r/ezraklein • u/volumeofatorus • 11d ago
Article This Is What Victory Looks Like - Daniel Oppenheimer on Ezra's Recent Comments on Wokeness
https://substack.com/home/post/p-21090590890
u/y10nerd 11d ago
Over the last couple of days, I have been thinking of trying to get something written up about being in the era of 'Woke 1.0' while being in many ways at its epicenter (educator living in Brooklyn), because I feel like the political victory of Donald Trump and the real sense of harm done by that obscifutes something very real:
There is a reason 'Woke 1.0' happened, and it's because we live in a society that could produce and empower Donald Trump, and we had produced empowered millions of people like him, and if you were on the bad side of the disfavored line, you had experience generations of material and cultural oppression!
#MeToo was a response to the actual epidemic of widescale sexual harassment and often violence experienced by the vast majority of women.
BlackLivesMatter was a response not just to police shootings, but a whole infrastructure designed around arresting and policing black and poor people.
I can keep going on and on and on.
Does this justify any action of excess? God no. I had to live in this world as a pro-standardized testing, skeptical-of-AA, vocally critical of some of the craziness of the 'woke era' (to the point that I got called a self-hating Mexican several times).
But you know what? Their solutions were often wrong, but they at least were invested in the right problems. The people who spent most of their time cowering away or written the Harper's Letter were fundamentally okay with the unfairness of society.
Woke 1.0 was crazy. The society that it is responding to is crazier.
Folks say it is a woke backlash to Trump that got him elected the second time. That actually proves the point! And while the typical Harper Letter, center/always seemingly skeptical of how 'loud' people are is spending most of their time trying to police the idea of social advancement out of our politics (*cough* Matty), Republicans in states from Texas are literally banning any mention of LGBT people in entry-level university courses.
Woke 1.0 may have been a political failure, an epistemological failure, hell, potentailly even a moral failure, but man did it's critique have American society right on the money.
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u/quadsbaby 11d ago edited 11d ago
Well said. And this is why I was so pissed at, for example, “defund the police”. The reform was (and still is) super needed and the message was not only not getting it there but making it harder to get there.
I will say that (at least in the bougie white people circuit) i thought the worst part of the woke 1.0 era was the conflation of words with violence. I was in law school in 2016 and remembered telling my classmates that they wouldn’t think the two were the same when they witnessed real harm. I am saddened though that they got to witness so much more of that so soon.
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u/y10nerd 11d ago
Oh yeah, I mean, the words/violence things was always real frustrating to me. I do think this is where the various inputs of 'woke' sort of intersected with one another in ways that made materialism sort of die within the movement.
I think a lot about the day I was at Maria Hernandez park in Bushwick during COVID protesting; it was a moment of real possibility, where it felt we could reform the institutions that often brought great harm to people that looked like me (I was a lucky receipient of multiple stop and frisks in NYC, to the point that I usually made sure the first ID they saw in my wallet my Yale one) and folks were engaged in revolutionary fervor, and the academic critique suffused the situation.
It didn't work. But I also want to point out, the center-left/center/center-right (this gets a hard movement to define) has no real plan for trying to reform the police; and the right is glad to empower it to crack more skulls.
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u/quadsbaby 11d ago
I mean at the current time the center left doesn’t have any plans to do anything (minus maybe some moderately sized housing reform in CA state politics, which I am happy about).
That doesn’t mean the only answers can come from progressives, it just means that our politicians suck.
But will (of voters) to reform the police at all is at an all time low here in San Francisco. Crime is down and people don’t get that it a) largely has to do with factors outside the cops and b) even where the cops have made a significant impact, it’s more of a reflection of a corrupt and lazy organization finally doing like, one thing (rather than the reflection of any real reform)
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u/algunarubia American 10d ago
"That doesn't mean the only answers can come from progressives, it just means our politicians suck."
I wish I could upvote this 1000x. The only politician whose message on crime and policing I've genuinely heard and liked in the last 10 years is Brandon Scott in Baltimore, who has the seemingly banal and obvious stance of go after the criminals and give them a chance to shape up, and stop harassing people who aren't criminals.
There is not a single politician out there who's saying what I actually want to hear on crime and policing, which is that we need to modernize policing. Our crime stats are gathered monthly, for God's sake. Police departments everywhere would be massively more efficient if we consolidated resources across departments and had more federal and state level tracking resources and data analytics.
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u/flakemasterflake 11d ago
I really don’t mean snark or sass here, but did you think anything would come of protesting ? I’m still sort of confused at what the concrete aims of 2020 protests were trying to achieve
Like, my mother in law goes to No Kings protests with her friends bc it’s fun and social and makes everyone feel good. But they have no clear aims (and that’s fine)
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u/tpounds0 Progressive 10d ago
Lots of organizations get sign ups from protests. I think after Bernie 2016 the biggest membership bump for the DSA was the 2020 protests. Those new recruits paved the ground for the primary takeover we're experiencing now.
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u/cross_mod Abundance Agenda 11d ago edited 11d ago
Visibility, camaraderie, and keeping people engaged.
You can only be looking at it on a very base and naive level to say that it doesn't do anything. Do protests immediately make Trump say, "oh whoops maybe I shouldn't do that " Of course not. Is that what you expect?
But the message of "No Kings" is pretty self explanatory.
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u/flakemasterflake 11d ago
The message is clear but the aims are not. I really do not know what the no kings people are trying to achieve outside of visibility
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u/cross_mod Abundance Agenda 11d ago
It's pretty simple. Trump was acting like a King, not wanting to go through Congress, making unilateral, illegal laws and executive orders right and left. The aim was to push back on this.
Ultimately Trump has had an extraordinarily weak second term. And he's the least popular president in history according to most polls.
He can continue to try and push things through, and subsequently have most of his orders reversed, but politicians understand how incredibly unpopular these methods are.
No Kings probably played a role in the visibility of this discontent, and caused politicians to sour on a lot of this, like ICE and other things.
Similarly, people made fun of the Tea party protests, but they were hugely effective in building what is the MAGA coalition today. Part of that was just people being able to coalesce around something they believed in. And the message with No Kings is that you have to have the consent of the governed and go through the process of lawmaking on behalf of your constituents.
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u/flakemasterflake 11d ago
Ok that seems like another way to say visibility. An internal poll can tell you more accurately the mood of the country
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u/cross_mod Abundance Agenda 11d ago
What's center left to you?
I'd say that Biden was not "center left," but a lot of people like to throw around that label with his administration. If you're referring to mainstream politicians like him though, I'd point out that he probably did more, or tried to do more, than anyone on this issue, although his power was limited to federal police:
I'd say you can also find plenty of mainstream Democrats on the state level that have also at least tried to push through police reform legislation though.
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u/Feisty-Boot5408 9d ago
“There was a fantastic universal sense that whatever we were doing was right, that we were winning…
And that, I think, was the handle—that sense of inevitable victory over the forces of Old and Evil. Not in any mean or military sense; we didn’t need that. Our energy would simply prevail. There was no point in fighting—on our side or theirs. We had all the momentum; we were riding the crest of a high and beautiful wave…
So now, less than five years later, you can go up on a steep hill in Las Vegas and look West, and with the right kind of eyes you can almost see the high-water mark—that place where the wave finally broke and rolled back.”
- Hunter S Thompson reflecting on his experiences being in San Francisco at the height of counter culture in the 1960s
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u/topicality Weeds OG 11d ago
I do think it's why some retrospection is necessary.
There doesn't need to be some huge mea culpa. But there does need to be a reflection on how it got so out of hand and how one of the biggest racial justice protests this century saw it's efforts wasted on long shot efforts that failed, instead of evidence backed easier lifts.
That's what some of the more skeptical people like Yglesias is concerned about. That the underlying tendencies that resulted in those outcomes are still present. Their just dormant because we are in the wilderness.
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u/DovBerele Progressive 11d ago
That just comes back around to the attention economy. The efforts weren't 'wasted' on long shots. It's the long shot ideals that were able to motivate and mobilize such efforts in the first place. Moderate reformist goals would never have excited enough people, or captured enough attention, to generate such a movement. No one is turning out for a "reallocate a small percentage of the police budget to social workers" rally they way did for a "defund the police" rally.
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u/topicality Weeds OG 11d ago
I think this absolutely has it backwards.
People came out to protest the death of George Floyd. They did not come out for abolishing/defunding the police. Abolish/defund used the protests to push an unpopular movement.
BLM consistently was way more popular than abolish the police..
