Why I'm no longer woke

A left critique of socal justice orthodoxies

When I first set out to organize my thoughts about what it means to be woke, I hadn’t yet seen the above meme. Once I saw it, with its moral and intellectual superiority seeping out at the rate of roughly a million parts per million, a great deal of this essay essentially wrote itself.

Part One of this essay is the story of why and how I began to reassess and, ultimately, reject what I’ll call here, and unpack later, the “woke” worldview. Part Two lays out my analysis of woke doctrine and its political shortcomings.

Part One:

A funny thing happened to me: I wrote a book about how leftists can communicate with moderates and conservatives across lines of difference (Beyond Contempt: 2019). At the time of writing, I was a moderately zealous adherent of woke social justice ideology. I concurred with most woke precepts but thought we could do a better job communicating our ideals instead of annoying and antagonizing people.

In the process of critiquing my Team Blue peers’ attitude and tone, I put enough daylight between myself and them to become more discerning about what I actually believed. That wasn’t my objective, but it’s what happened. I stopped reflexively accepting a set list of ideological positions and priorities, learned how to guard against confirmation and conformity bias, and started thinking things through for myself.

I became aware of a robust heterodox (meaning: not orthodox) discourse by thinkers who challenge dogma wherever they find it.  Many of these heretics are black and Asian-American socialists. Others describe themselves as queer anarchists. Mentioning these identity markers makes me uncomfortable, but I do so because standpoint epistemology (the idea that people without first-hand experience of marginalization should shut up) is the law of the land and, I’ve concluded, a part of the problem.

Later, I would discover podcasters and journalists who defy all labels. (I’ll name names later). Though I didn’t agree with everything they said, I found them to be wonderfully transparent, original and unapologetic in their thinking, thorough in their research and analysis, and unafraid to deflate dogma. They furnished me with facts and ideas that sometimes validated the woke point of view but just as often cut strongly against it. Here was a retinue of extremely intelligent, left-leaning thinkers attempting to unearth facts and perspectives that mainstream, liberal and right-wing media too often ignored or denied.

After a while, I couldn’t read or listen to standard woke content without noticing fallacies, distortions, and omissions. I became aware of a gap between what people said their values were (compassion, acceptance, inclusivity, equality, non-violence) and their actual behavior (judgment, cruelty, insularity, racial stereotyping and, on occasion, violence or apologism for violence). And, more importantly, I realized that, if I wanted to stay true to my values, I would have to disavow or at least reexamine a number of woke precepts.

Above all, I no longer had an appetite for the sameness of the woke perspective on all matters great and small, the way in which it purged nuance from complex issues, flattening them into social justice platitudes. I could no longer tolerate the ways in which woke discourse contributed to the polarization of the civic arena into a good versus evil binary. And I could no longer get behind the assumption that progressives invariably know best and that it is our duty to impart our superior wisdom to the unwoke masses.

---

There’s a prequel to this story: In 2001, I was working for a tiny non-profit that defended the human rights of indigenous Africans, Latin Americans and native Americans impacted by extractive industries. A change in leadership brought with it a shift in focus from the organization’s stated mission to relentless scrutiny of internal patterns of oppression of the majority-POC staff. The concept of White Supremacy Culture was introduced to protect employees of color from the purportedly white supremacist expectations of their white peers—punctuality, objectivity, urgency, perfectionism, hard work.

There was apparently nothing to be done about our racism, save subjecting our colleagues of color to a patronizingly lower standard. It wasn’t long before absenteeism, tardiness, and slacking off became major problems. Meanwhile, the white staff spent an inordinate amount of time bemoaning and checking our privilege, and engaging in long, demoralizing conversations about the relentlessness of our oppressive existence. Funding dropped off, and the organization entered a death spiral and folded.¹

I was dismayed by what had happened, but was already on to the next chapter of life (motherhood) and didn’t dwell on it. The White Supremacy Culture concept went relatively dormant for a decade, and I pretty much forgot about it.

---

Fast forward fifteen years. With Trump on the cusp of victory, I had begun to feel alienated by the tenor of left discourse, the demonization of Trump supporters, the smug certainty that we, the progressives, were the morally superior heroes in the fight of our lives against the Fascist Bad Guys. I started writing a book about how an attitude of contempt was undermining progressive electoral and grassroots movements, alienating huge swaths of the population, ignoring legitimate grievances voiced by people who didn’t check the right boxes, and contributing to the ungluing of social bonds.

I began noticing that Hillary Clinton’s “deplorables” gaffe wasn’t just a one-off but was emblematic of liberal contempt. This made me worry that someone as narcissistically gifted as Trump would seize on the opportunity to cast himself as a fellow victim who would put the sneering liberals in their place. And did he ever.

As one West Virginian Trump voter explained, “As the hit pieces [against Trump] kept coming, it seemed to many that Trump was being unfairly victimized by the media. Perhaps we sympathized with him because, as people from the hills who have also been rejected by the establishment, we know what it feels like.”

I began to suspect that, like the man quoted above, a lot of people in this country were feeling as though they didn’t matter. They were feeling this way not only because they were slipping financially but because they were literally being told by CNN pundits and others that they “are not people who matter.” Scornful elitists were inadvertently stripping working class voters of their humanity and driving them into the welcoming arms of a charlatan who would pretend to honor them. I speculated that Trump supporters didn’t necessarily believe everything Trump or Tucker Carlson told them—that they weren’t, as liberals assume—brainwashed; rather, they resonated with the cynical, aggrieved, suspicious attitude of right-wing populism, not necessarily with every bald-faced lie.

To field-test some of the assertions I was making in the book, I began participating in Braver Angels “red-blue” dialogues and was astonished to learn that conservatives were neither evil nor stupid. They did not resemble the MAGA oddballs from central casting cherry-picked by liberal podcasters and comedy producers. They had values that stemmed from a lifetime of experiences and learnings, just like I did. And most of them voted for Trump in the same way I did for Clinton and Biden, with all the enthusiasm of a cat in a bathtub .

Engaging in good faith dialogue with people I didn’t see eye-to-eye with turned out to be a liberating experience. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow became my muse: “If we could read the secret history of our enemies, we should find in each one’s life enough sorrow and suffering to disarm all our hostility.” Once I got to know the full, complex human beings behind the cardboard cutouts, I realized how much negative energy I’d wasted scorning and resenting them. It was a relief to lay down that burden, and I don’t see myself picking it back up ever again.

It wasn’t all peaches and cream. Sometimes, I came home from Braver Angels workshops and started furiously googling to debunk the untruths that had surely been imparted. When I found proof of inaccuracy, my cognitive dissonance was assuaged. When I came up short, I was forced to admit that I could be wrong or that the truth was unsettled. This was very headache-inducing, but it got easier over time.

If I had to pick one controversy that supercharged my heterodoxy, it was courtesy of a Braver Angels event I attended in which Randy Lioz, a Braver Angels liberal, made a painstakingly constructed case that the events surrounding Kyle Rittenhouse’s killing of two people in Kenosha, Wisconsin, were more complicated than met the eye. Like most liberals, I entered the forum with great certainty that Rittenhouse was guilty of unprovoked murder motivated by racist hatred. By the end, I concluded that what had happened that night, while tragic and very far from heroic as some on the Right averred, was a tapestry woven with multiple strands of truth, not a black and white parable. I resolved to wait until more information surfaced, with respect to Rittenhouse and all other crimes and controversies.

My certitude was shattered and, along with it, my superiority. My tribe could be wrong, the people I had worked shoulder-to-shoulder with for decades. We were capable of believing things that weren’t true and filtering out inconvenient facts. We were human beings with human foibles, as it turned out.

The meme below is me, you, and everyone.

If Randy Lioz had cracked my mind open, Africa Brooke’s 2021 open letter was a lightening strike. Entitled “Why I’m leaving the cult of wokeness,” Brooke recounts her journey from mean-spirited ultra-wokeness to a place of left-leaning open-mindedness. I was awestruck by this young black woman’s unflinching takedown of woke precepts, the circular logic of White Supremacy Culture, and the culture of sanctimony and retribution that had gripped the woke left. Her letter concludes, “And remember that we still have to co-exist on this planet, so expecting everyone you encounter to agree with every belief or view that you hold - is fucking wild, LOL.”

She nailed it. Never ever ever ever will all members of a large group of people agree on everything; but what they might do, for a variety of reasons I’ll discuss later, is pretend to agree. This brings to mind a scene from 1984, where members of the audience angrily shake their fists and boo and hiss at scenes in a government propaganda film, because they know that’s what’s expected of them.

Like Brooke, I didn’t suddenly discard my worldview in favor of a more conservative one but, rather, I realized the validity of other worldviews. I also realized that the way ordinary people think and talk about things is worlds apart from the discourse in academia, in the activist world, and on Left Twitter. The things people care most about are different too. I observed this anecdotally and then confirmed it with poll after poll after poll of people’s priorities (near universal prioritization, across all races, of kitchen table issues like jobs and health care).

I learned something else from Braver Angels: My hunch--that social justice advocates were provoking resentful blowback on the part of moderate-turned-ultra-conservative Americans—was correct. It was a complaint I heard repeatedly--how infuriated they were to be routinely labeled as racists whose trials and tribulations were held in contempt by the Left. And how insulted they felt as the punching bags of self-righteous, know-it-all liberals who made it clear that they considered themselves morally and intellectually superior. Their solution was to rely on Trump to retaliate against the libtards.

On the eve of my book’s publication, I felt jittery and anxious about the reception it would receive and whether a critic would find a mistake or thought crime and publicly humiliate me (a fear that says as much about circa-2019 cancel culture as it does about my personal insecurities). When I shared my fears with a friend, an unpleasant memory from 2001 surfaced: My friend said that I was perpetuating White Supremacy Culture by indulging in perfectionism.

In my friend’s eyes, my real life experience was secondary to the abstract (and, I believe, fictitious) notion that perfectionism is a white cultural vice. It felt to me that she saw me not as a person experiencing insecurity and anxiety but as a stand-in for a racial group so oppressive that even our private feelings caused harm. We patched things up, but I ruminated on this incident for some time and began regarding the White Supremacy Culture framework—and the woke culture that promoted it—with growing skepticism.

