Wokeness, Terminable and Interminable
What's a pundit to do when your favorite toy goes Gremlin?
[Sorry for an overlong and slightly unfocused post. There’s lots happening and a lot to say! Fair warning: I might do a second installment in a few weeks!]
The Trump administration’s unrelenting assault on the US education system has made for strange bedfellows. Suddenly everyone (or almost everyone) has always been against this. Suddenly people acknowledge that the image of the campus as a woke ideological echo chamber that supposedly drags conservatives before kangaroo courts needs to be nuanced. Which … yes. That’s great. It’s certainly nice to see so many people who have spent the last few years jumping on every ill-sourced and belief-beggaring campus freak-out (including the Wall Street Journal editorial board, which, one must assume, wrote the entirety of their article excoriating Trump’s attack on Harvard while sweating inside a hotdog suit), come out against the obvious and almost inevitable consequences of their own bad faith reporting. Suddenly Quillette thinks the University of Austin has “betrayed its principles”? Things are bad. And we’re in the unenviable position that seeing many of the same people who helped create this moment are now the people explaining to us why it’s bad … counts as a good thing.
At the same time, I think it’s a moment of great risk, because these people seem largely incapable of saying “our bad”. And they seem to want to retain their image of the universities, all the while claiming to want to save those universities. It’s characteristics of moral panics that there’s usually no real reckoning at the end of them. Rarely has there been an “our bad” about the Satanic Panic, the panic about gangs, about rainbow parties, what have you. Which is why moral panics are so easy to revive or recycle. We never grappled with them in any of their previous iterations, so repeating them is easier than working through.
Moral panics are about misallocated attention, they usually deflate by re-distributing that attention. Several thousand headlines about a specific topic or worry become a hundred, then dwindle to a handful. They almost never become several hundred headlines about what the purveyors of the moral panic got wrong, or how this could have happened. This is part of why moral panic-mongering is so seductive: people know instinctively that there is no real accountability at their end. They know that consequences exist only for those who are unfairly maligned in them, never for those who do the unfair maligning. After all, these panics tend to be about outgroups — does a TV reporter, a national pundit, a Member of Congress really care that someone went to jail for an incredibly long time because of some dumb freakout they participated in?
This is part and parcel of our contemporary pathology — one reason I wrote The Cancel Culture Panic (out on audiobook this week!) was because I wanted to create a record of what was being claimed in a language game that I felt a lot of people would walk away from the moment it showed its true face. To try my best to not let another one of these periodic panics pass without some message in a bottle that says something like “here’s whom people believed, maybe don’t trust them next time.” Well, my worry is we’re about to.
There’s an argument to be made that a public whose discourses seem to know no accountability practices is on extremely shaky ground. Why wouldn’t you get tons of misinformation and straight-up lying, if people get away with same constantly? But that’s not the only problem: It’s frankly a relief that people like Stephen Pinker are now trying to walk away whistling from the clusterfuck they helped usher in. But in walking away whistling, they seem also keen to write the final draft of what just happened. And because the purveyors of the recent campus panics are extremely influential and tend to congregate in the upper reaches of our media, I think there’s a real risk that their final draft is what sticks.
Consider how the Wall Street Journal editorial board closes the text I cited above:
“Even if it’s modified, Ms. Noem’s order will echo around the world as a signal that the U.S. is no longer open to educate the world’s brightest young people. Foreign students will get the message and take their talents elsewhere. […] Like most of U.S. higher education, Harvard needed a jolt to return to its mission of educating open minds. But that requires reform. The Trump Administration seems to think it needs to destroy Harvard to save it. This is the opposite of making America great.”