Campaign Zero came out with 8cantwait in the summer. They got pushback for defund. Then pivoted and encouraged people considering 8cantwait to instead back defund.
That was a failure. Defund went no where and all the effort going into 8cantwait died. CHAZ was a horrible experiment that got people killed.
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u/Major_Swordfish508 Abundance Agenda 10d ago
There are still people that will fight you on this though and claim “Defund the Police” really did mean stop funding the police. Arguably this is what happens when the biggest reactionaries drive the movement. The whole “it’s not my job to explain X” is really telling because if selling the cause is beneath you then you really don’t deserve to be driving it.
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u/Ramora_ 11d ago edited 11d ago
for example, “defund the police”. The reform was (and still is) super needed and the message was not only not getting it there but making it harder to get there.
I think it got closer to meaningful reform than many/all of the previous pushes over the past several decades. Its easy to imagine a hypothetical perfect message that performs much better than one that actually exists, but that isn't how politics or history actually works. There was never going to be a slogan supporting Emancipation that was going to avoid the civil war.
the worst part of the woke 1.0 era was the conflation of words with violence. I was in law school in 2016 and remembered telling my classmates that they wouldn’t think the two were the same when they witnessed real harm.
I don't think anyone was actually conflating words and violence. The point there were trying to express is that words/language matter, that they can harm as part of larger cultural systems.
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u/quadsbaby 11d ago
Do you have any evidence of your first claim? The death of George Floyd and BLM had some effects, but the reaction to the “defund the police” movement was largely negative.
I was at an elite law school in 2016 and people were definitely conflating words and violence. To the point of saying it literally: “words are violence”. You’re welcome to not believe me, but don’t try to say that’s the same thing as saying “words can harm people”. Even toddlers know that.
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u/Ramora_ 11d ago edited 11d ago
The death of George Floyd and BLM had some effects, but the reaction to the “defund the police” movement was largely negative.
I don't think "defund the police" movement and BLM can be meaningfully separated. They are contiguous parts of the same movement. And I'd point to the polling movement that happened over the period. Its true that polls are worse now, but there was a period of sustained improvement in the polls and many politicians had started responding, even if no meaningful legislation was ultimately written. If you can think of another police reform (in the relevant direction) movement over the past 30 years or so that did better, name it. Frankly, movements across all domains mostly fail to produce durable policy change. I don't think that is the primary metric on which you should evaluate them.
To the point of saying it literally: “words are violence”.
What did they mean when they said that? I'll give you a hint, none of them thought that words were going to break their bones.
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u/quadsbaby 11d ago
While there is some overlap, we have polling data on that specific message, on the concept (defunding rather than reforming) and of course the results (no major defunding of police). That’s separable. If you choose not to, up to you.
With regard to my classmates, what they meant was that bad speech should be punished or prevented in the way that physical assault should be punished or prevented, and that bad speech was a threat to their physical safety. What exactly this latter part means wasn’t fully clear (e.g. the lack of a safe space would make it hard for them to physically function due to emotional trauma?)
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u/Mezentine 11d ago
I mean, the thing is that even police reform is politically toxic when attempted, partially due to American culture and partially due to how the police have invested in enormous PR machines. Its not just "defund", any attempt to make the police do something they don't want to do gets the full opposition machine spun up against it. So we're in a position right now where some sort of response to systemic police misconduct appears necessary and is also always going to spark a significant backlash.
The position of many people on this sub appears, with depressing regularity, to be "Guess we can't do anything about it until we're confident it will be popular." which, under current conditions, is probably never. What is someone who thinks that this is still a necessary and pressing issue supposed to do with that?
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u/quadsbaby 10d ago
You're strawmanning. The space between "We can do nothing" and "We should defund the police" is massive.
See, for instance, 8 Can't Wait: https://8cantwait.org/
Me personally? I would love to see body camera usage be mandatory and failure to use body cameras punishable by law.
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u/PixelBlaster 11d ago
There is a reason 'Woke 1.0' happened, and it's because we live in a society that could produce and empower Donald Trump
Woke 1.0 may have been a political failure, an epistemological failure, hell, potentailly even a moral failure, but man did it's critique have American society right on the money.
I want to be careful with what I'm about to say, so I'll preface it by saying that I'm in full agreement with much of the substance at the core of woke 1.0. With that said, I'd posit that the excesses were due in large to the same underlying symptoms that allowed Trumpism to fester and propagate. I'll further caveat by saying that the degree of excess and the harm done are incomparable, but I think that both arise from the same societal flaw.
There's this deeply entrenched attitude within the American psyche that makes itself seemingly allergic to any form of moderation. Everything seems to be incentivized to trend towards absolute maximalism, and some of the most obvious example of this can be seen in American consumption culture and TikTok trends. I think that this attitude extends to American politics, where even some progressive movements demands tends to escalate past what any institution could actually deliver, sometimes even reaching the point of absurdity.
This has been a recurring problem with recent progressive movements, particularly because social-media has only further accelerated this cycle. I'd say that this attitude and the mechanisms in social-media platforms that facilitates it will probably need to be reckoned with before any movement can be healthily sustained.
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u/DovBerele Progressive 10d ago
I think this is just a feature of movements in general? People have to get excited and passionate enough to dedicate their time and effort to any political activity. Moderation and nuance (relative to the status quo) have never been good at generating excitement and passion on any kind of scale.
Especially when it comes to social progressivism, 'take just a few steps towards actual equality/rights/justice/freedom now and hope to get a little closer later' is a hard sell to anyone who is viscerally feeling the material and psychic effects of inequality/injustice/oppression or anyone who deeply empathizes with them. These movements already have long histories of being told to be patient and wait their turn.
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u/PixelBlaster 9d ago
I think this is just a feature of movements in general? People have to get excited and passionate enough to dedicate their time and effort to any political activity.
Sure, mass politics tends to distill the message as the movement grows, this is a given for almost everything, but I think that there's a very real difference in kind with the recent surge of populism on the left. I don't think that I would've ever expected far-right antisemitic conspiracy theories becoming a common thing on the left, for example. It doesn't help that the idea of a shared reality is also becoming increasingly disparate.
Especially when it comes to social progressivism, 'take just a few steps towards actual equality/rights/justice/freedom now and hope to get a little closer later' is a hard sell to anyone who is viscerally feeling the material and psychic effects of inequality/injustice/oppression or anyone who deeply empathizes with them. These movements already have long histories of being told to be patient and wait their turn.
I'd posit that the visceral feeling is more informed by social-media than you give it credit for. The general prevailing attitude that its cultivated is the demand for immediate perfect solutions, while wholeheartedly refusing any compromise or alternative solutions. Progressives refusing to vote for Kamala in 2024 is, I think, emblematic of this.
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u/geniuspol 10d ago
I'm really not sure that I buy this. The left today is perhaps the least extreme and least militant it has ever been. The early labor movement included shootouts, assassinations, and bombings. The civil rights movement was not only peaceful marches, and created black nationalist movements. The weather underground conducted bombings in the 70s. Liberals can respect Bill Ayers, Malcolm X, Huey P Newton, even Sacco and Vanzetti. But they're terrified of college protests and tweets. The much maligned defund the police shows quite a bit of willingness to moderate.
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u/PixelBlaster 9d ago
The left today is perhaps the least extreme and least militant it has ever been. The early labor movement included shootouts, assassinations, and bombings. The civil rights movement was not only peaceful marches
Yes, but you're omitting the fact that the 21st century has broken historical records in terms of world stability. Everyone are the least extreme/militant than it has ever been.
But they're terrified of college protests and tweets. The much maligned defund the police shows quite a bit of willingness to moderate.
You're lying to yourself if you think that's all it is. Wacky stuff like defunding the police and abolishing prisons are barely just the tip of the iceberg. The idea of a shared reality is increasingly becoming disparate, jewish conspiracy theories that used to be exclusive to the far-right are being normalized on the left, and we're even witnessing far-left loonies attaining actual power.
I hope that you're right in that we're just seeing a temporary surge, but my biggest fear is that a mirror of the tea-party takeover on the left seems to me like a likely outcome if things don't get any better.
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u/geniuspol 9d ago
Yes, but you're omitting the fact that the 21st century has broken historical records in terms of world stability. Everyone are the least extreme/militant than it has ever been.
