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I think the "peak woke" line is cope on the center left and right for different reasons. The center-left keep writing these articles as a smokescreen to let their radicals reload, and the people on the right are just deluding themselves that the extremists will give up and/or that the center-left will ever side with them.
Do you have any evidence that wokeness is still peaking, or has not yet peaked in the short to moderate term? I've gotten a lot of pushback from people on this site claiming how ridiculous it is to think wokeness has peaked... yet they kind of just handwave that as an assumption. By contrast, people like Noah have pretty good evidence in articles like this (non paywalled version available here)
Noah claims that progressives were in favor of immigration primarily, if not only, because Trump was against it, and that the right in general is against immigration on racial grounds. It's hard to take someone seriously after this kind of statement; The left has been very strongly in favor of immigration in general since the 90s, and this has been the case worldwide. The backlash to immigration has likewise happened worldwide, and for near-identical reasons: The number of immigrants were much higher than expected, the strain on the welfare systems, increased crime, etc.
Maybe it's because I'm in academia, but all the extremely woke people here haven't actually changed their opinion, and they haven't actually lost their positions, either. If I read the university newsletter, it's still full of "how to appreciate our diverse gender presentations" and very thin on hard science. If I walk around the campus, it's full of "critical orientation week" advertisements, which is exactly the kind of "critical" you'd expect. The university provides rooms for this week, which ostensibly is against the university, completely free of charge, of course. It's not even very long ago that the university kicked out a right-leaning moderate because "university is not political" and that the university should not "provide resources to political groups".
And this is the core problem imo: If there is a conflict and the right-leaning side is losing, the left will often successfully take away positions up to and including booting them out entirely. If the left loses, they just keep everything they try again after a while. Universities are still de-facto purging themselves of even moderately right-leaning people and promoting quite frankly completely insane people, so long as they are sufficiently far left. Unless we start kicking out far-left cranks the same way we do for the right, I don't see the general trajectory changing much. Sure this or that particular DEI statement gets discontinued, but the next thing is already being implemented.
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Musk buying Twitter was a crippling blow to SJ, to be sure, but it's far from dead and it still holds the high ground of the academy. I'm not saying it definitely will make a comeback in the next few years - it's no longer got either stealth or an aura of inevitability, and that's a big deal - but it's premature to definitively say it's peaked; I'll believe it's decisively defeated when the SJ party here in Australia (the Greens) either falls below 10% of the vote or recants its hair-raising "let's ban politicians from taking anti-SJ positions" policy (relevant part's on page 5).
The academy is the "high ground" in the sense that a defeated tribe can hide out in the mountains and wage guerilla war until a suitable opportunity arises (like Hilary wanting a way to attack Bernie from the left) - not in the sense that it is the key strategic terrain being fought over. That would be the government and corporate bureaucracies that actually implement cancellations.
A bunch of stupid nominally left-wing politics was defeated in the late 1970's, hid out in the academy for a decade, came out again as 1990's political correctness, lost again, hid out again, and came back as wokestupid in the 2010's. But wokestupid doesn't come out of academia - it comes out of tumblr - the changes from PC to wokestupid are very obviously driven by the need for social media virality. Academia was just a place where a parasite could be kept on life support until a new host turned up. If wokestupid is retreating into academia, it has been defeated (but not destroyed).
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Wokey-wan Kenobi: It’s over, Elonakin, I have the high ground!
Elonakin Blueskywalker: You underestimate my power!
WK: Don’t try it!
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