During the pandemic, the Brown University health economist Emily Oster was frequently a voice of very carefully framed sanity, criticizing lockdowns and school closures in a tone that tried to speak to the people who worshipped at the altar of public health absolutism. She was never a hell no; she was a guys, I understand why you all want this, but let’s try to think about it a little more. To the best of my recollection, and I’ll hear arguments against: In a landscape of monsters and demagogues, she wasn’t either of those things. She tried to get people to dial back the madness a bit, and she did it early.
Then, quite famously, she wrote this in late 2022:
And in that remarkable essay, she framed the whole thing as a big whoopsie, despite the fact that she spent the pandemic showing, logically and clearly, why prolonged lockdowns and school closures and mask mandates were a bad idea:
These precautions were totally misguided. In April 2020, no one got the coronavirus from passing someone else hiking. Outdoor transmission was vanishingly rare. Our cloth masks made out of old bandanas wouldn’t have done anything, anyway. But the thing is: We didn’t know.
But she knew. Someone who knew during the pandemic that public health officials were making terrible policy on the basis of nonsense fake-science standards then turned and forgave them, saying that no one knew at the time that they were wrong. She knew at the time that they were wrong, but by 2022 she was willing to pretend that it was all a big mystery back in the dark old days of 2021. She shrugged off a series of failures that she had thoroughly understood in real time.
Over the weekend, in a statement that drew a bunch of attention, Princess Donkeyteeth of Westchester laughed and said that oh my goodness, that woke stuff back in the old days was so crazy, amirite?
”Woke one was crazy.” See, it was all a big mistake, isn’t it funny? Anyway, moving on…
Walter Kirn nails this. “Thus the perpetrators come forth robed as their own judges,” declaring that they made a silly mistake that isn’t worth dwelling on. They pronounce themselves formerly and accidentally mistaken, back in ye olden dayes of, I don’t know, it was like SUCH a long time ago, like the medieval era of 2020. It’s all over now. Woke is all gone! No need to go on discussing that old topic!
Also, Sophie Cunningham is a vicious transphobe because she said that girls should play girls’ sports against girls, and we need to burn that witch for her fascist hatefulness.
Woke is dead, says the transphobia patrol.
Woke is the guy in the hot dog suit, saying that we all want to find out who did this. It’s standing right there, alive and well, laughing off how crazy it was back in the old days. It’s your scarily alcoholic binge drinker friend saying from the gutter that he remembers how drunk he used to get in college.
Tyler Austin Harper was a lock for tenure at a top-tier liberal arts college, with a dream job for life in an appalling academic job market, and he quit because everybody was crazy and endlessly descending into performative racism jihad. (He describes a dean as being “afflicted with a degree of racial neurosis that would have made Rachel Dolezal blush.”) If you think woke is in the past, go read that essay. I’m a refugee from academia, and it nearly gave me a stroke.
The social and cultural madness is still greatly in evidence, while woke politicians are laughing it off as something that was waaaaaay back in the past and just a huge accident. They’re arguing for a pandemic amnesty in 2022: Same policy, same behaviors, but you forgive them and forget about it before they actually stop.
“Woke one was crazy!” is a sign of someone who has just enough polling-induced self-awareness from consultant briefings to know that she’s done bad things, but not enough character to stop or to want to stop. It’s the performance of a prophylactic simulation of confession, familiar to anyone who’s dated a sociopath: If I say I’m sorry for hitting you, will you stop whining about it so we can go to dinner?
Leftists vaguely perceive the fact of their epistemic crisis. They know they’ve stranded themselves behind the wall of a performative language that keeps them from touching anything real. And so they’re trying to use the tools of performative language to escape the prison of performative language.
A reader sends this just absolutely magnificent essay on the deep wisdom of Pete Buttigieg, who struggles in politics because his ideas are so profound and his sophisticated policy efforts are so richly designed to pay off over the course of so many decades. See, he’s just so far ahead of the voters that he can’t get the voters to understand. He’s like the aliens in that Amy Adams movie whose circle language allows their minds to perceive the future.
They’re going to tell themselves stories about the obvious failure of their stories, about the way their language model doesn’t connect to anything. And they’re going to make the rest of us listen to them.
We’ll be needing to design a drinking game around this performance.
Drink!
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