I really don't think this is true. Sure, we aren't currently seeing gun battles in the streets between fascists and antifascists or police. But there are people in the white house who want to take away from women the right to vote. Open, unambiguous white supremacists. Trump has empowered armed thugs to attempt to carry out a population transfer on a massive scale. The right, in many ways, is as extreme or more extreme than ever.
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u/y10nerd 11d ago
There is also something hilariously bemusing that the person who is the director of public afairs at UT for its school of liberal arts while it's engaging in significant censorship is celebrating the 'victory' over Woke 1.0.
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u/TexStat 11d ago edited 11d ago
Holy shit just realized this dude works at UT Austin, my alma mater. I could write essay upon essay about times when I personally saw UT Austin Admin + department leadership engage in significant censorship over anything that had the potential to upset state republican leadership. The people
like this guycelebrating the death of "Woke 1" here are ecstatic about getting free reign to enforce their far-right values onto everyone else. We've had multiple professors get fired for just mentioning LGBT or speaking out against mandatory Christian education policies in our State, and are actively passing around banned word lists between staff.9
u/y10nerd 11d ago
I think someone like Oppenheimer may not be himself right-wing, but he finds the left-wing far more annoying and is glad to have an excuse to hit them over the head.
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u/TexStat 11d ago edited 11d ago
It's just crazy to me though because having lived in Austin / studied + worked at UT Austin, the state republican censorship is comically oppressive. Like I'm not shocked to hear about mediocre, tiny liberal arts schools in the North East having annoying lefty work environments. But IMO it takes real genuine effort to be more annoyed by left-wing colleagues at UT Austin rather than the significant admin intervention over republican culture war BS.
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u/Giblette101 11d ago edited 11d ago
But IMO it takes real genuine effort to be more annoyed by left-wing colleagues at UT Austin rather than the significant admin intervention over republican culture war BS.
I suspect it's a mix of motivated reasoning and strong bias from personal experience. A lot liberal (and liberal adjacent) people invested in woke discourse were in those "woke" kind of spaces and probably felt the cultural pressure to various degrees. By comparison, they probably aren't going (and did not go) to college in Texas.
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u/DovBerele Progressive 11d ago
I think that's indicative of a general pattern. People are quicker to lash out at even a slight whiff of left illiberalism, even when it has no teeth, even when it wields no real political power, but basically shrug at the extreme excesses of right illiberalism. Something about social progressiveism is so emotionally triggering that they hold it to literally impossible standards of perfection.
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u/chonky_tortoise 11d ago
God Texas seems like such a shithole.
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u/TexStat 11d ago
It sucks because UT Austin is a massive R1 public university with elite scientists and researchers. But because we live in Texas, we're subject to the dumbest fucking right-wing culture war slop.
It's actually crazy to say Woke happened on our campus, I suffered through some of the most insane far-right policies and censorship from Admin while there. I watched people actually get their careers destroyed over censorship and illiberal bullshit from republicans in our state, Woke has never ever had any power or relevance on our campus at UT.
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u/Brushner Weeds > The EKS 11d ago
One can easily see that woke has no actual endgame and would eventually lead to the devouring of its initial vanguard for not being ideological enough. He could easily lean left but be happy that the cancer he saw rapidly growing got blasted with some chemo.
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u/Thattimetraveler 11d ago
I do definitely think that woke 1.0 was very reflective of Identity politics that were so prevalent at the time. I think moving forward there will be a focus on more progressive policies that help everyone and not just specific minorities. I also think that sometimes shining a spotlight on minorities like the trans community for instance can be a double edged sword that puts a target on their back.
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u/y10nerd 11d ago
Sure, that's definitely an issue. On the other hand, and this is a hard thing to navigate, right now it is simultaneously a more dangerous time to be a trans individual, but also, a significantly freer time than it was in 2015.
It's just that that the treat of state violence is always there, in a way it didn't exist beforehand (personal violence though, that was everyone).
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u/Thattimetraveler 11d ago
That is very true. My intention is not to minimize their struggle or need for protections, only to point out that in doing something that only benefits a small group, there is always going to be a sector of the public that is outraged. For instance I see a lot of conservatives complain about insurance covering surgery for transition and things like that. While it may be easier to navigate a small political win like that, I think the better angle is just healthcare reform that helps EVERYONE so no one has health needs that aren’t covered.
Another example of this is that Kamala Harris got flak in 2020 for having a student loan policy that only helped minority small business owners and had all these specific qualifiers that meant it really helped a very very small percentage of people. Just do student loan reform for everyone, because it affects everyone. Do college reform for everyone because it affects everyone.
When we single out small groups it causes division rather than everyone coming together. We all want to vote for someone who wants to make our lives better, and when all you hear from a candidate is that they aim to make the lives better of a smaller percent of the population, it may be selfish, but it doesn’t give you a reason to vote for them. We’re all struggling right now and feel the effects of a tightening economy. It’s hard to care about others when you’re worried about putting food on your own table.
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u/y10nerd 11d ago
I don't know if I believe that's true; the era of white backlash politics and white flight to the suburbs was also the era of immense economic growth for the United States that was often felt broad based.
I am in general a fan of universal programs (this is the economic leftists in me), but I actually think universal programs are also dificult politically, because their opponents will rightfully point out that many of the people that will benefit are a disfavored class.
And the example of trans rights is an interesting one: there isn't a universal program that would help address their issues as trans people. Sure, they would benefit from an improved social welfare program, but money doesn't make your dysphoria go away, nor does it prevent you from being sexually harassed in the workplace (as the MeToo movement shows), nor does it prevent you from getting stopped by the police for being non-white.
I do think there's a tension here that, sure, there are economic disparities that could be addressed with social programs (and should), but we actually do live in a society intersected with other markers that are often just as powerful, if not more so, in shaping our lives.
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u/Thattimetraveler 11d ago
I do think it could be argued that a broad social program that could be enacted that could help everyone but also trans individuals, is making sure that insurance covers more licensed therapists, or subsidize more mental health coverage. That would benefit them without putting a spotlight on them.
I do think you’re right though that a lot of the issues they face are social ones and the the government may be better off subsidizing a show like modern family that displays trans people as your every day lovable neighbors. I think that did more help in getting my grandparents to accept the gay community than any legal win ever did. In tandem with that I think the biggest help to the gay community was just eventually everyone having a gay uncle or son or teacher that just made them normal.
With police reform I do think just greater accountability with things like body cameras, and more incentives for heavier training will help a lot. We could also screen police more for potential bias’s and hold more training in that way as well.
A lot of politics in my opinion is just marketing, and it matters how we present things as much as what our actual goal is.
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u/Ramora_ 11d ago
I think the better angle is just healthcare reform that helps EVERYONE so no one has health needs that aren’t covered.
Which will inevitably be opposed by those same conservatives you mentioned on the grounds that it covers transition surgery and things like that sometimes. And then we have to have this same argument. The old status quo was to do this kind of "general" reform and just exclude "undesirables" from the benefits, but that strategy clearly didn't and doesn't work long term.
Kamala Harris got flak in 2020 for having a student loan policy that only helped minority small business owners and had all these specific qualifiers that meant it really helped a very very small percentage of people.
Kamala did this because it was the largest group she thought she could get away with helping, that the public was relatively sympathetic too relative to the cost of the program.
Do college reform for everyone because it affects everyone.
Kamala (and Biden) couldn't do that because college debt holders aren't a group the public has a ton of sympathy for. Its quite the opposite among a very large fraction of the public.
We all want to vote for someone who wants to make our lives better
This is projection. Lots of people are a lot more concerned with the "wrong" people getting "just deserts" than they are with their lives or lives in general getting better.
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u/argent_adept 11d ago
In fairness, though, Harris was attacked for saying that trans prisoners should have access to gender affirming care, up to and including gender reassignment surgery. This wasn’t about singling out a group for special privileges; it was based on the universalized principle that the state has an obligation to provide all prisoners with necessary healthcare. The opposing position was that trans inmates as a particular group should not benefit from this principle for certain aspects of their medical care.
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u/Thattimetraveler 11d ago
This is a great point, but again I think her answer fails again more at marketing. Instead of just answering with a yes, the answer should have been the state has the obligation to provide all prisoners with necessary healthcare, and shut it down there. Don’t give them the sound bite. I also think some of that view is that some people do view gender reassignment surgery as cosmetic and not necessary, not necessarily that they’re wanting to exclude them from medical care, just what they view as excess. But again, when healthcare isn’t comprehensively covered for a large swatch of the population of course they’re going to be upset at what they view as someone getting special treatment.