Soon, White Supremacy Culture was everywhere, in Diversity, Equity & Inclusion (DEI) seminars, dismantling racism workshops, intra-left discussions, math education, and even on the walls of the Smithsonian.²

I harp on White Supremacy Culture not only because it is, in my estimation, baseless, unfalsifiable, and counterproductive. I harp on it because it tracks a shift in the predominant understanding many on the Left have about race and racism: When I came of age politically, I learned that racism is real but race is a fiction, that racism came first and gave rise to the fiction of race.³ Today, there is a fixation on both racism and race, with common sets of traits ascribed to huge, racialized groups of people.

Once racial identity is reinvested with so much meaning, it makes sense to believe that people naturally belong in discrete racial groups with unique cultural values and styles. We used to call this stereotyping. We used to call it racist, but now it’s done in the service of anti-racism. No matter how well-intentioned I understand this strand of anti-racism to be, I cannot get behind it.

Coincidentally, at the same time the woke Left began embracing what I believe to be antiquated notions of race, many adopted a snide, scornful attitude that scolded and shunned political adversaries, throwing them overboard where possible. When those adversaries are on the Right, the hectoring sets in motion a furious cycle of attacks and counterattacks that helps keep the country ultra-polarized and, seemingly at times, on the verge of some kind of civil war. When the adversaries are of the Left, the outcome is sometimes a circular firing squad and, at other times, a formulaic, ingratiating apology on the part of the called-out lefty trying to get back into the good graces of the overseers.⁴

Being ultra-woke came to entail competing in the Sanctimony Olympics with silver medals for killjoys who manage to find the hidden bad in everything and gold for those capable of making thought criminals grovel for forgiveness.

Operating as an activist had come to necessitate stepping carefully around way too many eggshells. Was I supposed to refer to people as “marginalized” or was that offensive? Did trans people want to do pronoun announcements or not? Was it okay to say I liked a movie or book or would I be reprimanded for failing to notice its racist taint? I knew I wasn’t supposed to ask people where they were from or what they did for a living, but what could I talk about, or should I just talk about the weather or ignore them so that we could both go home feeling awkward and disconnected? What new no-no had been pronounced while I wasn’t looking?  It had all become unbearably stifling and joyless, the conviviality stamped out.

Like Trump, the consummate victim, many left-leaning activists, writers and social media influencers have donned the mantle of victimhood and aired personal grievances and annoyances great and small. Those without a marginalized identity do so vicariously, as “allies”to the victims of various isms (or, in some cases, try to adopt marginalized identities). They’ve taken it upon themselves to police ingroup loyalty by calling out infractions alleged to have caused “irreparable harm” to an identity group.

Woke folks (“wolks”) moved from being careful not to blame the victim to inviting everyone to be a victim, unquestioningly believing (or pretending to believe) their allegations, and rewarding them with social cachet. They went from feeling compassion toward people who are suffering from poverty, violence and racism to trying to protect everyone (straight white men excepted) from everything and prosecute every alleged transgression, no matter how petty.

This tendency toward overzealousness has led to a number of purity spirals. A purity spiral is a cause or ideology with no upper limit. If standing up for racial justice is good, then recounting the racist history of yams is better. If calling out racism is good, then dredging up offensive statements someone made as a teenager thirty years ago is a noble endeavor. If cracking down on hate crimes is important, then why not (successfully!) demand that San Diego Gas & Electric summarily fire a driver who made the “okay” sign with his hand because white supremacists (alongside roughly…everyone!) have been known to use that gesture. And if denouncing a bigot is righteous, how much more righteous to denounce anyone associated with that bigot, a guilt-by-association logic that found Noam Chomsky accused of harming trans people because he co-signed the Harper’s “Letter on Justice and Open Debate” alongside accused transphobe JK Rowling.

When caught up in the fundamentalist fervor of a purity spiral, it’s easy to become unconcerned with the needs of others. If a trans-woman with a penis wants to expose themself to girls and cis-women (“cis” refers to people whose gender identity matches the gender assigned at birth) in a locker room, they should be allowed to, and the discomfort and fear this causes females, some of whom have been raped, is simply irrelevant. The potential for male sex offenders to abuse gender self-identification policies in order to gain access to female spaces is not discussed. (Likewise, cis-women who want to keep trans-women out of women’s spaces without considering where and how trans-women can safely go about their business are failing to consider perspectives outside of their own. Were each side to genuinely try to imagine walking a mile in the other’s shoes, I believe many would arrive at a more nuanced understanding of this thorny modern problem, but the poisonous atmosphere all but forecloses such an exercise).⁵

Far from engaging in empathetic perspective-taking, what I see is a tiny number of very online narcissistic individuals bullying well-meaning liberals into co-signing their victim narrative.  And on social media, the more extreme and inflammatory the content, the more the algorithms amplify it. So it is that bonkers ideas and cruel jabs go viral, creating ever more debased norms that don’t accurately reflect how most people want to interact.

I believe that wokeism appeals to people for one or more of seven reasons : (1) The majority are college-educated professionals applying academic theories to the real world and/or living in an elite bubble that is ideologically worlds apart from the vast majority of the population (count me in on this one); (2) most have an utterly normal need for belonging, are afraid of ruffling the feathers of anyone in their flock, and are susceptible to conformity bias (count me in again); (3) some have discovered that there are professional and social benefits to virtue signaling;  (4) a small subset are narcissists with “dark triad” traits, hungry for attention, control and admiration (they deserve help and sympathy but cannot be permitted to hijack the Left); (5) all of the above are exacerbated by the amount of time spent online and the ways in which online trends, norms and incentives warp our perceptions; (6) they truly and passionately believe in the wisdom and fairness of their approach to social justice and/or (7) many, perhaps most, feel powerless and scared (count me in once more). The world is falling apart. No one seems to know how to right this ship. Oligarchs control the economy but educated liberals wield quite a bit of cultural power in media, entertainment, higher education, arts, and literature, and so that’s where they flex.

We all want our lives to have meaning and purpose. “We all want to change world,” as John Lennon sang, but most of us are mere mortals who don’t know how. The consolation prize for wolks is to lash out at convenient targets and, in so doing, feel like they’re bending the arc toward justice when, from what I can tell, all they are actually doing is cranking up the misery index, making everyone hate each other and themselves.

A brief digression into self-loathing: Misguided allyship can become an exercise in unwarranted self-reproach. At a dismantling racism workshop in 2018, I was paired off with a young white woman for an exercise in which we were each to divulge a story of personal racism. The woman’s story was that she had gone early to get good seats for the movie Black Panther. Her racially diverse group of friends saved her a seat while she bought popcorn. When she found her seat, a black man seated a couple of rows behind her gave her the side-eye, which she took to mean that she should have voluntarily sat in the back row to give black audience members dibs on the better seats for the “black” movie. She cried while recounting this vile act of racism and, I mean, she really cried. She seemed entirely in earnest, not like she was trying to impress me with her anti-racist creds.

Being subject to interpersonal racism is psychologically wounding. In different ways and to different degrees, so too is being made to feel like a monster for showing up early to a movie. The imposition of guilt on the latter does nothing to repair the harm of the former. I don’t know what the black man in the audience was trying to communicate, if anything, during that incident. But neither his nor the woman’s reaction occurred in a vacuum. The woke zeitgeist marches to a drumbeat of white=problematic, and the rules of the road require white people to reinterpret all of their behavior as quite likely problematic and then to feel extremely bad about it. This dynamic, it seems to me, is a recipe for racial division and alienation in a society that is already suffering an epidemic of loneliness and separation.

Liberal white women seem to be particularly susceptible to these guilt trips.  Some pay $1200 to participate in a year-long “anti-whiteness and community building program” founded by two women who say they see no difference between their workshop participants and the people who stormed the Capitol on January 6. The purpose of the program is to “unravel the whiteness within.” The outfit’s “resident white woman” says, “This internal work is the hard work; it’s the work that never ends.”

Is there any reason to believe that intense self-scrutiny “that never ends” has societal benefits? Of course, it’s better that people not act like racist jerks, but does a just world emerge when enough white women have learned to sit in the back of the theatre? Who is being helped by any of this?

Getting involved in people’s personal dramas feels like the right thing to do, provided the drama is cast in identitarian terms as an epic battle of good versus evil. But when the personal masquerades as the political, the Left fractures into a million shards of broken mirror.

Those shards are hard to piece back together into collective action. Efforts to press for institutional change are crowded out by all the attention paid to what a handful of very loud, self-absorbed people are on about. Absent universal demands, all we have are dozens of tiny groups clamoring for attention but lacking the numerical strength to achieve tangible, durable gains.

By the time the Covid pandemic hit, left-right polarization and intra-left factionalization was peaking. Everything was politicized to the hilt by cable news talking heads, podcasters, and social media clicktivists with a penchant for scalding hot takes. Facebook memes dripped with pious sadism and vitriol. Wolks (not all, but the out-of-control vanguard) had gone from ridiculing red state rubes to gloating over their Covid deaths.

Doomscrolling through my post-George Floyd, pandemic-era Twitter feed left me feeling increasingly addled, irritated, and exhausted. A lot of the things being said ran counter to my values and beliefs, but they were said with such supreme confidence by people I had long considered my compatriots.

A tipping point came when the shrillness became sus. If they were so sure they were right, why were they shouting down all questions and doubts? Why did they so reflexively impugn the motives of people they’d never met? Why did they act like incurious mind-readers who knew that a stranger’s proclamation of good intentions was in fact evidence of their racism.

At the end of 2020, I moved to the country, unplugged from Facebook and Twitter, and started interacting with people who weren’t urban progressive activists. I met a general contractor who I’m pretty sure votes Republican, if he votes at all, and is a well-known pillar of the community who has given work, and multiple second chances, to guys in crisis. He’s also known for sharing the bounty of eggs and beef from his ranch. Five years ago, I would have been cursing the cardboard cutout version of this man but now I count him among the best people I know.

I began reading and listening to left-wing dissidents who partially or fully departed from woke orthodoxies: Toure Reed, Adolph Reed, Barbara and Karen Fields, Briahna Joy Grey, Freddie deBoer, Musa al-Gharbi, Ben Burgis, and the Jacobin, Bad Faith, Fucking Cancelled, This is Revolution, and Blocked & Reported podcasts. More and more, I sought out old-school reporters who chase down stories, report what they find without sifting and spinning and, like a good math student, show their work, not just their conclusions.⁶ I also checked out a few center-left, conservative, and unclassifiable voices (Meghan Daum, Erec Smith, Sheena Mason, Lisa Selin Davis, Jon Ronson, Thomas Chatterton Williams, Rob Henderson, John McWhorter, Coleman Hughes, Robby Suave, Glenn Loury, Jesse Singal, Steve QJ, and articles published in Persuasion).

