The 20th edition of Keeping up with the FITs.
According to the best publicly available data, members of most minority groups dislike PC culture more than whites do. Eighty-eight percent of Native American Indians, 87 percent of all Hispanics, 82 percent of Asian Americans, and 75 percent of blacks (vs. 79 percent of whites) call political correctness “a problem” for the United States. Per several studies, the only group that strongly supports the movement of speech in a more woke direction is made up of young liberal white women.
This is not so surprising. The moral dyad theory, as described in my review of The Mind Club, says that we simplify complex moral situations by assigning one party the role of unfeeling agent and the other party the role of helpless person who feels pain. In the case of political correctness, white males become the unfeeling agents and others become helpless feelers. In the extreme example, the party with agency is a robot and the party with only feelings is a baby. But a full human adult has both agency and feelings. So PC not only insults white males by treating them as unfeeling; it also insults others by treating them as infantile.
Recently someone posted a quote from Colin Powell following his death.
https://twitter.com/RichardHanania/status/1450077614521999365
Asked about the fact that he was an unqualified Affirmative Action hire, Powell said that he didn’t give a shit because “I got mine and you didn’t.” He suggested that anyone who felt bad about being a highly paid job they couldn’t do should take the job and use the extra money to pay for therapy if it would help them.
Yes, blacks don’t like PC being applied with them. But they understand it’s the cost of all that free shit they get from liberals, and it’s a deal they know has more pros then cons.
Great guy, huh. Well at least he didn’t suffer from impostor syndrome.
His death was reported on muh TV as “with Covid”. You had to figure out he also happened to have multiple myeloma yourself, but “with” was sufficient clue to start looking.
Have we reached peak woke yet? People don’t seem to like it. The polling looks awful. Can the blue leadership moderate on this or are the stuck having to pander to the illiberal left?
Judging from what the modal progressive colleague at my workplace supports, and the fact that in the long run they tend to get their way, I would say we are not even close to peak woke, and that they are all very frustrated at what they think is a slow pace of very mild measures without much real impact in moving the stubborn needles they want to move. They are still disgusted and dismayed that so much outrageous and offensive things are allowed to be thought, said, and done, that so many people have not yet internalized the enlightenment of why that is all so terribly wrong. There is a lot of pent up radicalism, and they really believe that all opposition is simple bigotry or oppression unworthy of engagement or which merits consideration beyond what is minimally politically expedient. In their minds, “We have only just begun to woke”.
Handle, I’m curious: have you ever inquired of your colleague what vision he/she has for a final, obtainable goal?
It seems that, as the name implies, “progressives” are solely focused on “progress,” but toward… what, exactly? The ever-moving goalposts* camouflage any identifiable end-state. …a point at which progressives might say, “There, we’re done. We’ve achieved success.”
* eg., social acceptance of homosexuals=>civil unions=>same-sex marriage=>social acceptance of trans-people=>trans-people in military, sports, kindergarten classrooms=>birthing people=>???
Hoffer suggests that, more or less by definition, progressives can never claim success, as the minute they do, their movement begins to lose its identity and to disintegrate into a new status quo that negates its erstwhile attraction to the socially disaffected, et al.
What are your thoughts? …until it all blows up, are we stuck with this ever more radical and irrational “progress”?
Probably the more apt Hoffer insight is that “the temper of our time” is one of impatience, which remains as true today on the progressive left as it was 55 years ago when he wrote it.
It’s not that the progressives hesitate to articulate any grand vision for the final, perfect society because by doing so they risk actually getting there in a way that would sap the energy of the political movements. It’s that pursuing certain abstract ideological values like “equity” and “justice” doesn’t lend itself to having any internally limiting principle or logical stopping point, and the constant redirection and rededication of political energy to the next-lowest hanging fruit thus never needs to end. It’s an incidental benefit, not a strategy.
