Woke is Dead, Long Live Woke!

I remember the first time I heard the word woke.

It was 2007 and I was living in a cardboard box with parquet flooring in Washington Heights when an old friend from college came to town. We did what you do when you’re in your mid-20s and a bit light on disposable income: we stayed in, threw on a Kids in the Hall marathon, masked the flavor of cheap liquor with something even cheaper, then drank and talked until 4. I’m not sure when we started talking about W.E.B. Du Bois, but I know that’s when things got weird. Again.

See, we’d taken a writing course built around the essay at some point during our junior or senior years at Penn. The Souls of Black Folk featured prominently as a case study. And for good reason – it is a great work! Du Bois did other fine work, too, some right there as a sociology researcher at the University of Pennsylvania. In The Philadelphia Negro he wrote explicitly and scientifically about how segregation policies had harmed blacks in Philadelphia. In the Conservation of Races he wrote passionately and eloquently about how carelessly allowing the black experience to melt into white American culture might harm blacks even more.

We are Americans, not only by birth and by citizenship, but by our political ideals, our language, our religion. Farther than that, our Americanism does not go.

At that point, we are Negroes, members of a vast historic race that from the very dawn of creation has slept, but half awakening in the dark forests of its African fatherland. We are the first fruits of this new nation, the harbinger of that black to-morrow which is yet destined to soften the whiteness of the Teutonic today…as a race we must strive by race organization, by race solidarity, by race unity to the realization of that broader humanity which freely recognizes differences in men, but sternly deprecates inequality in their opportunities of development.

The Conservation of Races, submitted to The American Negro Academy, by W.E.B. Du Bois (1897)

This conflict between the material loss of segregation and the spiritual loss of integration, between being black and being American, is what Du Bois would later refer to as double consciousness. It is an overwhelming, continuous, and inescapable part of the story of being black in America. It is also why I agree with South Park (once again) that most white Americans are best served by responding, “I don’t get it!” Not that we can’t intellectualize this double consciousness, which is a ridiculous cop-out. Not that we don’t have a right to talk about it, either. That is little more than surrender to schoolyard bullying from lazy leftists who don’t want to have to work to defend their position. It’s just an admission that being torn between the imperfections of segregation and integration is an experience and a feeling that white Americans cannot replicate, recall from memory, or reproduce in our minds. We can’t grok it.

So, of course, being a mischievous 19-year old little shit, I tried to do exactly that. I took the opposite side of my friend in an essay-writing exercise about a dormitory at Penn that was named after Du Bois himself and which was, for all intents and purposes, self-segregated. I took the position that its effectively segregated living, eating, studying, and social environment did far more harm to the black student body than any good it did by permitting the students to have so many permanent spaces to enjoy a not-so-brief respite from daily experiences with racism and prejudice. What’s more, I argued that Du Bois – or at least the version of him whose thoughts had matured as America sped toward the Civil Rights Movement – would have agreed with me. After all, this was a man who prophesied that the “destiny of the race could be conceived as leading neither to assimilation nor separatism but to proud, enduring hyphenation.” What ought we to say except that electing to live, sleep, eat, work, study, party, socialize, date, argue, flirt, joke, exercise, and learn separately is, in fact, the very separatism which Du Bois hoped against hope would not be the final destination of blacks in America?

I remember in college that my friend had some difficulty articulating why I was wrong. His essay wasn’t very good. When we met again in New York five or six years later, handle of Bankers Club vodka scalding our throats and every square inch of our respective digestive systems, he had found his words.

Or, well, his word.

You’re not woke, Rusty.

This was my friend! I knew him and trusted him, which means there was no wrong or right to it in either of our minds. For those of you under 30 or those of you who have built your entire personality around whichever jackass you wanted to be president, this may require some explanation. In the beforetime, it was possible to disagree with someone on something deeply important – even existential – to you, and to carry in your mind enough humility and uncertainty about your own position that you didn’t ghost them, unfriend them, abandon them, or use them to farm karma in a viral “am I the asshole” post on Reddit.

It helped that I understood him. What he meant by woke was something a lot narrower and a lot more defensible than what the word would come to mean over the next two decades of co-option and abuse. When he told me that I wasn’t woke, he was telling me that he thought my eyes were closed to passive forms of unfairness. He was telling me I’d convinced myself that racism was over just because people didn’t run around dropping n-bombs and posting “Whites Only” placards next to help wanted signs. He was telling me I was conscious of and sensitive to overt acts of prejudice, and asked me to consider whether that was blinding me to entire systems sustaining prejudice beneath the surface layer of society.

