It's fascinating how the discourse around wokeness is turning on a dime. And disquieting how the people most hurt and insulted by the trends of the last 10-15 years are thankful for this sudden grace – for a result they couldn't effect themselves.
What provoked it? If everyone else is too polite to say it now in this far-too-genteel sub, then I'll have to. It's that radical wokeness has advanced to the point it has begun to hurt Jews.
The problem here is quite obvious. The anti-hereditarian paradigm of privilege and «structural oppression» paints a massive glowing target on the back of the wealthiest, very visible and the most influential demographic. Focus on racism and apartheid feeds into anti-Israeli sentiment on the left. The most aggressive anti-white blacks regularly out themselves as even more Anti-Semitic, and have to be broken in by the same people who have encouraged them to fearlessly mouth off in the first place, breaking the kayfabe. The riots, provoked by media, create smoke that's carried to the better neighborhoods of NYC. The media is losing credibility over all that. There's plenty of Orthodox Jews who are straight up assaulted by black people in urban regions, and no matter how much you try to spin this (together with «anti-Asian hate crimes») into a white supremacism problem, they don't get unassaulted. Keep going in this direction long enough and you may well have a race war, and even before that you'll risk pogroms; not the powerless Russian pillow-cutting that's only good for fueling journalist outrage overseas, but something more like the efforts of Bohdan Khmelnytsky.
And this might be a small thing, but Andrew Gutmann finds fault with race obsession in Brearley Prep school in Upper-East Side Manhattan; «anti-intellectual, illiberal mob» has taken the reins of power there, he says: «Systemic racism, properly understood, is segregated schools and separate lunch counters. It is the interning of Japanese and the exterminating of Jews.» Andrew, I get that you fear anti-intellectual, illiberal mobs, and this is all very fair but I have to ask: is demonization and gaslighting of white Gentiles by every institution of prestige for the last few decades – not systemic racism as well? Is, let's say, the infamous Smithsonian NMAAHC «Whiteness» infographic not an example of it? And was it created by a mob?
In my book, the opposite is the case: NMAAHC is part of the Cathedral that has been propagating this ideology for a very long time already, staffed and legitimized by the well-educated ladies and gentlemen from previous generations of places like Brearley; an intellectual, namely one Judith H. Katz, is the author of the underlying works «Some aspects and Assumptions of Whiteness in the United States» and White Awareness: Handbook for Anti-Racism Training (1978 and already part of a rich tradition, huh, Ibram X. Kendi is even less original than I thought; also curious how I found it on Thai website first of all); and the mob of upset whites prompted the museum to apologize and take it down.
(«White Awareness has been created out of a personal and professional struggle and is designed to help whites understand and come to grips with personal, cultural, and institutional racism. The author was the child of refugees from Hitler’s Germany. She was further influenced by the social movements in the United States during the 1960’s. She has a vision of equality and a commitment to combatting the pathology of racism.»)
So that's enough of that; the program is going the rails and has to be curtailed. Beginning in 2019, a boatload of Jewish influencers, previously neutral, quiet or interested in different things, have jumped ship. Lo and behold: the critique that Sailer and co. or Pat Buchanan have been making for decades, the hateful far-right drivel that was falling on deaf ears, is becoming conventional wisdom bit by bit! Bret Stevens and Matt Yglesias, Bari Weiss and Rubin and Weinstein and another Weinstein and the Tablet and, it seems at times, half of Substack are subtly or boldly, but with growing volume prophesying doom and gloom to the woke America, often enough explicitly on «this is bad because it might turn out badly for the Jews» grounds. Slowly but surely it becomes possible to speak up against the woke in the polite society, if under the breath for now. The horrible steamroller of institutional wokeness is turning into a paper tiger. Soon, the collective sigh of relief may well start the Nth wave of COVID variant, but why didn't it all begin earlier?
(This report on immigration debate in 2001, particularly the sections «Abandoning the Field to Nativism and Xenophobia» and «Jews and Identity Politics», may have something to do with the answer.)
To be fair, this isn't even so much a fault of the Jews as it is the defect of white Gentile population (historically explainable by innocuous enough factors, as /u/2cimarafa likes to point out). While Jews have explicitly ethnically minded thought leaders with clout, White America is, in some sense, like that alien camp from District 9, a mass of confused plebeians, some very smart and rich, but still either powerless or irresponsible. USA have no elites which strongly identify as white, or are specifically driven by common white (or even WASP, or Italian, or Catholic, or whatever) interest, and haven't had them for a while now, probably since 1940s. «White» exists as an anti-group, a reason for disqualification from certain roles or a cause for some introspection about real and imagined historical wrongs (which provides minority advocates with endless opportunities for grift), but not as a political body; and it will never again become a political body. White identity can be deconstructed by dispassionate pathologists, but it cannot be proactively constructed. And amen to that! Americans are taught ad nauseam as to what the opposite can be, in all shapes and forms from cartoons to mandatory museum trips to philosophical treatises: mobs, pitchforks, burning of books, anti-intellectualism, etc. etc. Horrible stuff. But sometimes, in this very sub I get referred to some incoherent piece in Tablet Mag and:
If the Jews committed an incredible moral and cultural sin and deserted en masse to the GOP, exactly how would the Democratic Party ever win an election again? Jews contribute two-thirds of the money and probably provide 80% of the political energy in the Democratic Party. [...]
I remember Hannah Arendt made the observation in the Origins of Totalitarianism that Jews are reputed to be smart, but politically they seem to be quite stupid. They hang onto their political allegiances long after it makes any sense to do so. And they support political parties that don’t protect them. So, when you look at them politically, they’re quite dumb. Looked at coldly and rationally, why should the Jews not be Republicans? The Republicans have plenty of money without the Jews, but Jews would play a major role in the GOP.
The gentiles in the Republican Party claim to like Jews, who figure prominently in their eschatology. Why should the Jews not enjoy the freedom to maneuver politically like everybody else does?
– and I can't help but feel a little bit of pity for American whites, who'll never be able to speak in the same manner in a sane mind.
[...] But ultimately, this is a dangerous course, because the more you allow yourself to be subordinated, the less power you can wield, and the more you are severed from your own strengths, the less able you are to defend yourself.
So when does that bill come due?
It won’t be this generation. But It may be the next generation.
In reality, Jews need to resist now, before it’s too late. And in a couple of generations it will be too late.
So when the Christian Zionists hold out their hands and say, “Please work with us,” don’t rebuff them.
When conservative Republicans say, “Hey, come on over to our side,” don’t rebuff them.
Republican, that’s not a dirty word. It’s spelled R-E-P-