Bari, thank you for Mr. Savodnik. I'll never regret my subscription even as I may be made, uh, uncomfortable. I did read the noted essay and learned a new word or two.
I have four adult children in their 20's. They do not like censorship and do not abide by the "woke" thought attributed to their generation. There is hope......
There are a great many comments here and all of it is in the form of unstructured text. There is a way of dealing with this "fire hose" of information. It is using natural language tools. I would suggest Linguamatics which is now a division within IQVIA.
Now this company, Linguamatics, which was born of a bunch of Cambridge University mathematicians is now a division within IQVIA which is a health sciences company; however, linguistics, syntax and semantics are independent of disciplines.
Quick question for individuals who subscribe to Bari's Substack:
Have you posted thoughtful comments to their various articles which have never seen the "light of day"?
I know that I have and they tend to be reasoned comments which though not abusive or even politically incorrect in any way nevertheless are not fully supportive of the narrative.
Consider it.
C. Wright Mills (one of the more insightful sociologists of the later 1/2 of the 20th century) proposed the concept that the Power Elite is not only self-serving but also self-sustaining. The "faces" may change but the interests remain the same.
My husband and I have a saying we use often when we hear outrageous statements, and calls-to action, from the liberal elites and socialists that our press worship today.....”Get ready for Yuri to come home from the war.”
I was a high school teacher for too many years, too many years pretending enthusiasm, too many years of fixes and panaceas, and, eye rolls that had seen too many fixes and panaceas. We were the small fry enablers, products of diploma mills pretending "educated", workshopped into submission by consultants who proudly displayed their doctorates but hid the diploma mills from whence it came. It was fertile ground for contagions; where sloth and pretense and ignorance replicated, the only sin that mattered was negativity! To be thoughtful was to be negative. To question was to be negative. A negative person would never advance, would only be tolerated, a kind of Cancel LIte. It is never surprising when nonsense takes root in schools. No one is brave enough to be negative, to declare the emperor naked. Where such an environment exist, all kinds of poisons take root. Just enablers, too dumbed down to even eye roll anymore. Such are the schools and teachers currently preparing impressionable kids for careers in gender studies.
Bari, I just finished watching the Good Fellows podcast and am so blown away. I have thought the same things so many times but could not be as eloquent as the all of you. As a member of your grandparent’s generation I am proud of and inspired by you. I’m dreaming of the same party you describe and ready to join. So happy to be a subscriber of yours.
Read [re-read] Bari’s NYT resignation letter, it is a lovely prose poem, every bit as good as Mr Savodnik’s piece.
Poor AG Sulzberger: he looks terrible but he made the only decision he could [getting rid of the editor Bennet.] It would be a fearsome thing to opposed the woke mob at the NYT, the place would be torn asunder. Really, I own a business, only a fool would imperil a goose like the Times: MONEY. Media, the 4th estate, high minded pomp meets economic imperative: AG has a gun to his head and true believers on the trigger.
The Enabler in Chief is Biden with his Jim Crow accusations about voting laws. (But also we know he is brain dead and its not he who writes what he says). Not that the guy before him was any good. "The whispering, the accusing, the snitching, the bad-faith mischaracterizing" is the perfect description of life in Cuba. Being of Cuban descent, I never thought it would come here. But watching the Hemingway documentary last night and finding out that he sacrificed his integrity to protect his image for personal gain for that time's True Believers gives me pause.
The most brilliantly written essay I've read in a long time. Poignant, poetic and ingenious use of the English language. Reminds me of the Committee for the Defense of the Revolution, those pesky, tattling miscreants in Cuba who spy on their neighbors and report perceived indiscretions to the Communist Party, all to stay in good favor and keep their own refrigerators full. This is America, not Cuba. Or at least it used to be.
I bet their assistants do send out those tweets. I am not ready to put up the white flag yet. I do believe there is still a ton of geography between the two polar points. If ever there was a silent majority it is now. This past election was not indicative of anything and it solved nothing.
The fight now - is not on the national political stage. The fight is local. Its in your neighborhood and its with your local BOE if they overstep. For too long we have not been asked to sacrifice anything. If my local school decides to teach my kids CRT I will speak up and I am willing to suffer the consequences - social stigma, whatever, it may be.
What do the woke say - silence is violence ...if that is their position, then there is absolutely no reason to be silent. They will treat you the same. you might as well swing back.
