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"Please Just Fucking Tell Me What Term I Am Allowed to Use for the Sweeping Social and Political Changes You Demand, you don't get to insist that no one talks about your political project and it's weak and pathetic that you think you do"? Or is it "the basic stance of the social justice set, for a long time now, has been that they are 100% exempt from ordinary politics." Who is "they"?
The Cathedral is good reading. https://graymirror.substack.com/p/a-brief-explanation-of-the-cathedral
Inability to accurately specify "they" is not a gotcha, it is like this by design. Everyone knows that "they" will get you for saying the wrong thing, it doesn't matter who "they" are. You may not be able to name the lawyer who enacts lawfare against you, or the company he's on retainer for, but humans intuitively understand that they are frequently set against a vast, unaccountable memespace egregore that undergoes regular software updates to set itself against others.
The canonical response above is expressing frustration with the inability to accurately name this phenomenon of Cathedral-driven social change, because being able to name it is a weakness. Don't worry too much about social justice- within a few years the Cathedral will start shifting the other way. We're already starting to see signs.
The very beginning of the article define "The Cathedral" as "journalism plus academia". That's pretty specific to me. In fact I scrolled further and found even more specifically "Harvard, Yale, the Times and the Post". In your own example, you listed a line of bureaucracy from lawyers to lawfare to companies.
However I am going to assume you are also implying that even if the article is not being specific, your definition of the Cathedral still holds. Your second claim that "everyone knows that "they" will get you" is consensus building. Who is "everyone"? Does that include me?
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deBoer provides several examples of the kinds of people who compose "they".
I am not sure how else "who is 'they'" can be answered (when we're talking about a movement that rejects labels) if we don't describe them by their beliefs. Do you want a list of names or what?
Yes, I'd like a list of names of people you believe are enforcing wokeness.
Okay. Off the top of my head, Ibram X Kendi and Robin DiAngelo are woke. Does that help?
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Michael Reinoehl was enforcing wokeness when he murdered a Trump supporter in cold blood on the streets of Portland following a pro-trump demonstration.
His allies were enforcing wokeness when they publicly celebrated their ally's murder later that evening.
Would you agree that these two examples are, in fact, people enforcing wokeness? If not, what would be your disagreement with that framing?
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The Social Justice set. The people who think our main problems are caused by Oppressors organizing society to keep the oppressed under their heel. This set believes that they can bypass persuasion ("ordinary politics") and simply compel people to do things their way. Since they are not attempting persuasion, a legible label for their movement or their preferred tactics is completely contrary to their interests, so they actively and vociferously fight any label that starts to gain prominence.
We are talking about a movement that has dominated western politics for the last decade. To the extent that your confusion is in good faith, it is a testament to the effectiveness of this resistance to labels and analysis.
I’m not confused lol, I very much think you are wrong, but in the spirit of debate, I’d like to discuss specifics. Specifically, who is “they” that have dominated “western politics”? Is it the president? The Supreme Court? The circuit courts? The governors? The school boards? The voters? The entire Executive, Judicial and Legislative branches of government?
I’ll illustrate an example; when I say “the people who think our main problems are caused by Oppressors organizing society to keep the oppressed under their heel from a movement that has dominated western politics for a decade”, those people in particular would be Greg Abbott, Ken Paxton, Ron Desantis, Majorie Taylor Greene, Mike Johnson and Donald Trump, to name a few.
I appreciate the effort to debate and ask this question, but the problem is that defining "they" down to actual names is quite an arduous task!
I'll take an example that affected my life last year. My wife taught at a suburban (exurban?) Title I elementary school. Majority-minority classes. It has been a trend for several years, and mentioned above in this thread, that disparate impact policy may have been well intentioned but boiled down to "it's basically impossible to suspend students, even if they're violent." She had one student that needed a great deal of help and had violent outbursts. A violent 2nd grader can't do that much, but he could throw a chair or destroy the room. Policy hamstrings teachers against doing anything. So at least once a week, he'd have an outburst and she'd shuffle the rest of the class out to wait it out.
Nobody argues for "public schools should be held hostage by their worst students, and basically non-functional multiple hours a week," but somehow we get there anyways. I can't point to any individual that wants that. It's the result of a long string of decisions and beliefs, some good and some horrifying, a massive messy web of lawsuit-avoidance and ideological pandering and EdD/PhD overproduction.
Should I name the principal? No, she wasn't too bad and I believe when she said she's hamstrung by the school board (and the feds, Title I!). Should I name the board? Well, I certainly vote against them but they're not the source of the idiocy, they just help enact it. Where does the idea come from upstream of them? I'd love to be able to point at one person whose work could be erased and schools could go back to functioning, but unfortunately that's not the way it works.
Ibram Kendi, Nicole Hannah-Jones, Robin Diangelo, Sara Rao, Liz Warren, Tema Okun, every person that took any of the aforementioned loons seriously, every journalist that doesn't work for an explicitly right-wing media source, every sociologist, every critical theorist, 80+% of university professors that aren't economists.
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The managerial class. Twitter's board as opposed to Twitter's owners. Agents as opposed to principals.
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