Elon doesn't care about him. Jim Watson/AFP via Getty Images.
Everyone knows about the transformation of Che Guevara from a murderous Marxist militant into a T-shirt icon. In recent years, Western elites did something similar to political movements from the Left and the Right, only on a much grander scale.
Around a decade ago, in the fallout from the financial crisis, some of the world’s wealthiest individuals and biggest corporations started deploying the Left’s “woke” tropes to legitimise their own power and to disarm popular grievances. Since then, and especially in the wake of last year’s election, they have adopted the edgy aesthetics and rhetoric of the online Right in service of the same ends.
In both cases, the underlying message is remarkably similar, notwithstanding the enmity between Left and Right, between woke and anti-woke. The message is that all collective action is ultimately in vain; the individual — be he the anti-racist HR specialist of the Left or the heroic gym bro of the online Right — is the only realistic locus of change.
Take wokeness, which roughly emerged back in 2013, when George Zimmerman was acquitted for the killing of an African-American teen, Trayvon Martin, in Florida. This triggered the first Black Lives Matter protests. It was also the year a PR exec named Justine Sacco tweeted a tasteless joke before hopping on a flight to South Africa (“Hope I don’t get AIDS”), only to be fired before the plane hit the Capetown tarmac. In the ensuing years, wokeness and all the adjacent movements, from DEI to #MeToo, swept through and took hold of our mainstream institutions, reaching a fever pitch in 2020.
Most conservatives associate wokeness with progressive utopianism, only the most recent attempt to revive Marxism. But this is a mistake. The woke, to be sure, demanded dramatic changes to our public language, monuments, and institutional practices: “unconscious-bias” trainings became de rigueur at workplaces; newspapers began to capitalise the races; Churchill statues were vandalised. But wokeness was far from utopian — quite the contrary, it amounted to an intensely pessimistic worldview. Drawing from the academic tradition of Afro-pessimism, as the scholar Geoff Shullenberger has pointed out, wokeness ended up “inscribing black oppression into the very fabric of reality”.
In the American context, this served an immediate purpose for a Democratic Party seeking to displace blame for the devastation of the black middle class in the Great Recession. It wasn’t that neoliberal Democrats had bailed out big banks while abandoning African-American homeowners to the vagaries of the market. Rather, blacks were immiserated because racial tyranny was and remains “a metaphysical — even ontological — condition”, as Shullenberger neatly puts it. A metaphysical crisis can’t be blamed on any one policy mix or even remedied by normal politics, and that was the point.
Woke cultural actors thus dismissed the legitimate achievements of civil rights and similar movements in Britain and elsewhere: colourblind justice — the ideal that inspired the likes of Martin Luther King Jr. — was framed as racist. Future progress was similarly foreclosed by the racism that stamped the modern West at its material and psychic origins. Even (and especially) those who denied harboring racial animus were, in fact, irredeemably racist.
The only thing left to do was for people to “work” on themselves as individuals: to “unpack” hidden biases, confess their role in structures of “supremacy”, and lower their expectations regarding things such as objectivity and punctuality, now condescendingly recast as white values. Crises which had concrete fixes, such as chronically low wages, were ditched in favour of vaguely defined ones such as “racial capitalism”, with US firms like American Express and CVS lining up to self-flagellate — even as they resisted antitrust, unionisation, caps on interest rates, and other tangible reforms as ferociously as ever.
Who could fail to notice this dynamic when Hillary Clinton assailed Bernie Sanders by suggesting that the Vermont socialist’s proposed bank regulations wouldn’t undo “systemic racism”? Or when the chief diversity officer at the US outdoor-gear chain REI opened a company podcast by making a land acknowledgment — before launching into an anti-union tirade? Or when a vegan-food firm warned its diverse workforce that unions are for “old white guys”?
The role of wokeness as a prop for institutional power is so familiar now as to be cliché, even among many progressives. Much less understood, however, is how corporate power is putting the edgy online Right to the same use today.
The online Right took shape amid the stresses of lockdown and corporate-approved race riots in 2020 and 2021. The streams that fed it included Right-wing populism; the manosphere starring Andrew Tate; crunchy moms, vaccine skeptics, and “chemtrail” watchers; along with sundry edgelords whose anti-woke provocations soon gave way to overt racism, among other tendencies.
There was always an element of bootstrapping individualism here, especially in the American variety of the online Right. Yet in their more productive forms, these subcultures mounted systemic critiques of oligarchy and a “deep state” that included not just government actors, but also corporate power. Pervasive censorship — carried out not by governmental agencies, but Silicon Valley firms — had alerted them to how overweening private actors can imperil freedom. Ditto so-called debanking, a sinister new private-censorship method road-tested on Right-wing populists such as Nigel Farage.
As a result, taming “Big Tech” censorship was all the rage among Right-wing populists on both sides of the Atlantic. Republican lawmakers, for example, took up Section 230 reform, threatening to revoke the special legislative licence that permits social-media platforms to censor or promote content but without the defamation liabilities that traditional publishers carry.
Other conservatives, most notably Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, mused about treating such platforms as “common carriers”, the ancient common-law doctrine that bars firms operating things like public toll roads and rail lines from discriminating against customers. Just as your land-line provider can’t drop you based on what you say on the phone, the argument goes, so the likes of Facebook should be barred from un-personing users based on their viewpoints.