Wonderful article, but it’s too pessimistic. To be sure, the cultural mob is running rampant, but it represents at most twenty percent of the electorate. Eighty per cent of the country is opposed.
The bluest state are 60:40 Democrats:Republicans. Half of the Democrats and all of the Republicans are opposed to wokeism.
This is a political task for liberals and the center. Look at the blue states, 60:40 Democrats. Look. The Republicans are unelectable there. They don’t fund their own candidates meaningfully most of the time. Now look at the Democrats. They’re the Enablers. They trade complicity and appeasement for the political offices and cushy jobs when they cash in.
The extreme Left needs assistance from allies in government to impose restrictions on due process and to mandate oppressive indoctrination in schools, in the workplace, and in government. They need public officials closing down avenues of recourse. They need bureaucratic edicts declaring open season for them. They require elected representatives to look the other way. They need help from a government of elected officials to do things eighty percent of the country doesn’t like.
Strategically, the opportunity to oppose all of this lies in recognizing that this eighty per cent level of political opposition to all of this is the Achilles heel of Leftist authoritarianism. That’s the point of vulnerability.
The alternative is not the Republicans. They’re unelectable in blue states. But independent candidates, unapologetic anti-woke pro-Constitution liberals? Ten of them bypassing party primaries and running independently and simultaneously for US Senate in 2022 would devastate the woke. And there’s a new winning coalition waiting for those candidates.
One third of Democrats and three quarters of Republicans in blue states would vote for an anti-woke liberal. That’s 50 percent of the vote in places like Connecticut, California, and Maryland-with 40 percent for the Democratic Enabler and 10 percent for the unelectable Republican.
Ten independent candidates for US Senate in ten blue states in 2022. What can we do? We can suggest names and encourage them and donate to them when they run, The money will be there.
Don’t pity the Enablers. Defeat them in the blue states in 2022 and 2024, and then begin the long, arduous, private, non-governmental cleanup of de-Stalinization.
In the early 80s when I was a graduate student in a STEM field I had a housemate who was getting her Ph.D. in English. One evening her friends were over, having a spirited discussion of the new ball game in their discipline called "Everything is about power." Is there any room for reason I asked? Nope, it all comes down to power I was told. These were the birthing pains of deconstructionism and the various shades of Critical Theory.
In the mid 90s my friend, who is a professor at a major state university in a social science field, sent me an academic paper of a new hire in his department, detailing sexual practices of the author with his boyfriend. What seemed like soft core gay porn to me was regarded as a serious contribution to scholarship by the prevailing wisdom of his field. Soon the new hire had tenure, and not many years after that he was promoted to dean. I now see that he has made it to some flavor of provost at this same university.
I bring up these anecdotes to make a few points. First, those who many call "woke" played the long game and played it well. They methodically extended their reach throughout all echelons of academia and beyond, over nearly a half century. You have to admire their discipline, but also credit their shrewdness for banking, correctly as it turns out, on the spinelessness of those who should have stood up for liberal, Western values but refused to do so. This is a story with many unfortunate parallels in history that needs insightful telling.
Second, I'm afraid that turning back the tide is going to be harder, and take a longer, than what it took for wokism to prevail. A weakness of the liberal tradition is its willingness to entertain bold, new ideas with little discernment. Liberal academics, who hate being seen as repressive, let the critical theory curiosity have it run even if they (silently) didn't agree with it. Give them tenure, make them deans. The smorgasbord of ideas and all that: what could it hurt? But if case you haven't noticed, woke academics aren't much inclined to reciprocity. Those who want to right the ship back to a liberal tradition won't be able follow in the same historical footsteps. To put it plainly, it really is fundamentally broken.
My pessimism is tempered by knowing that historical trajectories are somewhat unpredictable. Although I don't see what the forces are that will turn things around, and most likely not in my lifetime, I am confident that they will emerge. I regret belonging to a generation that didn't see preserving liberal values as a hill worth dying on. It's now mainly a fight for those in their twenties through fifties. If they fight with the same perseverance as the enemies of freedom did, they might see some victories by the time they get old.
I don't think the 20-50 folks have the cojones or the wisdom to fight. I fear the game is almost over and the totalitarian are about to win. I PRAY I AM WRONG!!!
