Anti-Woke 1 was also crazy

We’re full on into the relitigation of the “crazy” era hopefully or anxiously labeled Woke 1.0. It is a discourse in a state of quantum indeterminacy, both overdue and already overdone depending on what media you consume and how touchy about or bored by it you are. We’re remembering Alison Roman’s cancellation. We’re talking about YA author pile-ons. We’re weighing it all up sagely. I think this is fine, for whatever that’s worth, because these behaviors were genuinely counterproductive and disordered, even when the kernel of social critique supposedly inside of it all was correct, as it not infrequently was.

But I lived through the peak of the Woke 1.0 era in north Texas, and here, the peak passed quickly and the backlash was dominant by early in 2021. And the thing is that Anti-Woke 1.0 was also absolute lunacy. They fired a principal basically for being Black up here. They were banning standard books about the Civil Rights movement. Remember the CRT panic? That was craaaazy. It was all there, the pile-ons, the hysteria, the most off-putting people you’ve ever seen packing school board meetings to bark like seals at every stupid thing someone heard on the internet. The resemblance between Woke and Anti-Woke was so uncanny that I started to suspect they were not so much opposed as deeply related, shared symptoms of a society made sick by offloading its cognition and basic social relationships to its phones and their hostile algorithms. Playing out in differently corrupted ways the legacy of New England Puritanism, with its “roots and branches” drive to purify the church of falsehood, idolatry, and error that we just secularized into a battle for the soul of the state or the republic.

And while Anti-Woke 1.0 is still running, and is indeed still the only real authorizing ideology of my home state, and of Florida, and of the faction in control of the federal government, it, too, engendered a backlash that had political consequences. School boards that were taken over by people who thought that a book with a gay character would turn their child gay ended up shifting back toward people who could at least mimic the speech and thought patterns of normal human beings.

Here, however, the stories diverge. Woke 1.0 was adjacent to and often woven into real institutions and respectable media. This produced some profound embarrassments—remember the brief fad for sane-washing the pro-rioting book? craaaazy—as the tide was rising. New York became downright unreadable. But it also produced the current ruminative mood on the respectable center-left after the tide ran out. Maybe mistakes were, in fact, made. Maybe those mistakes were not just excesses but were closer to the root. A big question, and not one I’m going to weigh in on here.

There was no equivalent intellectual adjunct to Anti-Woke 1.0. No, Helen Andrews, Chris Rufo, and Compact don’t count. To call them hacks is an insult to writers who work for a living. The only osmotic diffusion for the lunacy of Anti-Woke came through the political campaigns of people like Ron DeSantis and astroturf groups like Turning Point and Moms for Liberty. Which means that now, there’s no real accounting for any of it. No one is out there saying “maybe we went overboard in trying to throw Toni Morrison’s books out of the public library.” If the thought ever occurred to anyone in that world, there’s no market for exploring it. There’s no Anti-Woke equivalent of Ezra Klein or Atlantic. Texas Tech is using AI to cull objectionable books from courses. Lessons have not been learned.

And the weird thing is that neither is this of any interest to the respectable center-left media that is currently interrogating its own excesses. This is not really a criticism. Who wants to slog through all of that? Who wants to construct a scaffold around a pillar of Jell-o, that it may be better examined? It seems that it would be fun to score the points, but I don’t know who it would help. You can’t overcome denial on behalf of anyone else.

It so happens that I spent this week between dropping my oldest off at college and going to back-to-school night for my youngest. At the college, a Catholic institution hardly known for being on the bleeding edge of progressivism, the rhetorical residue of Woke 1.0 was present. And at the Texas elementary school, there is apparently a “protocol” for alerting parents that their child will read novels like, I kid you not, Bud Not Buddy. We’ve bowdlerized our reading lists and we still have to account for the possible reactions of the most excitable parents in the subdivision.

I’m still mad about this, so much so that it’s better not to dwell on it. I resented the patently ridiculous professional trainings I had to do and I resent having to opt my kids into the most anodyne movies ever made. Living inside someone else’s cultural project is stifling and annoying. It’s just important to remember that there is more than one project running concurrently, and more than one expression of neurosis inviting you to lose yourself in it. Everyone is hawking fool’s motley and my job and yours is not to put it on, no matter how crazy things get.

Share