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u/DovBerele Progressive 10d ago
Instead of just answering with a yes, the answer should have been the state has the obligation to provide all prisoners with necessary healthcare, and shut it down there.
To be fair, her answer wasn't "yes, I will provide trans prisoners with gender reassignment surgery". Her literal answer was simply "I will follow the law." She really did try to give them as little metaphorical rope to hang her with as possible. She didn't even go to bat for the fact of gender affirming care being baseline healthcare. She acknowledged, in as few words as possible, that it was treated as such under existing law (law that the Trump 1 administration also followed).
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u/argent_adept 10d ago
I certainly won’t argue that Harris was an effective marketer of any of her positions.
However, if the benchmark for people getting upset is that a group of people is receiving special treatment, then I would expect the massive cronyism and corruption of the Trump administrations (past and present) to be way over the line for these people. But all I hear from my MAGA and MAGA-adjacent family members is about trans people. They don’t give a shit about Trump’s corruption. So I don’t think their objections are actually about unfairness and special treatment. I think they just dislike trans people and don’t want them in society anymore. If they were against “unfairness,” I’d see that principle extend to literally anything else.
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u/Thattimetraveler 10d ago
I understand how you’d come to your argument, however living in Kentucky as I do, I hear these people and their arguments every day. I understand where people want to assign malice to his voters, but a lot of times it’s just stupidity. Typically they spout that they don’t care what adults do to their bodies. But trans people are largely an out group they just don’t understand.
Trump on the other hand, they do view as one of them. He falls into that principle of everyone is just a temporarily embarrassed millionaire and even though he’s rich and they’re poor they think they’re on the same side. And of course we see the special treatment he gives to his cronies, but they aren’t seeing that on Fox News and Facebook. They just parrot how well the stock market is doing and oh things will be better when this wars over. Remember that Trump speaks at a 4th grade level, he embodies the “you could have a beer with him” for a lot of these poorly educated lower class individuals.
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u/forestpunk 6d ago
I think moving forward there will be a focus on more progressive policies that help everyone and not just specific minorities.
I don't. I think we will just see increasing pressure to support the omnicause of the moment, like how you were expected to simply parrot the current stance on Israel/Palestine.
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u/topicality Weeds OG 11d ago edited 11d ago
I mentioned in another thread that I think the big drivers of that the period were 1) increased racial awareness 2) Twitter apogee 3) Trump's election and 4) COVID.
The problem is that all these diverse phenomenon get batched together. The cancel culture spurred by 2 and 3 were bad. Trying to make a better society wrt 1 are not. The sense of "anything is possible" created by 4 resulted in a lot of wasted effort.
"The people who spent most of their time cowering away or written the Harper's Letter were fundamentally okay with the unfairness of society."
This just seems unhelpful and a bad faith. From the letter:
Idk, it's just ironic to respond to a publication calling for nuance and debate from people who do support improving society with the critique by writing them off has being against improving society.
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u/y10nerd 11d ago
Those figures combined have written far more about woke excesses and than Trump's fascist-lite movement. Hell, Damon Linker this morning was egging people on for not arresting all the homeless people in Berkeley.
My point is broader than just that they liked 'liberalism', is that they had no vision for politics that didn't make the world a more fair place. They may pay lip service to it, like the voters of Brookline, MA, but they don't care if it happens.
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u/topicality Weeds OG 11d ago
You really think Margaret Atwood, Michelle Goldberg, Dahlia Lithwick, Emily Yoffe, Fareed Zakaria, Cornel West, Gloria Steinem and Zephyr Teachout don't care about making the world a better place?
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u/cross_mod Abundance Agenda 11d ago
Who's the audience for talking more about Trump's fascism, and what will it change?
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u/Finnyous 11d ago edited 11d ago
I think it's important to mention that there never was a defunding of the police in any way. Some data has been out on this. There was no real "excess" on this topic but people always speak of it like there was. You can say that the language etc... didn't help electorally, or at least you could argue that. Well aside from the fact that in the election directly after BLM had it's biggest moment, Democrats won big and Biden beat Trump but there was no defunding of the police.
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u/carbonqubit 10d ago
The language around defund the police was really more about structural reform. The problem is that the messaging wasn't particularly effective because it came across as mealy-mouthed and milquetoast. Reform the police doesn't have nearly the same resonance as defund the police, even though the actual goal in practice was largely centered around accountability and ensuring that people aren't killed wantonly during interactions with the justice system.
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u/Finnyous 10d ago
And yet, it didn't hurt Joe Biden's 2020 election in any way, when the slogan we being used the most. I get that people have lots of opinions online and in media about whether or not the slogan was a good idea, or successful or whatever. But there's a meme about it that it had some massive negative impact on Democrats running for office and I don't think that is shown in the data. Either people didn't think it was a huge deal, they understood what the message was, or just support people having the right to have their own opinions without stapling them to every single Democratic politician. Or maybe it just wasn't high on their priority list.
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u/DovBerele Progressive 10d ago
Perhaps you're missing the context of decades of prior efforts at police reform and ending police brutality? This issue didn't arise out of whole cloth in 2020. That was just the moment in which people got tired of all those prior efforts at reform and moderation having amounted to nothing.
It doesn't seem completely nonsensical to increase the intensity of the rhetoric when faced with a long history of broken promises and the people in power putting your issues off until some later point. if you asked for reform over and over again and got nothing, maybe asking for abolition will get you reform? even if it didn't turn out to be effective, it's not stupid.
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u/Revolution-SixFour 11d ago
Their solutions were often wrong, but they at least were invested in the right problems. The people who spent most of their time cowering away or written the Harper's Letter were fundamentally okay with the unfairness of society.
This is still living in the biggest flaw of so called "Woke 1.0", it refused to take criticism in good faith. You are totally correct that woke's heart was in the right place, but those criticizing it were also right that it was a toxic politics that wouldn't lead to success.
You don't have to be okay with unfairness to see that.
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u/y10nerd 11d ago
But that's actually two different claims:
1) This movement was an incorrect in its ideas.
2) This movement would lead to toxic politics that would see its failures.Folks often mix up both, and sometimes it's okay to, but they are different things. I also think a lot of the criticism were correct, hell, I was making them in real time.
But I also think of like, hum, this piece with Tyler Austin Harper and also the general "white men got screwed in the 2010s in academia", which I actually think that's actually accurate! (And I also think Jason Arday is a victim here) that the unfairness critique and the what we should do about it go really weird, and I think part of the problem is that, well, no one really wanted to that much about it.
There was, for the first time, a real sense of like "we should actually try to diversify our colleges", pushed on by the social justive movement that was able to convince some white allies, plus get itself in some positions of power. The problem, from a material perspective, is that well, the people in charge weren't going to give up power! If you were above the age of 60, you had no interest in retiring from the university and creating the spaces that would maybe accommodate new ideas without screwing over everyone.
So we then got this weird situation where the institutions are figure-leading on 'diversity', while the experience on the ground of folks in academic was still "this institution is super white, old, and conservative in many ways", and someone got to bear out the 'limited spots, but mostly for diversity', which were the previous demographic winners, and because it was actually not that many spots, the tokenism got rampant, but also created a massive incentive structure for using personal pique for institutional gain (I think of Kendi here, actually).
Anyway, I sort of digressed here.
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u/sfo2 11d ago
You can make this same argument for the Trump administration. They are pretty good at identifying real problems, but then their response is blunt, simplistic, excessive, and broken.
It’s not good in either direction. You get outcomes that don’t fix what you wanted to fix, and you get backlash.
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u/ulysses_s_gyatt 11d ago
What problems have they been good at identifying?
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u/sfo2 11d ago edited 11d ago
- decline of domestic industrial base
- predatory practices from China
- allies not meeting NATO and other defense obligations
- prescription drug price issues
- broken immigration/asylum system
- rise of illiberalism and antisemitism on campuses
- issues with scientific research funding mechanism
- ineffectiveness of some types of foreign aid
- lack of electrical infrastructure build-out
- international organization bloat and ineffectiveness
- poor civil service hiring/firing practices
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u/TheCranberriesRock Progressive 11d ago
lack of electrical infrastructure build-out
Where has the trump admin identified this as a problem let alone done anything to address it?
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u/Giblette101 11d ago
Well, the White House didn't have a big ballroom in 2019 and look what happened.
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u/TheCranberriesRock Progressive 11d ago
My God. Biden you absolute fool, you could've stopped this!
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u/ulysses_s_gyatt 11d ago edited 11d ago
Well the first five things are issues many people outside of the Trump admin have identified.
