I agree, and I'm concerned about the divide and conquer-type of impact it's having in societal discourse. This effect seems way too convenient (and beneficial) for the ruling class, and in that respect, I'm afraid academia may be inadvertantly working against the common interest of the working classes by pushing these worldviews.

You've nailed it. Analysis of social movements often doesn't take the intent of the ruling class into account nearly enough, and for good reason - part of their program is to deflect attention away from themselves and make it look organic.

> part of their program

Who's they? Name names.

Goldman Sachs is happy to sponsor floats for the gay pride parade (which incidentally is by now a huge commercial opportunity anyways), they were far less happy about the Occupy Wallstreet movement.

Why would anyone imagine or posit without sources that there is definitely a connection between these two movements? (In other words -- that an entity would be hypocritical for not supporting both)

Does that really imply any sinister motive? There are plenty of gay people working at Goldman; probably not many anti-capitalists.

It just illustrates that if your definition of "radical left" is people super concerned with identity politics, pronouns, dead naming, gay rights and so on, then this is a very convenient and non threatening definition to the rich and powerful. In contrast the people that marched on the opening of the new European Central Bank in Frankfurt and had paramilitary skirmishes in the morning are far less amendable to corporate sponsorship and feel good diversity and inclusion messaging, such as modifying your corporate logo to feature the rainbow flag.

They literally and figuratively want to burn down / destroy the capitalist system, which is a far more dangerous leftist position than demanding a carbon tax or "breaking the glass ceiling", diversity training etc., which only make sense if you take the capitalist system for granted.

Ah, I see what you’re saying. That’s an interesting way to look at it. Thanks!

Let's take another company then. Say McDonalds. They probably have gay people. They probably have homophobes. They probably have pro-capitalists and anti-capitalists.

He already said -the ruling class. The specific names aren't irrelevant since they change regularly...but the dynamic (divide and conquer) doesn't appear to.

Sure, but as soon as you start naming names, it's pretty obvious that a lot of the people proposing alternative pronouns that don't really catch on or making claims about their workplace are little-known ordinary middle class people without any real power, and some of the people declaring "war on woke" own media empires and sit in parliaments. Which places a different complexion on the "divide and conquer"...

Occupy Wall Street died when infected with identitarians.

Unions, as weak and pathetic as they are, become a whole lot more interested in pronouns, systemic racism and illegal immigration than fighting for a decent wage and decent working conditions for their paying members.

Politically, there is no more discourse on behalf of the poor or working classes, only for identitarian version thereof. With the obvious effect that the shunned identities naturally don't support erst left wing policies that exclude them on identity marker basis.

Wokeness is a huge win for the ruling class. Divide and conquer at its best.

Unions have been on the decline for decades going back to the deregulatory and anti-labor policies of Neo liberal governments and that probably has a lot more to do with the problem than pronouns

You've got cancer and then died of pneumonia. These are both deadly.

It doesn't work like that. The people in power find people with an agenda that suits their agenda (woke identity politics that divide any populist movement). Then they elevate those people to places of more power or reach or status. This comes in the forms of grants, promotions, publications, and opening doors (making connections).

You don't need to convince or coerce people to fit your agenda. You simply find them and elevate them.

Tavistok Institute, other tax exempt foundations used as cover for agendas by the oligarchs, etc.

For a more concrete example of this type of influence, I often refer to the Norman Dodd interview. Norman Dodd was the chief investigator for the 1953 Special Committe on Tax Exempt Foundations (aka the Reece Committee). During his investigation he sent a research assistant Catherine Casey to analyze the minutes of the foundations. Apparently Norman thought she would be good to send because she was not sympathetic to the investigation, and was generally defensive of the tax exempt foundations. After actually spot-reading the minutes though, apparently it shook her so badly that she was never able to return to practicing law, and Carroll Reece had to tuck her away in a job at the FTC, and Norman Dodd says she ultimately lost her mind as a result of what she discovered. (sorry for my poorly done quick transcription)

"... finally of course the war is over. At that time their interest shifts over to preventing what they call a reversion of life in the United States to what it was prior to 1914 when WW1 broke out. And they arrive at that point, they come to the conclusion that to prevent a reversion we must control education in the United States, and they realize that's a pretty big task. To them it is too big for them alone, so they approach the Rockefeller foundation, with a suggestion that; that portion of education which could be considered domestic, be handled by the Rockefeller foundation and that portion which is international should be handled by the endowment, and they then decide that the key to the success of these two operations lay in the alteration of the teaching of American history, so they approach four of the then most prominent teachers of American history in the country, people like Charles and Mary Bird. Their suggestion to them is will they alter the manner in which they present this subject and they get turned down flat. So they then decide it is necessary for them to do as they say, "build our own stable of historians". And then they approach the Gugenheim foundation which specializes in fellowships, and say "when we find young men in the process of studying for doctorates in the field of American history, and we feel they are the right caliber, will you grant them fellowships on our say so?" and the answer is yes. So under that condition, eventually they assemble 20, and they take this 20 potential teachers of American history, to London, and there they are briefed into what is expected of them, when as and if they secure appointments in keeping with the doctorates they will have earned. That group of 20 historians ultimately becomes the nucleus of the American Historical Association, and towards the end of the 1920's, the endowment grants to the American Historical Assocation, 400,000 for a study of our history in a manner which points to, what can this country look forward to in the future. That culminates in a 7 volume book study, the last volume of which is of course in essence a summary of the contents of the other 6, and the essence of the last volume is "The future of this country belongs to collectivism adminsitered with characteristic American efficiency."..."

So what I posit is that "wokeism", more than just a divide and conquer tool, is something that enables the further shifting of the overton window over time towards collectivism.

Now understand that the very article itself eminates from a publication with heavy connections to this same kind of subtle influence and control. I find it quite fascinating when viewing sources like the Economist with this sort of scrutiny the kind of insight that can be elucidated simply by trying to understand what they aren't saying and what they are trying to hide, or how they are trying to influence things.

https://youtu.be/YUYCBfmIcHM?t=1506

It's called recuperation and it doesn't even require nefarious intent.

These days anti-capitalism is literally sold as a commodity. Anti-consumerism has become a consumer identity. While this helps deradicalization by diverting the radical energy away from actual causes towards consumption, it also tends to make a good profit.

