I write this title enthusiastically and dreamy-eyed hopefully. I don't really think woke is dying (yet!), and there is a lot of life left in it, a long effing way go to before most of its civilization-destructive ethos is purged from the West.
Voices like Young encourage me. I generally like what he has done in recent years (esp during Covid!), as for the Spectator itself.
The Cathedral
...is this old, well-regarded, established(!) establishment mix of media and high academia--The intelligentzia, more or less (#829287, #890832).
...is the name given by the right-wing blogger Curtis Yarvin to denote the 21st century’s most prestigious intellectual institutions, particularly in journalism and academia. He’s talking about the BBC, CNN, the Guardian, the New York Times, the Washington Post, Reuters, Oxford, Cambridge, Imperial, Harvard, Yale, Princeton, etc. But we can enlarge the definition to include nearly all the West’s high-status institutions and professions.
the Washington Post's new editorial direction offers a glimmer of contrasting hope, eh! (#897774)
the people in these power centres seem to be members of the same cult-like religious movement – the Great Awokening, Wokus Dei – even though there’s no Holy See responsible for its official doctrine. Yet the members of the Cathedral all march in lockstep as if they can hear some drummer that’s inaudible to the rest of us.
It truly is eerie how the woke mentality (or whichever term you prefer... we're referring to a thing in the world, not a word) just lands in the same absurd conclusions without prior coordination.
the illusion that their most passionately held beliefs are based on pure logic or ‘the Science’ is being shattered. The cross and the altar have become visible; they can finally see the walls of the Cathedral just as they’re beginning to fall down.
The spell is (somewhat?) broken, and Trump is in large part responsible for that (though anything could have eventually revealed the nakedness of the old emperor!)
The catalyst was Donald Trump’s unexpectedly large victory, which seemed to sap the woke citadels of their aura of invincibility. Almost overnight, MSNBC’s primetime audience fell by a staggering 53 per cent, while CNN’s fell by 47 per cent.
Perhaps the social-desirability bias, and the social bonus points one got from expressing woke ideas will turn negative: expressing them in polite society yields you negative points (oh, a kid can dream!)
Regurgitating the orthodoxies of the woke church used to be a way of signalling you were a member of the Brahmin elite, but since November they’re no longer high-status opinions.
Anyway, well worth a read.
non-paywalled here:
https://archive.md/pO5AE