It wasn’t just social media. If Silicon Valley giants could amass a vast and unaccountable power, some on the Right wondered, were there other market actors that deserved similar scrutiny? When he was still a relatively sane anchor on Fox News, for example, Tucker Carlson devoted a long and penetrating segment to the asset-stripping of a beloved Midwestern sport-goods chain by Elliott Management, the hedge fund controlled by the uber-hawkish GOP donor Paul Singer. Some on the populist Right in America even took to calling themselves “Khan-servatives” in homage to Lina Khan, then-President Joe Biden’s crusading anti-monopoly czar.
But it all came to naught. That’s because, beginning in 2022 with Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter (now X), the oligarchy pulled off a rapid and astoundingly successful ideological shape-shift: rebranding itself as the enemy, and the chief victim, of woke middle managers.
Musk is, of course, the figure who best embodies this alchemy of corporate power. Having once promoted DEI in his own firms, he now routinely and positively interacts with X accounts that traffic in explicit racism and antisemitism — agreeing with one, for example, that Jews are behind multiculturalism.
Spicy stuff. But take a closer look: his purchase of X and, I suspect, his toying with edgy memes motivated the Right to abandon Big Tech reform. One of “their own”, after all, was now in charge of the most politically sensitive platform. It didn’t matter that the basic power asymmetry between platform and user remained unchanged. Indeed, censorship still goes on — only now it takes place at the behest of one man, rather than being directed by a bureaucratic class with a clear set of rules and an appeals process with a human being (rather than a robot) on the other end.
Nor were many on the Right bothered by Musk’s blending of governmental authority (the Department of Government Efficiency) and private power (X) that so alarmed them when the ancien régime did the same thing during the pandemic. Seen this way, it becomes clear that Musk rescued not so much free speech as the very narrow class of men who own the social-media platforms.
Musk is far from alone. Another richly instructive example is Jeff Bezos. Not too long ago, the Amazon boss placed his firm at the forefront of corporate America’s Black Lives Matter push. Moreover, Amazon for years banned When Harry Became Sally, a scholarly critique of gender ideology by the conservative thinker Ryan Anderson.
Yet now Bezos has inexplicably un-banned Anderson’s book and directed The Washington Post, the newspaper he owns, to promote free-market and libertarian ideology. His new friendliness with Donald Trump’s GOP earned him and his fiancée an invitation to join the 45th and 47th President on the inauguration dais. The new administration has also handed Amazon a raft of deregulatory wins, not least an early attempt to cripple the National Labor Relations Board, the New Deal agency tasked with enforcing collective bargaining, including at Bezos’s Dickensian warehouses.
Again, the power asymmetry between Amazon and its workers remains unchanged under the firm’s new ideological dispensation. But with rare exceptions, the Right has ceased to speak out about workers oppressed by his mega-firm.
Perhaps most astonishing is how the oligarchs managed to reframe even populist regulators as agents of a woke deep state. Soon after the election, tech oligarchs led by Musk and Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg (another censorious wokester-turned-Trump bestie) began to complain about the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, or CFPB, established in the wake of the financial crisis to combat banking scams, especially those targeting downscale customers, the type who tend to pull for Trump at the ballot box.
Sure enough, one of the new administration’s first steps was to “delete CFPB” (as Musk had called for), compelling it to drop its legal cases — including against banks that insisted on the right to debank customers — and putting the agency under Office of Management and Budget director Russell Vought, an old-school pro-business Republican.
In a memo setting out its reasoning, the White House described the CFPB as a “woke, weaponized arm” of the deep state that had given “itself the right to regulate Americans’ checking accounts”. Which sounds pretty bad — until you realise that by regulating checking accounts, they meant banning banks from piling on fee after fee on low-income customers who overdraw their accounts. Also cited as an example of the CFPB’s “woke” tyranny was a rule requiring the removal of medical debt from credit reports.
In short, the populist Right’s anti-woke edginess and solicitude for the put-upon “anon” was absorbed, commodified, and elevated into a new “dialect of power”. In the bargain, the movement was divested of its radical policy energies. Much as the Left had cashiered its more radical economic demands for more diversity training, so the Right learned to content itself with CEOs who would “own the libs”.
All that remains now of the online Right is the bootstrapping self-help element: bodybuilding; the consumption of raw milk and animal protein; “trad” marriages that smack of kink; vaccine avoidance; and the like. But here, too, the movement has been of service to the oligarchs, by generating fantasies of the genetically superior CEO or entrepreneur onto whom millions of temporarily embarrassed non-CEOs could project themselves.
The fate of woke and anti-woke alike is a testament to corporate elites’ capacity for absorbing oppositional trends, symbols, and ideals, thus turning potential threats into a means for the upkeep of institutional power. It’s also a reminder of the limits of culture-centric politics for confronting the power differentials generated by markets. Not to put too fine a point on it: capital is happy to grant your pronoun requests — and equally happy to throw Roman salutes — so long as wages and unions are kept down and antitrust regulators are brought to heel.
Sohrab Ahmari is the US editor of UnHerd and the author, most recently, of Tyranny, Inc: How Private Power Crushed American Liberty — and What To Do About It
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SubscribeWot? My narrative is that “woke” is the latest version of critical theory that the Frankfurt School started after WWI, because the lefty line that it was all about the workers against the capitalists didn’t explain how the workers went into the trenches in Flanders as flag-waving nationalists.
Story of the left. First it was we socialists fight with the workers against the capitalists. Then it was we feminists fight for the women against the patriarchy. Then it was we civil-rights activists fight for the blacks against the white racists. Now it is we wokies fight for the transgenders against the transphobes and deadnamers.
It is all a lie. The truth is that the educated class uses the victim du jour and the latest powerful monster to justify its power. For two hundred years. Period.