As we entered year three of the pandemic, I found UCSF epidemiologist Vinay Prasad to be more scientifically grounded and less politicized than the public health establishment and their scribes. Here was a San Francisco Bernie Sanders-supporting doctor making the case that available evidence didn’t support the public health benefits of shutdowns, masking or vaccination of young, healthy people. Mind. Blown.

It was all deliciously transgressive, depthful and nuanced, a far cry from the numbingly repetitive and shallow social justice memes and slogans that had sent me packing. I gorged like someone who doesn’t know how hungry they are until they start eating. Some of my new go-to’s, it must in fairness be said, stoke the woke wars by skewering their detractors, which I found disheartening. Snark sells.

When I had my fill, I unplugged. It was time to start thinking things through for myself, without the guidance, however insightful, of my favorite renegades.

This is where I’ve arrived. What follows isn’t an argument for wolks to disavow their ideology; it’s an explanation for why I did. Reasonable minds can differ, and the last thing I want to do is woke-scold the woke-scolds. My ideology still overlaps in places with wolks, and I’m not on an anti-woke crusade where I assume everything any woke-informed person says is presumptively wrong.

I wrote this essay primarily as an exercise in organizing my own thoughts, which had grown unwieldy during my time in the wilderness. Secondarily, if anything I say here builds understanding that can help the Left transcend the woke wars and become more effective agents for peace, justice, and a livable planet, then I’ll be happy for that. And thirdly, for all the silent skeptics out there wondering if there’s a left alternative to the near-monopoly neoliberal identitarianism enjoys…yes, there is.⁷

There are plenty of people who subscribe to some, maybe even most woke concepts but who are willing to engage in good faith debate and do not make a habit of sniping at people who disagree. In fact, most of the wolks I know are extremely nice, caring people who genuinely want to repair what’s broken and don’t have a mean bone in their body. But I’ve come to believe that they’ve outsourced a lot of their thinking to a small number of woke influencers whose substance and style is flawed in the ways I lay out below. I say this as an observation, not an insult. I’ve done plenty of intellectual outsourcing myself when the news and spin cyclone stupefies me, as it does most days. It’s almost impossible not to.

Part II

What is woke?

Ask a leftist what it means to be woke and they’ll say that it’s a right-wing fabrication used to discredit social justice causes, or that it’s an earnest commitment, with roots in Jim Crow-era civil rights organizing, to notice and root out bigotry in all its various forms.

The form of wokeness I reject is neither. Rather, it is the weaponization of marginalized identities to browbeat, shame and ostracize people for an ever-expanding list of transgressions, the harmfulness of which is sometimes exaggerated or fabricated. It’s a cultural trend that has been on the rise for at least ten years and that serves, like a bush-league version of China’s Cultural Revolution, to turn leftists against each other in a performative competition to be the most virtuous, the most correct, the most offended, the most woke.

My problems with wokeness

Critiques of wokeness are generally dismissed as the retrograde ravings of conservatives who can’t abide an increasingly multicultural, gender fluid country. But there are left critics, myself among them, who are very happy with multiculturalism and freedom from gender roles.

My disaffection for wokeness falls into three buckets: substantive, stylistic, and strategic. My chief substantive complaint concerns wolks’ priorities, or lack thereof. The primary emphasis is on diversification of elite spaces (universities, corporate boards, Hollywood, Congress) and, in second place, prosecution of a list of purportedly problematic⁸ words, beliefs and behaviors that is so long as to defy prioritization.

#1. Diversifying the 1%

Wolks want not just equality of opportunity, but equality of outcome via the elimination of racial and gender disparities. But this goal is not achievable in an intrinsically unequal capitalist system. (I’m no Marxist economist but my rough understanding is that capitalism is inherently unequal because one class profits off the labors of another class who can earn wages but seldom enough to themselves become capitalist investors; this unequal state of affairs reproduces itself intergenerationally via wealth inheritance and access to elite schooling). 

In light of the impossibility of equality of outcome under capitalism, wolks call for a more racially diverse middle and upper class. This remedy targets one nasty symptom of capitalism (racial disparities), but leaves the system intact. Eliminating racial disparities is not the same as eliminating inequality, it just rearranges positions on the ladder of wealth.

Instead of working to make the one percent include races and genders in proportion to the general population, I’d rather there not be a one percent that hoards a third of the nation’s wealth and probably even more of its power. Or, to put it another way, I’d rather close the wealth gap than the racial wealth gap. And I’d rather elect a white Bernie Sanders (D-VT) than a black Tim Scott (R-SC) or, for that matter, a black Kamala Harris.

That Biden’s Secretary of Defense, who swung through the revolving door fresh from Raytheon, is black, is cold comfort. As Trevor Noah aptly quipped, “What an honor to be bombed by such a woke administration.”

Racial and gender disparities in the halls of wealth and power are indicative of historic and ongoing racism and sexism, yes, but that doesn’t mean that reducing disparities is the best remedy, in my opinion, nor one that will bring us much more than a meager inch closer to a truly egalitarian society. These are, as Canadian labor activist Sam Gindin put it, “single-issue campaigns over status within the status quo.”

The remedies that I favor are those that improve the well-being of all poor and working-class people, population groups that are majority white and disproportionately non-white and female. In my ideal society, cashiers, teachers, plumbers and doctors make roughly the same income. Students of all races are free to pursue whatever tuition-free trade or academic course of study most excites them and, if none do, they can still have a decent life at a job others might find boring or too physically difficult.

Because I don’t believe one’s quality of life should be based on whether their occupation aligns with what the market arbitrarily values, I’m more enthusiastic about raising the minimum wage, strengthening labor unions and family farms, bringing home manufacturing jobs and restraining predatory financial enterprises and corporate monopolies than I am on making sure a diversity of Americans can penetrate the upper echelons. Labor unions are a particularly effective way of closing both the racial wealth gap and the wealth gap writ large, with unionized women earning 24% more than non-unionized women, unionized black workers 16% more, and unionized Latinos 40% more.

I’m in a hundred percent alignment with Freddie deBoer’s explanation for being a class-first leftist:

[C]lass comes first because class approaches to politics are the best approach to combating injustice, including racial injustice… it’s futile to try and get everyone to not be interpersonally racist, but we can economically empower Black people and other people of color such that interpersonal racism no longer has the power to hurt them… Of course I want people not to walk around with personal racial animus, but politics is about what can be achieved materially, not about manipulating people’s emotional attitudes.

I should note that I’m unreservedly on board with interventions that prevent or penalize discrimination in workplaces, housing, criminal justice, health care, and law enforcement. I’m all for effective bias reduction tactics, emphasis on effective. For example, my understanding is that the racial disparity in infant mortality is a function of both race and poverty. Universal health care would be extremely beneficial but so too are anti-bias interventions in the medical profession apparently needed. But non-discrimination is a narrower and more concrete objective than the sprawling social justice agenda that has overtaken the progressive left.

This is not to yuck on anyone’s yum. If promoting black-owned artists, businesses, politicians, and executives is your passion, then I’m all for you doing that work. If attending DEI seminars or examining your unconscious biases is what you believe will make the world a better place, then I completely understand why you would invest your energies there. Likewise, I pursue what I believe to be the most ethically and strategically wise path to justice. It’s awkward to have my path diverge from that of so many of my peers, but that is where I find myself.

In addition to substantive differences, I have strategic concerns about the race-centric approach to socioeconomic inequality, namely that it plays into the right-wing’s strategy of turning segments of the bottom half against each other, fighting for the crumbs dropped by financial elites. Paraphrasing Martin Luther King, Jr., when the poor white man cried out for food, the rich fed him Jim Crow.

Oligarchs are very happy to see racial divisions erode class consciousness. Trump himself was a master class in how to racialize despair.   

Artist: Denis Lushch

For low and middle-income whites whose financial security has been on the wane for decades, being told that they need to check their privilege and trade places with low-income people of color is, at best, a non-starter.⁹ The Right is extremely hip to this, but the progressive Left keeps hoping to awaken the white working class to their racial privilege and shame them into relinquishing it.

Martin Luther King, Jr. warned against playing the politics of racial division in his last book, Where Do We Go From Here? He critiqued the Black Power movement for giving “priority to race at a time when the impact of automation and other forces have made the economic question fundamental for blacks and whites alike.” In King’s final years, he called on the civil rights movement to shift its focus to ending the Vietnam War and advocating for economic rights for all poor people, including an Economic Bill of Rights that included, among other things, organizing rights for agricultural workers and a federal jobs guarantee.

I’m with King. The drift toward class-neutral, racialized, zero-sum rhetoric (i.e. all whites are privileged and should atone by caring more about reparations for descendants of slaves than about their own exploitation and precarity) worries me quite a lot, because it calls for a degree of selfless altruism that I don’t believe most humans possess. In politics, change happens when enough people see that there’s something in it for them and then form a coalition to press for that change. Mutual self-interest, not selflessness, moves the needle.

King, as well as Fred Hampton and others from that era, called for poor people of all races to join forces to demand economic equality. For a few years in the late 1960s and early 1970s, they did just that, with Confederate flag-emblazoned¹⁰ “hillbilly nationalists” finding common cause with Black Panthers and Puerto Rican Young Lords.

I’d rather poor whites participate in a radical Left rainbow coalition than join the MAGA faction. Were they afforded respectful recognition by the Left, MAGA would be a less compelling alternative.

#2 Presumptively problematic

My second substantive critique is the woke tendency to “problematize” everything. Allegedly racist rocks and murals become flashpoints.  A professor who teaches the meaning of a common Chinese word (“nega”) that coincidentally sounds like the n-word is suspended.¹¹ College cafeterias that serve cheap sushi rolls that aren’t nearly as good as what you’d get served in Japan are engaged in cultural appropriation. Small, iffy transgressions are cast as consequential acts of bigotry.