The problem isn't the worldviews. The problem is that you can't fight capitalism through consumption. You can't fight hierarchies by acting within the system of hierarchy, you have to step outside.

As an example, the Black Panthers (not the Marvel movie) not only offered social programs and free food in Black communities, they also built coalitions with other racial groups who tried to do the same in their communities. While at a glance acting only within their racial lines (i.e. racial identity politics) they actively worked against racial division through mutual solidarity.

Solidarity across divisions is important, but it can only work if you acknowledge the existence of the divisions and the power imbalances these divisions reinforce.

As an example in the negative, unions in the early 20th century US often failed because they rejected Black workers who then had no other economical option but to become scabs when white unionized workers went on strike (because they didn't get any of the union benefits and had no union covering their backs if they had joined the strike).

There's a widespread misconception these days that "left solidarity" means that all members of "the left" have to be equally "woke". They all have to believe in exactly the one leftist ideology you think is best, they all have to treat all marginalized groups exactly the way you think they must be treated and so on. This is where the leftist memes of the circular firing squad and purity spirals come from. THIS is harmful and divisive.

However the answer is not to "not be woke". The answer is to better embrace pragmatic alliances and understand that you can have a shared struggle even if it doesn't perfectly overlap. There's a place for close-nit communities but "the left" is not a clubhouse.

As another final example, there's a famous incident in the UK (recently portrayed in the movie "Pride") where gay activists joined striking coal miners because both groups were facing violent opposition from the police. The collaboration helped foster class consciousness in the gay activists and queer acceptance among the coal miners. They didn't become one cohesive ideologically perfect group but their solidarity made them more powerful in their shared struggle than either group would have been on their own.

"That anger dollar, that's a big dollar"

You, i like you. I did not know about the Union stuff nor the movie "Pride", so thank you. You are saying what i've been trying to say, staying factual and mesured.

The conspiracy theory is that modern “Woke” was a PSYOP to dismantle Occupy Wall St, which it was highly effective at.

I think people have vastly different work situations and that helps drive the divide. "Woke" ideas are just not that intimidating if you trust your boss and have a sensible employer. Other places it could seem much more of a threat to you personally. This difference in experience is less explicit than in the past when workplaces were more political places. Management can act benevolent whilst subtly gaslighting their people.

I'm curious what any possible alternatives might be to the practical problems "wokeness" tries to present itself as a solution to.

I don't think the problem of racism and sexism (two classic "woke" topics) are "Left" problems, which is why it strikes me as odd that I don't see ideas about how to deal with them coming from everyone, beyond a straight denial they exist, or that it's actually the fault of the folks experiencing the discrimination somehow.

I think the spectral signature of wokeness is that affluent white people whose knowledge of racial discrimination is at most anecdotal and second hand started treating racism as The Problem whose solution must get almost absolute priority, even at a cost of traditional civil liberties or putting other things (healthcare?) on the backburner.

It looks like a weird neurotic guilt attack that is probably counterproductive to any future common prosperity. Pushing "Latinx" on Hispanics and discriminatory quotas on Asian students is almost guaranteed to generate some weird backlash. Import of the same ideas to Europe whose racial dynamics is absolutely different (black people from Africa sail here on their own and "we"* mostly want to stop this movement, so pretty much the opposite of American slave history) is almost guaranteed to wake up some old demons.

* Of course there is not a uniform opinion on this among 400 million people, but the last five years have been spent tightening borders, not opening them, and even some lefty parties like Danish Social Democrats joined in.

It's well known that in every movement some people can cherry-pick issues to focus on and neglect others.

Sometimes it's an unconscious bias, sometimes is attention seeking, sometimes it's a deflection tactic.

E.g. some "affluent white people" might talk all day about discrimination and never touch the painful topic of wealth inequality across the world.

*BUT* this does not invalidates the valuable goals a whole movement.

If you cherry-pick some examples to dismiss a whole movement you are making a strawman.

I'm wondering why the woke movement prefers to classify the people by race instead of wealth. Wealth is a much better indicator of systems of power.

> the woke movement prefers

That's a big generalization.

Yet it's really unsurprising that a number of affluent people love to talk about race, gender, environment, and many other topic except wealth inequality.

> I'm curious what any possible alternatives might be to the practical problems "wokeness" tries to present itself as a solution to.

The obvious solution is meritocracy and race/sex blindness. That's the world I wish to live in - non-discrimination & equality of opportunity, not "positive" discrimination (it's always positive for someone) and (enforced) equality of outcome. But the Woke Left has been quite hostile to those concepts recently...

Edit: added "Woke" before "Left" because presumably there's other (liberal) Left that would support meritocracy.

This is something I genuinely am curious about: how do you get equality of opportunity without first getting equality of outcome in a system where money opens doors and inheritance exists? Just-freed black people started with nothing when white slave owners had farms to pass onto their children. If (I think it is) obvious that wealth provides more opportunity, there’s no way for black people to ever have equal opportunity as the original white population.

(Edit: this isn’t to say I agree with equal outcome. I think there’s a lot of nonsense stuff in that sphere. But I’ve never myself been able to answer how to consider how to make equality of opportunity happen if we started from an unequal space and inheritance exists which persists inequality.)

This is wrong on so many levels but I don't blame you as it's the false narrative that's most pervasive in most media.

First of all, "starts with nothing" isn't specific to black population. Many (most?) immigrants also start with nothing, yet often outperform locals (including whites) (the important question that almost noone is asking, is why?). Among those are Nigerians, so clearly "because they're not black" isn't the correct answer.

Your question already contains the "correct" (IMO) answer, which is: help poor people. To the extent that poverty correlates to being black (or any other categorical characteristic), both solutions are equivalent, except that mine is (1) non-discriminatory (e.g. it helps white homeless people as well), (2) self-correcting (when "racial equality of outcome" is reached and poverty is no longer correlated with skin color, my solution will continue to do "good"), and (3) non-wasteful (why would society spend any amount of resources helping e.g. Obama's daughters, who are by "inheritance" (of political connections) some of the most privileged people on this planet?).

