This confirms my impression, but you’re right to be cautious. I set out the reasons both to be optimistic that the Great Awokening has peaked, as well as the reasons it’s far from over — and warned that Trump’s re-election could shock the movement back into rude good health — here: https://dailysceptic.org/2023/05/27/a-dispatch-from-the-woke-wars/
A great piece. The pattern of peak, slight subsidence, then consolidation is what we saw in the first two Awokenings (late 60s, early 90s). I’d expect same this time. Only question is whether it ratchets to a an even higher level in a future upsurge.
This is interesting but it is not going to answer the question. The media is downstream from academics, where ideological and paramoral presuppositions meet the public, but it is downstream from the engines of cultural production. You should be looking at whether the neo-Marxist ideologies that manufacture woke ideologues are in decline, and that's not the same thing.
Recall, woke is postmodern and it constantly plays a game of semantic migration. For example, define woman. Alternatively, sex is observed not assigned, but it is woke-speak to say "gender assigned at birth." Notice how that phrase embeds presuppositions drawn from gender ideology that are inappropriate when it comes to identifying a person's biological characteristics. Wokeness is about controlling language, so the use of its jargon in media is a useful measure, but you have to look to the academies to keep up with the new words and redefinition. As woke jargon declines it is replaced. You are not measuring the rate if replacement and invention of new jargon (which would be extremely difficult).
To really know if woke is ascending or declining, you should be measuring DEI initiatives and other ways neo-Marxist ideologues implement their agendas. How many neo-Marxist professors are there? How many conservatives are in grad schools? These kinds of numbers will tell the real story.
Yes, we all saw it happening. You do excellent work, don't get me wrong. However, word usage is a symptom, not a cause. I do appreciate your research (especially since you publish it here), and it is useful. Perhaps you could compare the spread of the neo-Marxist Genus of ideologies to the semantic migrations in the media and academics? The manipulation of language is ongoing, and jargon used in the past is the language woke ideologues target. Remember when equity was strictly a financial term? How about inclusiveness, which used to mean viewpoint diversity? The migrations of meanings, and the people in the academies who make those migrations, are important considerations.
You raise a good point, but ignore the dictates of the market. Their means of cultural dissemination are failing. The corporate media is failing. Disney has had to cut staff and their movies flop. The DC franchise is failing, and most people simply aren't going to watch the next Marvel movie.
Woke capitalism is also failing. In America, there is Bud Light and in the UK the Wickes controversy is only just beginning, with the ill-chosen words of a CEO calling 90% of his customers ignorant and mildly bigoted not received at all well by the hoi polloi.
What people ignore about elite trickledown is that the population at large needs to be somewhat convinced by your argument- this is why the rights revolution was an astounding success.
Of course, you could counter with school indoctrination, but you would be wrong. A Psychology Today article showed that sympathy towards LGBT issues had declined, and the largest decline was found amongst the 18 to 29 category! What the ideologues ignore is that even young people in the Nordic Model countries seem to be wired for procedural fairness rather than equality of outcome.
There is a pretty obscure social science experiment floating in the ether in which social scientists asked paired college kids to try five Maths questions each, and then divide up the spoils with cash given for each question the pair managed to answer correctly. The point is that they didn't simply divide the cash per correct answer. High scorers were disproportionately rewarded, low scorers 'punished'.
This is what the Equity crowd doesn't understand- their project is going up against 50,000 years of human evolution. No amount of blank slateism and social construction is going to reverse human psychology which is almost hardwired. If they were smart, then they would distribute greater opportunities to the socioeconomically disadvantaged. Most people are willing to agree to a little class-based redistribution in the name of levelling the playing field. Some might argue that this is what the Left should have been pushing for all along.