Whether bigotry actually occurred, whether the accuser could stand to be a little more resilient, whether the accuser might be mentally unwell, and whether the allegations were exaggerated or fabricated are, generally speaking, very not okay questions bound to be derided as victim-blaming. But it’s worth noting that it’s not blaming the victim if there’s no victim.

If an individual is genuinely traumatized by a minor event, I believe the most appropriate and compassionate response is to offer that individual mental health counseling so that they can learn to cope with the inevitable discomforts that arise in everyday life instead of magnifying and fetishizing them.

Taking a more reality-based approach is doubly important when coddling the accuser entails throwing the alleged perpetrator under the bus. At Smith College, an elite school in Northampton, Massachussetts, a black student accused cafeteria workers and janitors of racism when they kicked her out of the lounge of a dorm closed for the summer. After an investigation cleared the workers, (one of the accused wasn’t even on campus at the time), Smith’s President persisted in validating the student’s “lived experience.” She did not publicly apologize to the employees who had become vilified as “racists” in Northampton, and she required them to attend a series of anti-bias trainings. One of the accused janitors said of the trainings: “I don’t know if I believe in white privilege. I believe in money privilege.”

The janitor points to something important: For all the problems liberals are awokened to, they too often snore when it comes to wealth supremacy. There are a thousand ways to Sunday that elites tighten their grip on wealth and power. But these big ticket offenses get lost in the ticker tape parade of privilege callouts.

During the rise of wokeism, the proliferation of alleged offenses came on too fast and was too scattershot an assortment, with most observers incapable of sorting out what was true, what was important, what was truly harmful, and what could be ignored in good conscience. For non-wolks, the only viable option was to tune out all of it. For right-wing activists, it was a gold mine of content that could be weaponized to freak out and radicalize conservatives. And for woke capitalists, it was a plethora of culture war distractions that enabled then to go about their business of making profits and buying influence without much pushback.

#3 Perpetuating the fiction of race

At the core of the social justice cannon is what I find to be a degrading race essentialism that treats white and non-white individuals like distinct human sub-groups and that overlooks enormously consequential regional, religious, age, and class differences within racial groups. Individuals lose their human complexity and become avatars for racial groups invented by seventeenth century racists. Under the race essentialist framework, a black waitress in rural Ohio has more in common with a black cardiologist in Los Angeles than with a white Ohioan waitress putting up with the same workplace bullshit and relying on the same overcrowded free clinic for her kid’s asthma inhaler.

In the name of anti-racism, wolks are, in my view, breathing new life into the fiction of race that has served to oppress black and brown Americans since the inception of the transatlantic slave trade. An example of some of the very strange places this can lead: At my son's high school graduation in 2020, the program placed an asterisk next to a graduate’s name if they were "scholars” and two asterisks if they were " black scholars." The criterion for being designated a "scholar" was a 3.7 GPA. The standard for being a "black scholar" was 3.0. I can't tell you how badly I cringed when I saw that and wondered how it made black students and their families feel to be held to such an explicit double standard. I'm sure the thinking behind the double standard had to do with the achievement/opportunity gap and wanting to make as many black students as possible feel proud, but I think it was a dreadful mistake.

In this new incarnation of identity politics, as distinct from the original meaning of identity politics coined in 1977 by the black feminist socialist Combahee River Collective, one’s racial or gender or other identity is the only thing that matters. And it matters not just because of the persistence of various forms of bigotry but because identity tells us everything we need to know about a person.

White people are one way. “BIPOC” are another way, all 6.8 billion of them. Someone who looks like me is like me, regardless of our geography, upbringing, religion, education, class, or life history. The cultures of ethnic groups have rigid boundaries that should be policed.

This all sounds to me like white nationalist garbage but so too does it reflect contemporary identitarianism in its worst incarnation. (I gather that wolks would not outright state that whites and non-whites are distinct human sub-groups, but when I listen to a lot of identitarian rhetoric, it sounds to my ear very much like that. When I see Nikole Hannah-Jones tweeting, “There is a difference between being politically black and being racially black,” I don’t know how to interpret that other than to mean that black people’s political opinions are monolithic, and a black person who is not “politically black” is tainted with whiteness (whatever that is).¹²

Contemporary anti-racists perpetuate the fiction of race for the noble purpose of eradicating racism. Author Kenan Malik notes, “The more we despise racial thinking, the more we seem to cling to it.” Malik believes that the retreat from radical universalism to identitarian silos has empowered racists to rebrand white supremacy as merely “white identity politics,” a reasonable and necessary analog to other identity-based politics rooted in racial self-interest. He has a point. This is a deeply worrisome development.

On a related note, I recently discovered the work of political psychologist Karen Stenner, author of The Authoritarian Dynamic. Her research shows that, for most authoritarian-minded people, racism is more a generic aversion to difference of any kind than it is a feeling of superiority or hatred toward a racial group. Stenner contends that (in addition to increasing economic equality) emphasizing sameness rather than difference fosters more acceptance of racial and ethnic diversity on the part of authoritarians (who comprise a third of the population). Her prescription is the polar opposite of the woke approach to antiracism, with its fixation on difference and scorn for commonly held values of family, country, and personal responsibility.

Likewise, I’ve begun exploring the theory that racism is better understood as “groupishness” – an altruistic orientation toward one’s own group rather than a desire to harm other groups.¹³ It’s a subtle distinction because, at the end of the day, indifference to the well-being of others undermines the entire concept of equity. But understanding the gradations within racist belief systems is, I believe, a necessary endeavor if such beliefs are to be contested.

#4 Infantilization of marginalized people

Wokeism requires that, when it comes to any issue affecting people of color (i.e. all issues), white people should remain quiet and defer, unless the people of color hold unapproved, white-inflected views, in which case they should be called out for their internalized racism. Likewise, if a woman brushes off what was, to her, a minor transgression such as an unwanted hug, she is exhibiting internalized sexism and betraying the #metoo movement. Women can be world leaders, soldiers and CEOs, but the one thing we cannot be allowed is discretion to tolerate something others deem intolerable.

There is no room for the possibility that what happened was a simple misunderstanding, an ordinary glitch of the human condition. Instead, bad faith is presumed and proclamations of innocence condemned as somehow compounding the harm. There is patronizing deference to “lived experience” and the invention of new forms of harm such as “curricular trauma” and microaggressions. Until recently, resilience was universally valued but, today, it’s coded “conservative” and derided accordingly (though a recent mea culpa by feminist Jill Filipovic about the mental health downsides of trigger warnings is a sign that the tide may be turning).

The woke response to what I’ve just written is that I’m speaking from a position of “white heteronormative privilege.” That is undeniably true and, at the same time, is not the end of the story. It isn’t foreordained that the person with privilege is wrong and the person with less privilege is correct. The conflation of privilege and truth leads to irreconcilable mayhem the moment non-privileged people start contradicting one another, which they always do. (Just ask this guy). It also overlooks the speaker’s inevitable blind spots and cognitive errors, like when a foreign-born person takes offense to a question about her birthplace, not realizing that the person who asked the question is from a rural community where place-based identity is formative. One’s feelings and experiences “as a ___ person” provide a useful starting point for a discussion, but should not hijack it.

Political philosopher Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò put it like this:

While we should reject and be suspicious of ways of thinking through political questions that ignore marginalized perspectives, we should also be suspicious of approaches that tokenize marginalized perspectives. Everybody’s capable of error, everybody has a partial perspective. Those aren’t problems that we can get out of just by adopting a different person’s perspective, even if that person’s perspective is more likely to be accurate than ours.” Furthermore, “The same tactics of deference that insulate us from criticism, insulate us from connection and transformation.

I can’t overstate how much I appreciate what Táíwò is saying here. The dictate around deference to the perspective of “marginalized” identities (provided they espouse the correct perspective) feels extremely awkward and paternalistic to me. I don’t want anyone deferring to my opinion as a woman or a Jew. I’m not a spokesperson for these groups. I might have something valuable to contribute to a conversation concerning women or Jews, or I might not. And I might be wrong.

I dwell on the seemingly esoteric issue of standpoint epistemology because it serves as the intellectual scaffolding for what the woke left focuses on and what it doesn’t. It goes something like this: The biggest problem confronting the BIPOC community (according to me as a BIPOC or BIPOC ally) is X. Any white person who says otherwise is marginalizing BIPOC voices, which is an act of white supremacy. Any BIPOC person who says otherwise is reacting from a place of white-adjacency or internalized racism.

I don’t know how to respectfully convey how ardently I disagree with the above. The phrase, “I call BS” comes to mind.

#5 Corporate wokewashing

Deference to anything any marginalized woke person says is one of the main reasons why there’s such a chaotic and self-defeating proliferation of issues. The way I see it, this social justice jumble is a gift to a corporate oligarchy that is happy to host DEI seminars, capitalize “black,” and wokewash itself in rainbow flags. These actions are chump change for large institutions, the equivalent of Coca-Cola setting out recycling bins in its corporate headquarters.

Amazon evades billions in taxes, treats its 1.5+ million workers like serfs, and has put countless mom and pop shops out of business but…hey look over here, it’s Jeff Bezos giving $100 million to black millionaire CNN host Van Jones. And over there…it’s Princeton, ExxonMobil’s unofficial headquarters, removing Woodrow Wilson’s name from one of its colleges. And let’s not forget Hillary Clinton defending big banks on the grounds that breaking them up would not end racism, sexism, and homophobia.

In 2022, on the heels of vetoing a bill that would have made 150,000 more students eligible for Cal Grant financial aid, Governor Gavin Newsom tweeted a picture of himself reading Toni Morrison’s Beloved with a caption implying that Beloved had been banned. (It hadn’t, though another Toni Morrison novel was). Newsom had spoken often of his commitment to rooting out systemic racism. But when given the chance to materially benefit the 20% of black students who default on their student loans, in a state whose low-income residents are slammed with soaring housing, health care and energy costs, Newsom chose a symbolic parry in the culture war with red states over cash-in-the-pocket for low-income black families.¹⁴  

A year later, Newsom vetoed a bill that would have allowed striking workers to access unemployment benefits. But he’s read Beloved so…

This is the how the game is played. The ability of politicians and marketing professionals to obscure institutional failures and misdeeds behind smoke and mirrors is all the easier when wolks are constantly blowing clouds of smoke. Wokewashing misdirects our attention in the same way conspiracism does—look away from the things that are too confusing or painful to bear, and swallow this tantalizing morsel of synthetic nutrition—tastes great, but not filling. 

