What is the end game of woke politics?
Controversies of late have shown how wokeness continually infects many corners of public life. The tinfoil hat inventions of some quirky academic theorists have certainly gained astonishing traction. Adherence to it has quickly become something of an ideological litmus test for the left. For this, we definitely owe something to the bemusing knack Donald Trump has for getting people to work themselves into fits of radical rage. The saddest, and almost pitiful, part of it all is how obvious it is that most of those who claim to be one with the race and gender obsessives are doing it out of pure political expedience. What I ponder at this moment is: what is the end game here?
The self-debasement to which we’ve borne witness during the Democratic primaries indicates the lack of self-awareness that has plagued members of the party. Marianne Williamson is, of course, a spiritual phenomenon. The spectacle of having her white supporters apologize to her black ones feels like something out of a rally hosted by the Reverend Jim Jones. Candidates like Kirsten Gillibrand and Beto O’Rourke have reduced their campaigns to something of a self-immolating joke. They are so desperate to demonstrate how newly enlightened and attune they are to the wisdom of the woke faction that they are perfectly willing to embarrass themselves on a daily basis. It is quite the advertisement for the alternatives to that no-good Hitlerite sitting in the Oval Office. One scratches their heads in search of answers for how it’s a sound political strategy to speak to white women condescendingly about their privilege; or cynically belabour the point that America is founded on white supremacy, even telling a group of immigrants that this is so. This will surely impress the average middle-of-the-line voter of which they are so desperately in need. In launching a bombardment on the Trump White House with the race and gender campaign, they are taking some almost admirable risks.
To no surprise, the struggle against Trump relies on the construction of over-the-top narratives to destroy his hopes for a second term. The idea that Trump is an unrepentant racist is on its own rather trite, so Trump’s peculiarities on the matter of race (think of them what you will) should be regarded as evidence for the wider narrative that America is at its foundation malevolent. It’s not solely Trump’s fault that he’s a bigot; he’s only a germ of the white supremacist disease that has afflicted America since the beginning.
The latest salvo in this campaign has come courtesy of the institution that has long been an astute force for the cause: that bastion of truth, the New York Times, which recently launched the 1619 project. Its intent, of course, is to bombastically pursue the thesis that the arrival of slaves in 1619 actually marks the country’s founding, as the real Founders are mere masters of lies and subterfuge.
It has elicited much praise (from the left) and scorn (from the right) over the last week or so, with some nuanced discussion cutting through the noise. Some of the historical detail in the first installment — -and in the rest of the project — — can surely be revelatory. I found much value in the feature in which a group of law students tell moving tales of the challenges faced by their families and working hard to get to where they are (which, ironically, does more to buttress the idea of America as a land of opportunity and hope for all than it does to debunk it). But much of it would bore anyone who has ever attended the average undergraduate or graduate seminar on American history or critical theory. The main thesis finds its essence in the maxims of leftist idols like Michel Foucault, particularly his trademark: “power is everywhere.” In this case, it’s “white supremacist” power.
Conservatives are indeed incensed by the project due to its propagandistic nature. They have a reason to be: Though there’s some quality work, it’s crafting a bunch of weak syllogisms (see Jamelle Bouie’s argument that the Republican’s “aggressive effort to secure conservative victories” is clearly redolent of a “ style of extreme political combat that came to fruition in the defense of human bondage”) in an unscrupulous attempt to delegitimize America and provide intellectual ammo for the arguments for reparations or any similar initiative.
Those objecting to the ideology underpinning the project are being derided as far-right know-nothings. Ishaan Tharoor, a writer who has mastered the art of making the term “far-right” meaningless, boils down the criticism to “far-right” halfwits who are petrified of history. “For right-wing nationalists, there’s little room for the recognition of fundamental evil, of an original sin, in the founding myth of the nation,” he asserts.
