Fixing What Woke Broke
Are we past the excesses of "peak woke" or still stuck with the consequences? How could we fix it?
There was a recent minor fracas on twitter (where all the important fracases are held) in which Kat Rosenfield noted that, during the height of the woke era (circa 2020), an Oscar winning writer wrote in favor of banning Gone With The Wind. One journalist responded with the functional equivalent of “why are you so obsessed with this ancient sin”, which is not a very good way to get people to stop talking about something.
I love it when two topics that I care about collide. In case, the two topics are “woke-era censorship” and “grace and repentance”.
There are a couple questions to ask on this topic. The question being put to Kat was essentially “when should we stop talking about the sins of the peak woke?” The obvious answer (to me) is “never” simply because there are some really valuable lessons about history and human behavior baked into how people and institutions behaved during peak woke.
I am also sidelining the question of whether or not “peak woke” actually ended or if it became more subtle and relegated to certain subcultures such as academia and entertainment. We can argue about that some other time, I’m going to take as a starting point that there was a stage of cancellations and censorship that occurred around 2019-2022 that were particularly egregious and that things haven’t been as bas in the the last few years, especially on the issue of active censorship (in which voices or works of art are being actively removed from public view).
The argument can be made that peak woke hasn’t subsided but has evolved into a low-key insidious force. For the sake of my argument here, I’m going to slide around that debate and simply say “It happened, the worst is over, most people agree it was bad.” Doing this allows us to ask the much more important question of “What should we do (or should have done) about the excesses of peak woke?”
Connor Friedersdorf offers a moderate stance that we can close the book on this topic “when the people who did the damaging thing acknowledge that it was bad and promise never to do it again”. This recognizes that a wrong has been done and that people should feel some form of shame or regret for their role in this thing. If there were to really be some sort of reconciliation or recovery from that era, this would be a necessary step but not a sufficient one.
Words are cheap. People say things they don’t mean all the time as a way of avoiding the hard questions. I call this “whoopsie daisy politics”: when something really awful happens and later everyone acknowledges that there was a grave injustice, but no one is punished. The guilty (and often their ideological allies) just shrug their shoulders and say “oopsies, my bad” but there are no consequences for the guilty and no recompence for the victims.
The implied lesson is “I guess we learned not to do it again.”
I don’t like this path for a lot of reasons, the first being that it doesn’t recognize any of the core personal or institutional failures that allowed “peak woke” to rampage through our culture. There are a hundred smaller, less glaring injustices that clear the brush for the greater cruelties. This “oopsie” strategy that seeks the minimum absolution without admitting that it was a part of a larger movement for which no apologies are coming.
I’m more interested in structural reform. I think we need stronger cultural protections against speech and ideological discrimination among corporations and in academic settings. These protections need to be formalized so that we can point to a law, an university bylaw, or a corporate policy and say “you promised never to do this, we have that as a formal part of your official policy.” I’ve been arguing this for many years (there are a few chapters in my book on this) and have gotten so frustrated with the lack of reform that I’m sympathetic to “burn it down” populism because at least it acknowledges the scale of the problem.
However, I also understand that structural reform must be imposed from the top down. No one in any of these institutions (corporate, political, or academic) wants to change the nature of the power they currently employ. During Covid, I argued that we need much stronger checks on executive emergency power, which would protect conservatives from an overbearing or totalitarian Democratic executive and protect liberals and progressives from an overbearing or totalitarian Republican executive. In the end, neither party wants to restrict executive power because they have thrilling fantasies about what they are going to do the next time they come into that power. They love power more than freedom. I can argue against this until I’m blue in the face, but it’s a losing argument.
In light of this failure to persuade, I don’t want to throw up my hands, shake the dust off my feet, and shout curses into the night sky. I want to suggest another path, one that I would like to see institutions adopt but also that we can adopt on a smaller scale in order to maintain a sanity check within our own schools, churches, and communities.
My proposal is this: elevate and promote the people who said “this is stupid and bad” when it was actually happening. These are the people who can see clearly when the rest of the world has gone mad. If I had my way, these people would be put in charge. The very least we could do is give them a seat at the table and listen to them.