This is to some extent face-saving for the WSJ. They’ve been peddling what Bradford Vivian has called “campus misinformation” for years — including the bizarre and utterly dishonest freak out over the notorious “Elimination of Harmful Language Initiative” at my own institution. And they’re now starting to realize to what uses that misinformation is being put. To what uses, we might say, it was always going to be put. And they want to push back. But, as Vivian points out, “arguments about perceived leftist dogma on college campuses” are largely modeled on “political pressures for greater ideological balance or viewpoint diversity in mainstream journalism — frequently on behalf of conservative interests, to counteract a presumed hegemony of liberal voices in the media.” The latter has, of course, been the WSJ’s raison d’être and its bread and butter. So the WSJ institutionally has to insist that the Trump administration’s frankly fantastical picture of the universities and what to do about them is deeply misguided and just a power grab; all the while not so subtly sharing that picture, and wanting some kind — though I suppose not this particular — power grab.
Steven Pinker similarly took to the pages of the New York Times to write about the Trump administration’s “Harvard derangement syndrome”. The piece has some good points — for instance, how little of the university’s curriculum ever consisted of the kind of stuff the anti-wokesters routinely choose to freak out about. But he once again can’t resist saying that Trump’s derangement had a point. Partly, frankly, because he shares it.
“Yet some of the enmity against Harvard has been earned. My colleagues and I have worried for years about the erosion of academic freedom here, exemplified by some notorious persecutions.”
Pinker is far too smart to equate the “notorious persecutions” (read: not actual persecutions) and the onslaught (read: actual persecutions) coming out of Washington at the moment. But Harvard nevertheless had it coming … somehow. The Wall Street Journal and Pinker both put this “nevertheless”-paragraph towards the end. It’s a kind of gestural flourish — largely designed, it seems, to swat away the dawning realization that their panicky “Harvard has completely lost its way and must be fully razed and rebuilt”-takes over the years might have done something to influence the current administration’s vendetta against the institution. There’s one other thing about these essays, which read like mea culpas, except they never actually get around to taking responsibility: they are uniformly extremely long. Pinker’s essay certainly is. These essays are — to some extremely unacknowledged extent — self-analysis, and are therefore kind of interminable. They need that space for the “nevertheless”. They need the extra words to not say they’re sorry.
I realize that my interest in “anti-wokeness” outside of the US is something that others may not care about as I do. But I think I have a good reason to look abroad: it’s in these texts, which are so interested in the US, but in many ways so distant from us, that we find the characteristic language games and buzzwords around “cancel culture”, “identity politics” and “woke” at a greater remove from the daily churn of the news cycle, which permits us to watch the discourse operate almost in a petri dish. These people pick up on the overall operations of the discourse far more than they can make sense of any of the specific imbroglios that provide grist for those operations.
Everyone in the European press seems to have an even more pronounced fundamental sense that none of these stories are all that serious. Their conclusions may be deeply serious, but their work with the sources that (supposedly) give rise to those conclusions? Not so much. However little of a shit the Wall Street Journal gave when it looked at the introduction to the “Elimination of Harmful Language Initiative”-list, noticed the disclaimer on top and said “eh, close enough”, these guys give less of a shit. In Europe, in addition, no one has a very good grasp on the facts or the people purveying these stories and terms — they’ll refer to Niall Ferguson or Francis Fukuyama as neutral observers, not as people who have staked their entire careers on the existence of the thing this news story is supposedly about.
For most European writers, there is a purity and abstraction to these stories and these conclusions. The terms are playthings, essayists and pundits use them with deeply unserious glee. But what are they to do when this plaything has been taken away from them? They can’t rehash a dumb little anecdote from UPenn for their long essay without people asking them whether they condone what’s happening to UPenn because of dumb little anecdotes like theirs. They are grieving that loss to some extent now. Their little plaything is gone, or worse, their toy has gotten water on it and is now a destructive little Gremlin.
There’s a long German essay from mid-March that I think sheds light on this dynamic: it’s an anti-woke pundit not-so-subtly grieving his lost plaything. But it also exhibits the tendency I started with, the tendency to retroactively reify and stabilize the very “wokeness”-discourses with whose consequences your text is allegedly grappling. It’s the same kind of self-soothing of the reactionary centrist you find in Pinker, but because it’s written from the bizarro world that is the German feuilleton, it doesn’t have to be as careful about not seeming to endorse Trump’s deranged crusade against the universities. The piece appeared in Die Zeit, and is by Ijoma Mangold, a literary critic who has, I believe, been the head of the paper’s culture pages. “Now we get a right wing morality police”, the title tells us. “Now”. Aha.
