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.
Yeah, I’ve been saying the same thing (in various comments sections) for a couple years now). In the long run, we will only know it has peaked when a cohort of kids arises that is less woke than those older than them. As long as youth is strongly correlated with wokeness, it’ll tend to get worse over time.
Note that the end of your sampling period is 2019.
Woke hasn't peaked in the sense of reaching a maxima; it has peaked in the sense that it has already contributed all the novel information it had readily available to contribute, has spent down most of its goodwill in controversy, and is no longer a rising cultural phenomenon.
It's more -salient- now, but that's in large part because people are complaining about it. Peak public awareness of racism doesn't co-occur with peak racism, it must necessarily happen sometime afterwards. (If 100% of people are racist, nobody is really -aware- of racism, because nobody is complaining about it!)
Peak wokeness, likewise, happened -before- there was widespread public outrage about wokeness. Personally I'd peg it to the mid 2010s.
So, anyways, yeah. The next rising cultural phenomenon will replace it.
I think it’s mistaken to view it (and similar movements) as mutually exclusive fads each replaced by the next one. E.g. conventional wisdom is that New Atheism peaked in the 2000s before being replaced by feminism which was in turn replaced by wokeness. You think wokeness will be replaced by some new thing. But that’s not what happened to its predecessors. New atheism was never replaced, it just lost cultural salience; but atheism has continued its assent unabated. Maybe the public will lose interest in wokeness as a topic, but if support for reparations or racial quotas continues to rise without fanfare, then that’s little consolation to opponents. The ‘woke’ can just as easily quietly win their war in the background without anyone paying attention to them, just like atheism is still quietly defeating Christianity even though no one cares about Richard Dawkins anymore.
And feminism? I invite you to go to the men's rights wikipedia article. Keep in mind, these were positions they were near-universally despised for holding, when feminism was the big thing. Ask yourself how many people would publicly admit to opposing the vast majority of them today.
Some movements change the landscape around a bit. Some change it a lot. Not always in the ways you'd expect. The atheism movement created more atheists (maybe, I'm inclined to think it's more made a lot of people realize they didn't really believe in the first place, with a large part played by increasing social acceptability of atheism); feminism created a backlash which made men's rights popular, even if everybody is reluctant to admit that we're all basically MRAs now. Like, the Barbie movie paused to admit that Ken had legitimate gripes with the system he was in - a movie with an overarching emphasis on women paused to take a moment to say men can have legitimate complaints about the system they're in, and actually addressed, even if only a little, a woman treating a man badly. Like, imagine that ten years ago.
Wokeness looks more to me like a "backlash-inducing" movement than a "lasting changes in the way its creators intended" movement. I think they'll get some trans acceptance in the long term, albeit not as much as they want, but I expect affirmative action will shortly be extinct (the flailing attempts to save it have just managed to make it look even worse), and the anti-police and pro-illegal-immigration parts of the movement have both not just run out of gas but are actively sliding down the hills of popular opinion.
Remember: Support for racial quotas was, thirty years ago, more or less the -default-. That racial quotas are even a topic of debate, for the woke to win, is -not- a win for the woke, it is a significant setback for their views on culture.
Reparations aren't that much better off from a political perspective; they're political uranium nobody seeking major office wants on them. I don't see anything major happening on that front in the next decade or two.
Reparations are actually already being implement at the local level by some city governments, maybe state governments soon enough. So it’s definitely or unthinkable anymore. And again, support for these things is clearly higher in each successive generation. Most of the backlash is older people finally reacting to things they were always uneasy about but previously ignored or tolerated.
I think it’s hard to argue that there hasn’t been a dramatic decline in sincere religiosity. Feminism is more ambiguous, but that’s because it’s sort of a special axis, since men and women have to deal with each other, which limits ideological conflict. Even so, I think young women are probably more feminist than ever right now. I’d reiterate my earlier point that the backlash is mostly older people who think ‘things have gone too far’ but will gradually die off and the pushback will recede one funeral at a time.
"feminism created a backlash which made men's rights popular"
I've never heard a person in real life talk about men's rights. I'm aware of no significant changes to divorce and family law. I have not seen the entirety of Barbie, but I don't really get a "men are important" vibe from it. Don't they basically tell the men to fuck off at the end.
