Talking Woke with the Collinses
Here’s another Based Camp podcast. This time, I have a frank conversation about wokeness with Malcolm and Simone Collins.
I keep hearing that “woke has peaked,” but those who voice this slogan suspiciously fail to distinguish between local and global maxima. Of course the post-George Floyd zeal cooled after a few months, but the idea that woke fanatics won’t make further progress in the next decade seems fanciful to me. Just ponder this Ngram for “racism”:
Talk about racism “peaked” around 1945, 1973, and 2002. Yet by the end of the sample period, it reached its all-time high. While the ebbs and flows are noteworthy, the most relevant facts are plainly (a) the steep long-run slope, and (b) intensifying moral panic despite sharply improved objective conditions. My most realistic hope is that the revival of federalism will provide sanctuary for those who spurn this benighted fanaticism.
I think your metric for measuring wokeness has three issues:
a) It doesn't distinguish between noise and power. 'Peak wokeness' to me is not the peak of the noise wokeness makes, but the peak of wokeness's institutional and cultural power. I expect it to continue to be very noisy for a long time even as its power diminishes, and maybe even increase in noise!
b) It cuts off before 2020, which I personally consider the high tide mark of wokeness, and I think most people would agree that the high tide mark came there or after.
c) Google ngram commonness of 'racism' locates not just people talking about woke stuff but also people talking about the excesses of woke stuff. I don't think anyone would argue that the backlash to wokeness isn't a significant factor in the amount of traffic about 'racism', so in order to use this metric you'd have to disentangle the actual wokeness traffic from the anti-wokeness traffic.
We're in uncharted waters. We've seen more focused forms of mass hysteria collapse through a gradual and peaceful return to sanity (eg, about occult-driven abuse of children in daycare centers or repressed memories). But "woke" is an entire extremist worldview. Those only seem to collapse (like Nazism and communism) after mass violence or major social upheaval. I hope those aren't in store.