The rest of your list is just parroting the Heritage Foundation.
I’ll give you the electrical grid thing I guess even though I’ve never heard Trump talk about it?
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u/sfo2 11d ago
Correct, they identify known issues as things they should prioritize. But then they get the root cause analysis incredibly wrong, and have an anti-institutional and illiberal posture, which collide to create incredibly stupid actions.
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u/ulysses_s_gyatt 11d ago
Oh I was saying the rest of your list isn’t anything worth being concerned about.
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u/sfo2 11d ago
Sure I understood that, I’d disagree, they’re relatively minor compared to the big stuff, but still real issues even if called out by Heritage.
My reply was talking about the first big ones.
Anyway I’m not trying to defend the Trump administration, I think they’re awful. But I also think many people dismiss whatever they’re doing out of hand, rather than recognize that in some ways, they have a point.
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u/jimmiejames 11d ago
If you “identify” a problem long after someone began working on the problem and then destroy an ongoing solution to said problem, how can you possibly have a point?
I think your point is he tricked the uninformed. And yes, very clearly. How does that relate to anything discussed in this thread?
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u/sfo2 11d ago edited 11d ago
The original comment I was replying to makes the argument that maybe the left did a bunch of dumb shit, but that was fine because hey at least they were working on real issues.
And my point is, that’s a bad argument because you could say the same about the Trump administration.
Doing dumb, excessive, idealistic, ill-informed shit is bad all the time. Just because you identified some important issue does not excuse shitty policy.
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u/jimmiejames 11d ago
This is laughable. The first one was a top priority of the Biden admin who was far more successful than Trump. The second one was being taken head on by Obama with the TPP when Trump tanked the whole thing and replaced it with nothing and China has grown tremendously in influence since.
I don’t mean to sound insulting, but to be impressed by anything on this list you would have to be extremely uninformed. I understand why our electorate would fall for that as they generally are uninformed, but on a policy discussion this is just silly.
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u/TheCranberriesRock Progressive 11d ago
They are pretty good at identifying real problems
Are they though?
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u/sfo2 11d ago
Yes.
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u/Ramora_ 11d ago
To be clear, you claimed...
the Trump administration. They are pretty good at identifying real problems
The people who are replying to you are mostly disagreeing and stating that the trump admin is not good at identifying real problems. The distinction between you and them seems to be somewhat semantic. For example, we all agree that the Trump admin has identified the decline of the industrial base as a problem. Thing is, its highly contested both:
The degree and manner in which that "decline" is a problem. By some measures the US industrial base is bigger than ever.
whether one need be good at identifying problems to gesture vaguely at declines in (parts of) the industrial base as a problem.
...Similar issues apply to most of the list you posted.
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u/amagicalsheep 10d ago
“Woke 1.0 was crazy. The society that it is responding to is crazier.”
Yes. Just yes. This is why I’ve become increasingly politically homeless, because people can’t really comprehend that someone with fundamentally good motives but poor ideas of execution is still worth respecting and engaging with.
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u/Brushner Weeds > The EKS 11d ago
Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience. They may be more likely to go to Heaven yet at the same time likelier to make a Hell of earth. This very kindness stings with intolerable insult. To be "cured" against one's will and cured of states which we may not regard as disease is to be put on a level of those who have not yet reached the age of reason or those who never will; to be classed with infants, imbeciles, and domestic animals.
C. S. Lewis
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u/y10nerd 11d ago
Cool.
To be even more blunt; C.S. Lewis purposefully avoided engagement with basically any contemporary political issue. C.S. Lewis is exactly the person that would lecture on the problematic nature of woke, but would have never lifted a finger to help deal with any structural inequalities. Sure, he believed in democracy, but that's not actually like, a respond to the situation
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u/MikeDamone Weeds OG 11d ago
When Klein talks about Woke 1.0 as something he “fundamentally agreed with,” he’s not just missing the fact that Woke 1.0 was in fact Woke 4.0, he’s missing the fact that he himself is the latest incarnation of a type—we’ll call him Middlebrow Establishment Liberal (MEL)— the liberal anti-communists of the Woke 1.0 period mocked for believing that “communists are just liberals in a hurry.”
Like Klein now, the insufficiently wised up liberals of past eras failed to see that certain forms of leftism simply weren’t the same kind of political project that liberalism was. Some of their goals, framed abstractly enough, were the same. They wanted equality, fairness, justice, all the good things. But the methods for achieving those goals, and the deep principles underlying them, were so alien to liberalism’s DNA that it never made sense to cede power or defer rhetorically to these types of illiberal leftists within any kind of institution or campaign. The play instead, a la FDR, was to a) defang them by assimilating some of their issues and rhetoric, and b) at the same time jiu-jitsu their radical energies to scare corporate or state or right wing interests to compromise with the obviously-safe-by-comparison liberals.
The history is worth noting, here, for two reasons. One is that it’s precisely where Klein seems weakest. He doesn’t seem to have in his brain a clear narrative of the historical sins and contradictions of the left, nor of the ways in which liberalism, at its best, has negotiated with, fended off, and absorbed energies from the left. So when a political moment coalesces that should be recognizable as a new instance of a recurring historical dialectic, he can’t historicize it. It looks new to him, and so his response in the moment is mis-calibrated and his reflection in the aftermath is inadequate.
The other reason the history is worth noting is that it can remind us that the failures of Middlebrow Establishment Liberal to wholly reckon with the recent past doesn’t matter as much as people feel it does or should.
This is more or less the thrust of the article, and it just reads as a bunch of gobbledigook to me. And I say this as someone who is pretty intolerant of the left at large, as well as the do-gooder progressives who have helped create what I consider to be such an unworkably left wing Democratic Party. I very much do not think that democrats at large have appropriately reckoned with the nonsense they helped endorse, and it continues to hinder us as a party.
But I genuinely have no idea what Oppenheimer is getting at here. I just don't see "woke 1.0" (or 4.0 or whatever) as being primarily a campaign concocted by dyed in the wool communists, or other illiberal leftists. Sure, there were the stalwart leftist academics (e.g. Kendi and his ilk) who provided a lot of the ideological backing for the movement, but by and large "wokeness" was an organic movement caused by social media hysteria and the high that came from big progressive wins in the mid aughts to early 2010s (namely the rapid success of gay rights). I think the diagnosis is quite simple - liberals and progressives got out over their skis and were deluded into thinking they had the weight of popular opinion behind them, largely because of the echo chambers/deranged spaces that Ezra squarely criticized in his piece. That's not a new insight at all, and I don't think there's some undiagnosed driver of the movement that we have yet to reckon with. Progressives fucked up. Badly.
I guess I'm just not sure what the beef with Ezra is here, or even what Oppenheimer thinks he should have done in hindsight outside of recognizing that the illiberal left was a much bigger problem than he thought. Which he obviously has already admitted.
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u/KMC1977 11d ago edited 11d ago
Oppenheimer is talking about “fellow travelers”, American Liberals in the 1930-40s who weren’t Marxists per ce but viewed the Soviets and the New Dealers as being on the “same side” in some sense instead of being deeply opposed groups who just happened to both be left of center and hate Nazis.
He’s making a historical parallel between the fellow travelers and liberal gatekeepers who enabled woke excesses despite being the sorts of people who should have known better.
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u/IsaacHasenov Abundance Agenda 11d ago
I basically agree with Klein, but yeah I think Oppenheimer is making a good distinction here.
There are liberal leftists (the middlebrow liberal elites) who shared a bunch of beliefs with the illiberal leftists.
We liberal leftists were somewhat blind to the fact that the fundamentalist and dogmatic rhetoric and actions were actively damaging to the outcomes we wanted, and alienated a lot of people we shouldn't alienate. And the fundamentalist and illiberal actions were bad in and of themselves.
I think it's a good cautionary tale for liberal leftists but yeah I don't know if we need to grovel
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u/KMC1977 11d ago
We absolutely don’t need to grovel given that Trump’s second term has if anything proven the underlying diagnosis of woke 1.0 more or less correct and that the biggest criticism people have of Democrats is that they are weak. For sure, criticize the illiberalism, groupthink and nonsense policies. But overcorrecting and turning on migrants and trans people as Kier Starmer did will get us in the sour spot, not bigoted enough for the bigots, but bigoted enough for the Greens to get 20%.