Enjoyed the commentary but we're at the same place. While I live in one of the poorest congressional districts in the US, I have absolutely no issues with the affluent of Park Slope and Brooklyn in general. In fact I believe the accumulation of wealth is good as it provides freedom. While visiting NY I walked those fantastic streets of Brooklyn always fascinated by the brownstones. All the pink hair and tattoos are interesting but no Peter those crabby little kids are a problem and are characters right out of the movie Children of the Dammed. They tolerate their pathetic week parents who continue to feed them broccoli and diet coke but make no mistake the real problem rests firmly with liberals who have lost their minds and consumed with their irrational toxic form of altruism. You and your little click will continue to rationalize your support for politicians that enable this nonsense only to have white color elite read this stuff and think Bari and Peter have a point. But then what?
Unfortunately SCOTUS is one of the "Gutless Enablers"of which you speak, because only they have the Constitutional Authority & Power to declare what is common knowledge to a majority of Americans and 61% Europeans (WSJ 2/24/21). And, that is, "the US political system is Broken", probably because video & eye witness evidence of Democrat corruption & collusion in the Polling Centers of six rogue states is so overwhelming. Not to mention the Federal & State Constitutional voting laws that were broken by executive order of mostly Democrat Governors & AG's to enable unsolicited mail-in voting. This created tens of millions of excess Ballots mailed to the 33% of voters who never vote, which were available to be harvested by coercion, theft, purchase, or counterfeited (the never-folded Biden only ballots).
SCOTUS knew the 2020 Election was stolen by Democrat election fraud, "but doing something about this real crisis is hard, and the Enablers (SCOTUS) are weak". So, SCOTUS was probably "relieved the True Believers were angry at other people", but "Now the True Believers are pushing up against the wobbly castle walls of the Enablers"(SCOTUS). Next they are coming for SCOTUS by "packing the Court" with Marxist judges, unless the Justices find the courage to save the Court, themselves, America and individual freedom for our children & mankind, by reversing the 2020 Electoral Vote in the six rogue States because of Democrat fraud. Perpetrators of fraud must never profit from their fraud, and they forfeit any benefit from that fraud.
Bari, thank you for Mr. Savodnik. I'll never regret my subscription even as I may be made, uh, uncomfortable. I did read the noted essay and learned a new word or two.
I have four adult children in their 20's. They do not like censorship and do not abide by the "woke" thought attributed to their generation. There is hope......
Excellent, albeit, depressing piece.
There are a great many comments here and all of it is in the form of unstructured text. There is a way of dealing with this "fire hose" of information. It is using natural language tools. I would suggest Linguamatics which is now a division within IQVIA.
Now this company, Linguamatics, which was born of a bunch of Cambridge University mathematicians is now a division within IQVIA which is a health sciences company; however, linguistics, syntax and semantics are independent of disciplines.
Think about it.
https://www.linguamatics.com/
Quick question for individuals who subscribe to Bari's Substack:
Have you posted thoughtful comments to their various articles which have never seen the "light of day"?
I know that I have and they tend to be reasoned comments which though not abusive or even politically incorrect in any way nevertheless are not fully supportive of the narrative.
Consider it.
C. Wright Mills (one of the more insightful sociologists of the later 1/2 of the 20th century) proposed the concept that the Power Elite is not only self-serving but also self-sustaining. The "faces" may change but the interests remain the same.
My husband and I have a saying we use often when we hear outrageous statements, and calls-to action, from the liberal elites and socialists that our press worship today.....”Get ready for Yuri to come home from the war.”
I was a high school teacher for too many years, too many years pretending enthusiasm, too many years of fixes and panaceas, and, eye rolls that had seen too many fixes and panaceas. We were the small fry enablers, products of diploma mills pretending "educated", workshopped into submission by consultants who proudly displayed their doctorates but hid the diploma mills from whence it came. It was fertile ground for contagions; where sloth and pretense and ignorance replicated, the only sin that mattered was negativity! To be thoughtful was to be negative. To question was to be negative. A negative person would never advance, would only be tolerated, a kind of Cancel LIte. It is never surprising when nonsense takes root in schools. No one is brave enough to be negative, to declare the emperor naked. Where such an environment exist, all kinds of poisons take root. Just enablers, too dumbed down to even eye roll anymore. Such are the schools and teachers currently preparing impressionable kids for careers in gender studies.