"Remember: Support for racial quotas was, thirty years ago, more or less the -default."
Quotas were so unpopular that it polled terrible and the Supreme Court had to officially claim quotas were illegal while a song and dance was made about "diversity". Had Trump not won in 2016 and appointed three judges even the Court wouldn't have changed.
Affirmative Action has expanded by any definition of the word. It used to be much more related to academia, but now it's practiced a lot in private industry.
And it used to just be "we have a few token blacks around", now its a sprawling array of identity groups all of which want an ever increasing piece of the pie.
There just aren't a lot of majority-minority states which don't devolve into some kind of racial spoils system eventually. That's where the demographics are headed. Demographics are destiny.
Illegal immigration has never been popular. But it's a long game. It costs you votes in the short run to change demographics in the long run. All of those people Biden let in may cost him the next election, but it will win elections for future democrats.
I do think both the GOP and the DEM have made a mistake thinking immigrants are like a race with solidarity, and approximating Immigrant to Hispanic. The idea seemed to be that if you allowed lots of immigration, current citizen Hispanics would vote for you. In reality current citizen Hispanics have little solidarity with current immigrants, even if they are also Hispanic. In many cases they may have a negative reaction to current immigrants (since current immigrants often negatively impact past immigrants). Thus, immigration policy isn't a path to winning over the Hispanic vote.
Unfortunately for the GOP, the welfare state and affirmative action are good ways to win over the Hispanic vote (note: things like Obamacare are part of the welfare state, not just cash welfare for the unemployed). As the Hispanic vote share increases both parties will move towards the new median voter preferences, which will be further to the left.
But it's also true that in another generation America will be a majority-minority nation. Those minorities will demand representation roughly in line with their population, and will have a political coalition capable of generating 51% vote share.
That is the point of things like the Biden border surge, they hurt in the short term but assure victory in the long term. Combine that with indoctrination of the young and they really do "own the future".
In the 90s both were “anti-immigration” in a complex way. The Dems were pro “brown” but bill clinton understood that immigration (like all progressivism) was a loser in the 90s. It was called “triangulation” where you try to distance yourself from the far left for electability reasons. Changing demographics altered that calculus, and while Hillary overestimated her situation it was broadly true.
Mitt Romney couldn’t win in 2012 with a demographic vote share similar to Reagan, and it wasn’t going to get any better.
You are correct that it is a “shifting coalition”. But what does that mean? Trump (and people like him) can put together a winning coalition by appealing to rust belt whites and Hispanics. But such a coalition is less mitt Romney and more Latin American right wing. Btw, this is exactely what Charles Murray said in the bell curve in the 80s.
So yea the GOP will inevitably shift until it’s competitive to get 50% of the vote. That shift will make it more like the demographics of the country under immigration (Latin American). More left wing, more left of the bell curve.
During COVID I had a friend in the most conservative county of Maryland. He moved from Spain to escape socialism. Had four kids. Fantastic guy.
The Maryland health council overruled his School Board to enforce masking of his kindergartener in fall 2022.
I just don't know if federalism will work. Cthulu doesn't want any meaningful divergence.
He moved to Texas but Texas will be majority non-white by the time his kids want to raise kids. Won't it follow California. Texas whites voting 70% GOP slows the spread, but demographics are inevitable. Texas can't even get school choice.
Every trend that I've seen in blue areas inevitably flows to red areas due to a mix of immigration and indoctrination. "Run Away" just isn't a sustainable strategy. You have to fight and win.
Love the Collinses, despite people theoretically in my camp describing them as "vitalist". Obviously, as a conservative Christian, I disagree with them a lot, but generally I find they provide a lot of useful information.
"My most realistic hope is that the revival of federalism will provide sanctuary for those who spurn this benighted fanaticism."
That's a reasonable thing to hope for, but I expect that the fanatics will continue do their utmost to implement their crusades at a national level and force it on those seeking refuge.
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.
