glacier-blue D.C. and Seattle’s socialist city council member Kshama Sawant barely escaped recall, then decided not to run for re-election and was replaced by a sensible moderate. As I wrote in a profile for The Free Press, Oakland’s black and brown communities are sick of the BLM-caused crime spike.
On the other hand, Hollywood isn’t getting any better and the “billion-dollar casualty of woke” that is Disney is only doubling down on its Criterion Collection of preachy trash. Disney is casting black actress Ayi Edibiri as the white Irish pirate Anne Bonny in the next Pirates of the Caribbean and audiences can also look forward to the 2025 release of Snow White and Her Politically Correct Companions.
And if you thought the Budweiser debacle with trans influencer Dylan Mulvaney, which cost the company $1.4 billion, was some kind of wake-up call, allow me to draw your attention to Advil’s new “antiracist” strategy to sell more drugs. The thing is, companies are still willing to risk a Budweiser-level flop in the hopes of recreating Nike’s 2018 “Believe in Something” campaign with Colin Kaepernick, because despite all the controversy, it generated a 31% bump in online sales.
I’ve previously commented on the rot in our education system, and that was before we began to see pro-Hamas rallies on college campuses nationwide. Meanwhile, the world of sports is still trying to figure out whether biological males are physically advantaged over women.
The rot has, of course, also cut deep into Democratic politics. Consider the Nex Benedict hate crime hoax. We now know Benedict started the physical altercation, lied to police about it, and committed suicide. Yet the Biden administration wants to suggest to Americans that Benedict was killed by bigotry. As you recently noted, “They’re really trying to create a non-binary George Floyd.”
We are witnessing the erosion of moral common sense. You can now cheer for jihadist terrorists who cook babies or support ludicrously racist rhetoric so long as the terrorists oppose Western capitalism and the racism is directed at white people. What is the upshot of all this? The worms have dug in deep and we are simply never going to get them all. There will be more racial division. More political division. More insufferable politicization of every conceivable aspect of regular American life. As a result of running this interrupt service routine for so long, truly valuable causes will struggle even more for the attention they deserve.
That’s the tragedy. Black Lives Matter harms black people most of all. The trans movement harms trans people most of all. Pro-Palestinian activists are doing Gazans no favors. As Paulo Coelho once wrote, “Hell is when we look back during that fraction of a second and know that we wasted an opportunity to dignify the miracle of life.” That is to say, hell is the missed opportunity to do great good.
And hell spreads by feeding upon the better angels of our nature. But there is hope. I have met and interviewed people who were extremely woke and came back again. But to get there, the better angels of our nature are going to have to learn to be a little less like Gabriel and a little more like Michael. We are going to have to do the work of re-teaching people basic things such as why Shakespeare matters. Or that there is a Western Canon. And no, your favorite black trans author isn’t included simply because xe wrote an slam poem about how trans women are the only real women.
We are going to have to explain again, and again, and again, why life in Russia and China is inferior to life in America. The battle will be exhausting and not always very interesting. The other side has the sexier collection of clickbait protest signs. They are on the side of REVOLUTION. We are on the side of dull common sense and reason. But the thing about clickbait is, it always disappoints once you actually click.
Hey David,
I think at this point I’m less concerned about woke than you are, even though I continue to support the policies I outline in my book to roll back the civil rights regime. I already see us moving away from the worst days of the insanity.
You mention the Nex Benedict hoax. Compared to George Floyd, it’s barely gone anywhere. Biden posts about this, or talks about Trans Day of Visibility, and conservatives dunk on it, and it has no larger impact on the culture.
I’ve talked about Sydney Sweeney’s boobs as unironically a sign that the vibe is shifting. I think that what we went through circa 2012-2021 was a one-time madness based on the rise of social media, which we didn’t have antibodies against.
This is probably also the cause of the increase in mental health problems among the youth. Eventually the virtue signaling got old, and most importantly Elon Musk bought Twitter. It sounds kind of lame to attribute the fall of woke to one business acquisition that was quite random, but it looks clear to me that this is what happened, and if future historians are doing their job well they will recognize the momentousness of that event.
I disagree that Trump winning will reactivate the energies of his first term. The frenzy has burned itself out. Have you looked at the stuff that Trump is saying on Truth Social these days? He’s become more deranged than ever, basically declaring himself an instrument of God, and we just shrug it off at this point. Again, the left not having Twitter is a big deal. It was a coordination mechanism that hasn’t been replaced.
If Democrats pull off a 2024 victory, I think liberalism will remain sort of sluggish and lethargic, setting up a Republican win in 2028. That is, unless pro-life extremism hasn't made Republicans unable to win national elections, which is possible.
That doesn’t mean that certain institutions aren't gone. Academia is bad, and it’s not related to any kind of administrative policy as much as it is self-selection at this point. I think smart and free-thinking individuals now realize that college is a joke, as are the social sciences, and there are better opportunities on the outside.
Some of the local polities in California seem completely captured by lunatics. But there is a world outside of college, and states other than California. As with Ivy League universities returning to the SAT, where there's pluralism and competition, there’s a cost to being too woke.
We are witnessing an extreme fragmentation of our culture, which goes beyond the woke/anti-woke debate. Leftists remain crazy, but people like Nick Fuentes, Bronze Age Pervert, Alex Jones, and much smaller and crazier figures have a voice.
Within the Republican Party and mainstream conservatism, you see open authoritarianism, and talk of once forbidden ideas like repealing the 19th Amendment and racial differences in intelligence.
This isn’t a completely positive development, as I think that we’re at the point where right-wing extremism is a problem, and creates difficulties for pushing back on the left. But I believe that we have such a fragmented and decentralized society now that it doesn’t make sense to consider what’s happening culturally on any kind of single axis.
This would perhaps suggest we should spend more time paying attention to macro-events that inevitably are going to affect us all, like the future financial health of the federal government and geopolitical competition.
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Hanania's response is a good reminder that he's still a doctrinaire Leftist who doesn't see reality. He casually asserts that the Right is vastly worse than the woke in the manner in which Leftists casually assert that Charles Murray is worse than Hitler, and he just expects that claim to skate because in his deluded circles, it does.