I don’t really see what any of that rant has to do with the article, which was pointing at that many of those who have latched onto Trump spouting an “anti woke” ticket were in fact some if it’s biggest cheerleaders when they thought it was politically convenient to do so. Trump was elected by large swathes of the working class, while many of his policies seem to be actively working against their interests
Not just that – but the very same ideas and causes they used to rally the working class against the woke “elite”, they have now embraced for themselves now that they are in power.
That’s the way it’s always been, but it is frustrating to see people who were crying out against abuses a few months ago excusing them now that it’s their team. They don’t seem to have realized yet that the new elite don’t think they are on the same team after all.
Here comes the new boss, same as the old boss!
As you say I expect nothing different to be honest, I’ve long since given up believing that I can change the situation. I’ll just try and make my life as comfortable within the confines I’m given.
However I do have a deep loathing of hypocrisy, and watching those who complained about this behaviour from the previous regime now cheering it on because it’s coming from their preferred side I find rather pathetic
This boss has a functioning brain so he’s different.
Is that good or bad news?
They were forced to it, unfortunately they did so. But still what ever is happening right now is better than anything what happened in the Dems Ära. They are at fault for everything bad, including the Ukrainian war.
The point is that the elites are highly motivated to keep the keep the working class divided. The elites didn’t invent woke theory or gender theory or feminism, but they are smart and opportunistic; when they see a useful tool for dividing people, they pick it up and use it. That is why corporations were so content to engage with DEI; it doesn’t threaten the corporate system and actually helps insulate the system. And the same with the right-populist successor to left-wokeism. Corporate capitalism co-opts them and then uses them to further divide the population.
Which policies?
The ‘educated class’ always does have the power, because that’s what education does for you – gives you the tools to be able to lead. Even such monsters as Stalin and Pol Pot were highly educated.
What about Adolph?
And are you sure about Comrade Stalin? I thought he was training to be a Priest?
I can also think of a plethora of ill-educated ones, George Washington, the first Lord Northcliffe, George W Bush junior, Ulysses Grant, John Major, and so on and on, ad infinitum.
In fact one of the remarkable things about the late Lady Thatcher was that she was an Oxford educated Chemist and not your average PPE* ‘bluffer’ as so many of our wretched politicians are and have been for quite some time now.
*Philosophy, Politics and Economics, or in plain English: General Studies.
I agree with your point, but have to take issue with the inclusion of U.S. Grant on your list. He was a great reader and proved a very capable writer with The Personal Memoirs of Ulysses S. Grant, which was written in his final weeks, in physical agony, and rescued his surviving family from debt with a big nest egg to boot. The picture of Grant as a dumb loser drunk is undeserved—or a least only part of the story. A military strategist and war hero of enduring fame.
I concede your point about Grant being an accomplished autodidact, and also an outstanding commander who did what nobody else could; Win the War!
I have always thought the ‘hopeless drunk’ stuff to be utter nonsense, and mainly motivated by jealousy.
Of course we could get bogged down on discussing what ‘educated’ really means, but suffice to say none of the great English Titans who launched the Industrial Revolution were educated in the conventional sense,ie at Oxbridge.
To veer slightly off piste I have yet to visit Grant’s Tomb, which is I gather is about as close to Mausolus’s as we shall ever get.
On my last visit I had the option of going either to Tom Paine’s cottage in New Rochelle or Grant’s Tomb and chose the former. Thus providing an excellent excuse for a further ‘adventure’.
Well said.
Perhaps one day we shall meet on neutral ground….perhaps Yorktown?
That’d be a kick, as we Yanks sometimes say. Neutral now I guess, in the sense of being in a so-called purple-state.
I always think that when historians look back on the ‘modern era’ they will regard England’s colonisation of America as/the seminal moment in world history.
Let’s face it the Swedes, Dutch, French, Russians, and even the Spanish could have done it, but ultimately it was us*with our completely idiosyncratic way of doing things. Obviously not perfect but better than most if not all.
Your/our founding fathers never forgot ‘the good old cause’ and tried to fashion their Republic in the shape of Ancient Rome. Good boys!
Somewhat astonishingly it has stood the test of time and far outdates ALL European ‘experiments’.
So it is now a case of ‘America Victrix’ and a jolly good job too.
*Never forgetting the old adage ‘self praise’ is NO recommendation’.
Perhaps. By emphasising the colonisation instead of the rebellion we call a revolution, you posit a Britain-tilted version of American Exceptionalism. I’m not fully unsympathetic to that. But your cautionary saying about self-praise is fitting.
I think the USA has much to be proud of on balance, but I’m not sure why so many Americans seem to need to view themselves as uniquely great across the board. Or, mostly on the far-Left, as uniquely bad. Why can’t we just be pretty good, still with plenty of room to do better? I think the idealising apologists and abject rejectionists fuel one another. Both go too far.
The American experiment (ongoing, complete results not in) was heavily inspired by pre-Imperial Rome, true. English practices also played a huge role, of course, notably in the bi-cameral legislative branch, which until 1912 had an appointed Senate, something I doubt is ‘news to you’, sir. There was some Athens and Iroquois Confederacy in the mix too. No one owns the great, or perhaps we should say ‘least terrible’, models of government—not even Americans or the British!
Even so, we owe a great and enduring debt to England and her expanding might from about 1588 onward. I hope that the so-called Special Relationship won’t be lost in all this rattling and fracturing of recent global norms.
The greatest test is longevity eg a 4 or 5000 year old Han Chinese civilisation. How well will the USA, a ‘black swan’ success with numerous faultlines now copied by western Europe, do on that score.