Your examples are good and support your point, but you are grossly discounting the power of academies to influence market culture. You may even be correct to claim that "most people" ignore certain factors of elite influence, but that is not what is going on. Your outright rejection of school indoctrination is based on a cherry-picked stat that isn't representative of the majority of the age group you mentioned. I agree that the DEI crowd is going up against evolutionary forces, but it is because their ideologies are based on 19th century Gnostic fallacies (which is why Lysenkoism is still readily adopted by young Communist regimes despite the Holodomor - they think in Lamarkian terms, not Darwinian). However, you are mistaken to assume class is purely economic. Races and genders are also classes. Wokists are postmodern. Intersectionalism combines multiple types of classes, including economic, to assemble their rubric. So, I respectfully disagree with your analysis. It smacks of conservative hubris, and the neo-Marxist left is counting on it. If you discount the academies, which are the manufacturers of cultural and economic producers (people with knowledge, skills, and norms), then controlling who advances in those academies is the surest way to defeat capitalism in the long run. We would never have fallen into this situation had this not been the case. The woke agenda has been moving us towards this since Hegel, under various names. You make a strong argument, but reach a hubristic conclusion.
In a nutshell, those are all good points and legitimate reasons for optimism. However, there are very few academies changing course and neo-Marxist pedagogy is still almost universal in teacher training and union leadership in Canada, the US, New Zealand, and Australia. The move to the right in Europe has largely been covered in our media using far left jargon (e.g. calling Meloni of Italy "far right"). We have a mountain of tenured professors who ascribe to the ideologies this political swing is rejecting. I hope it is successful, but I suspect it won't last if our schools and academies keep pumping out teachers who apply neo-Marxist pedagogy in the classroom. The Western right often has a problem winning the long game, historically, and the rise of the illiberal left since Communism was discredited in the 1960s is an example of conservative hubris. I think you are mainly correct and I appreciate your optimism. However, there are too many historical examples of apophatic belief systems (e.g 3rd century Gnostic cults, 10th century Millennialism, contemporary neo-Marxism, etc.) enduring because they remained embedded in the institutions of their day - in particular, where parents sent their children to be educated. As a result, despite their massive failures and being the belief systems that led to the largest democides and genocides in history (e.g. Holodomor, Pol Pot, Mao's agricultural reforms...), they have never been stronger at either the global scale, or the classroom one, and hence are not going away anytime soon as a force to recon.
I could offer the same compliment as yours- thoroughly well-argued, and you would be right, other than for a couple of reasons. First, Leftists crave political power more than anything else. It's the envisaged method of their utopian delivery system. And the Leftist are losing everywhere in the Western world.
All of Europe, with the exception of the UK (with it's bloody useless Tory leadership) all of Europe is swinging right- to the extent that the EU itself tempts disintegration over mass migration as an issue (even Sweden, with the potential for SWEXIT!)
The problem with intersectionality is that it creates arbitrary means of disposing of inconvenient dissenters. Black men reject it because of feminism. Almost all Latinos are rejecting it- 57% were against it in a Civiqs poll around the time of the California equity vote, and most who didn't know the full extent of the ideology.
Leftists love political power more than anything else, and they are slowly losing it wherever one looks. The problem with the arbitrariness of exclusion and cancel culture is that in the past, the Struggle session only worked because of the amorphous nature of the accusations.
So if given the choice will Leftists settle for their dominion of every major institution which counts, but consign the political hopes to oblivion forever more- ensuring that their precious institutions and centres of woke capitalism are subject to social conservative veto, curtailment and habitual defunding, decimation.
The American political landscape might present a superficial argument against this conclusion, but one has to remember that whatever one thinks of abortion on a moral level, the recent introduction of state level anti-abortion laws was politically catastrophic, shifting the polling by at least 10 points.
Remember, the Republicans won the popular vote for the first time in years, and in every single other demographic, other than Affluent White Female Liberals, social conservatism made gains. Plus, how do you think they will take it when they realise that virtually everyone of their precious Black and Brown migrants from other cultures is voting Right and rejecting the entirely of their lunacy.
I watched this a couple of minutes ago, and now I can't help but chuckle in glee.
It's about a teacher in the UK who called a child despicable for refusing to concede her classmate identified as a cat!
Do they have no conception of how it looks to someone not indoctrinated into the cult! Hegel may have thought that we would reach the pinnacle only for the next generation to through it all away- but even he couldn't have anticipated grown adults indulging children's self-identifying feline fantasies...
The real problem is that the Right doesn't have much in the way of elite cultural production. Other than a few exceptions, most of the websites look as though they designed back in the early 2000s. And I'm talking about the highbrow content. It's only really City Journal and few others which look as though they even have Art teams.