The bottomless excavation of personal racism and naming and shaming of other people’s racism have sucked the proverbial oxygen from the civic arena. The daily game of “who’s the biggest racist? Not Me, tag, you’re it” places so many garden variety accusations on the radar that the really big stuff becomes indiscernible. It’s a little like how the environmental movement operated twenty years ago, when a torrent of green living tips, some of them pretty darn expensive and time-consuming to implement, outpaced political activism aimed at Big Pollution. If wolks redirected a tenth of their privilege callouts to McKinsey & Company and their rogue’s gallery of drug-pushing, war-profiteering, ecocidal clients, maybe we’d get finally get somewhere.

I recognize that some settings cry out for anti-bias interventions more than others and don’t want to convey blanket disapproval. People in the specific town, house of worship, or workplace in question know far better than I do what’s needed. I’m also aware that there are different types of DEI workshops, and there are likely versions I would value. Ideally, they would not stoke interracial rivalry but, rather, would show how racism serves to make the rich richer by manipulating low-income whites into feeling grateful to at least have higher income and status than most blacks. Ideally, they would offer or co-create a vision of a world where the common good is widely valued and served. And, ideally, they would invite participants to take concrete action in pursuit of the common good rather than leaving them feeling guilty and depressed.

As long as whites see themselves in competition with people of color, they are disinclined to contest the corporate power at the heart of the capitalist system. Woke capitalism—whether accidentally or by design I cannot say—functions to make poor whites resentful of all the attention people of color and LGBTQ folks seem to be getting. It distracts working people from the real culprits controlling their lives and causing their suffering.

#6 Dogmatism

Like all dogmas, wokeism shuns complexity in favor of reductionist narratives, glosses over inconvenient facts, impugns motives without bothering to investigate (e.g. asking someone where they’re from is racist, full stop), presumes that anything believed by a conservative or a “class reductionist” is necessarily wrong, and finds intellectually dishonest ways to sideline logical arguments: Logic and objectivity are tools of white supremacy; your white fragility is showing; you deny you’re a bigot? That’s just what a bigot would do! (Yes, guilty people deny their crimes but so do innocent ones).

Image: ABC News, 4/17/18

From what I gather, nuance is not welcomed because it is seen as ceding ground to the Right in the eternal culture war. I understand this fear and, at the same time, want to guard vigilantly against allowing the Right’s culture war parries to pin me into a defensive stance where I feel compelled to lash back with the opposite of whatever they’re saying. I don’t want right-wing extremism to lead me away from critical thinking and nuance. Acknowledging nuance is not a concession but, rather, a vital aspect of the collective search for truth. Discourse without nuance is nothing more than a field of straw men waiting to be burned down by the next hot take.

Most people don’t have the time or inclination to delve into the validity of belief systems that everyone they like and respect seems to hold. In such a dizzyingly fast-paced world, with news and information oversaturating our brain circuits, we all to some degree rely on trusted messengers and tribal affiliations as a shortcut to processing the onslaught. There’s a fine line between taking necessary shortcuts and slipping into groupthink, a pitfall any human of any persuasion can easily fall into.

Dogmatic groupthink is, I believe, what’s driving some universities to impose a pro-DEI litmus test on faculty applicants. Selection committees are whittling down applicant pools by as much as 80% based solely on applicants’ DEI statements. This suggests that, as far as universities, of all places, are concerned, racial and gender diversity are good, but viewpoint diversity is intolerable. To understand how wrong this is, consider the shoe on the other foot, with applicants being required to state their position on diversity and being rejected if they affirm it. (Consider too the intense blowback against higher education engendered by this kind of blatant viewpoint discrimination). Once political litmus tests are normalized, there’s no putting that genie back in the bottle.

Reflexive adherence to the woke brand of anti-racism has also impoverished the discourse surrounding the Supreme Court decision striking down Harvard’s and the University of North Carolina’s affirmative action programs. Most liberal commentators gave short shrift to Harvard’s discrimination against Asian-American applicants. (As far as I know, no one disputes that it’s harder for Asian-American students to get into elite colleges than it is for equally or less qualified others; that’s discrimination).¹⁵ They denounced the Asian-American plaintiffs as either right-wing dupes or as racists whose anti-blackness and “proximity to whiteness” was on display.

Tolerance of anti-Asian discrimination surely burns bridges with Asian-American families who struggled mightily to get their kids into elite colleges and would be very surprised to learn that they were, in fact, motivated by hatred of black people. Asian-Americans’ perspective complicated the white versus BIPOC narrative and so was plucked out like a fly in the ointment.

The discourse also neglected to reckon with the fact that scant few affirmative action beneficiaries are low-income black, Latino, and Native American students and that low-income students of all races are disadvantaged in the rigged educational rat race but are seldom the beneficiaries of affirmative action programs. I used to think that affirmative action was providing educational opportunities for black students who grew up in poverty-stricken neighborhoods with crappy public schools. Data is scant but, as education writer Freddie deBoer suggests:

The default Harvard diversity pick appears to be the child of a rich Nigerian cardiologist, not a poor kid from public schools in Baltimore. I say ‘appears to be’ because these schools won’t open their books and let us know for sure. Now, why do you think they would play their cards so close to the vest, do you think? Could it be that affirmative action is just another means through which elite schools identify wealthy families who are sure to donate? I’m thinking yes!

My goal here is not to convince anyone that the Supreme Court case was correctly decided but, rather, to suggest that there are legitimate reasons for doubting the utility and fairness of affirmative action and for advocating for different approaches, such as a lottery or class-based affirmative action.

Nearly three out of four Americans disapprove of using race as a factor in admissions, and even blue state voters in California gave affirmative action a thumbs down in 2020. Black Americans were just about evenly split on whether they approved of the Supreme Court decision, with a slight tilt toward approval.

#7 If everything is racist, nothing is racist

Outside of the progressive Left, most people’s views on race and racism remain rooted in 1960s-era notions of colorblind equality and fairness.¹⁶ Ninety-one percent of Americans believe in equality of opportunity at the same time that 77% (including 68% of blacks and 77% of Latinos) see accusations of racism being overblown.

Anti-racists who espouse “equality of outcome” have a steep persuasion hill to climb, and they slide downhill a few inches every time they cast aspersions on people raised to see colorblindness as good and fair. Imagine that you and every halfway decent person you know bears no ill will toward people of color and understands that discriminating against them is wrong. Along comes somebody you don’t know to inform you that you and all the decent folks you’ve known your whole life are in fact racists who are just too ignorant or defensive to realize it. That somebody’s credibility is dust.

In their zeal to detect subtle expressions of bigotry, wolks can slip into mind-reading. If a white person says they think black kids getting shot on the streets is a bigger problem than school shootings, wolks just know that person doesn’t actually care about black kids but is dog whistling and/or playing some kind of gun rights whataboutism game.

The torrent of racist accusations has a numbing effect. The term means everything and nothing, presenting a huge “boy who cried wolf” risk of the public tuning out every time they hear the word.

This numbing effect is, I believe, why studies have found white non-college voters to be fairly allergic to woke-inflected political rhetoric but quite open to egalitarian policies if they are framed in populist rather than woke progressive terms. For example, the 2021 Common Sense Solidarity study found that white non-college voters reacted more positively to statement number one than to statement number two below:

Likewise, a solidaristic messaging approach called the “Race Class Narrative” speaks to a multi-racial working class with a common enemy: politicians who divide us while rigging the system for their rich donors.  Ian Haney Lopez’s book, Merge Left, shows that voters outside the progressive Left respond more favorably to race-class framing than to race-only or class-only framing. I’m happy to report that, while there is still resistance to Lopez’s strategic counsel, a growing number of progressive activists are adopting "race-class narrative” framing.

#8 Transgender orthodoxies

There’s another woke narrative I find myself increasingly skeptical of—the unquestionability of gender-affirming care for minors. Several European countries have realized that trans medicine clinicians are out ahead of their skis regarding which types and timing of treatments for children are supported by medical evidence. But in the US, where the number of clinics has skyrocketed, we’re not supposed to look too carefully at what goes on in these clinics and whether they’re adhering to best practices set by the World Professional Association for Transgender Health. We’re not supposed to wonder out loud whether, rather than switching genders, it would be better to help teenagers cope with angst around the changes an adolescent body goes through and the pressures to conform to rigid notions of masculinity and femininity. We’re supposed to strenuously avoid listening to people like Erica Anderson, past president of the US Professional Association for Transgender Health, when she sounds the alarm. (The American Academy of Pediatrics recently announced it will conduct a systematic review of the medical evidence and update its recommendations accordingly).

In the eyes of wolks wedded to a certain set of precepts, there’s no room for good faith concerns over the well-being of vulnerable youth on the brink of altering their bodies in risky and often irreversible ways with major lifelong impacts on reproductive and sexual health; no room for cognitive dissonance in reaction to the whiplash-inducing new practice of reclassifying as boys, girls who like Hot Wheels and Legos more than Barbies and tutus; no room for alarm over allegations that self-identified trans-women with sexual assault convictions have allegedly raped cis and trans women prisoners they were housed with; and no room to empathize with the plight of detransitioners who came to regret their decision and reversed it to the extent they could. It must be that the real problem, hidden underneath layers of concern-trolling, is anti-trans hatred.

Dismissal of good faith questions as “concern-trolling” is a woke staple. This has had such a chilling effect that even child and adolescent psychiatrists self-censor, which I consider an extraordinarily disturbing development that can only hurt a vulnerable population that deserves optimal care. If the medical profession decides that it is has attained all knowledge it will ever need, then all advances are foreclosed and all mistakes baked in for eternity. Imagine if medical knowledge were frozen in time in 1898, when children were given heroin-laced aspirin for sore throats. Arrogance in 2023 is no less dangerous.

In my experience, questions that go unanswered tend to mutate into distrust if not hysteria. When a question rooted in genuine concern or curiosity is swatted away as an expression of bigotry rather than being answered in good faith, the questioner is apt to wonder, “What the hell are they hiding, and is this problem actually a hundred times worse than I thought?” So it is that some line items in the transgender agenda once went down easily for me but are now more like a chicken bone in my throat.