Edit: I might have been too focused on the "race" part of your comment. If you're wondering about inherited inequality in general, well, yeah, that's one of the paradoxes of meritocracy & similar concepts, e.g. assortative mating - the end (stable) state is a society ruled by the (hereditary) "intelligent" class. But I think that's unlikely to happen naturally because there seems to be quite a lot of genetic variation in intelligence (and other traits our society treats as "superior", e.g. height, beauty, etc.); if anything, that's more likely to happen because of genetic manipulation/embryo selection, which doesn't exactly require a meritocratic society...

There is no such thing as equality of outcome. There will always be hierarchies. We can shift the core currency from $$$ to political favor or even ritualized victimhood, but we can't eliminate hierarchies. Remember the Soviet nomenklatura:

> Members of the so-called nomenklatura , numbering perhaps a million, have special holiday retreats, access to special medical facilities and--most resented by ordinary Russians--access to special stores that sell imported and Soviet-made goods that are simply not available in the regular stores. Many also have cars and chauffeurs.

> As a practical matter, the privileges are hereditary, since children of the elite have an inside track on admission to the top universities--graduation from which guarantees them good jobs and a place on the nomenklatura list.

https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1986-03-17-me-22368-...

Furthermore, 'inequality of outcome' is often times a good thing. We all want a good plumber, a good surgeon, a good baker, a good teacher, a good farmer, a good engineer, either as a service provider or a colleague. Having an 'equality of outcome' system where randoms are promoted to 'good plumber' by fiat in practice makes plumbing dysfunctional. See the collapse of the Soviet Union.

Which leaves open some hard problems:

* Competency leaning hierarchies, vs. power leaning hierarchies.

* Low gini hierarchies vs. high gini hierarchies.

* Low skill societies vs high skill societies.

* Skill acquisition. Help broad swaths of the population acquire proficiency in useful $skill.

Note that in practice equality of outcome systems have been successful only in flattening hierarchies by essentially bulldozing them into the ground, bringing everyone down (other than the new hierarchy leaders) into material, spiritual and skill poverty.

Hold on hold on. This comment presupposes that blacks have ways been disadvantaged. That's not true at all. Before the civil rights movement of the 60s, black incomes were increasing at a faster rate than whites and were on track to surpass the white income. Blacks even had more kids born within wedlock. The ghettoization of the African American community is a recent development. For most of the post bellum period, African Americans were on a swift upward trajectory. They were much like Asians today, who also often started with nothing in this country (due to currency export restrictions) and whose education achievement and incomes surpass whites...

Indeed poor black immigrants to this country do extremely well also.

All this is detailed extensively in the vision of the anointed by Thomas sowell (an accomplished black man from this era)

> meritocracy

A core problem is what this means. A lot of people insist that we previously lived in a meritocracy and that things like admissions tests are pure representations of this meritocracy, so that moving away from these systems is an attack on a purely level playing field of meritocracy.

But we don't all agree with this. The same people who you criticize do not agree that we have achieved equality of opportunity. Not even close. For a very clear example, we see wealth opening huge numbers of doors for people regardless of actual merit, either through access to training, or access to connections, or as a backstop that enables people to take risks.

What you consider hostility to these concepts, other people think are essential to achieving these concepts.

Yes, this is a common strawman.

Noone (sensible) is claiming that any system is a meritocracy. "Meritocracy" is just an ideal, like "equality", "fairness", or "airplanes not crashing", and it's unlikely we'll ever achieve this ideal, but that doesn't make it not worth fighting for.

So, while obviously objective exams aren't "meritocracy", they are without doubt more meritocratic than not having objective exams.

If "these people" really wanted to move towards greater meritocracy (as opposed to abandoning meritocracy), they'd support things like, abolishment of "extracurricular activities" in college admissions, or legacy admissions, or maybe even things China's limit on the amount of tutoring kids can do (I personally thing this is both too extreme and ultimately counterproductive, but at least we can all agree that it's with the right goal in mind - increasing meritocracy).

I agree that "wealth" is a problem, but the answer is having more objective measures, not less.

> So, while obviously objective exams aren't "meritocracy", they are without doubt more meritocratic than not having objective exams.

This is where we disagree dramatically. And this is why it is so frustrating to have people tell me that I "hate excellence" for supporting policy changes. By holding this assumption it enables you to both

1. Hold that meritocracy is an ideal

2. Conclude that people pushing for changes must oppose meritocracy

But I simply do not agree. To me, admissions exams are like the Leetcode interviews that people decry here. The test something, but that thing is largely disconnected from actual work and instead just becomes an obstacle course.

> If "these people" really wanted to move towards greater meritocracy (as opposed to abandoning meritocracy), they'd support things like, abolishment of "extracurricular activities" in college admissions, or legacy admissions, or maybe even things China's limit on the amount of tutoring kids can do (I personally thing this is both too extreme and ultimately counterproductive, but at least we can all agree that it's with the right goal in mind - increasing meritocracy).

I am involved in local politics to change the admissions program for a public magnet school. "Woke" activists proposed a merit lottery, a system where all students who met a minimum GPA and math-level requirement could be entered into a random lottery for admissions. This was criticized by opponents for being "anti-meritocratic" and even "racist against asians".

The eventually enacted policy maintains a "holistic" application, which does not consider race but does include these other topics. This received precisely the same criticism from opponents. Activists on the "woke" side preferred the merit lottery to this outcome.

So what I see here is that activists, at least in the situations that I am personally involved in, do support things like the abolishment of extracurricular activities in admissions systems.

Without more information about the specific case, it's impossible to determine which side was actually supporting meritocracy and which was simply promoting their political cause disguised as meritocracy.

What was the minimum GPA? Who can apply? Are admissions limited to a geographical area or not? Who determines the GPA? If the answer is "teachers", how easily can that be gamed? Why not a similar but much more objective and harder to game system, e.g. admissions exam followed by a random selection above a, say, 80% cutoff point (e.g. first narrow the pool with an exam, then halve it again randomly)?

> but that thing is largely disconnected from actual work and instead just becomes an obstacle course.