Even here in the UK, I think there might be room for cautious optimism- provided, that is, if Kemi Badenoch can hold onto Saffron Waldon in the next general election...
There is a very large part of me that pines for the cessation of this period of modern discourse, but I know that something just as bad or worse is waiting to happen in its negative space once it finally leaves. Nonetheless, this constellation of race rhetoric and victimhood hysteria will be remembered by history as deeply wrong-headed and intellectually embarrassing, and that will be cathartic to finally see play out one day.
David, would you be able to let us know what kind of data source you used for your work? Full-text search of these news sources has been inconsistent and limited in my experience. Are you working with a complete corpus of articles, both text and headlines, from these periods, or are you searching for these terms and calculating frequency based on the articles the APIs are serving up for each time period? V intrigued by your work, keep it up!
Yeah this is brilliant, great work. Agree that things look to be improving, but as you say, the mania could reignite with Orange Man Bad (TM) back in office. Its also interesting to see that WSJ was always far below the main shitty media NYT and WaPo in abusing the English language, in any case.
"But his return to the White House, or the election of a Republican U.S. President could easily reignite the spirit of the Great Awokening."
This seems to assign guilt for the Great Awakening to those that oppose it, and ignores that pre-dates Trump and emerged largely from leftist echo chambers.
A more practical explanation would be that the height of the George Floyd panic has subsided because "Defund the Police" got so many people murdered and BLMs popularity is in the toilet. The sexuality and trans stuff seems to be holding up better.
Practically, we are entering a "consolidation" phase. The raw emotions of the protest phase are digested into institutional policy and capture as the general public learns to digest core premises of the radicals before you can have another offensive. Like a military campaign you need time between thrusts.
Back to the original assumption, it seems rather odd to suggest that electing people that are anti-woke and will pass anti-woke laws would strengthen woke-ism rather than weaken it. Does anyone believe woke is having an easier time in Florida vs California?
I understand that if you are a liberal who doesn't want to give up being a liberal and wants to have more peace in ones social circle then electing a republican might derange your friends...but have you considered getting new friends that don't fly off the handle whenever they don't get their way?
Great source material! Finding and compiling these types of metrics must really take hard work. I think it should also serve as a warning to the anti-woke not to lose their own humanity in their reaction to woke lunacy. The answer to the Manichean mindset is not to go to war, but rather to remain implacable in the pursuit of shared humanity.
Have you seen the new data on the rise of social conservatism? Saagar Enjeti did a short 6 minute monologue today on Breaking Points. It's deeply reassuring. The plurality are still broadly in favour of gay marriage and reacted badly to recent attempts to ban access to abortion, but have discovered an anti-authoritarian mindset and the convictions of the civic libertarian.
In short, they've discovered they don't like be told what to think, or what they can or cannot say!
On a more depressing note, I think the next manifestation of authoritarianism will be the radical climate agenda. Since the pandemic, I've become deeply worried about the potential impacts of climate policy which ignores the basic realities of global economics and the humanitarian benefits it brings the world. Most people don't seem to understand that economic shocks can be just as inimical to the world's poor, hungry and vulnerable.
According to the World Food Programme's 2022 data- roughly 80% of global food insecurity was still caused by war, 10% was due to economic shocks and 10% was due to causes in which climate change *might* have played a role. The world desperately needs more innovation, more well-reasoned civil discourse and, above all, more persuasion. Inviting one part of the population to become the embodiment of the tyranny of others simply isn't a solution.
Recently, I've been thinking about how parasite stress has a tendency to awaken nascent authoritarianism in populations. I think it's the concept that fear makes for piss poor policy-making decisions can be applied more broadly- I think it can even be applied to subjects like foreign relations and mass incarceration (the sane answer on the latter would have been Scottish Public Health Policing).
Trends never continue forever. Despite whether Trump or Biden or whoever is in the White House, people get tired of one thing and move on to something else, in politics, fashion, etc. It was always likely we’d see a correction.
Another wonderful contribution, David. I am so grateful to you for figuring out how to measure something so diffuse and important.
This confirms my impression, but you’re right to be cautious. I set out the reasons both to be optimistic that the Great Awokening has peaked, as well as the reasons it’s far from over — and warned that Trump’s re-election could shock the movement back into rude good health — here: https://dailysceptic.org/2023/05/27/a-dispatch-from-the-woke-wars/
It may just be the pandemic. Let's see how it will develop in 2023+.
