Made money and bought politics with said money, go get government contracts and tax breaks to make more money, only to buy more politics and make more money.
Then you get a guy like Brendan Carr in the FCC as regulatory capture so you can make even more money.
Congratulations, you can buy more politics, now you have hydrocarbon subsidies and you guessed it…
I didn't say Harris wasn't a corportracy pick either, Trump is just more of one. And when did I say to "burn down the engine or prosperity." Corportracy is the engine of ruin, Citizens United is the engine of treason. Do you seriously think hydrocarbon subsidies, regulatory capture, and even things as basic as perpetual lawfare and lobbying against a fucking train by an airline industry is the engine of prosperity? What a joke!
News flash: Harris raised more money *and lost*. You're half-baked oligarchy theory is without merit.
We do have some dumb corporate subsidies but we also have plenty of very dumb labor subsidies like the Jones act and Davis-Bacon act. It's just too much statism and not free enough markets all around. Money in the US fights for left right and center depending on the guy.
The problem is definitely everyone that has more money than you. You're so awesome and special, what an injustice that you aren't the CEO of Nvidia. The fact your political ideology propa up your own ego, definitely don't meditate on that. Stay the self-righteous Bernie Bros you are now forever, we need you!
Why are you stuck thinking in absolutes? You can point to exceptions, but a rational person is going to point out both individual were rich, and the social media algorithm rigging in favor of Trump acting as a force multiplier. But I don't think "which elite backed candidate is actually a sign the system is elite consensus" is a fun game.
You can project whatever ideology and personality you want on me, campaign financing data doesn't lie. Wealth isn't the problem, wealth rigging the political system is the problem. Why is this so hard to grasp? The CEOs you bootlick would crawl over half our corpses to improve next quarter. They even rig immigration policy to rig the supply side of the labor market, ruining the value proposition of "wealth creates jobs" which is technically actually true.
I kept waiting for the part of this article backing up headline - how did wokeness help elites? And if it helped them why do elites hate wokeness so much?
I think it helped them in two ways -- (1) the opportunity to virtue signal and increase their social clout and (2) the distraction from material issues reduced the risk of tax-the-rich, pro-union and min wage hikes being implemented
People who wanted to wear the thing on a lapel pin and feel good about themselves and position themselves socially, but no real interest in the underlying thing.
It helped them by electing Trump again and giving them something easy to oppose that doesn’t threaten their agenda. They love to hate it because it makes them feel righteous.
It's a fair question - for the immediate term it probably did seem like a useful direction of populist/left energy to focus on progressive social causes over the Sanders version of the 99% vs the 1%, and even of Trump's initial anti-trade populism for the stated wealthy/corporate elite. They even got to play as the "good guys" for a period of time, like the cited Bezos example. Most corporations flush with COVID cash found responding to the woke demands to be relatively cheap - hire some DEI consultants to conduct some training sessions on captive employees (likely as consultants and not FTE's), create some ERG's (Employee Resource Groups), post positively on social media on various causes, participate and/or donate to Pride events, etc.
But eventually the woke monster did turn in the form of a lot of internal employee led "inquisitions" and disruptions. Recall the Netflix employee "walk out" over the Dave Chappell special, instigated by an employee hired under those same "woke" standards: a BIPOC trans "man" pregnant at the time who took it upon themselves to hijack a leadership call and make some demands over this issue. Comical story in NYMag I think about this - this employee literally walked all over the interviewer and hiring contact to issue demands about resources for trans employees and loudly deflecting on their claims to hosting an LGBTQ friendly workplace on the grounds "the trans employees will tell me that". The sheer gall of a new hire sweeping in like this was exemplar of peak woke in a lot of these companies desperate to hire from this supposed valuable youth market, but quickly found out these employees cause Problems. Many stories abound of internal company Slack/Teams channels overtaken with Inquisition like behaviors against other employees and management, absurdities like employee "sit ins" over Palestine, increasing demands to be relieved of expected work duties for various "woke" conditions (invented disabilities, "self care", etc), etc etc. it was a wild time indeed!
But the problem is these employee behaviors and the permissive environments companies initially championed to look like the "good guys" made their way up to the heads of management, and then there were policy changes, such as "no politics in work channels", the mass firing of said workers that "sat in" Google over Palestine, the closing down of the "empathetic management style" to a "get shit done style" etc, eventually meant that the "good guys" became "bad guys". Along with the souring of the public in general against Tech Bros/Silicon Valley, particulary in the Left, and of Biden's Lina Kahn's aggressive measures against (and she was right on, despite whatever other shortcomings of Biden's Presidency) and looming AI regulatory regimes, and yeah Silicon Valley flipped Right and Red, and hard. Trump not only promised a hands off AI policy, but he gave a social permission to crack down on woke employees, which I think underwrote a lot of the SV bloodletting that took place around that time, and to roll back the DEI stuff - no longer just an arm of HR but what might have been responsible for enabling a wave of (in their eyes, but maybe somewhat fairly too) rebellious and difficult employees who viewed their jobs and company as vehicles for their social activism and not to do, ya know, work. And that's what I think turned it around - it became an internal workplace issue as well as turning the leadership into the Bad Guys, and the AI issue all combined to create that Red Right Turn.