Nonsense, Han civilisation died when Sun Yat-sen & Co took over in 1911. The subsequent adoption of Marxism finished the process.
Even before that the obsession with ‘ancestor worship’ meant that each Chinese dynasty was an attempt to replicate the previous one.
Ossification not progress was the result, hence the ease with which the British defeated the place from 1840 onwards.
In any case, China can boast 5 000 years of uninterrupted statehood, which makes it an outlier on a global scale.
Btw, this uninterrupted statehood also explains quite a lot of things about China.
My personal rule-of-thumb is, “Whatever more-or-less significant happens in the world, think about China and how China might have influenced it to its maximum benefit”.
Wouldn’t argue with any of that, but China remains a Han Chinese nation with Han Chinese people who have a recognisable and enduring culture.
Your argument could be applicable to the Jews whose longevity has been coupled with some outstanding cultural achievements.
I don’t think the same can be said of the Chinese who seem to have been masters of monotony.
Mere longevity? That was achieved under remarkably closed off conditions during many of those centuries, and rank repression since 1949. And was that some continuous, identical culture across those millennia? Or were Athens or Rome a failure because they only endured (as great powers) for a fraction of the time that China has? Don’t get me wrong, their cultural longevity is impressive. India’s rather more many-sided culture too, sprawling web that it is.
China’s social cohesion comes at a cost most people in the Anglosphere would never, should never pay. Yet we could stand to take a few pages from the better side of their community-mindedness; they from our attachment to liberty. I’m not suggesting some bland, averaged-out world culture, but a greater willingness to learn from each other, with mutual respect and judicious emulation. Rather easily said anyway.
Again wouldn’t argue with most of what you write but, yes, longevity of the people and culture is the ultimate test of success. Doesn’t really matter whether or not you/anyone else likes or approves of it. Failure on the other hand is disappearance of a recognisable people and culture.
Maybe you can defend that belief in a bit more depth and detail. Are hunter-gatherer cultures of what is now the U.S., some of which lasted for 10,000 years (and endure in a fragmentary way) “the ultimate” societies, or do you require writing, or some other civilizational advancement?
Does a man who lives to be 110 by that fact alone have twice as much success as one who lives to be 55?
If we manage to hasten the demise of Earth within 100 years but escape to Mars and beyond in small numbers: Is that a greater accomplishment than living and dying here, and sustaining the one planet we’ve ever known, for a few more billion years, along with all the other species who have no vote? (Perhaps we can do both though).
Occupying the same ground for thousands of years, and calling yourself a culture and a people, doesn’t seem like much of an achievement at all, in and of itself. Along with duration, the way people live, what they live for, and what they kill has to be factored in.
Your example of the American hunter-gatherers (I’ll assume you mean Plains Indians) is the only like-for-like example (ie survival of a people and culture). I’m not saying they are ‘ultimate’ societies in the moral sense of accomplishment, in fact I’m not making any moral judgements at all, though I think you are assuming I am. Just observing that survival is the ultimate test of success. American Indians were very certainly very successful in America, expanding to fill virtually the whole continent over 1000s of years, until the ‘black swan’ of European arrival, which completely destroyed many tribes, displaced others, certainly destroyed their primacy in their traditional lands. Though of course you could break it down further eg the Iriquois Federation outcompeted other east coast tribes (without looking it up, I’m not very familiar with American tribal history). In this sense current European-heritage people-cultures are currently committing suicide, being outcompeted as fast or faster than say the American Indians were. Numerous towns not far from me in the UK are no longer recognisably English, British or even European, it’s taken two generations so far.
Thanks for the clarification. I guess you still seem to me to be using a subjective single metric of cultural success (and implied worth, moral or not).
Are your parents both English? In many ways the towns of their childhood would not have been recognizably English to your shared ancestors of 500 years before. And their Early Modern English would be very hard for the average present-day person to understand, especially as pronounced. Go back 1,000 years and you get near mutual incomprehension, with a few Old English scholars who could bridge the gap. Just before the Normans arrived to alter the linguistic and cultural landscape in 1066, adding their heavy weight to the Angles, Saxons, and Jutes, on top of previous influence from ancient Celts and their druidical ways. And so on.
I don’t dismiss your point about cultural preservation or the lack thereof. The best of the old ways matters to me too, though I’ve lived in lands (first Canada, and for much longer now the States) where there has always been some plurality, if an uneasy or unacknowledged one. Peoples that we’d now classify as Paleolithic to early-Neolithic found themselves in a pretty unfair fight—a bit like the peoples of Northern Europe did with Imperial Rome.
I find it curious that Neanderthals and Denisovans are considered by many to be “extinct” bloodlines when a non-trivial percentage of their genes persists in modern humans. Sould we say the cultures of Ancient Greece and Rome have been obliterated altogether when any good library contains many of their surviving books?
This is a question that I don’t think I or anyone else has a complete and objective, let alone incontrovertible answer for.
Yes all my great-grandparents are English, like many rural people, in fact I’m not that old and can remember the first time I saw a coloured person. In large parts of this country (and the rest of the world) demographic change was so slow that it wouldn’t have been noticed in a single lifetime.
I still maintain that in an important sense longevity in a form that remains broadly recognisable over the longer term is an ultimate test of success of a culture or people. Impact, eg the Mongols or Aztecs, is a different metric. As is some kind of moral benchmark, be it something modern (like ‘greatest good to the greatest number’) or not ( eg ‘righteous before God’).
Of course the influence of Greek and Roman civilisation echoed down the European ages, but it’s pretty clear that (especially in the case of western Rome) there was a living civilisation, a trauma or series of traumas, then there wasn’t.
