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KW's avatar

God I hope you're right. The Great Awokening was one of the most unpleasant political developments of my lifetime. Just nonstop yelling, shaming, moralizing, and divisiveness. I hate the fact that liberals became the moralizing scolds. It made me feel politically homeless.

Though to be clear, you'll never see me doing one of those "I'm leaving the Left" pieces and falling into Trump World. No sir.

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Secret Squirrel's avatar

I think that the awokening is usefully seen in a wider lens, one that includes a resurgence of the left all throughout the western world in response to the financial crisis of 2008. Podemos, Syriza, Corbyn, Mélenchon, maybe Five Star: leftist movements and ideas that used to poll at 5% and were seen as part of the lunatic fringe seriously competed for power, often under the leadership of elderly politicians who'd been saying the same thing since the 80s and had been seen as irrelevant fossils.

This is sort of a tinfoil hat position, but I think institutional receptivity to wokeness was a half-conscious strategy for containing this radicalism and channeling it in directions that big liberal institutions could tolerate. (This was definitely what social justice rhetoric was when deployed by Hilary Clinton vs. Sanders; the larger claim is an oversimplification and impossible to verify but I do believe it.)

This broad resurgence of left radicalism has been comprehensively defeated in America and Europe, although as Freddie De Boer recently noted most of the people who participated in the carnivalesque finale of 2020 seem strangely unaware that there was an argument and that the side they claimed to be on lost it. But absent the need to outflank leftists by being more woke than they are I can't see the weird hothouse atmosphere of 2016-2000 returning. Back then everybody presupposed in the back of their heads: the old center is broken, Trump is a sign of this, we will beat Trump in a landslide and make a new world. In fact the center held.

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