Yeah, I’ve been saying the same thing (in various comments sections) for a couple years now). In the long run, we will only know it has peaked when a cohort of kids arises that is less woke than those older than them. As long as youth is strongly correlated with wokeness, it’ll tend to get worse over time.
Note that the end of your sampling period is 2019.
Woke hasn't peaked in the sense of reaching a maxima; it has peaked in the sense that it has already contributed all the novel information it had readily available to contribute, has spent down most of its goodwill in controversy, and is no longer a rising cultural phenomenon.
It's more -salient- now, but that's in large part because people are complaining about it. Peak public awareness of racism doesn't co-occur with peak racism, it must necessarily happen sometime afterwards. (If 100% of people are racist, nobody is really -aware- of racism, because nobody is complaining about it!)
Peak wokeness, likewise, happened -before- there was widespread public outrage about wokeness. Personally I'd peg it to the mid 2010s.
So, anyways, yeah. The next rising cultural phenomenon will replace it.
I think it’s mistaken to view it (and similar movements) as mutually exclusive fads each replaced by the next one. E.g. conventional wisdom is that New Atheism peaked in the 2000s before being replaced by feminism which was in turn replaced by wokeness. You think wokeness will be replaced by some new thing. But that’s not what happened to its predecessors. New atheism was never replaced, it just lost cultural salience; but atheism has continued its assent unabated. Maybe the public will lose interest in wokeness as a topic, but if support for reparations or racial quotas continues to rise without fanfare, then that’s little consolation to opponents. The ‘woke’ can just as easily quietly win their war in the background without anyone paying attention to them, just like atheism is still quietly defeating Christianity even though no one cares about Richard Dawkins anymore.
And feminism? I invite you to go to the men's rights wikipedia article. Keep in mind, these were positions they were near-universally despised for holding, when feminism was the big thing. Ask yourself how many people would publicly admit to opposing the vast majority of them today.
Some movements change the landscape around a bit. Some change it a lot. Not always in the ways you'd expect. The atheism movement created more atheists (maybe, I'm inclined to think it's more made a lot of people realize they didn't really believe in the first place, with a large part played by increasing social acceptability of atheism); feminism created a backlash which made men's rights popular, even if everybody is reluctant to admit that we're all basically MRAs now. Like, the Barbie movie paused to admit that Ken had legitimate gripes with the system he was in - a movie with an overarching emphasis on women paused to take a moment to say men can have legitimate complaints about the system they're in, and actually addressed, even if only a little, a woman treating a man badly. Like, imagine that ten years ago.
Wokeness looks more to me like a "backlash-inducing" movement than a "lasting changes in the way its creators intended" movement. I think they'll get some trans acceptance in the long term, albeit not as much as they want, but I expect affirmative action will shortly be extinct (the flailing attempts to save it have just managed to make it look even worse), and the anti-police and pro-illegal-immigration parts of the movement have both not just run out of gas but are actively sliding down the hills of popular opinion.
Remember: Support for racial quotas was, thirty years ago, more or less the -default-. That racial quotas are even a topic of debate, for the woke to win, is -not- a win for the woke, it is a significant setback for their views on culture.
Reparations aren't that much better off from a political perspective; they're political uranium nobody seeking major office wants on them. I don't see anything major happening on that front in the next decade or two.
Reparations are actually already being implement at the local level by some city governments, maybe state governments soon enough. So it’s definitely or unthinkable anymore. And again, support for these things is clearly higher in each successive generation. Most of the backlash is older people finally reacting to things they were always uneasy about but previously ignored or tolerated.
I think it’s hard to argue that there hasn’t been a dramatic decline in sincere religiosity. Feminism is more ambiguous, but that’s because it’s sort of a special axis, since men and women have to deal with each other, which limits ideological conflict. Even so, I think young women are probably more feminist than ever right now. I’d reiterate my earlier point that the backlash is mostly older people who think ‘things have gone too far’ but will gradually die off and the pushback will recede one funeral at a time.
"feminism created a backlash which made men's rights popular"
I've never heard a person in real life talk about men's rights. I'm aware of no significant changes to divorce and family law. I have not seen the entirety of Barbie, but I don't really get a "men are important" vibe from it. Don't they basically tell the men to fuck off at the end.