A great piece. The pattern of peak, slight subsidence, then consolidation is what we saw in the first two Awokenings (late 60s, early 90s). I’d expect same this time. Only question is whether it ratchets to a an even higher level in a future upsurge.
This is interesting but it is not going to answer the question. The media is downstream from academics, where ideological and paramoral presuppositions meet the public, but it is downstream from the engines of cultural production. You should be looking at whether the neo-Marxist ideologies that manufacture woke ideologues are in decline, and that's not the same thing.
Recall, woke is postmodern and it constantly plays a game of semantic migration. For example, define woman. Alternatively, sex is observed not assigned, but it is woke-speak to say "gender assigned at birth." Notice how that phrase embeds presuppositions drawn from gender ideology that are inappropriate when it comes to identifying a person's biological characteristics. Wokeness is about controlling language, so the use of its jargon in media is a useful measure, but you have to look to the academies to keep up with the new words and redefinition. As woke jargon declines it is replaced. You are not measuring the rate if replacement and invention of new jargon (which would be extremely difficult).
To really know if woke is ascending or declining, you should be measuring DEI initiatives and other ways neo-Marxist ideologues implement their agendas. How many neo-Marxist professors are there? How many conservatives are in grad schools? These kinds of numbers will tell the real story.
It is true that these terms were building up steadily in academic papers for many decades before the explosion in news media https://davidrozado.substack.com/p/tialpasj
Yes, we all saw it happening. You do excellent work, don't get me wrong. However, word usage is a symptom, not a cause. I do appreciate your research (especially since you publish it here), and it is useful. Perhaps you could compare the spread of the neo-Marxist Genus of ideologies to the semantic migrations in the media and academics? The manipulation of language is ongoing, and jargon used in the past is the language woke ideologues target. Remember when equity was strictly a financial term? How about inclusiveness, which used to mean viewpoint diversity? The migrations of meanings, and the people in the academies who make those migrations, are important considerations.
You raise a good point, but ignore the dictates of the market. Their means of cultural dissemination are failing. The corporate media is failing. Disney has had to cut staff and their movies flop. The DC franchise is failing, and most people simply aren't going to watch the next Marvel movie.
Woke capitalism is also failing. In America, there is Bud Light and in the UK the Wickes controversy is only just beginning, with the ill-chosen words of a CEO calling 90% of his customers ignorant and mildly bigoted not received at all well by the hoi polloi.
What people ignore about elite trickledown is that the population at large needs to be somewhat convinced by your argument- this is why the rights revolution was an astounding success.
Of course, you could counter with school indoctrination, but you would be wrong. A Psychology Today article showed that sympathy towards LGBT issues had declined, and the largest decline was found amongst the 18 to 29 category! What the ideologues ignore is that even young people in the Nordic Model countries seem to be wired for procedural fairness rather than equality of outcome.
There is a pretty obscure social science experiment floating in the ether in which social scientists asked paired college kids to try five Maths questions each, and then divide up the spoils with cash given for each question the pair managed to answer correctly. The point is that they didn't simply divide the cash per correct answer. High scorers were disproportionately rewarded, low scorers 'punished'.
This is what the Equity crowd doesn't understand- their project is going up against 50,000 years of human evolution. No amount of blank slateism and social construction is going to reverse human psychology which is almost hardwired. If they were smart, then they would distribute greater opportunities to the socioeconomically disadvantaged. Most people are willing to agree to a little class-based redistribution in the name of levelling the playing field. Some might argue that this is what the Left should have been pushing for all along.
Your examples are good and support your point, but you are grossly discounting the power of academies to influence market culture. You may even be correct to claim that "most people" ignore certain factors of elite influence, but that is not what is going on. Your outright rejection of school indoctrination is based on a cherry-picked stat that isn't representative of the majority of the age group you mentioned. I agree that the DEI crowd is going up against evolutionary forces, but it is because their ideologies are based on 19th century Gnostic fallacies (which is why Lysenkoism is still readily adopted by young Communist regimes despite the Holodomor - they think in Lamarkian terms, not Darwinian). However, you are mistaken to assume class is purely economic. Races and genders are also classes. Wokists are postmodern. Intersectionalism combines multiple types of classes, including economic, to assemble their rubric. So, I respectfully disagree with your analysis. It smacks of conservative hubris, and the neo-Marxist left is counting on it. If you discount the academies, which are the manufacturers of cultural and economic producers (people with knowledge, skills, and norms), then controlling who advances in those academies is the surest way to defeat capitalism in the long run. We would never have fallen into this situation had this not been the case. The woke agenda has been moving us towards this since Hegel, under various names. You make a strong argument, but reach a hubristic conclusion.