This assertion is AFAIK quite nebulous. SATs and similar tests are correlated with IQ and with probability someone finishes university and with later life outcomes. Some say that high school GPA are better predictors, which might be true, but the real question is, how easy are they to game? A metric is only really useful if it doesn't change substantially when it becomes a goal. You might disagree regarding SATs (there's quite some disagreement and proper research into this topic is both hard and very politicised) but whatever other solutions you're proposing, should first be assessed based on how subjective (easy to manipulate/game) they are.

Same thing as Leetcode interviews, really. Everyone knows they suck, noone has come up with anything better yet.

3.5 GPA and enrollment in Algebra I in 8th grade. Admissions are geographical because the school is a public school in Fairfax County, though students from neighboring counties can apply and attend.

Of course GPA isn’t flawless. You’ll find that activists also seek to solve pipeline problems at lower grades. But this is a rapid retreat from “an objective measure is obviously better” to “this specific measure is better than proposed alternatives.”

Using exam score cutoffs was discussed. Generally, people prefer gpa to exams because there isn’t the same explicit cottage industry of exam prep (yes, private tutoring obviously exists) and it includes a wider range of material than what is included on the test. Exam score cutoffs was also deemed unacceptable and similarly called racist and destructive by the same opponents of the proposed policy.

Having thought about this a while longer, I've changed my mind.

I don't really see any purpose in randomization, except anti-meritocracy pro-diversity. It is potentially excusable at the edges to account for the inherent noise of measurement (i.e. is 3.4 GPA really that different from 3.6 GPA) but there's no real reason that someone with 4 GPA shouldn't have a greater shot at admission than someone with 3.5 GPA.

Of course, if your distrust in GPA is so great that you oppose even that, then... what even the point of GPA in the first place? We should be working towards improving the metrics, not eliminating them.

But otherwise, this whole randomisation business is like, "Would you like to be operated on by the surgeon, or by the nurse? Oh, wait, let's flip a coin."

> But otherwise, this whole randomisation business is like, "Would you like to be operated on by the surgeon, or by the nurse? Oh, wait, let's flip a coin."

We are discussing high school education admissions right now. The kids being evaluated are 13. What is schooling for? Do admissions exist to make sure that some unqualified kid never gets access to a strong education? That conservative approach can make sense for life-or-death interactions like surgery, but nobody dies if a "less qualified" kid is sent to TJ (actually, since suicide rates have increased as the school has gotten more competitive, it might actually save lives).

GPA measures several things at the same time. It most explicitly measures what you have done. But in admissions we want some measure of future potential. This is not aligned perfectly with what somebody has done in the past. Were we to change grading to a continuous evaluation of future potential then I'd be much more accepting of a stricter hierarchy in admissions, but I am extremely skeptical that such a metric would be achievable without introducing tremendous biases.

My GPA in middle school was about a 4.0. But when I review my life, the reason it was so high included many many things that were unrelated to my future potential as a student.

We can also take a step back and consider why we even have limited-access accelerated education in the first place. GMU is just down the street. Even discussing the idea of opening up accelerated education to anybody who wants it is also considered being "an enemy of excellence" by opponents.

Finally, your note about surgeons and nurses is interesting, given the history. Prior to understanding of germ theory, it would have been preferable to be operated on by a nurse. Obviously, this is an extreme example but it clearly demonstrates how widespread understanding of "merit" can actually be totally broken.

I think we share a lot of frustrations regarding the present state of the education system, but I still don't understand exactly what part randomisation is supposed to solve (except your anecdotal point about suicides, which I would easily counter with equally anecdotal or suicide rates might increase further as you'd be adding stress of randomisation on top of stress of performance). It appears to me that a lot of the problems you highlight would actually be solved with more/better metrics (including SATs / IQ tests, as these predict future performance).

I agree though that there's no good reason for gatekeeping education. In fact, in my ideal world, you'd have per-subject fast tracks available for anyone (or, more generally, non-age-specific schooling). For example, I always excelled at (and was interested in) math (other subjects, like physics and chemistry, I just excelled at but wasn't that interested in), so I think both I (individually, in future earnings) and the society (collectively, in future value/invention/...) would benefit tremendously if I was given harder math classes at an earlier age. There's a lot of kids like me, and in other subjects as well. But this would require better metrics and identifying such students earlier (even without any rate-limiting, simply to identify talent and steer it in the right direction).

Randomization expands access to qualified students who cannot access the same preparatory material or have divergent mental behaviors that do not hinder their ability to learn but do impact their ability to take tests.

The recent admitted class for TJ has seen absolutely enormous increases in the population of economically disadvantaged students as well as students on the autism spectrum or with other neuroatypical situations.

It therefore (in my mind) provides a more just system of allocation limited access to accelerated education, while we live in a world with such limited access.

> I agree though that there's no good reason for gatekeeping education. In fact, in my ideal world, you'd have per-subject fast tracks available for anyone (or, more generally, non-age-specific schooling).

My experience has been that promoting these policies receives even greater criticisms that me and my friends are racists who hate excellence. It is ridiculous to me that FCPS has a gated system for accelerated learning when there is a commuter-focused college right there. But if I go to school board meetings and suggest that we take resources and allocate them for this purpose, I'm called an "asian-hater".

My family saw a similar thing happen to them many years ago. The local GT programs were drawing students only from a select few (almost entirely white) schools and it turned out that a lot of this was due to how students were identified as candidates. My parents sought to change things, which did not deny any access to white students but instead expanded access and funding so that simply more people had access to accelerated education and... my parents were called "white traitors" by neighbors.

This is why I get so worked up about this stuff when people claim that support for a particular form of admissions exam is by definition support for promoting merit or promoting excellence.

A "Merit lottery" is a half measure when a true lottery is the least discriminatory way to go about things. Every position within society should just be to do a true lottery everywhere such an idea can be applied.

Water treatment plant workers? President? Honors program students? All of these roles are subject to countless forms of discrimination against people for lacking intelligence, lacking the right identity, lacking educational attainment, lacking all sorts of things.

Is this supposed to be a sarcastic argument against the merit lottery?

What I tire of this "faux egalitarian, faux equality of opportunity, meritocracy" stuff which almost invariably discriminates against the less intelligent while trying to establish equality over an arbitrary list of attributes such as race or ethnicity or gender or sexual orientation which have been deemed to be especially important, whereas discrimination against the lazy and unintelligent is taken for granted as righteous, and discrimination against the unattractive and short is tolerable. This is in spite of the fact people are born lazy, stupid, short, and ugly, and this will never change.