You vastly overestimate the number of of people who have even the slightest clue what the Fed does, let alone know the famous tradeoff between unemployment and inflation.
I don’t think you really believe that this is rational on paper: “all of society is conspiring against minorities and that we have to be willing to curb normal standards of liberalism to positively discriminate towards certain oppressed groups in order to correct these injustices.”
How is multiethnic American society (without a majority of white people in Atlanta, Georgia, or our region) conspiring against minorities? What does that even mean?
Batya Ungar-Sargon wrote that elites viewed the problem as a lack of diversity within their own ranks, rather than a problem of the gulf between the elite classes and the rest of the country. In other words, poverty and income inequality didn't matter as long as elites could point to a few token minorities in their own social circles.
A great example is the "Oscars so white controversy". How exactly was diversifying the ranks of Oscar winners/nominees, who represent the top 1% of the country, supposed to help an impoverished single mother working multiple jobs to support her kids? It's magical thinking of the underpants gnome variety.
Consider "representation", the cliche that's trotted out as a supposed response. How is a black Star Wars actor supposed to lower black homicide rates in poor inner city ghettoes? What exactly is the mechanism? Nobody can explain it.
And consider the counterfactual: Asians have much less cultural cache than blacks. Shaq, Jordan, Lebron, Snoop, black actors in films like "Black Panther" or the Marvel franchise films--where are the Asian equivalents? Yet Asians have the higher average salary of any racial group in the country while blacks have the lowest. If representation matters so much then how is that possible?
And all of this culminated in terrible, authoritarian COVID policies that pushed so many people out of New York, California, and Illinois that these states will be ceding 7 electoral votes to Florida and Texas beginning in 2030. Way to shoot yourselves in the foot, folks.
This was a good and thought-provoking article. I feel like initially steelmanning the woke culture of the 2016-2023 era could have been done better to more accurately pinpoint the visions failings (for example, I don’t think the majority of the leaders and educated followers of woke culture would say we should discriminate against the white privileged male to attain equity) and the actual thesis that wokeism supported the elites could have been expanded upon beyond the typical critiques that it led to posturing and sectarianism which divided an otherwise united leftist community. Still, the examples cited are very true and some of it I didn’t know before, and I agree with a lot of the overall points while disagreeing with some other parts. Well-written and thanks.
Have you read Why I quit the tenure track by Tyler Austin Harper in the last issue of the Atlantic? he describes a situation in academia which perfectly illustrates what you say…
Great article. The Sierra Club used to be a powerhouse, but then the wokesters took over, and today it is irrelevant. In fact, the environmental movement in general has been defanged.
Why are we pretending that “Woke” (such a dumb name for a collection of social phenomena) is actually a real thing, and not an engineered culture war battle adopted and pushed by 20 year old white liberal Karens by the powers that be to have us right where we are? If I’m not mistaken, the term and “movement” started as a specific attitude within the Black community regarding a newfound paradigm in thinking about their place in our modern Capitalist society, and not a bad one. E.g., https://youtu.be/llci8MVh8J4?si=EtSSpv6TitrI_Ii2
It seems that what followed is what happens with everything the black community produces, mainly, it is stolen by the broader younger white liberal community, is diluted to the point of being rendered meaningless and ridiculous, and then pushed back into society as if it were a “thing”, leading to (in the best case) the embarrassment of all involved.
"Woke Excess" generated the social and political backlash that enabled the most extreme wealth friendly (if you like doing business by bribery and risking deregulation in adjacent industries won't destablize yours) Adminstration and political cover to support it.
Yes, the left is bad, and always was. Performative BS to push disastrous policy.
Now, watch you make all the same mistakes under your fresh cool new "I hate rich people" banner.
You people never learn.
... And you call woke illiberal. Lol. It's super liberal to vilify people that made money in a free market! Lololol
Made money and bought politics with said money, go get government contracts and tax breaks to make more money, only to buy more politics and make more money.
Then you get a guy like Brendan Carr in the FCC as regulatory capture so you can make even more money.
Congratulations, you can buy more politics, now you have hydrocarbon subsidies and you guessed it…
Harris raised more than Trump. But yeah, sure, let's burn down the engine of prosperity to satisfy your envy. What could go wrong?
