Is The Woke Era Really Over?
The anti-woke crowd is declaring victory. Are they kidding themselves?
Depending on what kind of echo chamber you hang out in, the victory cries of the anti-woke crowd have been reverberating at increasing volume. And why not? The trouncing of Democrats on November 5 and the decisive resurrection of Donald Trump has been framed in many corners as a full-throated rebuke of identity politics. Never mind factors such as the DNC’s lies about the president’s cognitive decline or the fact that the party unilaterally swapped in a candidate who would almost certainly not have won a primary race. The big election takeaway boiled down to “All you rainbow-haired, gender-fluid, land-acknowledging TikTok car criers: your time is up. The problematic people are in charge now.”
As such, the floodgates have opened. And it’s not just edgelords and shitposters making rancid jokes on X. High-profile progressives like Ezra Klein have sharply criticized Democrats for mismanaging the once-thriving coastal cities that reliably voted for them and for letting reductive notions of race cloud their understanding of the needs of minorities. Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who has always performed above grade level when reading a room, stealthily removed her pronouns from her X bio. HBO has stated that it will stand by J.K. Rowling as it revamps the Harry Potter franchise as a television series.
In a deliciously unexpected turn, 1980s teen-sitcom-star-turned-indie-filmmaker Justine Bateman emerged as an unlikely folk hero, offering deadpan director’s notes on #Resistance meltdown videos. As every scrappy Substacker tries to get Bateman’s attention (yes, I emailed her and, yes, I’m still waiting to hear back), Bateman has already appeared on Fox News and been interviewed for The Free Press, where she said her anti-woke television script, formerly kryptonite to industry executives, would finally get a green light.
Since I’m an OG nuance monger, I should be elated. Our time has come! All those guest lists from which my name mysteriously slid off will surely have me reinstated. All those campus speaking invitations that evaporated when I started talking about culture war issues will be flying into my inbox at such a rate that I’ll have to find a new agent, which is to say an agent, since my last one decided to go in other directions.
With anti-wokeness declared the hottest trend since disco, the paparazzi will follow my heterodox pals and me as if we were Studio 54 kids in 1978.
With anti-wokeness declared the hottest trend since disco, the paparazzi will follow my heterodox pals and me as if we were Studio 54 kids in 1978. Interview magazine will assemble us for a sprawling photo shoot in a sun-drenched and lavishly dilapidated loft, where we’ll each strike our iconic pose. Bari Weiss will be in the center, leaning forward with elbows on knees like a boss. I’ll be in the third row, craning my neck so as not to be blocked by some millennial with more podcast listeners. Peter Boghossian will fix a pugilistic gaze into the camera while Jesse and Katie from Blocked and Reported stare obliviously into space, seemingly unaware that cameras were ever invented. Off to the side, the Red Scare girls will snort coke off Aella’s backside.
The woke age is over. And we mean it this time. We’re not talking about the “go woke, go broke” exhortations to virtue-signaling corporations that have been circulating for a while now. This is more like “get off the woke train before you find yourself wearing bell-bottoms in 1982; now, that was embarrassing.” Or maybe even “stay woke and find yourself on the wrong side of history.” (I say that with apologies to Erykah Badu, original purveyor of the modern day of “stay woke” coinage, and zero apologies to the lemming brigades that have spent the past decade compulsively setting their watches five minutes ahead and defining “wrong side of history” as anything that happens in the meantime.)
There’s a difference between deciding it’s now safe to run around using the word “retarded” and actually feeling safe sharing your heterodox opinions with your MSNBC-watching friends.
But is woke really dead? Maybe the tide is tugging gently at the shallowest waters, but come on now. There’s a difference between deciding it’s now safe to run around using the word “retarded” and actually feeling safe sharing your heterodox opinions with your MSNBC-watching friends. If my immediate circles are any indication, we’re not there yet. Not even close.
The Unspeakeasy, my community for freethinking women, is brimming with stories about not being able to connect with progressive friends and family members left catatonic by the election results. At Bluesky, the social media platform at which millions of X users are now seeking asylum from the political ravages of Elon Musk, users freely—and often gleefully—share lists of especially problematic and block-worthy users. (Dipping my toe in the other day, I unwisely typed my name in the search field and was greeted with posts from literary types lamenting my red-pill-induced reputational death.) On Wednesday, a friend who runs a Jewish organization at a large public university got spit on and called a “Jewish terrorist” during a hostage awareness event. Meanwhile, the hosts of The View are still doing their best unfrozen leftist cavewoman impression and Roxane Gay is still writing columns like this and commenters are swooning in solidarity.
Oh, and despite her new pronoun-free lifestyle, AOC once again proved to have little grasp on the nuances of the trans debate on Wednesday, blasting her GOP colleague’s Capitol Building bathroom bill as “disgusting” and somehow a pathway to girls and women having to submit to inspection of their private parts.
In other words, wokeness, like its major antagonist Trumpism, is surprisingly hardy. And as sociologist Musa al-Gharbi points out in his new book, We Have Never Been Woke, the “wokeness” that’s permeated society for the past decade is actually a form of woke-avoidance; a way for elites to pay lip service to social justice principles while getting on with the business of getting all they can. (More on that when al-Gharbi visits the podcast in a few weeks.)
As such, any rumor of wokeness’s demise is likely to be greatly exaggerated. Mark my words: come the inauguration in January—and quite possibly for the next four years—it’s only going to get worse. The cool kids might be enjoying their 15 minutes of schadenfreude, but take it from this Gen Xer: to be actually cool is to not care about being cool. It is to find comfort, and even a strange beauty, in detaching from things beyond our control. It’s also to know that running around calling everything “retarded” just because you can is not cool. That’s not the sound of victory. It’s the sound of gloating.
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Btw, as I've said many times, the key to "retarded" is to use it SPARINGLY and on the right occasions. The edge-youths just use it all the time and indiscriminately. There's an art to it.
I have only known Meghan from her podcasts — but the writing in this post will keep me coming back for more. Reading her prose is like watching a champion figure skater.