Sullivan Explains The Win

Questioning why the adults can’t seem to muster the guts to say “no” to the woke might seem like a lost cause. There are no doubt many reasons and influences that go into this morass. Andrew Sullivan has waded into the puddle in an effort to explain why woke is winning.

It’s been a staggering achievement, when you come to think of it. Critical theory was once an esoteric academic pursuit. Now it has become the core, underlying philosophy of the majority of American cultural institutions, universities, media, corporations, liberal churches, NGOs, philanthropies, and, of course, mainstream journalism. This summer felt like a psychic break from old-school liberalism, a moment when a big part of the American elite just decided to junk the principles that have long defined American democratic life, and embrace what Bari Weiss calls “a mixture of postmodernism, postcolonialism, identity politics, neo-Marxism, critical race theory, intersectionality, and the therapeutic mentality.”

There are two questions here. First, the one begged by Sullivan’s question, whether woke is winning or it’s merely the fashion trend of the moment. Designers raise and lower hemlines all the time because they wouldn’t be able to sell new dresses if the old ones were still in style. Is progressive ideology a paradigm shift or just the latest in hip fashion? Certainly, it has and will continue to do harm as it’s turning its dogma into law and policy and destroying lives in the process. But that doesn’t mean it’s here for good, as history shows how waves of new ideas are born, gain traction, then die a brutal death when the next wave washes over the unduly passionate.

Is this different? Is woke here to stay?

It’s everywhere. Across the country, schools and colleges are dumping SATs so they can engineer racial equity, and abolish the idea of merit. The Smithsonian backed the idea that working hard, showing up on time and perfecting a task are functions of “whiteness”. In California, there’s a ballot initiative to legalize government discrimination on the basis of race; and a new mandate that company boards add members from under-represented communities. Corporations who haven’t publicly committed themselves to the full woke project are being hounded by their employees into doing so, meaning hiring and firing on the basis of race, or forcing employees into re-education sessions, guided by DiAngelo and Kendi. The NBA, for Pete’s sake, is now a festival of wokeness, even as viewership collapses. CRT propaganda like the NYT’s 1619 Project can be exposed as untrue and unethical, but the paper can both debunk it in its own pages and still hail it as a triumph. And the pièce de resistance: 21 percent of liberal students in the Ivy League favor some level of violence to stop campus speech they disapprove of.

It’s almost as if the first question, whether woke is here to stay, might not matter if it “wins” enough and establishes itself in education, law and culture firmly enough. So why is it working when it’s every bit as authoritarian and illiberal as white supremacy? Sully offers his reasons.

The first, it seems to me, is emotional. The reason so many people marched this summer was because of a righteous revulsion at the visceral image of a black man being murdered slowly on the street by a bad, white cop.

But this had always been the case, even after video of police abuse became available, and nobody outside of a few criminal defense lawyers and our friends gave a damn.

The second reason for CRT’s triumph is that it’s super-easy. Social inequalities are extremely complicated things. A huge variety of factors may be in play: class, family structure, education, neighborhood, sex, biology, genetics and culture are some of them. Untangling this empirically in order to figure out what might actually work to improve things is hard work. But when you can simply dismiss all of these factors and cite “structural racism” as the only reason for any racial inequality, and also cover yourself in moral righteousness, you’re home-free.

Granted, it’s “super easy,” even if grossly simplistic. But that’s true of all simple solutions to complex problems.

Then there’s the deep relationship between CRT and one of the most powerful human drives: tribalism. What antiracism brilliantly does is adopt all the instincts of racism and sexism — seeing someone and instantly judging them by the color of their skin, or sex — and drape them with a veil of virtue.

Sure, it’s stereotyping under a new name, but we’ve always stereotyped because there’s no other way to function but to make assumptions about people that way.

Social aspiration also plays a part. The etiquette of wokery is increasingly indispensable for high society.

Be woke and you get invited to cool parties, have tons of fans on twitter and demonstrate that you know which fork to use when jabbing the privileged in their heart?

There’s little doubt, either, it seems to me that there is a religious component to wokeness. A generation of nones can feel bereft of transcendence and meaning, and “becoming woke”, like being “born again,” fills that spiritual hole. In an atomized and lonely age, feeling as if you are on “the right side of history”, banishing doubt, joining with countless of your fellow converts in marches and seminars, can abate the isolation and emptiness of it all.

There are a few human needs at play here. The need to believe in something is one of them, as well as the need to have someone to hate and blame for all the misery life dumps on you. Woke fills that void in many ways, plus you get to feel righteous about it as you slaughter the barbarians at the gate.

So is Sullivan right? Is woke winning because it deserves to win, or is it just the next crusade to save the holy land? Or will it disappear overnight, disavowed by all the cool kids, when it inevitably dawns on the elite that it’s just the next new Jim Crow with black people and women getting to drink from the good water fountain?