Thus the only two resolutions I see to the problem are simply thus. Kill absolutely everybody, thus establishing perfect equity and equality. The other solution is to use lotteries absolutely everywhere except for perhaps a special class of lottery runners (an unfortunate meritocracy), in dating, in work, in schooling, that made it so that everybodies outcomes in life was absolutely arbitrary, and thus equal and equitable.

Again, is this supposed to be a sarcastic argument against the approach?

Ideas like merit lottery are very interesting and worthy of consideration on rational, liberal, universalist grounds, some of which you've hinted at here.

Sadly, when they are promoted on the grounds of obtuse academic wokeness or identity politics, people instinctively infer that the real goal of such policies is to hand out undeserved benefits to minorities at the expense of a legitimate meritocracy.

If it were merely instinct then I’d expect op eds calling supporters racists and “enemies of excellence” to stop after some time, but they haven’t.

We've heard, and continue to hear, vastly, vastly more about the identity politics grounds than the more worthy ones, and in my observation, that's not entirely or even mostly the fault of the critics of merit lottery. It took me years to find any sustained, serious public promotion of the good reasons to do these things.

Instead, what made headlines was garbage like "I just don’t buy into the narrative that any one ethnic group [Asians] owns admission to these [selective] schools" from the NYC school chancellor. A clear attitude that all racial groups are entitled to proportional representation in selective schools regardless of performance.

I suspect that this is because op eds are deliberately drumming up rage.

Have you spent time with activist groups?

Carranza got lots of support for his attitude, including from a majority of the NYC city council. So I question the idea that the identity politics angle is all being drummed up from the ether by the media, and I'm frankly suspicious when people are so eager to downplay this obvious and very influential phenomenon. If people want to tolerate it for coalitional reasons, sure whatever, but let's not pretend it isn't happening.

The most virulent forms of racism are a symptom of material conditions, eg., that poor black people live uniformly in one area, and rich white people in another. This creates a competition for local resources, including demands on police time and attention. This competition reporduces racism, in that it is very hard not to have racism when "looking out for one's own" is a racial matter.

What we have in Wokeism is a pseudo-politics, in that, it make no material demands. The woke concern is against alleged "implicit" forms of racism which "harm" graduates jockying for position within large corporate structures.

It reads a little like "what happens when the upper middle-class discover that they too may, possibly, have been discriminated against".

> What we have in Wokeism is a pseudo-politics, in that, it make no material demands.

That’s because “Wokeism” doesn’t exist. Being “woke”, was never a descriptor of a politics but of the state of being aware of and engaged in social and political issues affecting a disadvantaged (originally, specifically Black American) community. It’s now morphed into a label assigned by outside group to anyone whose politics the speakers disagrees with for being too focussed, or focussed in the wrong way, on identity issues. So, yes, there is no coherent material program of Wokeism, because Wokeism isn’t a thing.

Now, within the broad mass that any user of the term labels “Wokeism”, there are many groups that have within them extensive, coherent lists of material demands,

Wokeism has come to refer to a type of (basically religious) revival which is happening across the western middle class. it sometimes includes a political project of 'equality'.

Whether you like the term or not, it is very hard to simply deny the revolution in identity construction currently taking place.

Watch the latest CIA advert which emphasises neauvox-oppressed identity markers over. It emphases how the CIA allows you to 'be yourself' qua how you are a member of an oppressed group.

Whatever you want to call /that/, this is what I am talking about.

> What we have in Wokeism is a pseudo-politics, in that, it make no material demands.

A plain reading of this seems false. Wokism definitely makes demands.

material [1] demands.

[1]https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historical_materialism

I can immediately think of one woke policy that is considered to be a material demand: UBI, also Medicare for all and reparations for black people.

Sure, I was just clarifying what GP wrote as the reply seemed to have missed/not understood a key nuance.

Also providing a little context to what I assumed was meant by “material demands”, based on the quote from GP below.

> The most virulent forms of racism are a symptom of material conditions, eg., that poor black people live uniformly in one area, and rich white people in another.

The conservative approach to racism would be to equalize opportunity (to the extent the government is allowed to) and replace the instincts that lead to racism with strong civic nationalism and then wait a very very long time, which is a solution that acknowledges that social change takes a long time.

You claim this is denial, but that's a biased reframing of the stated solution. This is a potential solution, but is not acceptable to the 'woke'

TLDR: Actually address the fundamental problems (spoiler: sexism and racism are not the fundamental problems, they are aggravating factors) that allow sexism and racism to cause issues for disadvantaged groups.

Most of the discussions around systemic racism and sexism fundamentally boil down to the topic either poverty or violence from police.

Poverty:

Specific groups are over-represented in the impoverished population, sometimes across generations. We, correctly, have identified systemic bias as an contributing factor to these trends.

Imagine a hypothetical society where the means of comfort (good food, safe and adequate housing, new clothing, entertainment, etc...) are available to people that need them, regardless of whether or not one is employed. Now ask yourself, would racism and sexism have the same bite that it currently has? If one's ability to live comfortably is not based on systemic bias, one would be disingenuous if they said "yes".

Life gets a lot easier when one can ignore shitty racists and sexists without fear of losing their means of survival. It would be nice if racists and sexists didn't exist, but if everyone had the means to ignore them without fear of repercussions, that's almost as good.

Violence from police:

A few observations from the last few years of police violence and the BLM movement:

-There is a large portion of shitty individuals within various police forces that enjoy victimizing victimizable individuals

-Racialized groups are more victimizable than the average

-Police violence, although concentrated against minorities, also victimizes everyone to some degree, regardless of race or gender.

What practical solutions have come out of all of the years of outrage and protests? Instead of using "master/slave" software terminology, my company now encourages "leader/follower", while all of management is patting its back for "fighting systemic racism". Huh?