It was totally fair.

While we’re being fair, let’s also acknowledge that my friend was full of shit. Specifically, not generally, I mean. The existence of a de facto segregated dormitory in the Year of our Lord 2003 was so stupid that it still makes my head hurt just to think about it. But look, if you’ve been on this Earth for more than ten years and still don’t think that there are a lot of things embedded in laws, institutions, norms, behaviors, and expectations that make life harder for Americans who are black, female, gay, poor, or just a little bit different, you really have been walking around with your eyes closed. The problem, I think – and this is why “woke” was such an effective and useful term – is that despite their significance, so many of these experiences are so mundane that they don’t show up unless you’re actively looking for them or unavoidably subjected to them. Awake to them. It’s hard to convince people that it’s harder to get a doctor to believe you’re in pain just because you’re black, that you’re not crazy to be more worried you’ll be misidentified as a criminal, that people ignore your resume because of your black-sounding name, or that the banks, grocery stores, hospitals, and schools really do seem to be a lot crappier where you live than in nearby areas serving similarly poor white people. Are some of these things confounded by some real problems black Americans have allowed to fester in their communities? Sure, and some day maybe there’ll be a revolution where people stay woke to those things, too. But all the same, if someone told you to wake up to some realities you probably missed while patting yourself on the back for not saying the n-word in polite company, you’d deserve it.

If only that is where it stopped.

There are a lot of reasons one narrative sticks while another one dies.

Sometimes a narrative accesses something fundamental in the way our brains have been wired to absorb and process complex symbols. Cultural universals are probably not a real thing. Cognitive universals probably are. In other words, the human experience includes certain unavoidable realities – hunger, death, childbirth, sex, that sort of thing. It should be obvious that we don’t need much coaxing to understand the meaning of symbols that look like or remind us of a relationship we would have observed with one of those things. That’s why you’ll find skulls and phalluses and art of women with good jeans in just about every example of human culture from any point in the last 75,000 years.

Other narratives rely more on our interaction with culture to tell us what they mean. Social networks have so empowered this process of acquiring these complex symbols that much of politics, marketing, and media has largely transformed into an exercise in making us invest in them. Done particularly well, they compel us to associate them with our very identity. They become something we need to be true.

The woke narrative exploited both of these pathways into a lot of brains. Frankly, it almost didn’t need to.

It took a while for critical theory and its intersectional cousin to work their way into the public consciousness. But once they did, they took with them a few particularly useful traits. The first is, well, that there’s a fair bit that’s true about their arguments. The rest of the useful traits, however, are derived from the systemic property of the claims they make. That is, three things happen when you say that something is systemic. The first is that you have created a permanent and undefeatable opponent. A problem you call systemic is useful in that it can be called upon time and time again. The second is that you create claims that are non-falsifiable. When your fundamental argument is the presence of an inchoate, impossible to measure, hidden feature of everything around us, not the result of any one action but of a system of disconnected forces, there really is no argument that cannot be dismissed as “not grappling with the systemic nature of the problem.” The third is that asserting the existence of a systemic problem in a framing where power differentials determine what is right permits you to redefine what is immoral. If being a good person meant actively avoiding doing bad things, now you can say that it means actively taking part in attacking the bad systemic thing – usually by demanding that it be attacked in precisely the way that you prefer. Choosing anything else would be, well, wrong. Evil, even. You…aren’t evil, are you, reader?

The final trick, of course, is to ensure there is a certain gravity to being told that your arguments in defense of an undefeatable and permanent evil are inadequate, and that your failure to act precisely as someone else demands constitutes active support of that evil. That’s where those symbols deeply embedded in the fabric of our culture come into play. A long history of slavery and prejudice (rightly!) caused a powerful meme of anti-racism to enmesh itself with the fabric of American culture. By and large, one of the positive outcomes of the Civil Rights Movement is that Americans need to believe that they are not racist.

How does all of this come together into a new woke narrative? Remember when everyone knew that everyone knew that racism meant doing actual racist things, and then within a period of about two weeks everyone knew that everyone knew that racism meant that you didn’t throw your whole heart behind some guy’s particular thirteen point plan to dismantle society?

It was a magician’s trick..

