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Culture War Roundup for the week of January 20, 2025

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Woke is just the omni-cause. Woke people are people who were informed of how at least one part of the standard patriotic narrative of liberalism is wrong and then devote themselves to cynically opposing every other aspect of the standard liberal narrative. If the standard liberal narrative is that America is a great place where any plucky upstarts can make a name for themselves through hard work and grit they believe the inverse must be true. America is a place where entrenched powers make it impossible for an under class of minorities - be they racial, sexual or religious - to succeed through violent suppression. They believe the west is rotten to the core and reflectively believe any criticism of it. The null hypothesis for every question is that the liberalism is a failed lie and anyone who opposes it must have a good reason.

Racial Justice activists are woke because they believe America has committed original sin against minorities and the stain of slavery and racism pervades every aspect of American institutions. They don't really even believe in progress, acknowledging past progress would be a concession to the patriotic liberal narrative so they insist that things are as bad now as they were under Jim Crow. If given a free hand to adopt any policy they want they'd find anything they built equally poisoned.

Anti-Rich rhetoric is woke because it is against the liberal idea that free enterprise is positive sum. Woke people believe every billionaire is a policy failure because they genuinely believe that to get that right you must be stealing from others.

Degrowthers are woke because they believe the liberalism must be destroying the planet. They don't want to use liberal solutions like carbon tax or deregulating nuclear because that would be allowing liberalism to try to solve the problem. Instead they oppose these liberal solutions and advocate for unworkable policies. They're more interested in using climate change as a bludgeon against liberalism than working on actual solutions.

These things are all joined by a disillusionment with the liberal order and reliably each of these and many other woke beliefs are found in the same people not as some kind of coincidence but because all those people have the same burning intuition that they were betrayed by the liberal promises they grew up hearing.

Maybe to people who live fully immersed in these illiberal mindsets it's like water to a fish but to people outside of the milieu it is very very obvious within a few seconds of talking to a woke person exactly which side they will take on any new subject that pits western liberalism against literally anything else. That a memetic clusters exists here is beyond doubt, what you call it is fairly irrelevant.