The entire article oscillates between a great deal of proximity to the US situation, and a curious remove. Mangold starts his essay with an anglicism, in this case “vibe shift”. The neologism, we’re told, is necessary because it helps us “better understand the present we live in”. Mangold’s ambition, according to Mangold, is “to describe the phenomenon” — presumably of the “morality police” : and “to describe it as precisely as possible.”
That may be what Mangold thinks his essay does. It is not what his essay does. His essay plays with terms. There’s the morality police, there’s the vibe shift, there’s wokeness, and the “descriptions” he promises are really a chronicle of the various gyrations and positions these terms can be forced to. In order to understand the vibe shift, we’re told, “another term is helpful: the shift of the Overton window. The vibe shift also reflects a shift of the Overton window.” This is, as they say, good to know. Each time you think you’d get some clear description of things happening in the world, you instead get another neologistic term of art fornicating with the others. It’s like a kid bending their GI Joe figures into various positions and then grinding and slamming them against each other. And has about as much descriptive power.
German intellectuals of a certain stripe really have become members of a cargo cult: any discursive detritus that washes up on their shore they begin to integrate into a complicated, but more or less fantastical, belief system. So fine, now it’s vibe shift. Of the Overton Window. Mangold is mostly interested in the vibe shift as a “reversal of thrust when it comes to culture.” Reversal of thrust. Yes, Mangold wants the canceling of grants, the detention and deportation of international students based on protected speech, defunding for entire disciplines and fields of study, massive layoffs in the tens of thousands, with … that time a student yelled at a professor for woke reasons. It’s quite likely that the anglicism is meant to facilitate that sleight of hand: by importing an English term that’s already overused, and for applying it just about 85% correctly, Mangold doesn’t have to explicitly make the comparison he wants to make.
For good reason: It’s a truly monstrous comparison, and Mangold doesn’t have the guts to make it outright. You might think that comparison really doesn’t hold water: a few people being yelled at online versus being whisked away in an unmarked van for an op ed? He could acknowledge those two are not the same, but that would mean adjusting his priors, acknowledging that something about the warnings about wokeness over the last 7-8 years was less-than-serious, and perhaps missed the main or most important threat to liberal values. That is not the road he takes. See, the reason the comparison might seem absurd to you is because you — reading his text in German in Die Zeit — have no idea just how bad woke was. Because in the United States, the reign of terror of wokeness, this German journalist knows and will have you know, was a brutal, all-out war:
“Because this culture war has only taken place in Germany in a much weakened form, far below the level of an intellectual civil war, we easily underestimate the extent to which the woke social pressure, especially at elite American universities, has first worn down liberal minds, then made them desperate, and finally ripe enough to vote for Trump.”
See what he did there? Any cognitive dissonance you (meaning: he) might feel is owed to not having fully appreciated the scariness of woke. Beyond that, I think there are three things to note in this brief passage: first, the “cancellations” of the last few years, the fives of professors who had to take slight demotions or experience — at times vituperative — blowback were “an intellectual civil war”. No word on what that makes what’s happening right now, when the very existence of institutions of higher learning hangs in the balance. Second, note that people who voted for a candidate who ran on “mass deportations now” and “I will be a dictator on day one” and “let’s destroy trans people” were apparently “desperate” “liberal minds”. Third, the vibe shift we’re told concerns “hegemonic ideologies and changed socio-political plausibilities”, which is a lot of fine words, but empirically, the claim that “wokeness” was somehow the hegemonic ideology of the last 4 years is frankly deranged, or — more likely — based on an understanding of the United States gleaned entirely from following Jonathan Haidt on X.
The examples — quite scant for an essay that appears to be three to four thousand words long and claims to be interested in detailed description — rehearse basically the absolute classics of the genre: people being mean to J. K. Rowling, for instance.