And like two twenty-somethings drinking bad vodka, once they mastered the trick, things went off the rails fast and only got worse for about two decades. People lived in fear of cancelation if they didn’t surrender immediately to accusations that they had voted the wrong way, thought the wrong way, resisted now-debunked “implicit bias” training, or simply asked one too many questions about the wholesale restructuring of human society around the idea that the policy platform of the Democratic Party was the only possible moral response to the observation that being poor or black or queer or female in America was sometimes a lot harder than being a rich, straight, white dude. Universities, governments, and corporations built massive administrative apparatuses around exploring and aggressively enforcing the woke narrative, at first to signal compliance with a cultural trend, and then to wave the white flag of surrender to the monster they had created.

So forgive me if I don’t hold it against anyone who celebrates the supposed death of woke.

Still, if the sole aim of the woke narrative had remained an earnest attempt make people aware of a whole range of fundamentally unfair things built into our institutions, I don’t think the last two decades play out the way they did. The people who invested their identities into the woke narrative are largely the ones who empowered its transformation from a useful reminder to a leftist policy cudgel. It’s a universe of white liberals happily reading and nodding along to Ibram Kendi – but only in a coffee shop or on an airplane where they can be seen enjoying Correct Opinions by other white people with Correct Opinions. This lot will tell you that when woke died, hate won out over love, that the strong won a great victory over the weak.

They are wrong.

But the people who think Donald Trump tweeting like a boob or Sydney Sweeney showing us hers killed woke? They are wrong, too. As it happens, there is another group who built their identity on the belief that key American institutions have been systemically infected with unfairness and injustice. Woke didn’t die. One strain was outcompeted by a more virulent strain with a similar mechanism of action that was more well-adapted to the prevailing environment.

The Intersectional woke movement is dead. Long live the America First woke movement.

I’m nowhere near the first to make this observation. Dan Crenshaw, Kevin DeYoung, and Neil Shenvi, among others, have deployed it in reference to the “woke right” with meaningfully different ultimate conclusions than my own. Still, it is useful to understand why this is true in narrative, symbolic, and memetic terms.

Like the intersectional woke movement that came before it, the America First woke strain is built on a narrative of inchoate grievance with the system that has more than a grain of truth behind it. Only instead of structural injustice targeting minorities embedded in housing, finance, tax codes, and criminal justice, this movement is focused on structural injustices targeting white people, Christians, and men embedded in news media, entertainment, corporate HR, and the deep state.

Like the intersectional woke movement that came before it, the America First woke strain begins from the truth of unfair things that have become a passive feature of certain institutions. It rarely stays there for long, however. That’s because the nature and path of a grievance narrative is inevitably determined by its two chief political uses.

The first of those uses is the creation of a special class of learned helplessness. In short, it is politically useful to create in an aggrieved population the sense that they have no agency and are not responsible for how they react and respond to the grievance. For the intersectional woke movement, that largely took the form of what I’ll charitably call “Obama liberals” excusing away just about any act of bigotry, hatred, or socially destructive behavior, so long as it originated from a protected class and was directed toward a class enemy. For the America First woke movement, it largely takes the form of social media influencers excusing away the drift of white, Christian men toward fascism, open misogyny, and white supremacism.

“What else can they do?” is the refrain for both, an ill-intended offer of social validation for the agency-free. Some rhetorical questions positively beg for a verbal response.

The second political use is to create a permanent source of political power by directing those being told “they have no other choice” to specific targets responsible for their grievances. Helpfully and inevitably, these will be systemic and ultimately undefeatable sources of grievance – like the ones we’ve already covered for both of these woke movements. The aim? To dismantle them utterly and completely. Scorched earth. It’s us or them, and if it means destroying other social norms and institutions, well, they were propping up these systems of injustice, so they were complicit and deserve to be dismantled as well. In the case of the intersectional woke movement, dismantling systemic sources of racism also meant we “had to” dismantle equal treatment under the law to favor the disadvantaged, and we “had to” dismantle free speech protections, and we “had to” dismantle American meritocratic norms, and we “had to” dismantle the plain text of the Constitution to ensure equitable outcomes. In the case of the America First woke movement, dismantling systemic sources of prejudice against traditional values and putting the people whose ancestors built this country first now also means that we “have to” dismantle our commitment to a constitutional order, we “have to” dismantle judicial and congressional limitations on presidential authority, we “have to” dismantle our commitment to a republican system of government, and we “have to” dismantle our cultural allergy to autocrats, tyrants, and kings.

