Requiem for the Woke Era

What the Wokies Got Right

I have the pronounced sense that the Woke Era is finished and gone for good. What’s been surprising in the blizzard of Trump actions is how little of a fight liberals have put up for some previously sacrosanct progressive causes — affirmative action, for instance, or aspects of trans rights. The quiet sense is that liberals didn’t quite have it in them to stand up to progressives on their own on hot-button ‘moral’ issues but are grateful to Trump to have done their dirty work for them, and to have configured a political landscape that — whatever else may be said about it — will be different from the politics of the ‘10s or the early part of the 2020s.

But if we’re giving our eulogy to the Woke Era — and to be clear, I think it really was disastrous; and have all kinds of terrible things to say about it — let’s also acknowledge what the Woke Era got right, or at least what will be missed with its departure.

1.A really strenuous effort to get race right. The consensus going into the Woke Era was that the US had achieved genuine political equality but that economic inequality remained an immovable stumbling block. The Wokies were, I believe, right to understand that that inequality wouldn’t just go away on its own, that something a little more muscular was called for. Probably every single one of their interventions hasn’t really worked — initiatives to eliminate testing systems in schools, for instance, just led to a deterioration of meritocratic standards — but they were right to regard racism as the original sin of the US, to recognize that even the first black president and the beautiful multiethnic rainbow society would at best offer a kind of cosmetic fix to deeper problems of race-based economic inequality, and to hold that no vision of the culmination of the American Dream (“the bridge” that was always used in liberal evocations of Obama’s rise) could be complete without really dealing with that problem. From the generally optimistic frame of mind at the beginning of the 2010s, it seemed like that kind of culmination actually was possible, and that it demanded concerted effort, some sort of grappling with the past combined with a conscientious effort to avoid shortcuts of any kind and to achieve full-on equality in every meaningful sense. That may not have been achievable — the tools of social engineering, as well as public shaming of “implicit bias,” “micro-aggressions,” etc — may have been ill-adapted to achieving the outcomes everybody wanted, but let’s give credit to the Woke Era for trying. The fact that the society now seems more polarized than it’s been for some time means that we may well never again get to this place of optimism, this place of really and truly putting the demons of the past to bed for good, and it is — beyond everything else — tragic to consider that we might not get there again.

2.An attempt to form a new national myth. The Wokies were, I think, correct to sense that the old national myth had run its course — that people simply didn’t buy narratives about the American Dream or believe in the justice of American triumphalism. The flimsiness of the Bush administration’s neo-colonialism in the Middle East or Trump’s cartoon version of ‘40s/‘50s-style triumphalism go to show just how spent that narrative proved to be. The liberal narrative of an America retaining all of its power while gradually expunging its moral failings struck many on the left as both hypocritical and inept. The Wokies opted instead for a different narrative — America beginning again, the entirety of the past being one long string of domination and injustice but America emerging shiny and new through the moral effort of pushing the past away and enthroning a very different, multi-ethnic society less beholden to imperial narratives about how states are constituted. It all got a little wet and woolly when the question turned on what to do instead, but let’s give some credit: nations are fueled by their narratives. It stood to reason that a more mature US national narrative would take information about slavery, the genocide of the Indians, the history of imperialism into account, and would produce a new narrative, about atonement and reconciliation, a narrative that a 21st century state could truly be proud of.

3.A laser-like focus on social interaction. A great part of the hypocrisy of liberal institutions was to get away with various forms of tokenism — how many movies satisfied their “diversity requirements” with “black best friends”?; how many companies and organizations achieved a cosmetic diversity by juking their statistics in different ways or by creating powerless but symbolic positions for minorities? It can actually be difficult to watch mainstream movies from the ‘90s or ‘00s with the insights of the Woke Era in one’s mind. The Wokies introduced a quotient of common sense and of EQ into cultural criticism, recognizing that just because numbers indicated a diverse or egalitarian society didn’t mean that it was necessarily the case. And the Wokies weren’t actually so wrong about micro-aggressions or implicit biases. Once people were paying attention to it, it turned out that there really were all kinds of casual prejudices informing people’s social interactions (the movie Get Out!, maybe the artistic masterpiece of the Woke Era, covers all this brilliantly). Where the Wokies went off the rails was in failing to recognize that the constant policing of the cultural sphere would result in fearful interaction and in a dynamic where saying something extreme became irresistibly tempting, even if one didn’t necessarily entirely believe what one was saying.

4.An intense interest in the past. In an era when everybody was getting addicted to their smart phones, when it was hard to get young people to care about history, there was something refreshing in having robust national debates about Woodrow Wilson or the hidden dark side of Abraham Lincoln. The Wokies’ history often didn’t seem to go very deep — it had the opportunistic quality of when, every four years for the Olympics, everybody suddenly becomes an expert on curling or pole vaulting — but they weren’t wrong to strip away the triumphalist narratives from previous decades or centuries of whitewashed history. Things like Washington and Jefferson’s slaveholding, or Columbus’ slaughter of Tainos, had been elided over, and there was something impressively neutral about telling history in a way where the people you assumed to be the heroes weren’t necessarily the heroes, even as there was a conscientious attempt to bring a better, more nuanced reading of history to bear on creating the new, more sophisticated and inclusive national narrative.

5.An engaging trial run of the internet. The internet, for several decades really, had been the place to go when you were powerless, when you were kind of dropping out of society. The Wokies were the first ones, really, who demonstrated the immense political power of the internet. It was built around a premise of purity, that the people sitting behind their laptops and smart phones were the real people and as such they enjoyed a certain veto power over the magnates making their decisions behind closed doors. The result was a sort of cost-effective vision of how democratic change could be made. It wasn’t about working in ‘blighted areas,’ or making reform from within, or taking to the streets, it was possible to just sit in front of your screen, and secure in the sense of your own moral innocence, make actual change out in the world — usually by targeting famous individuals who everyone else also had an opinion (and story) about. The problems with it were all obvious — how limited that change was, how easily it turned into witch hunts, how much online exchange was manipulated and curtailed by tech companies’ algorithms — but, as far as technology-testing went, it was an interesting finding that fringe beliefs, when hooked up to the world wide web and disseminated with enough vigor, had the power to reshape societies.

There is so much negative to say about the Woke Era — the identity essentialism, the fanaticism, the censoriousness, the way that highly-educated people shut off their critical reason in order to participate in good-think tribal righteousness, the way it all rebounded to strengthen the hand of Trump and MAGA — but it was a surge of idealism, which in many ways seemed to make a great deal of sense at that historical moment. Lose that and we lose an opportunity to create a new, hopeful national narrative. Lose that and it’s not clear what takes its place.