The vast majority of progressives – even academic public intellectual types – do not really work in terms of grand strategic vision at all. If you ever challenge one with the obvious logical extension or implication of the inferred principles behind the latest, fashionable demands, you will almost always encounter Dreher’s Law of Merited Impossibility and claims – not entirely insincere, that’s how the psychology works – that “No is calling for …” or “That’s distinguishable because …” and then, a whole year or two later, it happens anyway, just as predicted.
Here’s an example. If you are going to remove a statue of Robert E. Lee, then why not Thomas Jefferson? Literally every President on Rushmore has now already had a prominent old statue cancelled and removed in a widely publicized manor in a major U.S. city, so why not go full Taliban and blast the Mount to smithereens with artillery? Honestly, why not? The trouble is that there is no way to explain why not by reference to abstract progressive principles, and so one has no choice but to use evasive tactics.
The point is, very, very few people tend to think and are willing to articulate in the necessarily politically inexpedient terms the obvious underlying principle, which is that every prominent, public honorific representation of any historical figure anywhere who is sinful by modern lights needs to be removed, without exception, and as quickly as possible. Well, when people pointed this out, they were called crazy demagogues, and then, a whole four years later, it happens anyway, just as one would predict from the underlying principles. Progressives who, at the time, said that it wouldn’t, maybe even really believed that it would, or that progressivism didn’t demand it, but it obviously did, so it was inevitable.
So you see a movement which just constantly lurches from issue to issue, with each victory simply opening up the door to a new front of a new battle. In an actual conventional war, the regime and territory controlled by an actual, concrete, and defeatable enemy serves as the natural stopping point upon which a grand strategy can be formulated. But in something like a Cold War in which the perpetual existence of The Enemy is taken for granted, every gain just leads to yet another attempt to get more gains, “and the night does not end”.
In this way, progressive ideological entrepreneurs are really like capitalist entrepreneurs. People who are looking for the next great innovation or market disruptor or arbitrage opportunity are pursuing a value of profit without regard to any “big picture” of some state of the end goal of capitalism or a vision of the perfect, final, capitalist society. Social negative externalities deriving from systemic issues with the decentralized and unregulated pursuit of profit are not the intention of the individual entrepreneur, and if there were such a thing as “profitism” as analogy to the actual core of progressivism, then it would be impossible to explain what other social values should ever limit or trump this goal. If you could explain it, you would be operating under a different ‘ism’, not profitism. And if you can explain where progressivism needs to stop, you aren’t a progressive, you hold some other values in higher regard.
That’s why all the attempts by such people to convince or persuade progressives to rein in their excesses are futile. There is no way to get to a higher level of generality and transcend what is at root a fundamental and irreconcilable conflict of values.
Thank you! The time you took to compose that very comprehensive reply is really greatly appreciated.
…just curious (if you come back to read this thread), some many years ago I used to read a blog titled “Handle’s Haus.” Was that you?
It was one of my frequent & favorite blog visits, if so. Just wanted to say that. 🙂
Sounds like you work at Starbucks or something. At our place, any job over Process Management Specialist III is pretty buttoned down.
I don’t think we’re going to run out of young, liberal, white women, so probably not. If wokeness is the public policy equivalent of women’s oft made demand of men, “I just want you to listen to and support me more without trying to ‘fix’ everything,” or “I shouldn’t have to explain to you why I’m mad; you should already know,” then perhaps the end point will be whatever is the equivalent of, “Yes, Dear.” Maybe, we’re already there.
The common refrain from woke-sympathetic policymakers during the George Floyd protests was, “You’re right; we need change. What, precisely, do you want?” The common reply from the woke: “The burden shouldn’t fall on us to come up with the answers.”
It should go without saying that said behavior from women constitutes a shit test and the “Yes, Dear” response means “I am an abject beta and I prostrate myself before your pedestal”. Now if wokeness is the public policy equivalent of shit tests, then what would exploding the shit test look like? Conan the Barbarian?
I would expect a trough in public wokeness until the midterms, for perhaps obvious reasons. Then it’s time to turn up the heat on that damn frog again.