Some nations or cultures which seemed all-powerful in their day didn’t last long then were largely forgotten – I think Shelley wrote the poem about the statue of Ozymandias in the desert. And this was my original point about the modern USA – in broader scope it hasn’t been around long and it may not be. It had a uniquely fortunate foundation for obvious reasons (natural bounty, lack of powerful enemies, organised and law-respecting founding European population at the point of coming out of the Enlightenment and into the Industrial Revolution etc. etc. – all recognised by among others the Founding Fathers). Some of the USA’s unusual strengths are still somewhat true, others not, but the country has almost no experience (apart from perhaps the Civil War – when it was a very different nation) of dealing with the kind of failure/disaster that all countries must face (invasion and defeat, famine, loss of self-belief) and which are the real tests of character and ability to survive over the longer term.
Yours
Fair points, notwithstanding my partial disagreement. Thanks for the lively exchange.
Failure as you call it, is just part of evolution.
No, while China had long been a leading civilisation, its global influence was limited by its ‘China centric’ Middle Kingdom mentality. It lost its cutting edge after its naval explorations in the 15th and 16th centuries persuaded Confucianist conservative leaders that China had nothing to learn from the rest of the world. political, cultural, intellectual, and technological stagnation followed.
All true but you’ve missed my point.
The Special Relationship will endure if only because ‘we’ need it.
As to the Anglo-American experiment, so far so good but there is always “room for improvement”.*
*As one former Headmaster of mine continually intoned!
Here’s where I’ll do my rare trick of just agreeing with you, without qualification. Have a good rest of your Sunday ‘over there’.
AJ, I hope you never stop commenting here, because you seem like one of the more well-read and balanced posters here, even though you get ganged up on frequently. I enjoy your posts, even if I don’t always understand your perspective or agree.
Thanks very much, Philip. I have a similar feeling about a sizable group of people who comment here: respect across some level of disagreement or incomprehension on my part. And I tend to behave a bit better on a Sunday. Don’t make yourself too scarce BTL either.
Mark Twin published Grant’s memoir and his deft hand is sometimes seen at work in the text.
Ok. Didn’t know that. Doubt it’s all Sam L. Clemens though.
Yes, I also wanted to reply to the point about Stalin who was known for making gross spelling mistakes.
As for Pol Pot, the problem was not that he was highly educated. The problem was that, as a student in Paris, he was heavily influenced by Maoist French intellectuals (I’d rather use “intellectuals” in inverted commas, to be honest).
The rest, as they say, is history…
And how have the educated performed, even among the most liberal democracies? There is scarcely a nation that is seen as well-governed and the response from the status wis to label all opposition as ‘far right.’ We have many educated people who are not very bright.
Education often confers the ability to out-argue people, along with hubris. Not the same as being right (ie knowing truth).
That’s a good observation, indeed!
Thanks it’s an old but wise observation.
I just never thought about it in this way:-)
One I agree with. No amount of knowledge guarantees wisdom or deep insight. I don’t think the goals of true education can be conferred from the outside, or by sheer dint of study. And I’m not saying I’ve reached those goals.
This narrative is an oversimplification. The ‘theories’ from critical theory and postmodern thinkers have never been some kind of monolithic movement with a coherent goal. This is different from the earlier socialist movements which were much more coherent in what they wanted to achieve and how. Of course the theories did inspired the (radical) left and new left during the postwar period, some of whom were disillusioned socialists and Marxists. But that is certainly not the whole story. In fact, some of the theory was actually used by the radical right as well. The early new right in France, for example. Nick Land is another example of a thinker that uses postmodern concepts but is generally considered to be on the right.
What eventually happened is that the capitalist status quo co-opts these movements, especially during the neoliberal era this happened a lot. Fredric Jameson observed this early on when he argued that “postmodernism is the cultural logic of late capitalism”.
“This is different from the earlier socialist movements which were much more coherent in what they wanted to achieve and how.
Agreed but I believe they learned from those early socialist movements, however, with their privileged and already somewhat powerful positions they were able to turbo charge their goals in order to effect rapid change – as we have witnessed in recent decades.
Gramsci wrote this in 1915: “Socialism is precisely the religion that must overwhelm Christianity…in the new order, Socialism will triumph by first capturing the culture via infiltration of schools, universities, churches, and the media by transforming the consciousness of society.”
The pattern was there to be copied.
Yep, you have it about right. The powerful rule by keeping the underclass divided. Divide and conquer, whether abroad or at home. Then divide again and again to keep lower classes from recognizing their common interest. It works.
Wrongheaded, and as someone who taught various strands of critical theory for forty years I can say how and why. It’s an idealist sort of history of ideas that attributes ‘woke’ definition and agency, let alone ownership and control, to intellectual sources which seem faintly cognate seen from outside. While some ‘woke’ spokespeople went to University, that’s not to say any would have taken, let alone passed, a course in cultural studies.
If you want University connections to ‘wokeness’, the first place to look is the social dynamics between representatives of newly included groups and those from more established, relatively privileged backgrounds. Widely dispersed Dutch auctions of privilege took place. If no one wanted to be seen as associated with an exploitative and oppressive global elite that’s partly to be understood in the context of world events but the core is young adult peer esteem social psychology. If cultural or ‘ideological’ conditioning comes into play those were mainly the conservative and liberal notions students brought from home.
This isn’t just an impression, it’s been the subject of research, at Amherst, Massachusetts for example. And the resulting dispositions are more varied and softly defined than media accounts would suggest, never mind the caricatures made by would be political opponents. In a quite fundamental way, therefore, ‘woke’ is a joke. And the actual social trends behind it are better understood as another facet of ‘populism.’
