For me the problem with woke―aside from but related to its focus being on providing boosts to the professional classes―is that offered no way to unite disparate groups. Explicitly did the opposite in fact.
Given that, a serious and constructive opposing movement would have sought a way to find common ground between left and right and move forward without all the cultural and ethnic baggage. Obviously, this didn't happen. Most professional anti-wokes have just tried to promote their usual rightist hobbyhorses: plutocracy, neocon foreign policy, and some ancient grudges dating to when their parents used to go around beating up hippies. Andy Ngo, for example, has exposed himself as the kind of neurotic superpatriot who used to scribble down gossip and send the journals to J. Edgar Hoover. No one's building bridges.
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The fact it's a review of half a dozen books is impressive. The fact that it's such a dense read makes it impossible for me to offer a detailed response, although I agree with the 'No Politics but Class Politics' view and the assertion that people of all are in the same boat economically.
Remember old fashioned Political Correctness? At least that maintained some civility as well as a sense of humor: “Snow White and the seven men of diminished stature” had some creativity behind it. Nowadays Snow is seen as a victim of rape culture.
One could consider an argument it began with hippies but Harvard didn't declare centrality of hippiness, the Navy and Army didn’t institute mandatory hippie ideas training, and the CEO of JP Morgan didn’t appear in public with flowers in his hair. While the universities keep churning out dimwits there's going to be a chronic shortage of intelligent, educated people. Instead wokery has turned into legislation, policies, curricula, economic matters, the undoing of which will be very complicated. Or it could just end tomorrow if the internet goes down.
Woke is a fad because it is ‘slave morality’, resentful, and motivated by spite, middle class Jacobins at that. It is negative, totalitarian, sexist, racist, anti-working class, dogmatic, illogical and anti free thinking. Seeing all issues through a single, incredibly warped social justice lens. It's just perfect for bullying the gullible.
You're right that nobody offered a bridge. DeSantis looked good for a while but he lost the plot.
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On another note here's a version of Rhapsody in Blue from
the 1947 movie. It's pretty magical.
Dense read is right. Not only because it's rather long but because there are a lot of "stop to think" points in it. In this country the Great Depression marked the only time that class politics were seriously engaged in this country, leading to gains after WWII that have been eroded ever since.
The term "political correctness" was always applied to things that weren't really politically correct, which sometimes happens with "wokeness" as well. In general, though, people were more ready to laugh at themselves then. There's actually a new Snow White live action movie that seems to engage in all sorts of culture war skirmishes. Suddenly Disney seems really skittish about releasing it.
I remember you before sending me a Substack post (I think) on how to know you're in a society without a counterculture. Hippies were a countercultural phenomenon, which is one thing that just about everyone can agree on. JP Morgan, the Army, etc. don't really want to be around countercultures, because while they wind up attracting a lot of follower types there's always a core of questioning. An establishment philosophy that dances around in the skin of dead countercultures is a much safter prospect for them.
Malcolm X said "I'm for truth no matter who tells it. I'm for justice no matter who it's for or against." He may not always have been right but he was always honest and honorable. Most of those who cling to "social justice" as a mantra are dishonest.
I still like DeSantis better than Haley because he seems to prefer families to corporations. He's not reaching out beyond the confirmed conservatives, though.
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That was a great performance. I had forgotten that George Gershwin died so young. So that movie came out in the shadow of a life and career he still should have had.
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