#9 Silencing dissent

I hesitate to question the official woke understanding of transgenderism, having seen what happens to those who do. One of the most demoralizing aspects of woke culture is the habit of avenging thought crimes with fundamentalist zeal, in some cases even urging thought criminals to kill themselves. The goal is not to uncover truth but to enforce a narrative and punish those who present facts that contradict or complicate that narrative.¹⁷

Cancellations and public shamings are justified as acts of goodness and correctness. But imagine having thousands of strangers form a deranged online mob that revels in the prospect of your suicide…if you were someone already struggling with anxiety or self-worth, this kind of sadistic pile-on might push you to the brink. Even worse is being publicly humiliated in your real-world community, as happened to a Toronto high school principal who killed himself in July, 2023, in the wake of a series of workplace DEI trainings during which the trainer groundlessly accused him of perpetuating white supremacy. Other participants piled on, and the district’s executive superintendent tweeted a show of support for the trainer. There is no way to draw a straight line between the training, the reputational fallout, and the suicide but, at the very least, the incident raised serious questions in my mind.

That there are two sides to every story and controversy is a cliché with a strong ring of truth, and it’s baffling to me that so many on the Left have come to see this common sense notion as some kind of sinister both-siderism designed to obscure the sins of the hatemongers. It surprises me when people who consider themselves leftists cast aside core democratic principles like due process, freedom of speech, and reasoned discourse, as the antiquated encumbrances of white supremacy and patriarchy, when abiding such principles is inconvenient. When exceptions are made to a principle, the principle dries up and blows away.

Liberals cheer when tech giants censor people they don’t like talking about things they don’t like--the possibility (now probability) of an accidental Covid lab leak, Hunter Biden’s laptop, vaccine safety and efficacy, the Twitter Files’s exposure of CIA and FBI involvement in content moderation. When the public interest in the censored content is too compelling to ignore, they shoot the messenger—they’re telling the stories of detransitioners, they must be transphobes; they poked holes in the RussiaGate narrative and, are, therefore, Putin/Trump operatives; they criticized Biden during the 2020 election and, thus, are MAGA sympathizers.

A New York Times poll from last year found 55% of respondents reporting having held their tongue for fear of retaliation or harsh criticism. Censoriousness emanates from both sides of the aisle, but that same poll found Democrats significantly more willing than Republicans and Independents to shut down speech.

The erosion of free speech norms, and the expansion of the definition of “hate speech” to include anything that contradicts woke dogma, is dangerous. Freedom of expression is, as Frederick Douglass said, “the dread of tyrants. It is the right which they first of all strike down.” Imagine a labor union trying to organize a workplace or a peace group protesting the next war without free speech protections. With ongoing revelations of collusion between social media giants and intelligence agencies to suppress content that contradicts official narratives, never has defending freedom of speech been more important than it is today.

I could rant on about why I believe censorship is bad (and particularly bad for the Left)—and how confounding it is that this needs to be said in a 21^st century democracy—but what I want to home in on here is the way in which censorship fuels toxic polarization. When Joe Q. Public can’t watch a YouTube video because the YouTube overlords have deemed it misinformation, he is being told that he is too stupid to discern for himself the accuracy of the content. He needs algorithms created by savvy tech corporations, taking their cues from the Biden administration, to protect him from his gullibility.

The condescension here is positively incandescent. Whatever the censors hoped to gain is, I would venture to guess, outweighed by the bitter resentment felt by Joe Q. Public, resentment he won’t forget when Election Day rolls around.

It’s truly astounding to me that there are liberals who do not worry that civil liberties, once gone, are not easily recovered, that “free speech for me but not for thee” is not a viable principle, and that the loss of freedom of speech would cripple any non-fascist political movement and enable would-be authoritarians to seize power.

Likewise, I’m amazed that so many liberals don’t see how the posture of we’re-so-obviously-right-it’s-beyond-discussion drives moderates away. For example, when parents of non-binary children are wary of the side effects of puberty blockers and surgeries and want to rule out other mental health problems before allowing their kids to embark on what could become a difficult lifelong medical journey, they are shot down as transphobes who would “rather have a dead daughter than a trans son.” I’m going to estimate that upwards of 98% of parents would approach their trans-curious child’s treatment options with caution. If the Left stigmatizes them for failing to be sufficiently enthusiastic, where will they seek information and support? From those on the Right whose doubts and fears resemble their own.

---

I’m worried that people don’t worry about all this. Or maybe they do. Quietly. One of my reasons for writing this essay is the hunch that there are many liberals and progressives who are keeping their heads down, waiting out the denouement of peak wokeness, and trying to avoid being squashed by a pile-on in the meantime. I participate in a semi-private online community where left and right-leaning heterodox women¹⁸ speak their minds freely, interrogate each other’s opinions with (usually) respectful curiosity, and strive to form independent views that are not preordained by their partisan affiliation. The need for such a community speaks volumes, and I often wonder if we are a silent majority too frightened of reputational damage to speak freely. Many of the women in this community fear job loss if they voice their beliefs to their peers in the non-profit or academic worlds. Professional risks aside, no one relishes the prospect of becoming persona non grata in their peer group.

The Woke Style

I’ve now segued into my second and third set of concerns—the cultural style of wokeism and the downstream counter-strategic effects of its sanctimonious, demeaning, punitive, and sometimes downright cruel rhetorical mode.

#1 Self-righteousness

I recently joined my local Rotary Club and was struck by members’ humility. They’re out in the community cleaning up parks, organizing food basket giveaways and raising money for river cleanups in distant lands, but they’re not on their high horse about it. They do it because it needs doing, not to impress others with their goodness.

By contrast, the woke style is rooted in a self-righteousness that lends itself to smugness, superiority, and binary thinking. They are correct. They are virtuous. They have the best information, the best understanding, the best morals. They are for the underdog (unless the underdog is a working class white guy in which case they’re “tired of hearing white men talk”). They want progress and progress is always unquestionably, inherently positive, and anyone who doubts that is a backward bigot. They are good. The unwoke are bad. It is righteous to bully baddies and excommunicate dissidents.

Is there anything to be gained by sorting the populace into good and bad? I’m thinking no.

For an enlightened minority to be woke, there must be an unenlightened majority sleepwalking through a foggy dream state of oblivion. This notion--that the ignorant masses should awaken to reality--smacks of cultishness; we know the one and only truth: awaken to it and disavow all other creeds, or else.

If an unwoke person contradicts woke orthodoxy, playground taunts stand in for good faith consideration on the merits. Look at the flack Freddie deBoer caught over his critique of AOC:

It's hard for wolks to see how judgy and condescending they are, for the same reason, I imagine, it’s hard for Christian missionaries to see the condescension inherent in their mission. They’re simply trying to impart truth, goodness and wisdom, what’s the problem?

Once I became attuned to the smug superiority, it was everywhere. It was leaking out of land acknowledgements and radiating out of “Dumbfuckistan” t-shirts and “In this house…” lawn signs and celebrity tweets skewering backward Appalachians: We are smart. We are good. We are righteous white allies.

The condescension is especially acute among wolks with advanced degrees who don the mantle of authoritative expertise, as in: “Epidemiologist here…Covid boosters absolutely do curb transmission and people with zero actual knowledge should STFU.” Such interjections, which are rampant on Twitter, are no less irksome nor more persuasive than the following: “Economist here…trust me, raising the minimum wage will destroy the economy.” Nope, not having it.

#2 Overconfidence

Education and training are not synonymous with infallibility. The book Galileo’s Middle Finger gave me a crash course in just how fallible even the most esteemed scientists can be and how unwilling to correct themselves when proven wrong. Scientists and the institutions they work for have all the same flaws that non-scientific people and institutions do—careerism, ego, corruption, bureaucratic ineptitude, politicization, confirmation bias.

Professionals almost always have a range of opinions, and couching one’s opinion as incontrovertible fact really truly annoys the heck out of people, especially people without the credential in question. The not-so-subtle message is: “Leave it to the grownups to work this out.”

Here’s the FDA, in 2021, trying to keep the backwater rubes off Ivermectrin by ridiculing them:

This supercilious attitude is, I believe, why trust in institutions is cratering. The more someone claims to be an authority, the less authoritative they become in the eyes of someone with a modicum of doubt.

Credentialism, mockery, stereotyping, finger-wagging harangues, jeering demands for apologies, the meting out of punishments (often without due process), and insistence that the transgressors “do better” (or else). Self-appointed arbiters of right and wrong, equipped with a narrow identitarian lens for defining justice and injustice, yet overconfident in their powers of discernment and over-reliant on the spokespeople for their tribe, their incessant surveillance, scolding and sneering have created a hot mess. Or rather, they have responded to the hot mess that is 21^st century America by turning up the heat on a proliferating array of issues that are not important to most people, including people they purport to be representing.

#3 Elitism

In the wokosphere, new tenets are pronounced, seemingly overnight, and new jargon deployed. Silence is violence. White fragility. Black bodies. Centering frontline communities. Microaggressions. Toxic masculinity. The White Gaze. Unhoused. Intersectional. Folx. These words and slogans are to be adopted uncritically even though they are hard to explain without recourse to additional jargon. They exist in a bubble of dogmatic insularity outside of which non-wolx’s heads explode in bewilderment or exasperation. (I once saw a woman at a Trump counter-protest dressing down a Trump supporter over imperialist hegemony and then ridiculing him for not knowing what that meant).

One of the more maddening aspects of political activism (that I suspect is true of the Right as well) is that largely self-appointed spokespeople not only prescribe jargon, but set the agenda and claim to speak on behalf of their “community.” (I cop to this out of personal experience—all the times I showed up at hearings pontificating about what “the community” wants, by which I meant, what I and my tiny circle of activist comrades wanted). Yet, as mentioned earlier, polling suggests that the concerns of non-activists (aka “normies”) are very different from the concerns of activists, academics, and activist-adjacent professionals (journalists, entertainers, lawyers).

Normies of all races and ethnicities want jobs (and don’t see the work ethic as a form of white supremacy). Normies want affordable housing, health care, and child care. They want homeless people and people addicted to drugs to get help, and they want their communities to be safe and clean. They don’t know or care that they’re supposed to call people of color BIPOC¹⁹ or Latinx or now maybe Latine—it changes every ten minutes so why bother tracking it. They want men to treat women with respect but don’t lose sleep over “toxic masculinity.” They want clean air and water but are preoccupied with immediate mundane struggles, less so with slow motion catastrophes like climate change. Abstract problems like structural racism and rape culture might not light them on fire, but they are against things that are clearly wrong, like discrimination and violence.