Here are some actual practical solutions to this issue:

-federally-mandated body cameras for all overt police officers that are always-on, and record to multiple external and publicly-viewable archives

-police review bodies with actual teeth to punish criminality amongst police officer

-a legal mechanism to permanently bar an individual from any kind of policing, country-wide

-removing "verbal evidence from a trusted officer" as admissible evidence in court

"Wokeness" is just yet another socially-acceptable form of discrimination, where us commoners have been pitted against each other playing some stupid "privilege points" game based on physical appearance. It's divisive, and is not actually moving us towards a healthier society. We should be looking towards our government to solve the actual issues that are aggravated by (and not caused by) sexism and racism.

In the case of violence-based examples above, the hypothetical society doesn't address the issue of past harm (decades or centuries of a disadvantaged position in society). It also doesn't address non-economic forms of harm (like media underrepresentation, leadership underrepresentation, etc.)

> practical definition of "left" and "right" is "no hierarchy" vs "hierarchy"

Absolutely not: it's the left that's usually the favor of giving more power to the most oppressive and monopolic hierarchy there is, the government, while the right is fighting to dismantle it.

And how is that working in Texas?

The right doesn't want to dismantle government at all. It wants to own it.

Texas? The only state in US that resembles what I mean by the right is New Hampshire.

You're just replacing an elected government with more unelected power.

I guess by "the left" you mean Democrats? They're mostly liberals, not leftists, and want to maintain the hierarchies but ease some of the most obvious impacts through regulations.

The idea that "left means more government" is also very ahistorical and feels uniquely like a product of modern American political discourse. The origin of the left-right distinction is literally the abolition of feudalism, i.e. replacing a fixed hierarchy by birthright with egalitarian democratic elections. By 1776 standards the founding fathers were left-wing radicals. The right would have literally defended the Crown.

If you understand left-right as Democrat-Republican, your view doesn't hold true either. Republicans generally want to void labor protections, reduce taxes, cut social welfare and lift environmental regulations, but they also always want to increase the military, intelligence and police budgets. Republicans also tend to want the state to enforce their idea of morality, e.g. by prohibiting (secular or non-Christian) same-sex marriages, criminalizing abortion or restricting sex education and access to contraceptives. They want to enforce what they see as the natural order through punishment whereas "the left" wants to counteract it through support. Prison abolitionists tend to be on the left, not the right.

The government isn't hierarchy. The government is an institution that interacts with hierarchy. As are large corporations for that matter. Reducing the government budget and shifting more economic power to corporations doesn't reduce hierarchies, it only takes power from elected officials to unelected shareholders.

If you believe in an unregulated free market capitalism, you literally support the hierarchy of the market and you believe in a natural order. Or to put it in words that feel less icky if you think of yourself as an anarcho-capitalist: that people should vote with their dollars on what goods and services should thrive or fail.

If you believe money is power and you believe it's good and natural for some people to have many orders of magnitude more money than other people, you believe in a natural order. This is what leftists call a hierarchy and leftists don't like it.

Note: I'm not saying leftists don't want a big government. I'm saying leftists (even outside anarchism) want to get rid of the state. They just disagree on how to get there. And for reformists that answer usually involves using the state one way or another.

> The idea that "left means more government" is also very ahistorical and feels uniquely like a product of modern American political discourse. The origin of the left-right distinction is literally the abolition of feudalism, i.e. replacing a fixed hierarchy by birthright with egalitarian democratic elections. By 1776 standards the founding fathers were left-wing radicals. The right would have literally defended the Crown.

Look at how many Black Americans supported the Loyalist side. Many of the American Founding Fathers were slave owners and supported the continuation of slavery. The British Empire promised freedom to American slaves who supported the Empire, and it mostly delivered on that promise. Both sides were very racist, if judged by contemporary standards, but I think there is a decent argument to be made that the racism of the British was on the whole a lot milder than that of the Americans.

The British Empire, including what is now Canada, officially abolished slavery in 1833; the United States would not finally abolish it for another 30+ years. (And it took a bloody civil war for America to do it; the Empire’s abolition of slavery was largely peaceful.) But in actual fact, slavery was de facto rendered legally unenforceable in most of (what is now) Canada by a series of court decisions in the 1790s, so in practice slavery was abolished in Canada over 60 years prior to its abolition in the US.

While there was widespread social discrimination against Black people in 19th and 20th century Canada, it was generally much milder than in much of the United States. The British and Canadian legal systems generally accepted the theoretical legal equality of all citizens regardless of race, even though it often failed to enforce that theoretical equality in practice; by contrast, the legal systems of many American states contained explicit discrimination against Black citizens.

Lynching was a great scourge on American history, of which Black people were the disproportionate (but not exclusive) victims. Many Americans defended lynching as a form of democracy. Judges, law enforcement and prosecutors in the US were very sensitive to public opinion – in part due to their widespread direct election – and were often loathe to properly investigate, prosecute and convict lynching cases if public opinion appeared to approve of the act. Likewise, many American jurors believed that it was appropriate for them to defer to public opinion in deciding cases, and return "not guilty" verdicts in popularly approved lynchings even when the evidence clearly pointed to guilt.

By contrast, the British Empire strongly objected to people taking the law into their own hands, and would-be lynchers in Canada faced far greater odds of successful prosecution for murder (and its then near-mandatory death penalty) than in the US. British culture–including among politicians, law enforcement, prosecutors, judges and jurors–prioritised upholding the rule of law over popular opinion to a much greater extent than American culture did. Due to this cultural difference, lynching was extremely rare in Canadian history – a mere handful of isolated incidents, compared to many thousands in the US.

So, who were the "egalitarians" and "left-wing radicals" in the American Revolution? I think we should seriously consider the possibility that the American Revolution was in fact a reactionary right-wing movement, widely supported by slave owners who lived in fear that the British Empire might forcibly liberate their slaves, and not really a "left-wing" one.

Black Americans weren't loyalists because they believed in the divine right of kings, though. I'm not sure why you've decided to spend the majority of your reply on explaining why the American revolution was bad for Black people to address an off-hand comment.

Chattel slavery was directly tied to scientific racism, which is literally a system of hierarchy and the belief that the system is both natural and good (e.g. the "white man's burden" ideology that slavery is good for the slaves because they're unfit to survive on their own).