“Author J. K. Rowling's position that trans women have no place in women's shelters would probably no longer lead to book burnings among repentant former Harry Potter readers today, as it did in 2020.”
Quite apart from the fact that that’s not what people got mad at J. K. Rowling over, it feels like a fool’s hypothetical: what does this even mean? In a world in which J.K. Rowling had not been quite so vociferous about her feelings about trans people, and had only let loose in 2025, there would have been less blowback in 2025 than in 2020? How and why would Mangold know that?
2025 isn’t 2020, okay, but that’s the nature of chronological time. It’s quite likely that media might not fixate as much on the behavior Mangold describes — former Rowling-fans burning their copies of the books. But it’s a big planet, and literally setting your Potter-books on fire was likely a pretty unusual step to take in 2020 as well. For all we know the same people would set the same books on fire today, or say they did, or chase clout by saying they did, or whatever happened in 2020. But it’s likely it would enter the media cycle in a different way.
If that’s what Mangold means by “vibe shift”, then it’s a telling slip. After all, the “vibes” that have shifted would not concern former wokesters seeing the error of their ways, or gaining less acceptance for their ideas, or whatever. The “vibes” that have shifted would all be about the way people like Mangold pay attention to what these wokesters are doing. Just as frequent as evocations of the terrors of “woke” are declarations of its “death” — because birth, death, life and opinions are ultimately in the minds of the critics, and dependent on where they fixate their attention.
But in some way the non-sensical re-litigating of the same old wokeness-fights matters more than any of those fights. Because in the end, in a bunch of places these re-litigations allow people like Mangold to engage in what can really only be schadenfreude. There’s a part of him that’s excited that the “vibe” is shifting, there’s a part of him that’s excited that people he’s taught himself to look down on are scared for their lives and their careers. Perhaps that is, to his mind, simply as it should be.
“The cultural vibe shift is changing ideological assumptions and moral intuitions. And social etiquette is also shifting again: What did Trump's campaign poster read? ‘Kamala is for them/them, President Trump is for you.’"
How is this passage anything but an endorsement? To his mind, Trump read the signs of the time correctly, he went after the right people, and now he’s delivering the shift that people like Pinker, Mangold and the Wall Street Journal editorial board have been clamoring for all this time. Except Pinker and the WSJ are smart enough not to admit that.
“And that's why many leftists are horrified by what is suddenly possible to say again – even the taboo regime changes in such times of historical upheaval. Whereas previously, statements that could offend minority groups were criminalized, they are now branded as supposedly unpatriotic statements.”
“What is possible to say again”; the “taboos” on “statements that could offend minority groups” that were once “criminalized” have been lifted. The sigh of relief is audible. He’ll get to the terrors of the “right wing morality police” eventually. But in passages like this, you can tell that any shock about the Trump administration’s actions is laced with … glee. His team has won. It’s also noteworthy that Mangold attributes everything that characterizes the current illiberal onslaught in the US — the criminalization of “DEI” for instance, the mass firings, the arrests — to the old “woke” regime, except in a metaphoric register. Thank goodness we have been delivered from non-literal criminalization of speech by the literal criminalization of speech. Not sure what you call that, but liberalism it ain’t.
Being an anti-woke critic requires a very specific kind of recall: hyper-memorious when it comes to specific incidents, incapable of of remembering even the basic outlines of similar debates of 10, 15, 20 years ago. There is an immense capacity for surprise in their self-presentation, a kind of guilelessness that is often in bad faith, but in some cases appears to be genuine. Cancel culture, they intone — get this! — from the right??? Now I’ve heard everything! This form of surprise is everywhere in German media at the moment: Mangold’s entire essay is drenched in it, Germany’s biggest pop philosopher (and frequent self-declared cancel-victim), Richard David Precht basically rehearsed it for an hour on his podcast. René Pfister, who had spent years flogging a book about how wokeness was ushering in a new illiberalism in the US, has started talking up the idea that wokeness “has changed sides”. Just to stick with Mangold’s essay, here’s what this trope looks like:
“For instead of abolishing the left-wing thought police, we are witnessing them being replaced by a right-wing thought police: […] Anyone who doesn't fall in line gets kicked out.