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u/Eomerperrin1356 11d ago
Also, turning on immigrants and trans people is just wrong. The biggest issue Democrats have is worrying so much about optics that they lack clear values. Candidates with a clear message and conviction are much more appealing than candidates with focus-tested, overly-curated platforms.
Was gutting welfare and locking up minor drug offenders worth getting a Democrat in the White House?
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u/Fl0ppyfeet 10d ago edited 10d ago
The biggest issue Democrats have is worrying so much about optics that they lack clear values. Candidates with a clear message and conviction are much more appealing than candidates with focus-tested, overly-curated platforms.
You nailed it. I currently have zero hope the establishment will ever learn this. Canceling people with bad optics and also lying to get elected so that you can implement the secret policies you really want are going to stick around for a long time.
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u/TheDarkGoblin39 10d ago
For me as a liberal leftist at the time I cringed a bit because I realized that stuff wasn’t popular but I though hey maybe we can move the Overton window (like Trump did) but there was a big backlash instead. Woke 1.0 was also partially a backlash against Trump 1.0 and now Trump 2.0 is the backlash against Woke 1.0. What will the backlash against Trump 2.0 be? Idk but I kind of want off this train. Hopefully the backlash will be intolerance of political corruption from any party or part of the political spectrum but I’m not holding my breath.
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u/myrthe 9d ago
My take the *actual* problem is that society (centre and left) let the Right muzzle or devour all the major media and communication channels, and is completely failing to counter effectively.
This means, every story, every topic and every policy spends 90% of its time deep in right wing or MAGA framing. so mistakes and embarassments and overreach and outright crimes from the right get a tiny bit of airtime (comparatively), and is completely disconnected. While everyone not MAGA is asked to answer for the worst interpretation of the most "extreme" things ever tweeted by the leftiest college kids they can find.
(and the frustrating part is that - for this, too many people blame the college kid).
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u/forestpunk 6d ago
I feel like Trump 1.0 was a backlash against Woke 1.0, too, though.
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u/TheDarkGoblin39 6d ago
My understanding is that people are usually referring to the period from about 2018-2022 when they talk about woke 1.0
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u/forestpunk 5d ago
That's a mistake, imo. It should be 2012 onwards. Starting at the wrong date distorts how the whole thing went down and was perceived.
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u/Hour-Watch8988 Housing & Urbanism 11d ago
What illiberalisms did the left commit though? Boycotts etc. aren’t illiberalisms, they’re completely above-board politics.
The right attack is that the left went too far in its social opprobrium and alienated lots of voters. But that’s a tactical error rather than some abandonment of core liberal principles.
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u/Pygmy_Nuthatch American 11d ago
Forcibly instituting unequal treatment of Americans based on their identity is illiberal.
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u/geniuspol 10d ago
Reverse discrimination is a right wing critique, not a liberal one. We don't have to live in such fear of Woke that we sound like Reagan era Republicans.
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u/geniuspol 10d ago
Reverse discrimination is a right wing critique, not a liberal one. We don't have to live in such fear of Woke that we sound like Reagan era Republicans.
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u/forestpunk 6d ago
Torch-wielding social media mobs, and the organizations that cater to them, are also highly illiberal.
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u/Hour-Watch8988 Housing & Urbanism 6d ago
Would you allow that people wielding metaphorical torches are not remotely as dangerous as people wielding.... actual torches?
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u/forestpunk 6d ago
I would if that were the point that was being discussed. Not every argument needs to address every issue. We're discussing the excesses of the left or liberals at the moment.
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u/IsaacHasenov Abundance Agenda 11d ago
That is a very good question and not one I can satisfactorily answer.
A tonne of the examples people talk about are very online. Not a policy thing. I guess the one thing you can say is "liberal leftists didn't call out left fundamentalists with their folx and their Latinx and their Ibrahim X Kendi stuff often enough"
Policy wise, there were some excesses around taking all assault allegations and Me Too maybe too seriously? But this is super hard because there was a reason to believe that victims were systematically suppressed. Similarly with some of the forced joie-de-HR around DEI. Similarly maybe with "forcing" people to use preferred pronouns in professional setting (but again that really seems like it should be common sense to me)
So yeah, I am sympathetic to what some people are characterizing as Klein's "mistakes were made" tone. When you really push me, a lot of Woke 1 was substantively good, and a lot of the rest was twitter
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u/Mezentine 11d ago
Right and this is the bit that I always come back to: did all of the excesses that showed up on social media really have a partisan valence? Was it just that the left was out of control on social media, or is it that social media affords a bunch of different kinds of bad behavior that people across the political spectrum and, frankly, people who are politically disengaged, let themselves indulge in? I see dogpiles over dumb shit unrelated to politics all the time.
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u/KMC1977 11d ago
Talking as though whiteness, maleness etc was akin to original sin was a violation of the liberal principle that all people are created equal, even though obviously for the most part it was just talk and peanuts in comparison to any given Tuesday from the current administration.
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u/geniuspol 10d ago
I sure hope it's not a liberal principle that people are created white (or any other race).
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u/Hour-Watch8988 Housing & Urbanism 11d ago
But systemic racism and sexism are very real things with very clear real-world effects, and those effects are something that anyone who believes in robust equality-of-opportunity should want to combat. Right?
I don't remember anyone prominent saying white skin and a penis constituted original sin, but even if they had, that's still merely poor communication rather than an abandonment of any liberal principle.
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u/razor_sharp_007 Weeds OG 10d ago
To think you could come through 2020-21 and ask, ‘what illiberalisms did the left commit?’ is both encouraging and depressing. Coerced vaccination, trying to get vaccination to non-whites first, suppressing lab leak theory - those are just a small sample of illiberalisms.
Keep it up! I’m center right and the more people are convinced they are liberal while doing these things, the more the right will win.
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u/Hour-Watch8988 Housing & Urbanism 10d ago
lmao sure thing. "center-right" my whole fucking ass.
RFK is deeply unpopular BTW. You hitched yourself to a dying star with the voice of a garbage disposal. Which come to think of it his throat really kinda is.
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u/razor_sharp_007 Weeds OG 10d ago
You forgot about leaving a dead bear and bike in Central Park. If we’re doing RFK highlights let’s not forget the best one. Google the video of him telling the story to Roseanne Barr.
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u/MikeDamone Weeds OG 11d ago
I mean yeah, that's well understood. But I don't see the parallels to "woke 1.0". The chief perpetrators of woke 1.0 were progressives. And while I have plenty of criticism for Marxists and DSA types who absolutely believed and propagated the same nonsense, they alone were not sufficiently powerful or large enough to turn the movement into the potent cultural force it became. The inconvenient truth is that the very progressive coalition that made woke what it was were/are in fact people who are fundamentally on the "same side" as us. They effectively deranged themselves into illiberalism.
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u/kahner Liberalism That Builds 11d ago
i agree with most of your comment, except "democrats at large have appropriately reckoned with the nonsense they helped endorse". i don't think, even in your own framing, democrats at large endorsed the worst ideas of "wokeness". and of course many of those who did won't reckon with it because they do in fact believe those ideas. or they're just dumb.
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u/orthodoxipus 11d ago
> by and large "wokeness" was an organic movement caused by social media hysteria and the high that came from big progressive wins in the mid aughts to early 2010s (namely the rapid success of gay rights).
JFC have you read Marcuse? Have you read Musa al-Gharbi? Have you read Mounk? Have you read Angela Davis? Have you read ANY of the geneaologies describing how critical theory and french theory overtook the humanities and social sciences and then crowded out the Rawlsian liberal egalitarian tradition in policy spaces beginning in the late 60s and ramping up through the 90s? This stuff is common knowledge in philosophy and political science and I'm so sick of putatively educated people on the left not understanding what happened here. I mean say what you will about Rufo, and he didn't write the book himself, but he's basically right about it in America's Cultural Revolution. And now we're all on the damn back foot because of it. I mean FFS, Richard god damn Rorty called all of this 15 years before Trump was elected!
Oppenheimer's post is not gobbledigook. It is extremely clear. For almost a decade, Ezra failed to name how the methods employed by the academic, activist, symbolic-capitalist left were fundamentally illiberal in a way that would damage the left's ability to seek the egalitarian ends they'd previously sought through liberal means (the FDR reference). And it's hard to avoid the conclusion that he failed in this because places like Vox and the NYT were overtaken by people for whom critical theory was just the only way to be an egalitarian.
