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.
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.
*Something* is happening, anyway. No one's noticed yet, but the darker corners of the internet have more or less abandoned Trump as old news. Now there's just sort of a swirling mass of generalized venom, resentment toward newcomers & a sort of two-minded fear/worship relationship with Taylor Swift.
I think the path forward is very clear, albeit forked. Whichever party makes a clean break with their insanity fringe first will win big. As Biden is not himself the insanity fringe, it seems most likely that the Democratic Party will manage this first.
But - I don't know. I wouldn't count those old Republicans out yet. There's just over a month 'til the convention, and a lot can happen in a month. If Cato lives, he wakes now.
I understand what you're trying to say, but just for the record, you're talking about a man suffering from advanced dementia and who has his finger on the button. Voting for him might not be "insanely fringe", but it is clearly insane.
The time for someone younger to take his hat was six months ago. They didn't. It's him. Whatever problems he has, apparently no younger person on the Democratic side has either the guts or the ability to give him a run for his money. It's not really a complicated situation.
Do you really want to get into a sanity comparison between people who think giving puberty blockers to adolescents for sociosexual difficulties is a good idea - on the one hand - & on the other an cotogenarian who's taken all comers in the Democratic party and won? We can go there, I'm just not sure you want to.
I'm not demanding that you vote for him in any case, since it's not like he's taking on the insanity fringe directly at the moment. Vote third party if you like, or Taylor Swift. I think she may take Florida.
I don’t ever vote for anyone I don’t support, so Biden and Trump are both out. But if I listened to my Democratic partisan friends and family who have been telling me for the last 25 years that it’s my moral duty to vote for the lesser evil, I guess I’d be voting for Trump, as much as I dislike him.
As Barack Obama said, "violence for violence is the rule of beasts." If you're gonna cross the Rubicon, you'd better do it right. Enjoy Hell. Sorry about the smell.
Do you recall why Mr. Pence now considers Mr Trump a dangerous madman? There were some pretty embarrassing events in Congress a few years ago, involving some sort of shaman and also what seemed to be a pack of hog-human hybrids. I'm sure some mad scientist somewhere was very upset that his mutants all turned tail at the sound of a bullet. If' you've been living in the woods, I respect that, but you should read about the last few years. It hasn't been good.
Why should we be at all confident that any corner of "the internet", no matter how dark, represents what large parts of the country think about Trump? Personally I think his support networks have largely moved offline, and are now totally invisible to this kind of shallow scrutiny. The internet is more irrelevant than ever but the people who live on it haven't noticed and are incapable of seeing anything else.
While I wish what you were saying was true, it's sadly not. The majority of Americans now live on the internet -- and the majority of those who don't are really just a few locks downriver. Their news comes from the internet, their entertainment comes from the internet, their socialization is through the internet. And even when they aren't on the internet - say, if they're watching TV or (chuckle) reading a modern book - they're consuming content made by people who almost certainly spend most of their time on the internet.
This is why people say things like "everything is the same now." It's the same because whether you're watching netflix, hulu, appletv, or old tv, most of the writers spend most of their days scrolling twitter. Thus everything seems unoriginal, because it is.
So average people consume content made by creatives who consume content from twitter. Where does twitter content come from? Well, any girl who was uncool in middle school in 2008 could tell you that most twitter content is rehashed tumblr content from 10 years ago. (The "wokery" included.")
I like my liquor straight, so I go to the source, and I like my food wholesome, so I read old books. If you're doing anything in the middle, you're chewing someone else's cud.
"Traditional news outlets don’t speculate because there are so few data points to grasp at and there’s still an unwillingness to fully account for the cultural hothouse of the 2010s" - thank you for saying this - a few writers have explored this (and brilliantly so), but not enough have. In 2018-2019 a lot of older folks, who I thought had a steady hand, really lost their composure into a full on descend into this hothouse and the awokening ... the goals were of course admirable, but there was a manic energy to that time period (everything needed to be fixed yesterday), even amongst those who I really thought would have more patience for the long arc of justice. And then we had a pandemic. I don't think that energy repeats again - it'll manifest differently if a second Trump term happens.
More people are seeing through the hypocrisy - certainly young people and the black neighborhood. When Stephen A. Smith said that black people can relate to Trump because it's obvious from the ridiculous indictment he's being targeted, he was right. They made him 'apologize' but it was a moment of truth.
