The Woke Train Rolls On

Oh, Tyler Cowen. Esteemed, bookbrained Tyler Cowen. Your Orange Line naivety never tires.

The prodigious scribe and econ prof is out with a doozy of a column, which is more compositional victory lap than polemic. “Woke is dead!” Cowen declares in The Free Press. He then proceeds into a jig on its sustainably-resourced grave plot, heartily patting his own back.

The confident boffin is convinced the radlib excesses of campus leftism have been flushed from ho-hum American life. “Wokeism is hardly gone,” he concedes, “but it does seem to have peaked in 2022 or so.”

Hear that, disgruntled laptop-jobber? Pronoun ninnies have lost their dainty grips. You can start using “faggot” and “retard” in work emails again! Hell, send a slur-filled missive to your HR director. Remind her (a bureacratess, natch) that lefty p.c. sensitivity is stiff and done. Sign off with a “So relax, Toots,” to reinforce the new, freer dispensation.

Actually, refrain from signing your own walking papers, as Free the People shouldn’t be held liable for your UI.

Cowen seems to earnestly believe the country’s moseyed past woke trappings, like inclusion riders, land acknowledgements, DEI promotion standards, campus struggle sessions, mandated email signifiers, capitalizing the “b” in blacks, indebted undergrads shrieking about privilege, third-worldism masquerading as a choate ideology, the jaw-crimping acronym “BIPOC” and the soulless pablum of strung clichés like “indigenous,” “marginalize,” “social justice,” and “IT’S MA’AM!”

Good riddance were it so! But the possibility that wokesters have only fallen back, hiding away the rhetorical ploys and intimidation schemes, is off Cowen’s radar. He remains deadset that wokeshivtiz ways are set dead, citing, among other curious happenings, the Ukraine War. (Putin couldn’t capture Kiev, but he apparently butchered Ibram Kendi’s profit quota.)

Woke is withered, Cowen contends, but something more wicked grows in its stead. “I fear we are now moving to a new culture of anger and resentment,” he augurs. Because slicing the world into good/dark and bad/white was an exercise in peace and civility?

Poor Tyler is having visions of the bomb-happy ‘70s: “[l]eft-adjacent movements have arisen with a contrasting emphasis on action, and often action of a terrible sort.” The troubling praxis his refers to are… garden-variety progressive policies like a California wealth tax and Bernie Sanders’s airbrained data-center moratorium? Well, I suppose such reams of legalese sound like the Killing Fields to George Masontarians.

Cowen does have a real, substantive chill, and isn’t just chasing hobgoblins that keep Washington wonks awake at night. “What’s more, it is possible we are entering an era with a new culture of assassinations,” he shudders, listing off recent downed targets like Charlie Kirk and UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson. He also references the climbing attempts on President Trump’s life. Then comes the prevarication so prominent with Beltway columnists: “It can be debated how many of these killers had direct connections to the political left, but it is hard to avoid the conclusion that left-wing rhetoric about democracy destruction helped make such actions conceivable.”

“It can be debated” is a particularly grating string of words that unshackles the writer from having to make definitive statements. So in the Péguyian spirit, I’ll dispense with equivocation: the men who killed Kirk and Thompson were down-the-line lefties. That they may have offered a stray opinion or two that flirted red doesn’t suddenly redefine them as deranged moderates. Nor is Cowen’s conclusion “hard to avoid.” I’ll put it in positivistic terms modern economists love: Prog disagrees with con; prog kills con; therefore murderer = prog. Proof that one in your model!

Maybe it’s aging brain cells; perhaps it’s an endearing innocence; or, possibly, it’s proximity to the blinding Imperial City. Whatever’s to blame, Cowen plots a false divide between woke wordgames and Defargian bloodlust. “[M]uch of society, including the more radical political left, is shifting toward more fascistic approaches and away from touchy-feely universalism,” he projects.

Not since Nikolai Petrovic has a well-meaning duffer been so purblind to the wild whims of youth, or the cold-eyed determination of communistic ideology. So, again, back to economic jargon to make it decipherable. Consider this, Mr. Holbert L. Harris Chair: the transitive nature of wokery. Expressing emotive affinity for the colored downtrodden was the A in the equation that eventually equals C, the riotous overthrow of private-property capitalism. Therapeutic empathy was a veiled opening salvo in a larger charge to de-embourgeoise society. The former necessarily leads to the latter.

Woke isn’t on life support; its mandate is being fulfilled by armed and angry foot soldiers versed in acrid shibboleths. Like Candy Lane, we’ve only advanced to a new square in the leftist agitation game.