Normies are fed up with polarized bickering. They are what’s been called the “Exhausted Majority” who tune out what they find too irksome, extreme, irrelevant, or exaggerated, and occupy middle ground on a host of issues.

#4 Hyperbole

This last point—exaggeration—merits a sentence or twenty. There is in social justice culture an absence of proportionality. All grievances and offenses are five-alarm fires worthy of a shitstorm of complaints and cancellations. But if everything is a priority, nothing is a priority and, in this way, the social justice agenda undermines itself.

There is no such thing as someone simply being uncomfortable or miffed—the offense is assumed to be rooted in identity-based prejudice, and the correct response is to classify the offense as “violence” or “erasure” and act outraged. If a TikTok influencer says using the wrong pronoun is “literal violence” then using the wrong pronoun is literal violence, and it’s necessary to get very worked up about that. Self-soothing is out of the question because it is a form of deference to bigotry. Like the fabled princess who demands that the kingdom be covered in leather so that she can walk around barefoot (instead of putting on a pair of shoes), society must defer to every individual who claims a marginalized identity, even though other individuals with the same identity want to be treated in a different way.

Maurice Mitchell, head of the Working Families Party, (and, I’m speculating here, most people of color outside of activist or academic circles) views such deference as infantilizing:

To be clear, personal identity and individual experience are important. And while it is true that the “personal is political,” the personal cannot trump strategy nor should it overwhelm the collective interest. Identity is too broad a container to predict one’s politics or the validity of a particular position. There are over 40 million Black folk in the US. Some have great politics, some do not. One’s racial or gender identity, sex, or membership in any marginalized community is, in and of itself, insufficient information to position someone in leadership or mandate that their perspective be adopted.

People with marginal identities, as human beings, suffer all the frailties, inconsistencies, and failings of any other human. Genuflecting to individuals solely based on their socialized identities or personal stories deprives them of the conditions that sharpen arguments, develop skills, and win debates. We infantilize members of historically marginalized or oppressed groups by seeking to placate or pander instead of being in a right relationship, which requires struggle, debate, disagreement, and hard work. This type of false solidarity is a form of charity that weakens the individual and the collective.

Lack of proportionality and excessive deference come at a huge cost. Not only are activists striking out in a million directions at once, they are constantly reinforcing a pessimistic mindset in which bigotry is at an all-time high and will only get worse. A generation of young wolks are steeped in a distorted narrative in which they are powerless agents imprisoned in victimhood. This is a recipe for unhappiness.

A victim mindset makes people angry, anxious, depressed, and cynical, emotions that make them less likely to vote and more likely to tune out. (Anger motivates loyal base voters but demobilizes everyone else, especially the Exhausted Majority who increasingly tune out politics and sit out elections). There are plenty of truly awful things to be distressed about without going DEFCON 5 over every little thing.

#5 Online toxicity is normalizing anti-social behavior

Much but not all of what I’m describing takes place on the internet. The online wokosphere is an insufferable surveillance state in which self-appointed morality police guard against departures from dogma and mobilize Orwellian Two Minutes of Hate rituals against heretics. Leaving Twitter two years ago was one of my best life choices. It gave me the space to think things through for myself instead of racing to check my favorite Twitter influencer’s snarky jargon-laden hot take. And it freed my heart and mind from the agony of watching the Left consume itself in a frenzy of public shaming and toxic one-upmanship concerning insular fights that 99.9% of the country have never heard of. I have no doubt that a fresh new hell breaks loose every day online, but out in the real world, there’s less wagging of fingers and more helping hands.

But online nihilism is leaking into the real world.²⁰ At a sold-out Fucking Cancelled event in Portland, wreckers scent-bombed the venue, slashed the speakers’ car tires and smeared excrement on the windows. A vendor was excluded from a Caribbean food festival in Vermont because the vendor publicly stated that she was “gender-critical” (meaning: skeptical of transgender ideology).²¹ The targets here, and in most cases, aren’t rich celebrities like Dave Chapelle with the backing of Netflix. They’re ordinary, vulnerable people being discriminated against for their beliefs and paying a steep price for their integrity.

Reporting for The Intercept, Ryan Grim documents how callout culture and internal racial reckonings have derailed a number of liberal NGOs.  During a racial justice movement roundtable discussion, Sendola Diaminah, co-director of the Carolina Federation, noted that progressive organizations are vulnerable to “hustlers” who hitch their wagons to deeply flawed concepts like White Supremacy Culture for purposes of self-advancement or deflection of responsibility. (And, I would add, vulnerable to buy-in on the part of perfectly earnest, well-meaning staff convinced that internal race and gender dynamics are an organizational priority). Fellow panelist Rinku Sen, executive director of the Narrative Initiative, added that it’s important for people to learn how to handle difficult situations and hurt feelings without recourse to identitarian binaries.

Wokeism is a strategic backfire, but we’re not allowed to talk about strategy

I don’t believe that morality police can bludgeon a better world into being. On the contrary, they stoke the fears of people already worried about their place in a changing world. What is needed is reassurance that the Left’s goal is equality for all, not an inversion of the social order in retaliation against white male privilege. What’s needed is affirmation that everyone has an honored and dignified place in the new world that is (hopefully) coming into being. But far from reassuring anxious conservatives, social justice advocates too often demean them, inflaming their status anxiety and lending a faint ring of truth to Tucker Carlson’s white nationalist delusions.

If you don’t want white men to get riled up, don’t make them the scapegoats for everything that has gone horribly wrong. If you don’t want white Americans coalescing into a white identity group, then don’t make them feel like white identity is a necessary defensive corollary to “BIPOC” identity. If you don’t want lonely, directionless young men looking to Jordan Peterson or, God forbid, “Bronze Age Pervert” for advice about how to conduct themselves and make sense of the world, remedy their alienation and confusion instead of condemning their “toxic masculinity.” Reducing people to a racial or gender identity and then telling them that their identity makes them intrinsically bad, wrong, and dangerous to society, is going to motivate them to mobilize around identity markers they’d never even been aware of. It’s a recipe for a fascist backlash.

With so much wealth and power in the hands of so few, and with borderline fascist politicians continuing to gain ground with working class voters of all races, the Left is desperately in need of solidarity, humility and goodwill. We’re also in need of frank internal dialogue about strategy and tactics. Yet there seems to be an aversion to strategic analysis that could conceivably upset the cart.

During the 2020 protests against the murder of George Floyd, data scientist David Shor tweeted a peer-reviewed study by Omar Wasow, a liberal black political scientist, showing how looting and riots (as contrasted with non-violent mass protests) helped Nixon win in 1968. The inevitable Twitter uproar ensued—Shor was “concern trolling” and motivated by “anti-blackness”-- and the firm he worked for promptly fired him. If Shor is racist, so too was Martin Luther King, Jr. who observed:

Riots tend to intensify the fears of the white majority while relieving its guilt, and so open the door to greater repression. We’ve seen no changes in Watts, no structural changes have taken place as the result of riot…I am convinced that if rioting continues, it will strengthen the right wing of the country, and we’ll end up with a kind of rightwing take-over in the cities and a Fascist development, which will be terribly injurious to the whole nation.

The punishment meted out against Shor, based on the presumption that his strategic concerns were made in bad faith, has a chilling effect on the Left’s ability to have productive strategic discussions. Halfway through writing my book, I considered abandoning it for fear of being attacked for “tone policing.” I knew that, in the minds of many people, effective communication was subordinate to the need for marginalized people and their allies to vent their outrage. If defensive rhetoric—or sporadic acts of violence—has a backfire effect that helps propel Trump-like figures to power, well…these things can’t be helped.

This posture sounds righteous but is counterstrategic. Táíwò warns that “[o]ur country…is teetering towards minority rule. So all these responses about whether this or that demographic of people are good people or genuine allies just seems like changing the subject.”  He calls for left organizers to dial back on moralizing about privilege and arguing about whose voices should be amplified and whose silenced and, instead, focus on being constructive, meeting people’s material needs, and being nice to them so that they want to participate in your group. Identity, in his view, can be a starting point but the key to movement building is solidarity across different identities—only in this way can enough collective power be amassed to challenge our common union-busting, nature-plundering, war profiteering, financial sharking adversaries.

---

To those on the outside, the Left looks like a coterie of overeducated, privileged woke-scolds who use words like coterie and who are so besotted by their own supposed moral and intellectual superiority that they feel justified in lecturing the inferior rubes, demanding that they repent and referring to them as “literal Nazis” when they don’t. What people outside the choir see is out-of-touch killjoys who have the luxury of getting worked up about whether white chefs should publish chick pea curry recipes and are trying to force their worldview upon ordinary Americans who are just trying to get by.

Coming off as little tyrants is a bad look. For decades, modern socialists have strived to shake off historical associations with repression and totalitarianism.  The Maoist Cultural Revolution overtones often found in social justice public shaming rituals reignite this association in the minds of ordinary Americans who are not versed in the distinctions between woke neo-liberalism, progressive populism, and the various shades of socialism. What they see are Commies taking a page from 1984, and they don’t like it.²²

Wokeism’s arrogance problem is compounded by the tendency to abstract concrete problems. Abstract language sometimes reflects muddled thinking and, in a negative feedback loop, can lead to muddled thinking. It’s also a breeding ground for misunderstanding and suspicion—if I don’t understand what you’re saying, I’m apt to either stop listening or try to interpret what you’re saying in light of what else I’ve heard people in your tribe say. For instance, it is common to frame complex socio-economic problems as manifestations of “whiteness.” No one outside of a graduate seminar in “critical whiteness studies” knows what that means, but they do know it’s an insult of some sort because, at this point, most Americans have gotten the memo that whiteness and maleness are epithets. (Michael Moore was ahead of the curve when he published the book Stupid White Men in 2002).

Sociologist Musa al-Gharbi, author of the forthcoming book, We Have Never Been Woke, writes that abstractions “mystify, rather than illuminate, social processes.” He observes elites inveighing against “systems” and “structures” of oppression, because getting into the specifics would expose them as beneficiaries, not victims, of said systems. Elites who lay claim to a marginalized identity “regularly pretend as though a ‘win’ for them personally is a ‘win’ for the groups they identify with.” By keeping the discourse in the realm of abstraction, they obscure the fact that their wealth isn’t trickling down to the ‘hood any more than Sam Walton’s wealth trickles down to the holler.  