"Climate Change" is the same bag of nonsense. If Biden is so concerned about hydrocarbons, why'd he empty the SPR and flood the country with gas in order to keep the price down before the 2022 elections? Millions of barrels for cheaper gas and more driving doesn't seem to fit the paradigm. The USA is now the biggest energy producer in the world. We are flooded with historically inexpensive NatGas. We've added 2 Saudi Arabias in the last 10 years of fossil fuel production, and this administration has approved moribund pipelines and blown up the Nordstream pipeline, which only helped the American gas business.
There are many other rank hypocrisies during the 'woke' era - many come to mind. Young people aren't on twitter & don't have an illogical hatred for Trump. When I show them Obama's $14 million mansion along the fragile coastal ecosystem with its huge carbon footprint, in the whitest neighborhood in the country, we simply talk about it. No anger, no yelling, just good debate. I'm with Obama on the topic - it's a beautiful house and he earned it. The students ... not so much.
As the Top of the Pyramid thrashes about, seen with this latest fiasco with putting Steve Bannon in jail, the direction of the culture and the country will be, at best, interesting. I don't think it will be very smooth.
You’ve left out an extremely important development: many Jewish billionaires have closed their checkbooks on progressive think tanks, like Harvard and Columbia.
What a refreshing thing to read a recap of 2016-2020… culture has continued to shift and transform, and while it blurs together for me, for the children of the 80s, etc., the influential air of leadership and its polarity has been formative for younger people. The candidates have only gotten older but the “movement-counter-movement” paradigm moves and moves, institutions have changed, and precedents have been set
Devastating how? Are you actually in favor of a continued Biden regime? (Biden as in not-Biden. With Trump we would at least know who is the acting President, and who to confront, assist, mitigate or bargain with on any particular issue - though hopefully this time we will confront ONLY his actual actions and formally introduced proposals and not his midnight Don Rickles social media act.)
Deeply in favor of Biden. Our president is putting people to work by repairing bridges and roads across the country after a lot of failures on this topic from the last guy, improving broadband access, issued executive orders protecting reproductive rights and housing equality for LGBTQ people. I am nervous about our country going back to the chaos of the last President where every day was about him and has said he’ll be a “dictator on day 1.” I’m a dad and I don’t want this for my son’s future.
I personally hope Trump is reelected. He we need leadership and not identity politics. The nation had almost full employment and inflation was low. I had more money for discretionary spend and the world was a safer place. You may not like his attitude but his administration had things moving in the right direction.
Very interesting thinking here. It just confuses me a bit that the biggest development of the late 2010’s and early 2020’s has been that of the “authoritarian populism” of Trump and his 45% of the population. One cannot say simply that this is an “anti-woke” reaction. It is a product, or perhaps a fusion, of many conservative an and authoritarian threads in our American culture and history. One may or may not be a Trumper, but I think if you are going to talk about activism and the woke environment, one has to at least talk about Trumpism.
I just googled my quote to see if anyone said it first, and I see now you were talking about Socrates! Clever! See how little I really know? Imagine what you could do!
Don't worry. I'm not like all those goofball "professors" and "grad students" from the last round. I actually know a thing or two. Would you like to see where I'm busting it open? I've been going at least half ham for over a month now.
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.
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.
*Something* is happening, anyway. No one's noticed yet, but the darker corners of the internet have more or less abandoned Trump as old news. Now there's just sort of a swirling mass of generalized venom, resentment toward newcomers & a sort of two-minded fear/worship relationship with Taylor Swift.
I think the path forward is very clear, albeit forked. Whichever party makes a clean break with their insanity fringe first will win big. As Biden is not himself the insanity fringe, it seems most likely that the Democratic Party will manage this first.
But - I don't know. I wouldn't count those old Republicans out yet. There's just over a month 'til the convention, and a lot can happen in a month. If Cato lives, he wakes now.
O feared incantation, come thee now
unto my beggar's lip, give me thy sound,
O make thee known thy hardest harshest vow,
I'll take 't, ay, t' keep our hallowed ground.
O thunder in the store of heaven, strike now,
and if to rot and tyranny we're doom'd
then strike thou twice, split thou this prow,
or thou art naught, as young I ere assum'd!