I didn't say Harris wasn't a corportracy pick either, Trump is just more of one. And when did I say to "burn down the engine or prosperity." Corportracy is the engine of ruin, Citizens United is the engine of treason. Do you seriously think hydrocarbon subsidies, regulatory capture, and even things as basic as perpetual lawfare and lobbying against a fucking train by an airline industry is the engine of prosperity? What a joke!
News flash: Harris raised more money *and lost*. You're half-baked oligarchy theory is without merit.
We do have some dumb corporate subsidies but we also have plenty of very dumb labor subsidies like the Jones act and Davis-Bacon act. It's just too much statism and not free enough markets all around. Money in the US fights for left right and center depending on the guy.
The problem is definitely everyone that has more money than you. You're so awesome and special, what an injustice that you aren't the CEO of Nvidia. The fact your political ideology propa up your own ego, definitely don't meditate on that. Stay the self-righteous Bernie Bros you are now forever, we need you!
Why are you stuck thinking in absolutes? You can point to exceptions, but a rational person is going to point out both individual were rich, and the social media algorithm rigging in favor of Trump acting as a force multiplier. But I don't think "which elite backed candidate is actually a sign the system is elite consensus" is a fun game.
You can project whatever ideology and personality you want on me, campaign financing data doesn't lie. Wealth isn't the problem, wealth rigging the political system is the problem. Why is this so hard to grasp? The CEOs you bootlick would crawl over half our corpses to improve next quarter. They even rig immigration policy to rig the supply side of the labor market, ruining the value proposition of "wealth creates jobs" which is technically actually true.
It's nice to be reminded that no matter how much the left loses its way, right wingers remain the stupidest people on the planet.
Yeah Reagan definitely worse than Pol Pot. Right.
I kept waiting for the part of this article backing up headline - how did wokeness help elites? And if it helped them why do elites hate wokeness so much?
I think it helped them in two ways -- (1) the opportunity to virtue signal and increase their social clout and (2) the distraction from material issues reduced the risk of tax-the-rich, pro-union and min wage hikes being implemented
It’s a way of enjoining the revolution without sacrifice.
It was gentrified. https://status451.com/2016/09/15/social-gentrification/
People who wanted to wear the thing on a lapel pin and feel good about themselves and position themselves socially, but no real interest in the underlying thing.
It helped them by electing Trump again and giving them something easy to oppose that doesn’t threaten their agenda. They love to hate it because it makes them feel righteous.
It's a fair question - for the immediate term it probably did seem like a useful direction of populist/left energy to focus on progressive social causes over the Sanders version of the 99% vs the 1%, and even of Trump's initial anti-trade populism for the stated wealthy/corporate elite. They even got to play as the "good guys" for a period of time, like the cited Bezos example. Most corporations flush with COVID cash found responding to the woke demands to be relatively cheap - hire some DEI consultants to conduct some training sessions on captive employees (likely as consultants and not FTE's), create some ERG's (Employee Resource Groups), post positively on social media on various causes, participate and/or donate to Pride events, etc.
But eventually the woke monster did turn in the form of a lot of internal employee led "inquisitions" and disruptions. Recall the Netflix employee "walk out" over the Dave Chappell special, instigated by an employee hired under those same "woke" standards: a BIPOC trans "man" pregnant at the time who took it upon themselves to hijack a leadership call and make some demands over this issue. Comical story in NYMag I think about this - this employee literally walked all over the interviewer and hiring contact to issue demands about resources for trans employees and loudly deflecting on their claims to hosting an LGBTQ friendly workplace on the grounds "the trans employees will tell me that". The sheer gall of a new hire sweeping in like this was exemplar of peak woke in a lot of these companies desperate to hire from this supposed valuable youth market, but quickly found out these employees cause Problems. Many stories abound of internal company Slack/Teams channels overtaken with Inquisition like behaviors against other employees and management, absurdities like employee "sit ins" over Palestine, increasing demands to be relieved of expected work duties for various "woke" conditions (invented disabilities, "self care", etc), etc etc. it was a wild time indeed!
But the problem is these employee behaviors and the permissive environments companies initially championed to look like the "good guys" made their way up to the heads of management, and then there were policy changes, such as "no politics in work channels", the mass firing of said workers that "sat in" Google over Palestine, the closing down of the "empathetic management style" to a "get shit done style" etc, eventually meant that the "good guys" became "bad guys". Along with the souring of the public in general against Tech Bros/Silicon Valley, particulary in the Left, and of Biden's Lina Kahn's aggressive measures against (and she was right on, despite whatever other shortcomings of Biden's Presidency) and looming AI regulatory regimes, and yeah Silicon Valley flipped Right and Red, and hard. Trump not only promised a hands off AI policy, but he gave a social permission to crack down on woke employees, which I think underwrote a lot of the SV bloodletting that took place around that time, and to roll back the DEI stuff - no longer just an arm of HR but what might have been responsible for enabling a wave of (in their eyes, but maybe somewhat fairly too) rebellious and difficult employees who viewed their jobs and company as vehicles for their social activism and not to do, ya know, work. And that's what I think turned it around - it became an internal workplace issue as well as turning the leadership into the Bad Guys, and the AI issue all combined to create that Red Right Turn.