You won't find any political movement that neatly fits into the "left-right" spectrum. In retrospect even the often lauded direct democracy of ancient Greece was deeply undemocratic because it was restricted by its very narrow definition of citizenship. Under scientific racism Black slaves were barely considered human and even if you only consider white people the US still didn't let women vote until the suffragettes fought for it and won.

My point wasn't that the founding fathers should be considered leftists. My point was that the original historical definition of leftism was opposition to the king of France during the French revolution because that's how the seating happened to be arranged in the National Assembly in 1789 (notably before the American revolution, but close enough to make the point).

As feudalism became less relevant, the meaning began to shift by becoming more generalized. I'm not arguing about morality here but definitions. The 18th century definition of left and right was almost entirely about royalty and the aristocracy. The generalized definition I summarized evolved considerably later.

> Black Americans weren't loyalists because they believed in the divine right of kings, though.

White loyalists didn’t believe in the Divine Right of Kings either. That ideology was promoted by the Catholic King James II, who was overthrown in the “Glorious Revolution” of 1688. The Hanoverian monarchy (to which George III belonged) was ideologically opposed to it because if true it would mean the 1688 revolution was illegitimate, and hence Hanoverian rule of Britain would be illegitimate too. The main supporters of Divine Right of Kings were Catholics and the Jacobite rebels in Ireland and Scotland, not Protestant supporters of the British government. In fact, some Jacobites supported the American Revolution - such as Hugh Mercer.

> Chattel slavery was directly tied to scientific racism,

The Atlantic slave trade was already well underway when the theory of “scientific racism” was first being developed. And it didn’t become widely popular until the mid-19th century, by which time slavery was approaching its end. It was a post hoc rationalisation for chattel slavery, not a cause.

> My point was that the original historical definition of leftism was opposition to the king of France during the French revolution because that's how the seating happened to be arranged in the National Assembly in 1789 (notably before the American revolution, but close enough to make the point).

The French Revolution was (in part) a revolution against the “Divine Right of Kings”, but the American Revolution wasn’t, since the British had already rejected that ideology in the revolution of 1688. If you define “leftism” as merely rejecting that then both sides in the American Revolutionary War were “leftist”, and the British Empire was a “leftist” empire

I take it you haven't talked to many leftists, then. We're quite anti-authoritarian and opposed to hierarchy.

If you consider US democrats to be "left", you are sadly mistaken.

I was born in USSR, still live in Moscow and have a very good understanding of what "left" is.

Lenin was a political opportunist and Stalin most likely faked Lenin's will to appoint himself after his death. The Bolsheviks also murdered/incarcerated plenty of leftists and disempowered the pre-existing worker coops and trade unions through centralization.

Anarchists, syndicalists and other leftists were literally building decentralized structures before the Bolsheviks swooped in and decided the public would need decades of ideological education before it could be trusted to make any decisions about their lives and "helpfully" started making the decisions for them. It doesn't help that many of the leftists outside Russia who were critical of Bolshevism were murdered by German paramilitaries and later more indirectly by the USSR while trying to fight fascism in Spain.

Saying you have a good understanding what "left" is because you were born in the USSR is like saying you have a good understanding of what pasta is because you've been eating Yum Yum noodles for a decade.

Have you read Kropotkin? Bakunin? Proudhon? Bookchin? There is a wide range of leftist thought outside the very narrow niche within Marxist-Leninist-Maoism that still uncritically defends the USSR.

> Have you read Kropotkin? Bakunin?

Actually, yes. Lenin, Trotsky, Lenin and Mao too.

You try to explain the consequences of communism with "few bad apples"; well, at least it's not a "no true scottsman", I have to give credit for that. However, there have been so many cases of leftists coming to power and building a state, and the only one I know that didn't end is tragedy was Israel — and even it resulted in financial crisis and eventual move to capitalism.

Of course, it's opportunists and sociopaths who come to power. You're absolutely right about that. But it would be silly to explain all these outcomes as fault of particular individuals, even if they are at fault. It's the principles behind the system itself, which make it vulnerable to this kind of attack.

Essentially, the problem is with this: every kind of leftism makes moral behaviour nor a matter of personal choice and responsibility, but something mandated by the state or a quasi-state organisation. This sounds very good in theory, especially for the people who are sensitive to the wrongs of the world. But in practice, it makes those organisations infallible and creates in their place a perfect vessel for said opportunists and sociopaths.

State power is like The Ring from LOTR. It's very seductive to use it for good, but absolute power corrupts absolutely. It should be not used, but destroyed.

You do know that anarchist ideology is literally defined by the opposition to states and state-lile structures, right?

It seems odd to tar specifically anti-statists with wanting to create a state. Anarchy being literally the antonym of hierarchy, statism is the complete antithesis of anti-authoritarian left-wing politics.

You're conflating the desire in theory and the practical outcome in practice.

You're thinking of Stalinist/Leninist authoritarian communism, which certainly doesn't encompass all of left-wing ideology, only a niche.

When Stalin came to power, one of the first things he did was too purge all the anarchists and other non-authoritarian socialists. Thus most leftists despise Stalin and what he did. Mao, too.

True leftists are anti-authoritarian, therefore every leftist that is authoritarian is actually not a leftist.

Yeah, I think that was the intended reading of that reply given the obviously similar phrasing.

However there's a word for anti-authoritarian leftists. We're called anarchists. Not all leftists are anarchists and not all leftists are anti-authoritarian. Even authoritarian leftists (or "statists") generally believe in the end goal being the ideal of a stateless, classless society.

Statists just tend to believe the only way to get there is with an intermediary socialist state established through a communist revolution and led by a vanguard party who directs the economic, social and philosophical evolution of the people towards bringing about communism. The differences between those groups are largely about what that intermediary state should look like and at what point it can be dissolved.

Some of the aspirationally communist states of the 20th century justified their continued existence with communism having to be rolled out globally simultaneously for it to b successful. Some instead argued that what they had achieved was "real socialism", heavily implying that's as good as it gets and any critics were utopian idealists who'd rather tear down the local optimum in the hope of an unachievable ideal. The USSR opened its markets and collapsed under the dual load of its bureaucrat aristocracy and capitalist oligarchs, China pivoted to Dengism to contain their "capitalist experiments" with the promise of a greater good coming from the temporary toleration of exploitation.