O fie then God! -- Is there then some man
who fains to rule our storied far-flung Rome?
Or woman? Cincinnatus, gone's thy clan,
and Washington, so too's thy humble own!
Where couldst thy ghost in peace yet still reside
while cries thy greatest child for the chide?
> As Biden is not himself the insanity fringe
I understand what you're trying to say, but just for the record, you're talking about a man suffering from advanced dementia and who has his finger on the button. Voting for him might not be "insanely fringe", but it is clearly insane.
The time for someone younger to take his hat was six months ago. They didn't. It's him. Whatever problems he has, apparently no younger person on the Democratic side has either the guts or the ability to give him a run for his money. It's not really a complicated situation.
Do you really want to get into a sanity comparison between people who think giving puberty blockers to adolescents for sociosexual difficulties is a good idea - on the one hand - & on the other an cotogenarian who's taken all comers in the Democratic party and won? We can go there, I'm just not sure you want to.
I'm not demanding that you vote for him in any case, since it's not like he's taking on the insanity fringe directly at the moment. Vote third party if you like, or Taylor Swift. I think she may take Florida.
I don’t ever vote for anyone I don’t support, so Biden and Trump are both out. But if I listened to my Democratic partisan friends and family who have been telling me for the last 25 years that it’s my moral duty to vote for the lesser evil, I guess I’d be voting for Trump, as much as I dislike him.
As Barack Obama said, "violence for violence is the rule of beasts." If you're gonna cross the Rubicon, you'd better do it right. Enjoy Hell. Sorry about the smell.
I have to be honest: I have absolutely no idea what you’re talking about.
Do you recall why Mr. Pence now considers Mr Trump a dangerous madman? There were some pretty embarrassing events in Congress a few years ago, involving some sort of shaman and also what seemed to be a pack of hog-human hybrids. I'm sure some mad scientist somewhere was very upset that his mutants all turned tail at the sound of a bullet. If' you've been living in the woods, I respect that, but you should read about the last few years. It hasn't been good.
Why should we be at all confident that any corner of "the internet", no matter how dark, represents what large parts of the country think about Trump? Personally I think his support networks have largely moved offline, and are now totally invisible to this kind of shallow scrutiny. The internet is more irrelevant than ever but the people who live on it haven't noticed and are incapable of seeing anything else.
While I wish what you were saying was true, it's sadly not. The majority of Americans now live on the internet -- and the majority of those who don't are really just a few locks downriver. Their news comes from the internet, their entertainment comes from the internet, their socialization is through the internet. And even when they aren't on the internet - say, if they're watching TV or (chuckle) reading a modern book - they're consuming content made by people who almost certainly spend most of their time on the internet.
This is why people say things like "everything is the same now." It's the same because whether you're watching netflix, hulu, appletv, or old tv, most of the writers spend most of their days scrolling twitter. Thus everything seems unoriginal, because it is.
So average people consume content made by creatives who consume content from twitter. Where does twitter content come from? Well, any girl who was uncool in middle school in 2008 could tell you that most twitter content is rehashed tumblr content from 10 years ago. (The "wokery" included.")
I like my liquor straight, so I go to the source, and I like my food wholesome, so I read old books. If you're doing anything in the middle, you're chewing someone else's cud.
Whatever happens, I'm sure Alyssa Milano will know what to do.
So basically, there are zero actual predictions here.
"Traditional news outlets don’t speculate because there are so few data points to grasp at and there’s still an unwillingness to fully account for the cultural hothouse of the 2010s" - thank you for saying this - a few writers have explored this (and brilliantly so), but not enough have. In 2018-2019 a lot of older folks, who I thought had a steady hand, really lost their composure into a full on descend into this hothouse and the awokening ... the goals were of course admirable, but there was a manic energy to that time period (everything needed to be fixed yesterday), even amongst those who I really thought would have more patience for the long arc of justice. And then we had a pandemic. I don't think that energy repeats again - it'll manifest differently if a second Trump term happens.
More people are seeing through the hypocrisy - certainly young people and the black neighborhood. When Stephen A. Smith said that black people can relate to Trump because it's obvious from the ridiculous indictment he's being targeted, he was right. They made him 'apologize' but it was a moment of truth.