The problem, of course, is that true to their nature, the systemic things we were resisting themselves resist being dismantled. Meanwhile, the institutions and norms that were worth keeping after all end up dying for nothing. It is a ridiculous, everybody-loses suicide pact.

What does this look like in practice? You can see the formation of Common Knowledge about these things live on social networks. Suspend for a moment whether you think any of these claims carry some truth or, better yet, if you’re feeling charitable, accept for a moment my contention that they do carry a lot of truth. Simply consider whether you can spot the formation of a grievance narrative in the wild.

The Deck is Stacked Against White People

The Deck is Stacked Against Men

The Deck is Stacked Against Christians

Once you have the grievance narrative, can you spot the reactionary story-telling that takes place to establish a narrative of a lack of agency? Do you see how effortlessly this entire structure permits the rationalization of, well, just about anything so long as it might be framed as an understandable reaction to all of the terrible injustices that have been visited upon…<checks notes>…literally the richest, freest, most richly advantaged creatures that have ever stepped foot on the face of this planet?

Look, the obsequious, condescending air of liberals spinning tales of zero accountability for protected classes for the better part of half a century was nauseating. But the America First woke movement is full of people whose entire argument is that we need more men of worth, men who will take risks and build things, and men who aspire to greatness. And by the way, every one of those arguments is true. But the very idea that these folks would then turn around and claim a lack of agency, constructing some woe-is-me tale of why becoming an incel or a hate-filled fascist was an inevitability rather than a profound personal defect?

Pathetic.

And inevitable.

That’s the problem with reactionary grievance narratives. Their weakness is not that they are built on utter falsehoods but that their structure means by design that they will surround true things with narratives of helplessness that give men and women license to become Ionesco’s rhinoceroses. That is my main (and minor) contention against the DeYoungs, Shenvis, Crenshaws and others who have asserted the existence of a woke right. I think we should be happy to entertain concerns that the excesses of attacks against “privileged classes” require some correction.

But this? Y’all, this is just sad. And miss me with the “explaining doesn’t mean excusing” mail. Yes, it does.

Can You Blame Them for Embracing Fascism / Dictators / Ignoring the Constitution?

I understand that it may be irritating to some readers to be associated so closely with a movement that they feel necessitated their own, a feeling which, I might add, is only more evidence of the sad loss of agency its adherents allowed themselves. But I do understand, which is why I think it is important to be very clear about what I am saying. I am absolutely saying that the American First woke movement is an authentic woke movement, born from grievance culture, imposed on weak men by those who would manipulate them for political capital, the sad, reactionary equivalent of an angry 11-year old concluding that the only response to an unfair game going poorly is to violently upturn the table. Or, you know, like a leftist revolutionary.

And that’s the thing. Grievance narratives know no party, no allegiance. They will always play out this way, and once they are established as the new meta of our political game – that is, the game of defining the rules of the game – they will not go away. There is no superior strategy that will supersede it.

You and I will never live another day in these United States in which a grievance narrative underlying a movement to dismantle a system of institutional prejudice is not the single most important factor in the prevailing political environment.

What you and I have to decide is whether we’re going to allow ourselves to bounce between angry resistance and angry revenge based on how true the current woke and the next woke seem to us. Based on how they make us feel.

Are we going to sign up our country’s principles and institutions to a suicide pact just so that we can achieve nothing, or are we going to sign up to do the long, hard work of convincing our countrymen of the existence and need to work on slowly eroding the hidden, embedded systems of power and prejudice which target us and those like us?

At some point, the America First woke movement will abdicate, and a new, more virulent woke strain will become dominant. It won’t be the same as anything that came before, but it will probably look more like intersectional woke than this one. Maybe it will include an additional reactionary response to the targets of the current regime – immigrants, government employees, non-heritage Americans, that sort of thing.

I don’t know.

What I do know is that whether you belong to a group that was structurally disadvantaged by the system or one that got told by the system that everything you did made you a hateful bigot, the people telling you to burn down your own house to fix it aren’t your friends. Who are your friends? Your actual friends. Remember? The people you used to drink thinly disguised bad vodka with until 4 in the morning? The people you could tell your most dangerous and uncomfortable and only partially thought out ideas?

Why don’t you call them? It’s been too long. You know who I mean, because you’re thinking about them right now.