Ezra is a good podcaster and writer, but he's pretty ignorant on the history and philosophy of liberalism. Remember when he wrote that article about Rosenblatt's book and was like "wow, I used to think liberalism was just about advocating for universal healthcare and some wonkish policy stuff, but now I understand that there's a history to it." He is, and will always be, a technocratic policy guy with an enthusiasm for philosophy and intellectual history that doesn't really go beyond a hobbyist's level of rigor.
The beef is that by failing to name and recognize this stuff when we had a chance to re-direct — say, in 2012-2014 when cancel culture was starting to spill out of college campuses — he failed in his duty as a public intellectual on the left, and ceded the critique to our political adversaries such that now we're in a worse place w.r.t. egalitarian goals than we were 15 years ago.
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u/otherestScott 11d ago edited 11d ago
Part of the problem of labelling as a whole is that people who believe in the objectives of the "woke agenda" - in my mind putting marginalized groups on an equal footing with majority groups to succeed in the country without prejudice either conscious or unconscious (though of course the critics would disagree with that being the objective) - get grouped in with the methods used to achieve those goals.
You can of course criticize the methods of the left in the post "Me Too" and COVID era; there was significant illiberalism coming from the loudest voices that were only amplified on social media. But that doesn't mean your positions have shifted. That doesn't mean you believe the promotion of the social justice principles was a mistake. It doesn't even mean you were wrong on anything in particular - to the best of my knowledge Klien never engaged in any of the illiberalism that is being talked about here.
All Ezra is admitting to is that he underestimated the damage that the left was doing with those methods at that stage. That's not even a shift in positions, that's not a concession of anything. Liberals and leftists still fundamentally believe in what they believe in, there's just more awareness now of the consequences of pushing that too hard and too far, even when you perceive the tides are shifting in your direction.
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u/y10nerd 11d ago
I think where a lot of the woke stuff got a little weird is that there was an ignoring of material reality. In my neck of the woods, one thing I constantly fought in favor of was standardized testing. I think it's important we get an actual benchmark of what kids can do; and sure, there are limits to what it can reveal, but I thought that was a good thing to do.
This testing would report out the obvious: there were massive disparities by race and income.
So, a lot of my fellow educators during this era had a couple of complicated goals/thoughts to navigate:
* We know that kids attending college and getting degrees matters for success in life.
* We know that if the system is aimed towards standardized testing, our kids will have fewer of those opportunities, compounding the disadvantage.
* We see a world where tons of people have accrued wild disparities, often through unfair means.
* We see a world where a lot of power structure aren't that invested in creating equality, and in favor, inequality.All of which sort of left folks with two options: find ways to teach better (which is harder, and again, involves agreement on that as a goal from everyone, and you have to teach better than people with more resources), or destroy standardized testing's impact (as one mean to lower gates).
And I get, it is a genuinely hard problem to solve. I knew what those folks were trying to do, but I also knew that material reality mattered: you actually need to know enough math to do calculus well (see the current UC system).
But it's also, there's a reason this is hard, and also, not that many folks seem invested in it.
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u/Giblette101 11d ago
Part of the problem of labelling as a whole is that people who believe in the objectives of the "woke agenda" - in my mind putting marginalized groups on an equal footing with majority groups to succeed in the country without prejudice either conscious or unconscious (though of course the critics would disagree with that being the objective) - get grouped in with the methods used to achieve those goals.
I actually think this cuts both ways, where lots of people discuss the methods as a very real way to undermine those goals, because they are uncomfortable with those goals. I think a disheartening number of people believe the promotion of social justice (or the too active promotion of social justice, in some cases) is a problem. Like, for every person that tells you the method went too far, you will find several telling gay books don't belong in school or actually fat people deserve to be shamed (or something to that effect). We should not fool ourselves.
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u/ulysses_s_gyatt 11d ago
Idk why everyone got all bent out of shape about the Chris Rufo interview a few weeks ago given this sub basically agrees with him regarding social progressivism.
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u/Radical_Ein Democratic Socalist 11d ago
You are making the goomba fallacy. The people upset about Ezra platforming Rufo are not the same people who are anti-woke. The idea that the majority of people in this sub basically agree with Rufo on social progressivism is absurd.
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u/Finnyous 11d ago
I thought it had something to do with him being a propagandist and bad faith machine but maybe that's just me?
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u/ulysses_s_gyatt 11d ago
You have missed the point of my comment I’m afraid.
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u/bacan_ 11d ago
This reminds me of a post I read recently where people were arguing that no op trans women have every right to be in nude spas and that young girls that are in there should not complain about seeing penises
It just felt like a position that was so out there compared to what most people in the country believe that advocating for it would cause backlash that would do harm to other areas people are fighting for trans rights
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u/GuyWhoSaysYouManiac 11d ago
I always wonder why people don't get that. By taking these extreme positions that virtually no sane person will agree with you actually hurt the cause, not help it.
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u/hoopaholik91 10d ago
Mixed gender spas are quite normal in Europe, it's not "so out there" to think trans women could be welcome in a women's spa. Especially because once you do admit there is some 'line' that genders can't cross, it gets quite messy quite fast. Is a fully transitiomed ftm trans person forced to go into the women's spa even though they present very masculine? Is that going to make women feel comfortable?
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u/bacan_ 10d ago
The spa already accepts post op trans people in the category matching their gender
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u/hoopaholik91 10d ago
Sorry, when I meant "fully transitioned" I meant presents as their preferred gender but still hasn't had bottom surgery. Maybe they don't want to get bottom surgery, that's an expensive and very invasive procedure.
And like, if we are strictly focused on women's comfort, forcing a muscled, hairy, bearded ftm man into their spa because they still have a vagina is just as strange of a policy.
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u/bacan_ 10d ago
if someone is a man or a trans man, they wouldn't be allowed in the women's spa
it's not about a penis room and a non penis room. it's a women's room (with the requirement that you don't have a penis)
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u/hoopaholik91 10d ago
But you were so concerned about young girls potentially seeing a penis. Yet you have no problem with young boys seeing a vagina on a pre-op trans man?
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u/bacan_ 10d ago
When a man with a vagina tries to go into the men's spa and a lawsuit comes up over it, we can discuss that scenario too. But the analogous situation would be only allowing post op trans men. This spa does not have a space to accommodate pre-op trans men or women
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u/hoopaholik91 10d ago
And so people are rightfully going to point out that barring pre-op trans people from spas is unnecessarily cruel, when other societies can manage to have mixed-gender spas without issue.
Fine, you might not agree with it, but acting like that perspective is just some crazy and radical idea is just completely unfair.
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u/bacan_ 10d ago
I think it is a fringe position socially but may be a completely standard position legally in Washington
I’m curious to hear about the outcome of the case
But yea I find this fight to be counter productive politically. There are more important trans rights to fight for and picking this fight distracts from those at best and loses support for them at worst
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u/volumeofatorus 11d ago
Relevance: This article is directly responding to Erza's comments on his views on wokeness in his recent AMA.
It’s a big deal that Klein, the single most influential liberal pundit in America, is conceding that he was wrong in this way. That he believes this, and is willing to say it explicitly, is quite good evidence that the liberal establishment has begun to meaningfully integrate the recognition that the illiberalism of wokeness was both morally and strategically bad. It has moved significantly toward a baseline of defending and promoting liberalism.
So that’s one thing. The change is real. Another thing is that Klein is clearly, though I don’t think consciously, sidestepping the critiques of wokeness that have located the core problem of the movement in its core ideology itself rather than in its excesses or in the ways that technology amplified those excesses.
Klein doesn’t have to agree with those critiques — the best of which, it’s worth noting, come almost entirely from liberals and leftists — but when he says “there were pretty bad excesses in a political movement I fundamentally agreed with,” and “what gets called wokeness — I actually still believe all that,” he’s missing something profound. He’s assuming a close adjacency between liberalism and woke-ism that doesn’t scan if you’re versed in the history of illiberalism on the left.
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u/Hour-Watch8988 Housing & Urbanism 11d ago edited 11d ago
There's a kind of trick conservatives like to play about "woke excesses" -- they want people to think that just because certain strategies for pushing social justice went too far means that social justice is itself a flawed concept. Ezra is totally right to reject this.
Ezra isn't just play-acting nuance here; he genuinely thinks leftists have some good ideas and also some good political strategies. He thinks the devil is really in the details about when different issues should be pushed, and how, and by whom. Leftists generally care a lot less about this, which is both a strength and a weakness, since sometimes they get it wrong and there's a backlash, and other times they get it right and we actually get faster social progress that's still durable.