Bari, I just finished watching the Good Fellows podcast and am so blown away. I have thought the same things so many times but could not be as eloquent as the all of you. As a member of your grandparent’s generation I am proud of and inspired by you. I’m dreaming of the same party you describe and ready to join. So happy to be a subscriber of yours.
Vera
Read [re-read] Bari’s NYT resignation letter, it is a lovely prose poem, every bit as good as Mr Savodnik’s piece.
Poor AG Sulzberger: he looks terrible but he made the only decision he could [getting rid of the editor Bennet.] It would be a fearsome thing to opposed the woke mob at the NYT, the place would be torn asunder. Really, I own a business, only a fool would imperil a goose like the Times: MONEY. Media, the 4th estate, high minded pomp meets economic imperative: AG has a gun to his head and true believers on the trigger.
The Enabler in Chief is Biden with his Jim Crow accusations about voting laws. (But also we know he is brain dead and its not he who writes what he says). Not that the guy before him was any good. "The whispering, the accusing, the snitching, the bad-faith mischaracterizing" is the perfect description of life in Cuba. Being of Cuban descent, I never thought it would come here. But watching the Hemingway documentary last night and finding out that he sacrificed his integrity to protect his image for personal gain for that time's True Believers gives me pause.
The most brilliantly written essay I've read in a long time. Poignant, poetic and ingenious use of the English language. Reminds me of the Committee for the Defense of the Revolution, those pesky, tattling miscreants in Cuba who spy on their neighbors and report perceived indiscretions to the Communist Party, all to stay in good favor and keep their own refrigerators full. This is America, not Cuba. Or at least it used to be.
I bet their assistants do send out those tweets. I am not ready to put up the white flag yet. I do believe there is still a ton of geography between the two polar points. If ever there was a silent majority it is now. This past election was not indicative of anything and it solved nothing.
The fight now - is not on the national political stage. The fight is local. Its in your neighborhood and its with your local BOE if they overstep. For too long we have not been asked to sacrifice anything. If my local school decides to teach my kids CRT I will speak up and I am willing to suffer the consequences - social stigma, whatever, it may be.
What do the woke say - silence is violence ...if that is their position, then there is absolutely no reason to be silent. They will treat you the same. you might as well swing back.
Wonderful article, but it’s too pessimistic. To be sure, the cultural mob is running rampant, but it represents at most twenty percent of the electorate. Eighty per cent of the country is opposed.
The bluest state are 60:40 Democrats:Republicans. Half of the Democrats and all of the Republicans are opposed to wokeism.
This is a political task for liberals and the center. Look at the blue states, 60:40 Democrats. Look. The Republicans are unelectable there. They don’t fund their own candidates meaningfully most of the time. Now look at the Democrats. They’re the Enablers. They trade complicity and appeasement for the political offices and cushy jobs when they cash in.
The extreme Left needs assistance from allies in government to impose restrictions on due process and to mandate oppressive indoctrination in schools, in the workplace, and in government. They need public officials closing down avenues of recourse. They need bureaucratic edicts declaring open season for them. They require elected representatives to look the other way. They need help from a government of elected officials to do things eighty percent of the country doesn’t like.
Strategically, the opportunity to oppose all of this lies in recognizing that this eighty per cent level of political opposition to all of this is the Achilles heel of Leftist authoritarianism. That’s the point of vulnerability.
The alternative is not the Republicans. They’re unelectable in blue states. But independent candidates, unapologetic anti-woke pro-Constitution liberals? Ten of them bypassing party primaries and running independently and simultaneously for US Senate in 2022 would devastate the woke. And there’s a new winning coalition waiting for those candidates.
One third of Democrats and three quarters of Republicans in blue states would vote for an anti-woke liberal. That’s 50 percent of the vote in places like Connecticut, California, and Maryland-with 40 percent for the Democratic Enabler and 10 percent for the unelectable Republican.
Ten independent candidates for US Senate in ten blue states in 2022. What can we do? We can suggest names and encourage them and donate to them when they run, The money will be there.
Don’t pity the Enablers. Defeat them in the blue states in 2022 and 2024, and then begin the long, arduous, private, non-governmental cleanup of de-Stalinization.
