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PaperclipPerfector  4mo ago (text post)   28521 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of June 24, 2024

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I recently listened to podcast of Jordan Peterson with Eric Kaufmann and Kaufmann explained the phenomenon of woke as coming in waves. With first being in the 60ies in old Days of Rage where the left radicals first pushed this stuff and actually managed to carve out huge cultural concessions especially for blacks in form of Black Studies departments and such. Then there were eighties where people thought it was all behind them, it was age of Regan and neoliberalism and winning the Cold War - but at the tail end of 80ies and 90ies came the second woke wave in academia with intersectionality and and queer stuff. It also subsided a bit after 9/11 and Bush era of War on Terror only for woke to reemerge in 2010s.

I think he is right, saying that the woke is subsiding to me feels like previous times of pause. Kaufmann is especially skeptical as the millennials and zoomers are strongly in favor of woke ideas in various researches - especially women. If there will be some pushback next few years we may expect 4th wave maybe in the 2030s where the phenomenon may be rekindled with some new additions.

It does seem incredible but either the search is broken, totally broken, but no one has posted a review of Christopher Rufo's book "America's Cultural Revolution: How the Radical Left Conquered Everything" which pretty much explains woke as a result of a carefully planned campaign by a few prominent neo-marxist thinkers to shape the nation's memes by altering language so favorable politics result and the glorious revolution and liberation from oppression can be achieved. Namely Herbert Marcuse and Paolo Freire. If you've never heard about either, that's pretty curious. Freire's book 'Pedagogy of the Oppressed' is a classic in the field of American educational studies, that is, teacher training.. And has been, for the last 50 years. 100k hits on Google Scholar, e.g.. For comparison, Foucault's famous scribblings have 100k too..

You might think the title is a bit hyperbolic. It's really not. But aren't you at least a little curious why a book written by a Brazilian Marxist, later neo-marxist, concerned with how to use education to promote conditions for the Revolution is a mainstay of US teacher training? It's pretty odd, you know, US having been an ostensibly anti-communist country.

Anyway, here's Kaufman's review of it (1st part is .

Key paragraphs:

Rufo’s account begins with Marcuse, who, despairing of the Western working class, turned to the energy of Third World Socialism, Black Panther radicalism, and the 1968 student revolts for inspiration. Instead of the orthodox “dictatorship of the proletariat,” Marcuse dreamt of a “dictatorship of the intellectuals” who could join hands with “outcasts and outsiders” to make a revolution. In effect, he invited Marx’s lumpenproletariat into history. His One-Dimensional Man (1964) became a bible of the counterculture, and while his Frankfurt School colleague Theodor Adorno reacted against the anti-intellectualism of young protestors, Marcuse embraced them as a harbinger of the new utopia.

Dubbed the “ideological leader of the New Left” by Weather Underground terrorist Bernadine Dohrn, Marcuse rubbed shoulders with their leadership and that of Black Panther radicals like H. Rap Brown. The rioting and vandalism in America’s inner cities in the late 1960s blighted neighborhoods and sent crime soaring, hindering black progress. Together, the Weathermen and black militants conducted some 4,330 bombings, resulting in 43 deaths. The Weather leadership gushed that it would have to kill 25 million people to achieve its aims. The organization styled itself the “white revolutionaries inside the oppressor nation” and their manifesto, Prairie Fire, spoke of the United States as founded on white supremacy and “white-skin privilege.”

Marcuse envisioned the university as the “first revolutionary institution,” the nerve centre from which the revolution would spread. As if on cue, many comrades settled into cozy academic sinecures. Dohrn landed at Northwestern, Bill Ayers, who bombed the Pentagon and the Capitol, wound up at Columbia, and Angela Davis, who participated in a courtroom siege that left the judge and three others dead, was handed a position at UCLA. Davis, a Black Panther, successfully recast herself as a latter-day runaway slave resisting a system of white supremacy.

Rufo convincingly draws a line between violent Panther radicalism and the Black Lives Matter movement. For instance, Panther leader Stokely Carmichael coined the concept of “institutional racism.” The Panthers’ Ten-Point program called for affirmative action, the release of “all Black and oppressed people” from jail, and the teaching of its revisionist racial ideology in schools. The Black Lives Matter movement of the 2010s merely reiterated these slogans, seeking to abolish the police and prisons while demanding “culturally relevant education.” BLM leader Patricia Cullors, meanwhile, studied with the Weather Underground’s Eric Mann and lauded the influence of Davis and the Panthers.

Still reading the book, I've been very online so aware of the woke and even the abortive laughable revolutionary attempts in early 1970s - but I had no idea there was a direct line, same phrases used, same concepts, even personal continuity.

Sure, I love my boy James Lindsay including his extensive deep dive into Paulo Freire - with Pedagogy of Oppressed being the 3rd most cited work in humanities. Kaufmann himself gives a lot of praise to Lindsay and he by no means denies these influences.

But that is not the whole story, Kaufmann argues that it is moderates and "bleeding-heart liberals" who enable free reign of these ideas. The way he put it is that after defeat of economic socialism at least in its most radical form of planned economy, liberals still do not understand where the borders on social issues are. This is what enables woke to rampage through our society. It is a little bit depressing but also encouraging - most people do not actively believe these revolutionary thoughts such as Critical Race Theory or Queer Theory - they just want to be and sound as if they are kind and moral. On one hand they can be easily duped into various extremes, but on the other hand it means that potential pushback may not be as tough as many people think.