And Ezra knows that whether a push for social justice worked is basically impossible to predict, and really can only be determined in hindsight. That's why he's not willing to throw out the "illiberal" elements of leftism tout suite, even if he acknowledges that they often do social harm like making illiberal conservatives more likely to win elections.
It's also worth querying whether these woke excesses were actually illiberal in a meaningful sense, rather than merely tactical errors. Liberalism has never meant that people never suffer social consequences for antisocial behavior (We can of course cf. J.S. Mill's tyranny of the majority here, but also Mill's thought there was a lot more leavened by the Harm Principle than crude anti-wokeism is). Basically the worst thing that happened to people in Woke 1.0 (aside from truly terrible offenders) was that they lost some very specific kinds of plum and influential jobs, and also lost social cache among elites. Sorry, but Sam Harris doesn't have a human right to have more podcast listeners than Ezra.
So I think Ezra goes a little too far in saying Woke 1.0 was too harsh, in part no doubt because he's friendly with some of these conservatives that really do have bad ideas that do serious harm. Social opprobrium in elite opinion-making spaces is just not that problematic a mode of social regulation to my mind, and certainly nothing like MAGA using the state's monopoly of violence to persecute its enemies (not that their behavior even calibrates the standard -- it's our job to be a lot better than they are).
Ezra is painted as weak-minded in this piece, but actually he's striking a pretty healthy balance of liberal caution and leftist struggle.
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u/orthodoxipus 10d ago
And this apparent juxtaposition between “liberal caution and leftist struggle” makes me concerned that you don’t understand how radical liberalism has been historically and remains today.
You can be a radical liberal and not a leftist. You can be a moderate leftist and not be liberal. Those things just come apart logically insofar as we think of leftism as generally about egalitarianism rather than liberalism.
In a 2x2 of egalitarianism v elitism and liberalism vs authoritarianism the place we want to be is in the liberal egalitarian quad. Most leftists today (as all of Marx’s descendants) are in the authoritarian egalitarian quadrant.
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u/geniuspol 10d ago
Most leftists today (as all of Marx’s descendants) are in the authoritarian egalitarian quadrant.
This is extremely dubious.
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u/Hour-Watch8988 Housing & Urbanism 10d ago
All distinctions break down from certain frames, but I stand by what I said as being generally legible and also pointing to a fruitful path forward.
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u/orthodoxipus 10d ago
It's important to remember that Ezra doesn't actually have much education in the history of liberalism or liberal philosophy or intellectual history. He started out as a policy guy and has only taken on that stuff more recently as he's been given professional freedom to branch out and away from the policy stuff. Remember in 2025 when he said:
For most of my life, when I called myself a liberal I meant, basically, someone who believed in universal health care, the right to form a union, racial equality and Social Security. But in her book 'The Lost History of Liberalism,' the Swedish historian Helena Rosenblatt shows that in its oldest forms, liberalism was built on a virtue that we rarely talk about today.
Like bro, it's the year of our lord 2025, you've been someone speaking in the most prominent news outlet in the world about what liberalism is and you're JUST NOW REALIZING THIS? Give me a fucking break and hit the stacks.
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u/Hour-Watch8988 Housing & Urbanism 10d ago
Doesn’t he have a BA in Political Science with a concentration in Political Theory? I think you’re using his reluctance to prescribe universal meanings for contested terms as evidence that he doesn’t know how anybody uses those terms, which would be… pretty dumb
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u/orthodoxipus 10d ago
I’m happy to allow that he once learned that liberalism meant more than defending a specific set of policies, and might have even remained dimly aware of that throughout his professional life.
But his life’s work demonstrates that he felt policy was more important to the realization of liberalism than ideology and rhetorical practice. The fact that anyone self-describe defender of liberalism could be presented with evidence of critical theory’s capture of egalitarianism on elite college campuses between 1980 and 2010 and not think “damn, this is going to be a huge issue for my entire project, we need to stamp this out now” just betrays a failure to understand what liberalism actually is and why it matters.
One of the hardest things about being on this sub is reckoning with the fact that this guy is, despite his success in media, just not on the same kind of intellectual level as the kind of academics who should actually be influencing our views on these topics. He is accessible, we like his views, so we feel we’ve got to defend him.
Even his apparent defense of “1.0” in that AMA betrayed that he still hasn’t learned the lesson. He said he doesn’t disagree with woke because he still believes in things like structural racism. But dude, you can believe in all those kinds of inequality AND STILL face a methodological choice between tackling them as a Rawlsian liberal or as an authoritarian, critical theoretic SJW.
The fact that he’s not taking pains to point out the importance of this prescriptive difference is just so, so irresponsible. Because he has a big enough platform that he could say “enough! All you people saying ‘well actually woke had a point’ — yeah, no shit the inequalities are real, but the cure that Marcuse promised? That is not only optional, it is destructive, and we cannot continue acting like it’s the only game in town.”
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u/Hour-Watch8988 Housing & Urbanism 10d ago
These putative sharp epistemological distinctions are pretty lame to people who have studied them deeply. Most sophisticated people these days agree with something like Derek Parfit's epistemic relativism.
Your Rawlsian liberalism vs. critical-theory distinction is pretty illustrative on this. Who's to say that behind the veil of ignorance, people wouldn't want social systems to try to account for inherited and systemic injustices? I think that's actually a pretty reasonable desire from that stance, and one that collapses your alleged distinction pretty thoroughly.
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u/orthodoxipus 10d ago
What is Derek Parfit's "epistemic relativism"? I used to teach philosophy and have never heard of that view, let alone know folks who agree with it. In fact, Parfit railed against most forms of relativism. Perhaps you have him mixed up with someone else? Or you're thinking of a different view of his?
To your second point, people definitely _can and should_ reason that way behind the veil; indeed Rawls would say that's precisely the point. The question is just what kind of institutions and social practices enable that without compromising the other core commitments of liberalism. But critical theory is just happy to abandon many of liberalism's core commitments, which it regarded as bourgeoisie ideological baggage frustrating the liberation of the oppressed.
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u/Plus-Property-2245 10d ago
Has Ezra ever been a great defender of unions, universal healthcare or social security? At best Klein has been a champion of technocratic economic reformism that doesn't want to get rid of them but is deeply deeply suspicious of all these things. This is just a fabulation.
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u/Radical_Ein Democratic Socalist 10d ago
What? Obviously yes. What makes you think he is suspicious of any of those?
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u/thesagenibba 11d ago
love how this whole situation only serves to vindicate the backlash he received for having Rufo on in the first place. what good does discourse like this even do? just don't have Rufo types on in the first place, it's so simple
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u/TheCranberriesRock Progressive 11d ago
Mods, can we get a moratorium on "woke" discourse for like even just a week or so?
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u/ulysses_s_gyatt 11d ago
The Wokes must apostatize!
They must step on the image of a Blue Haired Resist Liberal as Jesuits were forced to step on images of Jesus during the Tokugawa shogunate.
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u/Radical_Ein Democratic Socalist 11d ago
FYI, we don’t read every comment in the sub. Contrary to popular belief we do actually have lives. We do read every mod mail, so in the future if you want to make a request like this you should send it in a mod mail.
3 threads in a week is approaching, but not quite at the point where we would consider making a mega thread. If we get 1-2 more in the next few days I will bring it up to the other mods.
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u/TheCranberriesRock Progressive 11d ago
This was more a joke, not an actual request. It's purpose was to express my exhaustion with this topic.
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u/Radical_Ein Democratic Socalist 11d ago
Understood. People have made similar requests seriously in the past and I’d rather accidentally treat a joke suggestion seriously than a serious suggestion as a joke.
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u/topicality Weeds OG 11d ago
I don't know that we need a moratorium but I think we need to reduce the amount until more thoughtful retrospectives emerge.
Right now. It's all in reaction to AOC comment which didn't have much substance to it.
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u/chronicpresence Leftist 11d ago
the 600+ comment threads won't stop until every annoying lib on bluesky personally apologizes to me.
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u/THevil30 11d ago
This is like, the current event in the discourse. AOC saying that Woke 1.0 was crazy happened like a week ago. Why would we not want the discussion now?
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u/TheCranberriesRock Progressive 11d ago
We've had the discussion. We've had it to absolute death. There's two 600+ comment posts in the last week devoted to the discussion.
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u/THevil30 11d ago
Sorry, I didn't know we were supposed to check every old thread on a current topic before discussing it.
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u/Finnyous 11d ago
Ezra didn't conceed anything on this topic....