In the early 80s when I was a graduate student in a STEM field I had a housemate who was getting her Ph.D. in English. One evening her friends were over, having a spirited discussion of the new ball game in their discipline called "Everything is about power." Is there any room for reason I asked? Nope, it all comes down to power I was told. These were the birthing pains of deconstructionism and the various shades of Critical Theory.
In the mid 90s my friend, who is a professor at a major state university in a social science field, sent me an academic paper of a new hire in his department, detailing sexual practices of the author with his boyfriend. What seemed like soft core gay porn to me was regarded as a serious contribution to scholarship by the prevailing wisdom of his field. Soon the new hire had tenure, and not many years after that he was promoted to dean. I now see that he has made it to some flavor of provost at this same university.
I bring up these anecdotes to make a few points. First, those who many call "woke" played the long game and played it well. They methodically extended their reach throughout all echelons of academia and beyond, over nearly a half century. You have to admire their discipline, but also credit their shrewdness for banking, correctly as it turns out, on the spinelessness of those who should have stood up for liberal, Western values but refused to do so. This is a story with many unfortunate parallels in history that needs insightful telling.
Second, I'm afraid that turning back the tide is going to be harder, and take a longer, than what it took for wokism to prevail. A weakness of the liberal tradition is its willingness to entertain bold, new ideas with little discernment. Liberal academics, who hate being seen as repressive, let the critical theory curiosity have it run even if they (silently) didn't agree with it. Give them tenure, make them deans. The smorgasbord of ideas and all that: what could it hurt? But if case you haven't noticed, woke academics aren't much inclined to reciprocity. Those who want to right the ship back to a liberal tradition won't be able follow in the same historical footsteps. To put it plainly, it really is fundamentally broken.
My pessimism is tempered by knowing that historical trajectories are somewhat unpredictable. Although I don't see what the forces are that will turn things around, and most likely not in my lifetime, I am confident that they will emerge. I regret belonging to a generation that didn't see preserving liberal values as a hill worth dying on. It's now mainly a fight for those in their twenties through fifties. If they fight with the same perseverance as the enemies of freedom did, they might see some victories by the time they get old.
I don't think the 20-50 folks have the cojones or the wisdom to fight. I fear the game is almost over and the totalitarian are about to win. I PRAY I AM WRONG!!!
Brilliant comment. Thank you
Enjoyed the commentary but we're at the same place. While I live in one of the poorest congressional districts in the US, I have absolutely no issues with the affluent of Park Slope and Brooklyn in general. In fact I believe the accumulation of wealth is good as it provides freedom. While visiting NY I walked those fantastic streets of Brooklyn always fascinated by the brownstones. All the pink hair and tattoos are interesting but no Peter those crabby little kids are a problem and are characters right out of the movie Children of the Dammed. They tolerate their pathetic week parents who continue to feed them broccoli and diet coke but make no mistake the real problem rests firmly with liberals who have lost their minds and consumed with their irrational toxic form of altruism. You and your little click will continue to rationalize your support for politicians that enable this nonsense only to have white color elite read this stuff and think Bari and Peter have a point. But then what?
Unfortunately SCOTUS is one of the "Gutless Enablers"of which you speak, because only they have the Constitutional Authority & Power to declare what is common knowledge to a majority of Americans and 61% Europeans (WSJ 2/24/21). And, that is, "the US political system is Broken", probably because video & eye witness evidence of Democrat corruption & collusion in the Polling Centers of six rogue states is so overwhelming. Not to mention the Federal & State Constitutional voting laws that were broken by executive order of mostly Democrat Governors & AG's to enable unsolicited mail-in voting. This created tens of millions of excess Ballots mailed to the 33% of voters who never vote, which were available to be harvested by coercion, theft, purchase, or counterfeited (the never-folded Biden only ballots).
SCOTUS knew the 2020 Election was stolen by Democrat election fraud, "but doing something about this real crisis is hard, and the Enablers (SCOTUS) are weak". So, SCOTUS was probably "relieved the True Believers were angry at other people", but "Now the True Believers are pushing up against the wobbly castle walls of the Enablers"(SCOTUS). Next they are coming for SCOTUS by "packing the Court" with Marxist judges, unless the Justices find the courage to save the Court, themselves, America and individual freedom for our children & mankind, by reversing the 2020 Electoral Vote in the six rogue States because of Democrat fraud. Perpetrators of fraud must never profit from their fraud, and they forfeit any benefit from that fraud.
JH, USMA, JD