It’s a well-argued piece, but finally smacks of whataboutism. Quite simply, it’s too early to be making this kind of argument re: how Trumpian populism will play out.
I agree that what happened to the CFPB was lame. But the sight of Bezos and Zuckerberg sucking up to the new sheriff—this doesn’t surprise in the least, and it doesn’t mean these corporate heads are using the Right-wing edgelord ethos in anything like the mendacious way our corporate heads used wokeism. Nor does it mean the Trump administration will begin censoring Americans’ speech.
Musk is sui generis, and so what? As a journalist, Sohrab, you should be grateful he bought Twitter. By doing so, he probably did more than anyone to short-circuit the Censorship Industrial Complex that was clearly getting close to making real journalism impossible.
Why would the Trump administration want to censor speech? He can safely leave Musk, Zuckerberg etc. to do it for him. Or just defund and harass anyone whose words he does not like and wait for people to get the message. You seem to believe that there is nothing wrong with censorship – as long as it is done by a private individual and not by the government.
I don’t believe any such thing. What’s more, you seem to be projecting Biden-era censorship outsourcing onto the Trump admin.
Do you have any evidence that Musk censors X, beyond the laws of the relevant country? I’m genuinely interested, as I’ve often heard this claim, but when I’ve looked into it there doesn’t appear to be anything solid.
Admittedly I do not have solid evidence. But then, to get it I would need a group of researchers and full access to Twitter internals. I just think it is a no-brainer. Musk, Zuckerberg et al control the black-box algorithms that determine what is seen and what is not. Both of them are openly and energetically favouring Trump. Musk is busily hacking away at parts of the government he does not like and openly trying to promote ‘friendly’ politicians in various European countries. They have the power, and no one can check them, Why would they not use it? A reluctance to throw their weight about? Moral scruples (rofl)? Respect for democracy, or for the opinions of his enemies (more rolf)?
“Why would they not use it?”
Honestly you seem to not get that there are people who actually favor free speech. People who *want* opposing ideas to be openly debated. Zuckerberg I don’t trust on this, but Musk I do.
The guy bought Twitter for twice what it was worth and is now willing to seriously damage his main company, Tesla, by pissing off his largely coastal customer base. Why do these things? Evidence suggests that he *really* wants to end the woke censorship regime that was turning the West into a kind of epistemological Soviet Union.
There are people who genuinely favour free speech. You can recognise them by the fact that they will sacrifice a lot to protect the freedom of the people they disagree with. Then there are the people who want to force out the hegemony of their enemies and simply replace it with their own. Like Musk or Trump. Musk is not fighting an idealistic fight to make it possible for all kinds of European dissidents to be heard – including islamists, communists, or antiracist campaigners. He is simply trying to get his political friends and fellow saluters into power in Europe, and get his enemies out. Exactly like the USSR promoted communism around the world.
Yeah, again I sense that you won’t be able to provide evidence of how Musk is trying to censor any European dissidents. Of whatever stripe. Or perhaps you’ll say that his not allowing anti-racist EU hall monitors to censor X is an example of censorship. Because he’s shutting out the censors.
Evidence-free. Projection. Tedious.
I do not have solid evidence, either. Nor do I have any statistics.
However, as someone who is active on Twitter, I can attest that there you can find a full range of differing views. I am not always happy to stumble upon things that run contrary to my values and beliefs or are just cheap clickbaits, but then, this is what freedom of speech means.
As long as it is within the realm of the law, it should be allowed. And, judging by my experience as a Twitter user, I think that this is exactly the case with Twitter.
Since when have you ever needed evidence
Now this article lives up to the concept of “unherd”, in my opinion. Left or right wing, it does not matter, big capital is simply opportunistic. Even if individual business leaders might have true motivations, big corporations simply have to use these PR practices in our (late) capitalist system. Not to mention the cronyism. And it has been this way for a long time actually.
Moreover, under the surface there is still a class war going on, which, in the end, is mostly rooted in economic inequality. Of course you are not supposed to notice that, but I fear that, in the coming decades, the middle classes will figure this out the hard way.
Wokery was so obviously insane, over-the-top and counterproductive that I almost wonder if it was a ploy to usher in Trump 2.0.
Can we imagine Trump-Musk enjoying the unquestioning loyalty of millions without such a grotesque alternative on offer?
From across the pond, I cheer the destruction of DEI, knowing that the dominant ideology in America always filters down to its vassals.
It’s not just whatever direct threats Trump might make to Starmer, but the prevailing mood on Netflix & Instagram and the policies of American multinationals (at the Big Four, it seems, pronouns in bios went from suddenly compulsory to suddenly forbidden).
So I cheer the war against woke, but I worry about what will happen if the Democrats ever get power again, and I worry about what evil deeds Trump-Musk will get away with because normal people are terrified of a return to woke insanity.
So far I don’t see evil deeds from Trump and Musk but only missteps. Which probably comes with moving so fast. The problem is if some of these missteps become serious own goals, making some sector of Trump’s voters regret their vote. But we’ve a long time before the mid-term elections. Missteps can be amended.
Where I think Ahmari’s wrong is in pointing to what’s happening during these first months and arguing: “See? The Right does the same as the Left. Populism equals wokeism.” It’s a sleight of hand. And it isn’t persuasive.
The mere fact that corporations seek to bend government policy to corporate interests is nothing new. Wokeism was in fact new, and it was both deeply illiberal and radically un-American.