Similarly, Eric Levitz, another writer who’s very good at miscasting arguments, avers that the “histrionic” critics of the project are engaging in “white identity politics.” If they would “simply choose to identify as Americans” instead of as white Americans, “then they’d free themselves” from this compulsion to defend the sainthood of the Founders. Some of the outrage is indeed “histrionic” and overblown, but the crux of this argument explains the discontent: defending the founding principles and institutions of America is now synonymous with defending the country’s grave racial sins. Any defence of Thomas Jefferson or George Washington is rooted in solidarity with their whiteness and not in reverence for the propositions they put forth — -in spite of their shortcomings — -to help construct a free, constitutional republic. He contends that Americans from Washington to Harriett Tubman are all from the “same human family,” and if the critics recognized this, they’d sympathize with the project. And he forms a false binary that suggests that if one defends the Founders, they are repudiating the heroism of people like MLK. This is intellectual dishonesty of the highest order since there is a clear philosophical thread that ties the Declaration of Independence to the I Have a Dream speech. And this tradition is what most of the critics are defending in the first place.
All of this is bilge but is to be expected because no objections to the idea that America’s birth was actually in 1619 and slavery defines the nation could be in good faith. Those who do object are just being intransigent in their defense of the white supremacist status quo.
There is also the concept of “punching up,” which is one of the more nettling aspects of the project and culture that inspired it as it asserts that these interpretations of history are somehow absent from the public discourse. The project is reframing American history because, for generations, Americans “have not been adequately taught this history.” This is quite obviously a scurrilous statement. Given the ideological make-up of most history departments, hagiographic accounts of the Founding Fathers or appreciations of the Constitution are likely the last things you’ll hear. The social justice “woke” narrative prevails indeed. But the denial of this shows the delusions that so pervade the current moment. As Andrew Doyle has said, these people who have the cultural clout delude themselves into thinking that they don’t so they can say they’re unwilling to conform and being recalcitrant in the face of the oppressive class. In their mind, there is no “free society” so much as there is a limitless list of things from which to “liberate” themselves since Western liberty is a sham and a cover for exploitation. It doesn’t much matter if they are the dominant influence in much of the culture and institutions.
Such a narrative provides a reason to feel as if what they’re offering is always a novelty, particularly one they hope will shift the nation’s consciousness in their revolutionary direction to undermine what the Pope of the New Left, Herbert Marcuse, called the “exploitative order.” To him, dismantling everything from the culture and linguistics to the institutions was a necessity because everything was tainted by this order of domination. Here’s how he put it in this passage from “An Essay On Liberation”:
It has been said that the degree to which a revolution is developing qualitatively different social conditions and relationships may perhaps be indicated by the development of a different language: the rupture with the continuum of domination must also be a rupture with the vocabulary of domination.
We most certainly see this manifested when Joe Biden panders to the woke base, saying we must transform the “English jurisprudential culture, a white man’s culture.” Or when the dog whistle specialists portray any encomium of Western civilization’s goodness as an appeal to the dominant “white and Christian” culture. The problem is that many on the left appear so Manichean in their view of history and current affairs that they repel ordinary people who are quite fond of where they live and perfectly capable of also acknowledging that there are shades of darkness that need to be addressed through public policy. The left’s failure to adequately do both at the same time can alienate many.
Indeed, the project and the Democratic campaigns could be framed to spark a national conversation about America’s past that could address these grim subjects in a way that’d be unifying. Instead, they’re serving mainly as a barrage of demagogic political tracts that will inflame the divides within an already embittered populace.
So, is the end game burning it all down and forcing the white majority into atonement for collective sins? Is that the only solution to white supremacy and Donald Trump? What if the voters rebuke the wokeness and the demonic Donald ascends to the White House for another four years? What shall they do, then? I’m inclined to assume they’ll double down and see it as a vindication of the notions that pepper the 1619 narrative and only radicalize their politics further in response. Perhaps a defeat could serve as a referendum on woke politics, delivering its adherents back to something at least somewhat resembling reality. But from their performances, we can glean that their capacity for self-evaluation is all but diminished, which only empowers their sworn enemies on the Right. And so, the never-ending cycle of polarization continues.