But that's not what this is about. The crux of the matter is that the very tool of language policing, once the holy grail of the woke movement, whose followers spent ten years renaming everything that seemed to them to be an expression of patriarchal colonialism, is now being appropriated by right-wing culture warriors.”
These pundits seem deeply sensitive to even the most minute shifts on the left; and even though they seem to get most of their information from right wing sources, they don’t seem to be at all aware of developments and trends on the right. The reason for this is simple, and in fact identical with their central mistake: they have mistaken a right wing propaganda narrative for an objective description of the facts.
They do this all the time: now we’re even getting “identity politics” on the right, now we’re getting cancel culture even from Republicans, now wokeness has changed sides and Republicans act as censoriously as they imagine college students behave. This is, of course, utter poppycock. The idea that somehow Republicans had to “learn” how to censor art and research from “the Left”, let alone “wokesters” is pretty rich and kind of depends on not knowing a single thing about the Republican Party. But the whole language game is absolutely nutty. The first “identity” that came up when critics first attacked “identity politics” in the 1980s was the identity the critics were trying to defend: WASP identity.
People like then-Secretary of Education Bill Bennett thought that the US was a WASP country, and it was horrible that universities were forgetting that and offering “separatist” courses in things like African American Studies instead. They wanted to defend the “legacy” of European America, they wanted to defend the whiteness of US political institution, they wanted to defend the “canon” (which meant for them keeping people like Toni Morrison and Alice Walker out for … reasons). The entire language game around “identity politics” has been “people are fixated on their identity [which isn’t the majority’s identity].” Anyone who has spent any time with these discourses, and has turned to them over time, can and should know that. The anti-woke critic conveniently represses this knowledge.
A second point: the mimetic theory that suggests that right-wing authoritarianism has learned from left-wing censoriousness is deeply trollish. The people claiming that must know it’s not true. In Germany it comes with the added frisson of the forbidden, because it mirrors the basic structure of Ernst Nolte’s argument that Hitler’s crimes had been inspired by Stalin’s, which triggered the Historikerstreit (historian’s controversy) in the 80s. It is meant to trigger the libs, in other words. What it isn’t meant to do is describe facts: We know that, because in introducing ideas like “political correctness”, “wokeness” or “cancel culture”, writers would reliably say: we know this stuff from the far right, especially the Christian right, but did you know leftists do this too? In other words, the left-wingers from which the right-wingers allegedly learned their behaviors, learned their behavior from the same right-wingers now learning from the left-wingers. A classicist might call this an ouroboros. I would call it bullshit.
To be clear: the vast majority of descriptions of “PC”, “cancel culture” and “wokeness” turn to pre-existing analogues on the right. Wokesters are fanatical like Christian fundamentalists, they are obsessed with purity like the conservative morality police. The reason for this is simply: most of the people who coined these terms were from the US, and were likely all-too-familiar with Christian and conservative freakouts over various speech issues. Does anyone recall “Freedom Fries”? Was that not a “language police” according to Mangold? If so, did Republicans learn that from the wokesters by means of a time machine?
While I’m at it: Was Piss Christ a left-wing freakout? What happened to the Dixie Chicks in 2003? How would we describe the kind of disciplining of public speech that ensnared people from Susan Sontag to Bill Maher to totally ordinary college professors after 9/11? Most US professors are not in fact worried that their “woke” students write about them on social media. Being featured on Bill O’Reilly’s show back in the day, being talked about on Fox News, being subject of a Christian Right freakout, or today being in a video on Libs of TikTok is far scarier a proposition. We know this, but I guess we can repress it in favor of this babe-in-the-woods vision of history.
Since Mangold seems so fond of anglicisms, here’s another one: cope. “This isn’t what this article about”, he says at several points, and in a way it’s really quite hard to figure out what the article about. But it’s fairly easy to figure out what the article is: it is cope. Sorry, Ijoma, you had to realize that the language game you’ve participated in so enthusiastically for the past few years, was what your critics and friends have long told you it was: a Trojan horse discourse that would be used to justify a far-right crackdown on speech.