Jacob Siegel over at Tablet has some of the best analysis of how wokeism functioned as a control-cum-social-engineering system. Back before Trump won, he asked whether an incoming right-leaning administration would simply take over the same arsenal of mechanisms. So far, clearly, Trump’s team is not.
When we hear of “progressive” citizens being fired or debanked for their speech, or of state agencies coordinating with tech companies to censor content, Ahmari can start making his equation. To make it merely on the basis of “corporations don’t like unions” doesn’t cut it.
Why would the state agencies need to coordinate with the tech companies? You do not need state agencies involved when the tech companies can do it all on their own, with just a quiet word to the boss. The end result is the same.
Honestly, you seem to have missed the last decade. Ever hear of “the Twitter files”?
A private company acting on its own can do as it sees fit. The market will punish it. But when the government is coercing companies into censoring speech it is a crime.
Sohrab, you are my new favourite anti-capitalist political commentator. Your debate on ReasonTV against Nick Gillespie described so precisely the relationship between mass immigration and the Capitalist class that benefit from it, while screwing the low and middle-income class.
Most commentators on the Right will lambast everything – mass immigration, Multiculturalism, and wokeness – yet, for some reason, will give the economic system that brought us to this mess a free pass.
Looking forward to read more from you.
So what’s your idea of a ‘better’ alternative, that would make us ‘more free’ of such things?
More breaking up of monopolies and shifting more of the taxation from wages to wealth.
Ah, redistribution of wealth! Why hasn’t anyone tried that before?
And who, exactly, do you suggest should determine such a course if action?
Knee-jerk solutions on a Saturday morning… just enjoy the weekend, (while) you’re free to do so.
It’s not a redistribution of wealth as such, just a shifting of the tax burden towards those who are making the most from the current system.
Perhaps replace the word wealth with assets/capital gains then. Inequality has soared in the last 20 years, mainly as a result of asset prices soaring while wages have remained stagnant therefore to me it makes sense to shift the tax burden away from one towards the other.
Taxing somebody’s wage then having to give large chunks back in tax credits because of high rent/house prices seems rather idiotic
The US already has a terribly ‘progressive’ tax structure that allows half the population to have no skin in the game. A flat tax is a truly fair system. A consumption tax would be fair as well.
It’s also wealth, rather than income, which makes inequality permanent.
I think wealth redistribution is the right term to use. That doesn’t mean total redistribution, just making the whole thing less skewed than it has become.
Really enjoying your comments.
When something is taxed, there is usually less of it. Today it’s some guy’s multiple mansions; tomorrow, it’s your house and things.
I’m not suggesting vastly increasing the tax take, merely adjusting where it comes from. Assets have soared while wages have remained stagnant therefore to me it makes sense to shift the burden away from workers and onto those who have benefited the most during the last two decades.
The hoarding of wealth is also bad for the economy. It’s much easier for businesses to thrive when you have 1000 people with £100 to spend as opposed to 1 person with £100k
hoarding of wealth is also bad for the economy
You do understand that the investments people make go into funding businesses, growth, and jobs. Scrooge McDuck isn’t sitting around swimming in gold coins. Taxing investment earnings more heavily would reduce investment and encourage hoarding.
Actually McDuck is increasingly investing in non-productive assets like housing. The modern version of gold coins.
Not sure if you’ve noticed, but in spite of all McDucks assets there isn’t much growth to be seen.
As Thomas Sowell may say, how many more times has the free market got to succeed before people finally get it?
Is it working in its current guise though?
I like Sowell, but he does tend to look at the successes of the market and ignore it’s failures. And no market is really free – there are all kinds of ways that we define what can be bought and sold, and under what conditions.
Good comment. There ought to be more anti-corporate common cause on the Left and Right. Not bloody revolution, but more bleedin’ opposition to this level of control and influence by huge companies and the de facto oligarchs who run them.
I like Nick Gillespie and enjoyed hearing him in discussion with Jon Stewart recently, somehow mostly in agreement. I’ll listen to Mr. Ahmari “go against” Gillespie soon. Thanks for the suggestion.
Interesting essay. The American political system is uniquely corrupt. Big money will always rule, no matter who is in power.
The so called ‘Franklin Prophecy’ come true?
As an aside, the interweb has its pluses and minuses, but I do enjoy the way one can come across a term such as ‘Franklin Prophecy’ which meant nothing to me but I could look up in a couple of seconds to find out what it is. I don’t see the connection between it and the comment upon which it is made but that’s just my stupidity and ignorance!
That document is a forgery, a hoax like the Protocols of the Elders of Z i o n. Correct?
I certainly hope so!
Just checking. Cheers.
“The woke, to be sure, demanded dramatic changes to our public language, monuments, and institutional practices”
And now, the pendulum has swung back and tens of millions demanded dramatic changes in govt and spending. Trump is a course correction. That should not require explanation.
Some of it pushback against the woke and some against excesses of the left in general, but a lot of it is pure rejection of the status quo, including progressives and RINOs.
More dismissive “crunchy moms” rhetoric from UnHerd, I see.
Even as a libertarian, I used to dismiss most leftist complaints about corporate power.
It is a bit ironic that as the mainstream left discovered a love for Pfizer, I came to appreciate the full horror of American corporatism.
I didn’t question vaccines until COVID, when a novel product we couldn’t possibly know to be “safe and effective” was pushed to groups that clearly didn’t need it (most notably children, and those who had already recovered from the wild virus).
Even then, it took me a while to doubt other vaccines. My children had all the standard UK jabs. Turns out I was playing Russian roulette with their health, and I didn’t even know it.
Anyone who doubts this needs to do more digging.