"Remember: Support for racial quotas was, thirty years ago, more or less the -default."
Quotas were so unpopular that it polled terrible and the Supreme Court had to officially claim quotas were illegal while a song and dance was made about "diversity". Had Trump not won in 2016 and appointed three judges even the Court wouldn't have changed.
Affirmative Action has expanded by any definition of the word. It used to be much more related to academia, but now it's practiced a lot in private industry.
And it used to just be "we have a few token blacks around", now its a sprawling array of identity groups all of which want an ever increasing piece of the pie.
There just aren't a lot of majority-minority states which don't devolve into some kind of racial spoils system eventually. That's where the demographics are headed. Demographics are destiny.
Illegal immigration has never been popular. But it's a long game. It costs you votes in the short run to change demographics in the long run. All of those people Biden let in may cost him the next election, but it will win elections for future democrats.
I do think both the GOP and the DEM have made a mistake thinking immigrants are like a race with solidarity, and approximating Immigrant to Hispanic. The idea seemed to be that if you allowed lots of immigration, current citizen Hispanics would vote for you. In reality current citizen Hispanics have little solidarity with current immigrants, even if they are also Hispanic. In many cases they may have a negative reaction to current immigrants (since current immigrants often negatively impact past immigrants). Thus, immigration policy isn't a path to winning over the Hispanic vote.
Unfortunately for the GOP, the welfare state and affirmative action are good ways to win over the Hispanic vote (note: things like Obamacare are part of the welfare state, not just cash welfare for the unemployed). As the Hispanic vote share increases both parties will move towards the new median voter preferences, which will be further to the left.
I don't think you have a historical context for a lot of the things you're talking about.
All of this is true.
But it's also true that in another generation America will be a majority-minority nation. Those minorities will demand representation roughly in line with their population, and will have a political coalition capable of generating 51% vote share.
That is the point of things like the Biden border surge, they hurt in the short term but assure victory in the long term. Combine that with indoctrination of the young and they really do "own the future".
When I was younger, the Democrats were the anti-immigration party, and the Republicans the pro-immigration party.
There's no "they" to "own the future". It's a shifting coalition.
Not quite.
In the 90s both were “anti-immigration” in a complex way. The Dems were pro “brown” but bill clinton understood that immigration (like all progressivism) was a loser in the 90s. It was called “triangulation” where you try to distance yourself from the far left for electability reasons. Changing demographics altered that calculus, and while Hillary overestimated her situation it was broadly true.
Mitt Romney couldn’t win in 2012 with a demographic vote share similar to Reagan, and it wasn’t going to get any better.
You are correct that it is a “shifting coalition”. But what does that mean? Trump (and people like him) can put together a winning coalition by appealing to rust belt whites and Hispanics. But such a coalition is less mitt Romney and more Latin American right wing. Btw, this is exactely what Charles Murray said in the bell curve in the 80s.
So yea the GOP will inevitably shift until it’s competitive to get 50% of the vote. That shift will make it more like the demographics of the country under immigration (Latin American). More left wing, more left of the bell curve.
During COVID I had a friend in the most conservative county of Maryland. He moved from Spain to escape socialism. Had four kids. Fantastic guy.
The Maryland health council overruled his School Board to enforce masking of his kindergartener in fall 2022.
I just don't know if federalism will work. Cthulu doesn't want any meaningful divergence.
He moved to Texas but Texas will be majority non-white by the time his kids want to raise kids. Won't it follow California. Texas whites voting 70% GOP slows the spread, but demographics are inevitable. Texas can't even get school choice.
Every trend that I've seen in blue areas inevitably flows to red areas due to a mix of immigration and indoctrination. "Run Away" just isn't a sustainable strategy. You have to fight and win.
That was quite good.
Love the Collinses, despite people theoretically in my camp describing them as "vitalist". Obviously, as a conservative Christian, I disagree with them a lot, but generally I find they provide a lot of useful information.
"My most realistic hope is that the revival of federalism will provide sanctuary for those who spurn this benighted fanaticism."
That's a reasonable thing to hope for, but I expect that the fanatics will continue do their utmost to implement their crusades at a national level and force it on those seeking refuge.