But for anarchists (and mutualists, who fall somewhere between anarchism and statism) the biggest problem tends to be that they usually either start out or end up surrounded by nation states with standing armies who want none of their nonsense.

The most promising approach seems to be dual power, i.e. building anarchist structures[0] within existing states through cooperation and solidarity so that when they inevitably collapse in the future, the people can fall back on those structures as an alternative to just reasserting the old (hierarchical) power structures.

[0]: To preempt the obvious joke: contrary to the portrayal of "anarchy" in most media today, anarchists don't believe in no organizations, just no hierarchical power structures, i.e. usually they agree with consent-driven forms of bottom-up organizing. The one exception tend to be egoists (see Stirner), but most anarchists try to ignore them because they're weird.

People are getting fired over those things, it is not just mindspace of silly people.

Leftist movements tend to consume themselves in escalating purity spirals.

https://unherd.com/2020/01/cast-out-how-knitting-fell-into-a...

That article goes directly from people complaining about discrimination to Mao's Great Leap Forward, but it seems like wanting to be treated with a reasonable level of dignity at work is unlike causing a major famine that kills millions of people. Politics leads to ideological thinking which generates mostly garbage.

Heh. If you replaced “leftist movements” with “human movements” then I’d be with you. Witness the ever developing criteria for identifying and excising “RINOs” from the Trump movement. Find any decently sized organization with humans in it, and you will find a subset of its members actively attempting to identify and excise inpure members. The fallacy you are demonstrating is the notion that such behavior is relegated to a particular other group, as though ostracizing behavior doesn’t predate the very concept of “left” vs “right”.

Doesn't saying "but you can find this on the other side" imply that it's much more common on the side you're comparing to?

Not really, it just implies that there's a common perception that may or may not reflect reality.

To an extent left and right are asymmetrical---leftist groups tend to be groups organized around being leftist as their main purpose, while "rightist" groups (churches, police unions, gun enthusiasts) tend to be rightist incidentally. Neo Nazis feel like the exception that proves the rule.

I know some Quakers who put your "churches are rightist groups" to the lie. Not new either; read up on Public Universal Friend.

The quakers are today so small as to be completely irrelevant. And the existence of the quakers proves the commenters points that right wing groups tend to be right wing only incidentally. They have another main purpose. He gives churches as an example. People go to church for religion. Coincidentally, many of them also happen to be conservative. That there are churches where this is not true only emphasizes this point that right wing groups tend to form incidentally.

> It might exist in academia or PR departments or journalism or facebook pages and twitter threads but it does very little to affect material relations and power structures, so it's if anything the Left and not anyone else who should be concerned with it.

Are you sure? It feels like it has a much stronger influence, at least in Western Europe.

The influence exerted is usually orthogonal to the traditional goal of improving the conditions of the working class. Instead identity politics focuses on a platform of "more POC female dictators" rather than one that actually fights to make a material difference in people's lives.

It also destroys any form of class consciousness, replacing it with one based on race. The white middle class get the catharsis of flagellating themselves but the people struggling to pay rent or working two jobs are understandably defensive when you try to tell them how privileged they are.

I agree completely. It reminds me of when German trade unions found out that their members are much more conservative than their apparatchiks and their response was "we'll teach them" and they pressed full force ahead, predictably losing 20% of their members in the past 20 years.

Inflation is much higher than wage increases, rent is exploding in the cities while jobs are being migrated into the cities, but thank god we have committees for identifying more and more absurd diversions and divisions.

What is the long term plan here? The infighting is at an ever increased risk of leaking into real world and real violence.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thirty_Years%27_War

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yugoslav_Wars

I don’t think these movements have been based on identity but rather the concept of lacking something. This group lacks X, thus we should seek to give them X. But X does not necessarily equal the identity.

What I find heartbreaking in all this identity issue is the ever-increasing number of dimensions. Simple math shows that at about 20 or so there’s going to be about one gender identity per person or two. Which is absolutely correct as all people are unique and beautiful in their own ways. But instead of being able to freely move across the spectrum that is being a “man” or a “woman”, each person would be locked in their own tiny identity. And, as we see, crossing the identity barriers is hard for many many reasons. I can’t see this increasing happiness of people. Everyone is or should be looking for their identity for most of their lives, creating additional barriers on this journey is unlikely to be beneficial.

It's a prison for the mind.

>Identitarian does not mean what you think it means.

From context it should be clear that I'm talking about identarianism in the literal sense of the term (https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/identitarianism), not the European right-wing political movement that confusingly shares the same label.

>women's suffrage, the US civil rights movement, universal male suffrage

the keyword in those movements is 'suffrage' and 'civil' not 'man' or 'woman'. The reason they were successful is because they were republican movements. Women's suffrage wasn't about women with a capital W having a sort of privileged identity, it was about the opposite, women being treated like equal citizens. Identity politics is the opposite, it is the creation of separate, distinct, protected spaces for groups of people based on some set of features.

Rather than gaining access to the commons, aspiring to universal values which was the goal of desegregation in the civil rights era, women's rights and so forth, identity politics seeks to carve out virtual spaces that are only even understandable if you share said identity. The notion of the a citizen proper goes out of the window.

And the gay rights movement is a good example of that shift, whereas historically it was focused on access to civil rights, nowadays you have clashes between different queer groups. Which part do we include, are TERFS reationary? Are asexuals queer? There is at least half a dozen fronts in this war already about who deserves to be part of the rainbow label.

>> "It's always surprising to me that this seems to be such a Conservative topic of concern who if anything should be glad that it occupies so much mindspace."

I think most people who self-ID as conservative really believe what they claim to believe about wanting to work with people who have other views to make a better world where they don't have to worry so much.

There are people within their own spheres who encourage their fears because they know it's a distraction. A lot of them do seem to be wising up to it, but only because the firestarters overplayed their hand. The people who once persuaded people to see this as some majority, overwhelming force did so by sounding more reasonable than the people they complained about.

Once the agitators went off the deep end, I think most people are reasonable enough to see it for what it is even if the realization takes a while to propagate past the scripts people have developed in a half decade or so getting mad online about it.

A similar thing happened on "my" side when people started to catch on to all the plainclothes cops in protests trying to turn them into riots.