Spot on sir!
If you want a current ‘Crime against Humanity, ‘the Vaccine Fraud* is it.
We hanged better men for less at Nuremberg, a few years ago now.
*The legal immunity clause was a rather blatant ‘give away’.
When you are in a (rabbit)hole, stop digging.
“The wild virus…” Don’t believe the Covid virus was wild, though its pre-lab-tinkering progenitor may have been.
Sorry I was unclear. I meant the engineered virus that they released into the wild.
A great article that, exposing the utter hypocrisy of both the woke and anti woke crowds.
Bunch of idiots the lot of them
No need to fret, either eugenics or AI will soon sort this out.
Bashing chameleon tech-bros or ‘corporate oligarchs’ et al is all fine and good….they surely deserve it. But – in the bigger picture – the “locus” of our Western story of hyper-liberalism IS ultimately the “individual” nevertheless. It is a 300-year story of Liberalism’s Icarus-like not knowing how high is too high. It is ultimately a story not of ‘politics’ but of a pervasive, evolving social psychology that infects everyone (albeit in varying degrees of intensity). And so all the ‘which individuals can we point the finger at and blame’ narratives are ultimately shallow and willfully myopic. Wokeness is neither Marxism on steroids nor Capitalism on steroids….it is Liberalism on steroids. As I have argued here: https://grahamcunningham.substack.com/p/the-madness-of-intelligentsias
The bitter fruit of the Enlightenment, Yoram Hazony is good on this.
I still maintain that the biggest struggle of the modern Right is against neoconservatism which literally destroys whole countries and 100,000s of their people. The second task is to take on transhumanism, the true creed of the Dark Lord which encompasses everything from mass abortion to abuse of teenage girls under a noxious medicalised idology.
Woke is a very specific ideology with very specific ideas about the world, as suggested here. “Anti-woke” is no such thing; it doesn’t have a similarly defined set of beliefs. Instead, it’s simply a reaction against the civilisational destroying madness and racial hatred that is woke ideology.
If you want to do the “both-sides” thing, you have to at least point to the true mirror image. MAGA isn’t the mirror image of “woke,” nor is the segment of the online right mentioned in this piece. Actual neo-Nazis are. For example, the woke want to “abolish whiteness,” which is genocidal rhetoric mirrored only by neo-Nazis—or, ironically, anti-Palestinian extremists.
isn’t the genocidal rhetoric coming from Hamas, Iran, Hezbollah, etc??
This leftist in deep cover does not succeed in his pretense to be an objective broker analyzing political and economic reality. And I see he is UnHerd’s US editor. Beware readers.
Big business, like the hard left is against borders…would have liked to see the links between businesses like BlackRock and leftist parties discussed. Europe seems to be becoming like EMEA, as US multinationals describe the market place of Europe, Middle East and Africa.
There is a battle going on in Irving, Texas right now between two groups of Trump voters that very much relates to the topic Sohrab Ahmari is addressing, as the Las Vegas Sands Corporation, owned by the Trumpist Adelson family and supported by the city’s Chamber of Commerce Republican types, including the mayor, is willing to destroy a small Catholic university known for its academic excellence and its conservatism, the University of Dallas (the new ambassador to the Vatican is an alumnus; the Secretary of Transportation sends his daughter there), by building “a destination resort” (fancy casino) immediately next to it. The citizens of Irving, especially those in neighborhoods adjacent to the proposed casino, are overwhelmingly against it, but if Texas legalizes gambling, it will be difficult to stop the Adelsons with all their money and the local Republican politicians who are happy to do their bidding. Actual conservatives need to recognize, as Ahmari does, that large corporate interests are willing to turn against them quickly and can’t be trusted.
The middle class left consists of Frankfurt School plus Gramsci to create cultural Marxism. This is combined with contempt for physical courage, patriotism and British and American heritage for people who are full of self hatred, possess a shallow self righteousness, have an urban outlook, live in a world of ideas divorce from reality, only capable of carping criticism, have a grudge against their fellow man and civilisation. They live on the allowance from their Father( tax payer ) yet resent him.
They are full of self-hatred because they are a waste of space, are of no practical use. They look at their ancestors and feel inferior.
Prior to 1914 the public sector hardly existed in the UK and USA. The growth of the public sector, including universities is a result of the entry of left wing politicians with no practical use, providing jobs for their supporters. This was first predicted by the Marques of Salisbury in the latter part of the 19th century. Charles Northcote Parkinson rote satirical books such as Parkinson’s Law in the late 1950s mocking the massive growth in the public sector post 1918. Musk is trying to return to some pre WW2 common sense with regard to employment by the state.
Spot on.
Not just collectivism in action, but also class as a way of understanding society, has been pushed to one side. Amazingly, there are still those commenting on Unherd who think this is the outcome of Gramsciis slow March through the institutions! A kind of ongoing marxist plot by rich people!
Just how cynical the elite has been in all this I find harder to judge – was feminism and other woke ideologies taken up with such enthusiasm because members of the elite really believed in it, or was it really just diversion and camouflage to cover what was really going on.
“Not to put too fine a point on it: capital is happy to grant your pronoun requests — and equally happy to throw Roman salutes”
It’s almost quaint to see the Marxian term Capital: It’s the left’s version of the devil. It invokes ancient tropes of cigar smoking, top hat wearing Victorian oppressors of the proletarian masses.
The actual person Musk you coyly allude too didn’t throw what you refer to as the Roman Salute though (and we know it wasn’t really the National Socialist version).
I couldn’t face reading the whole thing, so probably shouldn’t comment, but what I did manage was nonsense.