I fully agree. It's the consequence of our being not anxious enough. Prosperity has insulated us from the consequences of bad decisions,we can afford to be sloppy and sentimental.

they just want to be and sound kind and moral. Which is precisely what the critical theory deconstructors are using. If you redefine $your radical demand as compassion, just being nice etc..

As the mad prophet said: "Never get so racist that your forget that white leftists are the worst people in the world."

I'm trying to imagine what pushback looks like. Perhaps it starts with language reform. Those pushing forward call it "gender affirming care". Perhaps those pushing back need to insist on calling it "gender bending care".

Race and crime get easier to discuss if you expand your vocabulary through anthropomorphism.

  • Black criminals are foxes
  • Working blacks are chickens
  • White criminals are wolves
  • Working whites are sheep

Now we have encoded the real-world racial segregation of crime into the language of parable: foxes eat chickens, while wolves eat lambs or sheep. Racial discourse, pitting black against white, implicitly says that one team is team fox+chicken, while the other team is team wolf+sheep. But most of us see sheep and chickens as a team that must work together against foxes and work together against wolves.

With this framing, abolishing prison and defunding the police is a movement of sheep working to let the foxes into the chicken coop. Notice that this language punches hard. It is nearly as strong as "transwomen are women".

But I'm still stuck on imagining what pushback looks like. I'm not seeing catchy reframings coming from the right, and I don't know why. The right was traditionally on the side of law-and-order. But that depends on what the law actually says. If a persons experience of the law is with red-light cameras with wonky timings being used to raise revenue, they will find "law and order" slogans repulsive. What about saying that the teams are chicken allied with sheep, not chicken allied with foxes? That emphasizes real harms. Maybe it leads to a crack down on red-light cameras rather than a focus on foxes? That would be good; a small amount of progress but in the right direction.

Maybe my fox-chicken-wolf-sheep language doesn't work. I spend the words on it to make my comment concrete. Abstractly, I'm noticing that the left are the masters of word magic, and the right seems bewitched by it, and unable to cast spells of their own. But why? What is going on?

Thanks, I've been meaning to check out the research he and Lindsay(?) did, because it's so anthropologically fascinating.
Like the question of who first used "folx" and Y/X-ing words generally, where did "abolish the family" come from? Who came up with all the awful rhetorical tactics to paralyze victims like a spider's venom?

I said in another convo that there's still a lot of value in discussion here. Its an Area 51 bunker where we can carefully dissect this stuff while flying saucers obliterate cities outside.
Who knows, maybe someone will make a virus for Will Smith to upload to the mothership or something. But at least it would be more interesting than another round of "it's not happening and it's good."

Abolish the family is a 19th century concept. Loyalty to family above state and class, all that. Complicates the revolution.

Rhetorical tactics are mostly new. A big chunk of it is due to:

In 1977, a group of black lesbian activists working together as the Combahee River Collective followed Davis’s lead and published the landmark Combahee River Collective Statement, which gave birth to the term “identity politics” and operationalized Davis’s unified theory of oppressio

And why was Davis who bought guns for the criminals who used them attack a trial walking free, writing?

Davis and her attorneys had beguiled the all-white jury, persuading them that the Marin courthouse revolt was a “slave insurrection” and that Angela was a “symbol of resistance.”56 They turned the tables, identifying the state as the victimizer and Davis as the victim. During thirteen hours of jury deliberation, the facts of the case seemed to melt away and the political narrative took hold.

Then her ideas were elaborated into a system by that 'lesbian collective'.

But this cage of oppression also contained the key. The program of revolution could begin with an excavation of personal complexes, pathologies, and traumas, which can be transformed into emotional weapons, using the status of the oppressed as a means of establishing credibility and a method of organizing resistance. “This focusing upon our own oppression is embodied in the concept of identity politics,” they wrote, coining the phrase that would devour American politics for the next half century. “We believe that the most profound and potentially most radical politics come directly out of our own identity.” The Combahee River Collective’s goals were unoriginal: they proposed the old tripartite solution of anti-capitalism, anti-racism, and anti-patriarchy. But their means were revolutionary. The activists eschewed the masculine inclinations toward violence, system-building, physical power, and the seizure of the means of production, and created a uniquely feminine program that marshalled identity, emotion, trauma, and psychological manipulation in service of their political objectives. The Combahee Statement recast left-wing politics as an identity-based, therapeutic pursuit. The language of the document is strikingly modern: the reconceptualization of the activist organization as “an emotional support group”; sentences that legitimize themselves with “as Black women” or “as Black feminists”; gratuitous capitalization of identity markers such as Black and Lesbian; embarrassing neologisms such as “herstory” instead of “history”; emotional references to “pain,” “joy,” and “sisterhood”; venomous hostility toward white women in particular.7 Despite its shortcomings,8 the Combahee Statement is a triumphant document: a declaration of independence from “white male rule,” using a vocabulary and a method of argumentation that would become commonplace in every corner of American society.9

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