Not realizing that doesn’t make you “a liberal (of European style)”, it makes you a dupe. You were duped. But you can’t admit that, and in not being able to admit that you do something far more unforgivable: at the moment when it’s abundantly clear what the language of “wokeness” and “cancellation” is meant to authorize, you keep giving credence to this narrative. You cannot speak the language your essay employs and then harrumph about “cancel culture from the right”. Because if you use that language, you are part of that cancel culture from the right, you are its partisan. The people you identified with — the “classical liberals” who were “free speech absolutists” — have mostly revealed themselves to be closet fascists. And even as their protestations wear ever so thin, you are willing to credit them.
Admittedly, when it comes to a Berlin-based literary critic, this kind of cope is telling but fairly inconsequential. But the tendency to retroactively concede the bases of the attacks all the while (feebly) attempting to push back against the attack has even become a favorite rhetorical tool of our university presidents. Longtime readers of this newsletter will remember the brief media frenzy over the “Elimination of Harmful Language Initiative” at Stanford — which started, coincidentally, with an editorial in the Wall Street Journal. The TLDR is: this initiative, which was reported as “Stanford” “banning” certain “forbidden” words, was nothing of the kind; it was Stanford IT services (i.e. the people who maintain our websites) having a conversation about what potentially problematic terms they could possibly get rid of in their web infrastructure.
And yet, the folklore version of “EHLI” has had a surprising afterlife of its own: parts of the Stanford faculty, various media outlets, and university critics continue to act as though the fever dream version of this list that briefly made the rounds in late 2022 were real. I won’t hide the fact that that bothers me, especially coming from within universities. Not because the lie reflects poorly on us — plenty of stuff reflects poorly on us. But because universities are fundamentally supposed to deal with what’s factual. We don’t investigate pizzeria-based child abduction cults, because they’re not real (though we may study the people who investigate pizzeria-based child abduction cults). It is disturbing to me that a group people whose fealty is ultimately in whatever measure to what is the case, can be so absolutely cavalier in pretending something that wasn’t the case was the case. Well, in 2025, that group includes the university’s president: Stanford’s president has taken several opportunities now to single out “EHLI” not as an example of bad-faith attacks on the university, but as evidence that those bad-faith attacks were totally onto something.
There’s so much going on, and it feels weird to harp on something ultimately fairly minor. That having been said, it does bother me for a place that isn’t a party-political institution, but one ostensibly concerned with facts, to stipulate to facts they know to be false, in order to make someone else feel better. And while I am not a journalist, I also feel like it should bother journalists to stipulate to facts they have reason to know are not facts.
I won’t comment on the fact that the “facts don’t care about your feelings”-crowd has been oddly protective of the feelings of imagined or real Trump voters or supporters. I don’t like to point to such inconsistencies, for the simple reason that they’re unlikely to be actual inconsistencies. For these folks, some people’s feelings do exert a pull on the facts, others do not. There are two kinds of people. Those who are real and whose every feeling, even when based on lies, speak the language of legitimate grievance; and there are insubstantial people with insubstantial feelings, whose every feeling, even when based on facts, is eo ipso illegitimate and annoying.
And that is the most important thing that people like Mangold deny: that what they decry as “wokeness”, and what is now being destroyed by an increasingly authoritarian government, is an empirical analysis of our world. Not an ersatz-religion, not some kind of cult. Facts that don’t fit your priors are not therefore religious. Gender Studies, CRT, etc. etc. were doing empirical research and were doing theoretical and archival work; you may not have liked it, or what it told you about the world, but too bad. To accommodate ourselves to those triggered by our research, only because they feel more real, more American, more substantial than the constituencies we took ourselves (incorrectly, I think) to offend, really does enormous damage to the institutions we take ourselves to be defending. With friends (and presidents) like these, the American university may in the end not need enemies.