In a nutshell, those are all good points and legitimate reasons for optimism. However, there are very few academies changing course and neo-Marxist pedagogy is still almost universal in teacher training and union leadership in Canada, the US, New Zealand, and Australia. The move to the right in Europe has largely been covered in our media using far left jargon (e.g. calling Meloni of Italy "far right"). We have a mountain of tenured professors who ascribe to the ideologies this political swing is rejecting. I hope it is successful, but I suspect it won't last if our schools and academies keep pumping out teachers who apply neo-Marxist pedagogy in the classroom. The Western right often has a problem winning the long game, historically, and the rise of the illiberal left since Communism was discredited in the 1960s is an example of conservative hubris. I think you are mainly correct and I appreciate your optimism. However, there are too many historical examples of apophatic belief systems (e.g 3rd century Gnostic cults, 10th century Millennialism, contemporary neo-Marxism, etc.) enduring because they remained embedded in the institutions of their day - in particular, where parents sent their children to be educated. As a result, despite their massive failures and being the belief systems that led to the largest democides and genocides in history (e.g. Holodomor, Pol Pot, Mao's agricultural reforms...), they have never been stronger at either the global scale, or the classroom one, and hence are not going away anytime soon as a force to recon.
I could offer the same compliment as yours- thoroughly well-argued, and you would be right, other than for a couple of reasons. First, Leftists crave political power more than anything else. It's the envisaged method of their utopian delivery system. And the Leftist are losing everywhere in the Western world.
All of Europe, with the exception of the UK (with it's bloody useless Tory leadership) all of Europe is swinging right- to the extent that the EU itself tempts disintegration over mass migration as an issue (even Sweden, with the potential for SWEXIT!)
The problem with intersectionality is that it creates arbitrary means of disposing of inconvenient dissenters. Black men reject it because of feminism. Almost all Latinos are rejecting it- 57% were against it in a Civiqs poll around the time of the California equity vote, and most who didn't know the full extent of the ideology.
Leftists love political power more than anything else, and they are slowly losing it wherever one looks. The problem with the arbitrariness of exclusion and cancel culture is that in the past, the Struggle session only worked because of the amorphous nature of the accusations.
So if given the choice will Leftists settle for their dominion of every major institution which counts, but consign the political hopes to oblivion forever more- ensuring that their precious institutions and centres of woke capitalism are subject to social conservative veto, curtailment and habitual defunding, decimation.
The American political landscape might present a superficial argument against this conclusion, but one has to remember that whatever one thinks of abortion on a moral level, the recent introduction of state level anti-abortion laws was politically catastrophic, shifting the polling by at least 10 points.
Remember, the Republicans won the popular vote for the first time in years, and in every single other demographic, other than Affluent White Female Liberals, social conservatism made gains. Plus, how do you think they will take it when they realise that virtually everyone of their precious Black and Brown migrants from other cultures is voting Right and rejecting the entirely of their lunacy.
I watched this a couple of minutes ago, and now I can't help but chuckle in glee.
It's about a teacher in the UK who called a child despicable for refusing to concede her classmate identified as a cat!
Do they have no conception of how it looks to someone not indoctrinated into the cult! Hegel may have thought that we would reach the pinnacle only for the next generation to through it all away- but even he couldn't have anticipated grown adults indulging children's self-identifying feline fantasies...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EOiL-TM4DP0&t=76s
The real problem is that the Right doesn't have much in the way of elite cultural production. Other than a few exceptions, most of the websites look as though they designed back in the early 2000s. And I'm talking about the highbrow content. It's only really City Journal and few others which look as though they even have Art teams.