Upper-middle class students and parents who want to renounce their privilege in a meaningful way could choose to forego advantages that I believe are more propitious than white skin privilege. They could choose not to enroll in expensive private schools and not to leverage the social connections of their family or alumni networks. Parents could choose not to support young adult children pursuing unpaid internships or artistic dreams. If they’re one-percenters, they could choose to give most of their money away rather than allowing the next generation to inherit an average of $1.7 million. They could choose not to invest in the stock market where every dollar they gain is a dollar some worker didn’t get.

A lot of the people who capitalize on their wealth and connections are the same ones decrying race-based advantages. I don’t mean this as a “gotcha” accusation of hypocrisy. There are contradictions to be found within the life choices of just about everyone. What I do want to suggest is that awareness of our own contradictions might make us less judgmental of others.

---

Do people who subscribe to prejudices and conspiracy theories and vote for terrible politicians deserve a decent life on a beautiful planet? Do people who aren’t good at the things our meritocracy rewards deserve a good life? I say yes. If someone else’s answer is no, then we are not engaged in the same project.

Because the woke Left is intolerant of flaws and treats people as political abstractions defined by the worst thing they’ve ever said or done, their answer to the above is often a hard no. No to being listened to, no to being Facebook friends, no to getting anything other than the comeuppance they so richly deserve. And no to even the remotest possibility that they, on occasion, have a point.

We are all wrong about something, we just don’t know what that something is. In a big, complex world, no one can absorb more than the tiniest fraction of human knowledge that has accumulated for millennia. Ignorance is the norm, and feigning certitude is not only offputtingly arrogant but, given what we know about our predilection for cognitive errors, dangerously deluded.²³ I’ve gone down countless rabbit holes in search of the truth about many contested issues, and not once did I stumble upon a simple answer. The deeper I dug, the more warrens I discovered, without exception.

Given the state of public opinion, it behooves those who wish to advance unpopular positions, such as affirmative action, trans-athletes and open borders, to present their beliefs with humility and nuance, not moral superiority and certitude. The truth does not always lie in the middle, but might it sometimes?

Absent agreement on every single issue, the Left can and does succeed in winning social conservatives’ support on a variety of causes. Florida voters passed a minimum wage hike and restored voting rights to felons at the same time they voted for Trump. Idaho, Utah, South Dakota, and Nebraska voters passed initiatives expanding Medicaid, improving the health of black, brown, and white rural and urban patients alike. Political coalitions need not be pure to be effective, and purification efforts are a demoralizing waste of precious resources.

Never in the course of human history has an idea been successfully rammed into someone’s stupid little mind. Never has someone been belittled into enlightenment. Never has a vitriolic truth bomb engendered peace. Never have two wrongs made a right. Wolks drill their ideas a thousand times a day and the outcome is always the same: a recoiling into angry bewilderment.

Wokeism, at its best, is tireless vigilance in the face of injustice and idealistic yearning for a more just world. At its worst, it’s a project of shame masquerading as uplift, one more likely to provoke remorselessness than redemption.

When people are shamed, they try to regain their self-esteem by attacking someone who disrespects them (or by attacking an innocent bystander they can feel proud of overpowering). “When people suffer an indignity, they become indignant,” notes James Gilligan, a psychiatric expert on violent behavior. Look at Twitter at any moment of any day to see that this is true.

Wolks try to shame the bigotry out of people based on the mistaken belief that shame opens hearts and minds. From what I’ve seen, the opposite is true. If people don’t like you, they won’t listen to you. Maya Angelou had it exactly right: “People will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.”

There’s no use in being right if no one’s listening and, outside of the social justice choir and right-wing partisans looking for fresh content to lambaste, no one’s listening. They’re not listening, but they’re hearing, and they’re repelled.

Performative certitude and sneering contempt toward the unwoke, be they left dissidents, conservatives or moderates, engenders resentment and blowback, which then trigger another round of denunciations, which provokes more blowback and so on. When wolks demand compassion and acceptance for certain groups at the same time that they’re demeaning everyone else and dissolving our shared humanity, the contradiction is glaringly obvious. They have broken the Golden Rule.

I’ll end where I began, with a story that represents another personal backstep away from wokeness: I recently attended (via livestream) a memorial for a longtime climate justice and clean energy activist friend and colleague. As at most funerals, the speakers shared memories and stories that wove the tapestry of the deceased’s life and invited mourners into a circle of intimacy. That was the case here too, until one of the speakers decided to make it about her, noting approvingly that the deceased had leveraged his white privilege and his male privilege to empower queer people like her.

Seeing his long, rich life stripped for parts like that made me shudder, and not knowing whether anyone else was saddened by it made me feel very alone. The thin gruel of woke ideology doesn’t nourish me anymore. I’m not sure it ever did.

1. I can’t draw a straight line between the organization’s preoccupation with internal oppression and its demise, but I believe it was the primary cause. Others who stayed on after I left might have a different point of view.

2. The White Supremacy Culture framework has been revised and expanded over the years, and I encourage curious readers to visit the updated website to learn more about it than I can cover here. I know people who have found the material to be personally helpful, so please don’t take my jaundiced view as the final word on it.

3. See Barbara and Karen Fields’ book, Racecraft.

4. In this interview, Fucking Cancelled podcaster Clementine Morgan draws an insightful distinction between submitting to an abusive social justice “accountability” ritual and genuinely taking responsibility to repair what you’ve broken after careful reflection about whether you acted inside or outside your integrity.

5. Similarly, on the issue of trans athletes, what I see is a fairly stark and obvious conflict between inclusion and fairness. But partisans on each side don’t acknowledge the other side of the coin.

6. If you’re looking for nuance, I’d recommend Tangle. Publisher Isaac Saul examines controversies in the news cycle in a meticulous manner, giving a fair hearing to all points of view and then laying out the basis for his personal opinion.

7. I’m aware of at least six recent or forthcoming books critiquing wokeism from a left or left-leaning perspective: Musa al-Gharbi, We Have Never Been Woke; Freddie deBoer, How Elites Ate the Social Justice Movement; Meghan Daum, The Problem with Everything; Norman X. Finkelstein, I’ll  Burn That Bridge When I Get to It; Batya Ungar-Sargon, Bad News: How Woke Media is Undermining Democracy; Yascha Mounk, The Identity Trap. And Tara Henley’s open letter resigning from the CBC is a window into how wokeism has distorted the field of journalism.

8. It’s easy to tag something as “problematic,” but the lack of specificity makes my spidey senses tingle. Sometimes, it’s legitimately hard to articulate why something bothers us, but I often see “problematic” as a tell that the person is casting aspersions dogmatically.

9. Calling out a poor white person’s racial privilege implies that the person is to blame for their poverty—you had all that white privilege and still you’re poor, what a loser you are!

10. The “hillbilly nationalists” eventually disavowed symbols of the Confederacy.

11. A black USC student noted that the absurd accusation would redound against black students, “I’ve already seen people reference this situation and say we blow everything out of proportion, when the majority of us never took issue with this situation in the first place.”

12. There is in some woke discourse an implication that “whiteness” is some kind of inborn evil—a uniquely white set of traits that includes, among other things, an innate belief in their racial superiority. I’m not sure I’ve seen it set forth that explicitly, but it’s in the ether.

13. See chapter 9 of Jonathan Haidt, The Righteous Mind.

14. Hat tip to Ben Burgis for spotlighting this contradiction.

15. In How to Be an Antiracist, Ibram X. Kendi wrote, “The only remedy to racist discrimination is antiracist discrimination. The only remedy to past discrimination is present discrimination.” I’ll leave for another day discussion of whether any form of racial discrimination is ever warranted, but include the quote here by way of noting that overt endorsement of racial discrimination is freely aired.

16. A recent Ted talk by Coleman Hughes argues that colorblind antiracist interventions are more effective than race-based interventions. (A dustup ensued, which Jesse Singal covers here). Agree or disagree, but it’s hard to simply dismiss Hughes as a racist.

17. A couple of examples of censorship: In August, 2023, a public library in Davis, CA shut down a forum on transwomen in sports when one of the speakers referred to “males” on female teams. The librarian warned the speaker that use of the word male in this context constituted misgendering and that the event would be shut down if the word was uttered again, which it was, because biological males and females playing sports together was the topic of the forum.  Also in August, 2023, the New York Times removed the following reader comment in response to an article about political polarization: “From my perspective, the loudest, shrillest voices of red and blue do not speak for the majority of people in any party. For example, I have worked for and supported the democratic party for more than 40 years. I believe trans people should have all the legal rights of any citizen, but I don't support the sterilization of children or biological men in women's sports. According to the far left, that makes me a right-wing transphobe, unwelcome in the democratic party. So where do I fit in the red/blue divide? Until people can discuss issues like this without being screamed at from both sides, we cannot move forward.” (The commenter gave me permission to disclose her comment but not her identity).

18. It won’t surprise you at this point to learn that I’m ambivalent about the women-only exclusivity of this group.

19. Sherman Alexie’s essay, “The ‘I’ in BIPOC” is wonderfully and hilariously on point here.

20. When I saw some progressives celebrating or rationalizing Hamas’s atrocities against Israeli civilians, while others cheered Israel’s stated intention of destroying Gaza, I wondered whether too much time spent online, immersed in nihilism, tribalism and mutual dehumanization, is smothering people’s innate compassion. But there are other specters of wokeism afoot here as well.

21. I didn’t do a deep dive into this incident and am relying on the screenshots in the linked Substack. It’s possible there’s more to the story though there would have to be a lot more for me to approve of the decision to bar her participation.

22. Hillary Clinton recently floated the idea of a “formal deprogramming of the [MAGA] cult members.” Whether or not she was serious, raising the spectre of totalitarian mind control is political malpractice.

23. Chapter three of my book, Beyond Contempt, goes over some of the more common cognitive errors. Here’s one example: A 2013 study found that liberals and conservatives were significantly more likely to botch a math problem when the fact pattern concerned a gun rights issue than when the fact pattern concerned a neutral subject (skin cream). For more about this fascinating subject, check out The Righteous Mind, by Jonathan Haidt, and Thinking Fast and Slow, by Daniel Kahneman.