Different group of elites.
You vastly overestimate the number of of people who have even the slightest clue what the Fed does, let alone know the famous tradeoff between unemployment and inflation.
I don’t think you really believe that this is rational on paper: “all of society is conspiring against minorities and that we have to be willing to curb normal standards of liberalism to positively discriminate towards certain oppressed groups in order to correct these injustices.”
How is multiethnic American society (without a majority of white people in Atlanta, Georgia, or our region) conspiring against minorities? What does that even mean?
He was being sarcastic.
I hope you’re right.
The poor were unconcerned anyway, it was an obvious power play by the elites who knew nothing about the poor and didn’t want to, either.
Batya Ungar-Sargon wrote that elites viewed the problem as a lack of diversity within their own ranks, rather than a problem of the gulf between the elite classes and the rest of the country. In other words, poverty and income inequality didn't matter as long as elites could point to a few token minorities in their own social circles.
A great example is the "Oscars so white controversy". How exactly was diversifying the ranks of Oscar winners/nominees, who represent the top 1% of the country, supposed to help an impoverished single mother working multiple jobs to support her kids? It's magical thinking of the underpants gnome variety.
Consider "representation", the cliche that's trotted out as a supposed response. How is a black Star Wars actor supposed to lower black homicide rates in poor inner city ghettoes? What exactly is the mechanism? Nobody can explain it.
And consider the counterfactual: Asians have much less cultural cache than blacks. Shaq, Jordan, Lebron, Snoop, black actors in films like "Black Panther" or the Marvel franchise films--where are the Asian equivalents? Yet Asians have the higher average salary of any racial group in the country while blacks have the lowest. If representation matters so much then how is that possible?
And all of this culminated in terrible, authoritarian COVID policies that pushed so many people out of New York, California, and Illinois that these states will be ceding 7 electoral votes to Florida and Texas beginning in 2030. Way to shoot yourselves in the foot, folks.
Sounds like the message is an advertisement for Woke 2: WOKE HARDER
This was a good and thought-provoking article. I feel like initially steelmanning the woke culture of the 2016-2023 era could have been done better to more accurately pinpoint the visions failings (for example, I don’t think the majority of the leaders and educated followers of woke culture would say we should discriminate against the white privileged male to attain equity) and the actual thesis that wokeism supported the elites could have been expanded upon beyond the typical critiques that it led to posturing and sectarianism which divided an otherwise united leftist community. Still, the examples cited are very true and some of it I didn’t know before, and I agree with a lot of the overall points while disagreeing with some other parts. Well-written and thanks.
Have you read Why I quit the tenure track by Tyler Austin Harper in the last issue of the Atlantic? he describes a situation in academia which perfectly illustrates what you say…
What's with the past tense?
Great article. The Sierra Club used to be a powerhouse, but then the wokesters took over, and today it is irrelevant. In fact, the environmental movement in general has been defanged.
Well it was a project of the elite--academic, philanthropic, and political--arguably to buttress their own power.
Normally when the first film is a flop there isn't great excitement to see the sequel.
Why are we pretending that “Woke” (such a dumb name for a collection of social phenomena) is actually a real thing, and not an engineered culture war battle adopted and pushed by 20 year old white liberal Karens by the powers that be to have us right where we are? If I’m not mistaken, the term and “movement” started as a specific attitude within the Black community regarding a newfound paradigm in thinking about their place in our modern Capitalist society, and not a bad one. E.g., https://youtu.be/llci8MVh8J4?si=EtSSpv6TitrI_Ii2
It seems that what followed is what happens with everything the black community produces, mainly, it is stolen by the broader younger white liberal community, is diluted to the point of being rendered meaningless and ridiculous, and then pushed back into society as if it were a “thing”, leading to (in the best case) the embarrassment of all involved.
Counterpoint:
https://jillybeanmonet.substack.com/p/congratulations-on-beating-the-woke?r=7hhis&utm_medium=ios
Maybe I missed it in the article but how did this help elites?
2026 everyone hates elites, both the left and the right, and this stuff is partially why.
"Woke Excess" generated the social and political backlash that enabled the most extreme wealth friendly (if you like doing business by bribery and risking deregulation in adjacent industries won't destablize yours) Adminstration and political cover to support it.