Even here in the UK, I think there might be room for cautious optimism- provided, that is, if Kemi Badenoch can hold onto Saffron Waldon in the next general election...
Where do you get your raw data and what packages do you use to produce these? They are excellent.
There is a very large part of me that pines for the cessation of this period of modern discourse, but I know that something just as bad or worse is waiting to happen in its negative space once it finally leaves. Nonetheless, this constellation of race rhetoric and victimhood hysteria will be remembered by history as deeply wrong-headed and intellectually embarrassing, and that will be cathartic to finally see play out one day.
David, would you be able to let us know what kind of data source you used for your work? Full-text search of these news sources has been inconsistent and limited in my experience. Are you working with a complete corpus of articles, both text and headlines, from these periods, or are you searching for these terms and calculating frequency based on the articles the APIs are serving up for each time period? V intrigued by your work, keep it up!
Ye, this is what anti woke people who want to vote for Trump don t seem to get Trump in office will trigger the activists even more.
After all, wokism appeared during his term, in part as a reaction to him.
Yeah this is brilliant, great work. Agree that things look to be improving, but as you say, the mania could reignite with Orange Man Bad (TM) back in office. Its also interesting to see that WSJ was always far below the main shitty media NYT and WaPo in abusing the English language, in any case.
This letter is very informative
Intergenerationally we are still loosing though. See Eric Kaufmann's article on the political views of Gen Z in Britain
"But his return to the White House, or the election of a Republican U.S. President could easily reignite the spirit of the Great Awokening."
This seems to assign guilt for the Great Awakening to those that oppose it, and ignores that pre-dates Trump and emerged largely from leftist echo chambers.
A more practical explanation would be that the height of the George Floyd panic has subsided because "Defund the Police" got so many people murdered and BLMs popularity is in the toilet. The sexuality and trans stuff seems to be holding up better.
Practically, we are entering a "consolidation" phase. The raw emotions of the protest phase are digested into institutional policy and capture as the general public learns to digest core premises of the radicals before you can have another offensive. Like a military campaign you need time between thrusts.
Back to the original assumption, it seems rather odd to suggest that electing people that are anti-woke and will pass anti-woke laws would strengthen woke-ism rather than weaken it. Does anyone believe woke is having an easier time in Florida vs California?
I understand that if you are a liberal who doesn't want to give up being a liberal and wants to have more peace in ones social circle then electing a republican might derange your friends...but have you considered getting new friends that don't fly off the handle whenever they don't get their way?
Great source material! Finding and compiling these types of metrics must really take hard work. I think it should also serve as a warning to the anti-woke not to lose their own humanity in their reaction to woke lunacy. The answer to the Manichean mindset is not to go to war, but rather to remain implacable in the pursuit of shared humanity.
Have you seen the new data on the rise of social conservatism? Saagar Enjeti did a short 6 minute monologue today on Breaking Points. It's deeply reassuring. The plurality are still broadly in favour of gay marriage and reacted badly to recent attempts to ban access to abortion, but have discovered an anti-authoritarian mindset and the convictions of the civic libertarian.
In short, they've discovered they don't like be told what to think, or what they can or cannot say!
On a more depressing note, I think the next manifestation of authoritarianism will be the radical climate agenda. Since the pandemic, I've become deeply worried about the potential impacts of climate policy which ignores the basic realities of global economics and the humanitarian benefits it brings the world. Most people don't seem to understand that economic shocks can be just as inimical to the world's poor, hungry and vulnerable.
According to the World Food Programme's 2022 data- roughly 80% of global food insecurity was still caused by war, 10% was due to economic shocks and 10% was due to causes in which climate change *might* have played a role. The world desperately needs more innovation, more well-reasoned civil discourse and, above all, more persuasion. Inviting one part of the population to become the embodiment of the tyranny of others simply isn't a solution.
Recently, I've been thinking about how parasite stress has a tendency to awaken nascent authoritarianism in populations. I think it's the concept that fear makes for piss poor policy-making decisions can be applied more broadly- I think it can even be applied to subjects like foreign relations and mass incarceration (the sane answer on the latter would have been Scottish Public Health Policing).
Trends never continue forever. Despite whether Trump or Biden or whoever is in the White House, people get tired of one thing and move on to something else, in politics, fashion, etc. It was always likely we’d see a correction.