"Climate Change" is the same bag of nonsense. If Biden is so concerned about hydrocarbons, why'd he empty the SPR and flood the country with gas in order to keep the price down before the 2022 elections? Millions of barrels for cheaper gas and more driving doesn't seem to fit the paradigm. The USA is now the biggest energy producer in the world. We are flooded with historically inexpensive NatGas. We've added 2 Saudi Arabias in the last 10 years of fossil fuel production, and this administration has approved moribund pipelines and blown up the Nordstream pipeline, which only helped the American gas business.
There are many other rank hypocrisies during the 'woke' era - many come to mind. Young people aren't on twitter & don't have an illogical hatred for Trump. When I show them Obama's $14 million mansion along the fragile coastal ecosystem with its huge carbon footprint, in the whitest neighborhood in the country, we simply talk about it. No anger, no yelling, just good debate. I'm with Obama on the topic - it's a beautiful house and he earned it. The students ... not so much.
As the Top of the Pyramid thrashes about, seen with this latest fiasco with putting Steve Bannon in jail, the direction of the culture and the country will be, at best, interesting. I don't think it will be very smooth.
You’ve left out an extremely important development: many Jewish billionaires have closed their checkbooks on progressive think tanks, like Harvard and Columbia.
What a refreshing thing to read a recap of 2016-2020… culture has continued to shift and transform, and while it blurs together for me, for the children of the 80s, etc., the influential air of leadership and its polarity has been formative for younger people. The candidates have only gotten older but the “movement-counter-movement” paradigm moves and moves, institutions have changed, and precedents have been set
This morning I read that Trump may be taking the youth vote. This is devastating: https://www.axios.com/2024/06/13/trump-election-young-voters-polling
A no vote on the current administration is hardly surprising.
Devastating how? Are you actually in favor of a continued Biden regime? (Biden as in not-Biden. With Trump we would at least know who is the acting President, and who to confront, assist, mitigate or bargain with on any particular issue - though hopefully this time we will confront ONLY his actual actions and formally introduced proposals and not his midnight Don Rickles social media act.)
Deeply in favor of Biden. Our president is putting people to work by repairing bridges and roads across the country after a lot of failures on this topic from the last guy, improving broadband access, issued executive orders protecting reproductive rights and housing equality for LGBTQ people. I am nervous about our country going back to the chaos of the last President where every day was about him and has said he’ll be a “dictator on day 1.” I’m a dad and I don’t want this for my son’s future.
I personally hope Trump is reelected. He we need leadership and not identity politics. The nation had almost full employment and inflation was low. I had more money for discretionary spend and the world was a safer place. You may not like his attitude but his administration had things moving in the right direction.
Very interesting thinking here. It just confuses me a bit that the biggest development of the late 2010’s and early 2020’s has been that of the “authoritarian populism” of Trump and his 45% of the population. One cannot say simply that this is an “anti-woke” reaction. It is a product, or perhaps a fusion, of many conservative an and authoritarian threads in our American culture and history. One may or may not be a Trumper, but I think if you are going to talk about activism and the woke environment, one has to at least talk about Trumpism.
Define "Trumpism".
The Creedal Passion Period is winding down. There will be no second Great Awokening.
https://mikealexander.substack.com/p/cycles-of-radicalization
Bad news for you: I'm just getting started.
There is always a place for trolls and gadflys.
I just googled my quote to see if anyone said it first, and I see now you were talking about Socrates! Clever! See how little I really know? Imagine what you could do!
And to quote properly, "What's man but fly, and life his gad?"
Oh, yes. Now they've invented this "internet," a sort of "universal bridge," if you will, and to misquote, all the world's a bridge, and all the men and women merely https://media4.giphy.com/media/v1.Y2lkPTc5MGI3NjExem1haWNmNmV6ZDZqbHMzY2p6MnhuZnJ0aGhsaGU1MG1mc3JlczRhbCZlcD12MV9pbnRlcm5hbF9naWZfYnlfaWQmY3Q9Zw/b7aoFeTu6WtW6OQpq6/giphy.webp
Don't worry. I'm not like all those goofball "professors" and "grad students" from the last round. I actually know a thing or two. Would you like to see where I'm busting it open? I've been going at least half ham for over a month now.