Nick Cohen seems to have retired from mainstream journalism to write on Substack, which is a shame as I always liked to read him in The Observer. All Wikipedia says is this:
Cohen’s last column for The Observer was published in July 2022.[11] In December 2022, he began publishing on Substack. In January 2023, the Press Gazette reported that he had resigned from The Observer on “health grounds”.
Well, as long as he keeps writing I guess it’s okay. I’ve always liked his writing, particularly his books on free speech and censorship.
Right now Cohen’s writing a several-part series on Substack (Writing from London) about Christopher Hitchens. The first piece, “Whatever happened to New Atheism?“, was okay, but I decided not to highlight it here because I perceived a lack of substance. What I will highlight is part 2 of the series, since it deals in part with “Wokeism”, a term that seems to divide people but one I’ll continue to use as a pejorative name for what I once called “regressive liberalism” or “authoritarian Leftism”. Click below to read, but subscribe if you read Cohen regularly. At the bottom I’ve also put a bonus video of Hitchens taken from Cohen’s post.
Cohen begins by referring to this notorious tweet by conservative author Bethany Mandel, whose new book, Stolen Youth: How Radicals are Erasing Innocence and Indoctrinating a Generation, targets adults for inculcating children with wokeism. Despite that, Mandel couldn’t even define “woke” when asked:
LOL: Briahna Joy Gray BREAKS the brain of Rising guest Bethany Mandel by asking her to define "wokeness" pic.twitter.com/uwRSSH0LaM
— The Vanguard (@vanguard_pod) March 14, 2023
Well, “woke” as Mandel uses it isn’t that hard to define. We’ve talked about how Freddie DeBoer construes it, and readers chimed in with James Lindsay’s definition (DeBoer’s is more a characterization than a definition, but the two show a lot of overlap). Liberals, says Cohen, used Mandel’s befuddlement to show that wokeness doesn’t really exist, and the Left is the same as it ever was. But Cohen says no, that’s not true (like me, he’s in the “center Left”, which used to be the “regular Left”):
Mandel’s inability to define her terms supposedly proved that today’s liberal-left is no different from its predecessors.
The best retort I have read recently comes in a new book from the American writer Matt Johnson How Hitchens can Save the Left: Rediscovering Fearless Liberalism in an Age of Counter-Enlightenment. Johnson offers more than an examination of Christopher Hitchens’s life and thought. His research takes him from the controversies about the Russian Revolution to today’s culture wars. No one reading it can deny that there has been a jolting cultural change in the US left over the past 10-15 years. I cannot see why progressives would deny it, unless they want to place their ideology beyond the normal bounds of debate.
Two ideas can be true simultaneously. A new and distinct “woke” ideology developed after 2010 in American academia, and boorish right-wingers use “woke” to mean “whatever I don’t like”.
I read Johnson’s book, and have to say that despite my admiration for Hitchens I didn’t enjoy it a lot, perhaps because I’ve read so much about Hitchens. I won’t say you shouldn’t read Johnson’s book, because I can’t remember exactly why it didn’t enthrall me. If you want it, you can buy it in the US here, though I note that it’s not selling like hotcakes.
Like Cohen’s first piece, this ibw is a bit disjointed, for Cohen immediately moves from wokeness to censorship without a transition statement. I presume he’s referring to how the woke use social media to quash ideas they don’t like, and to their hypocrisy and censorship, though he takes digs at the right as well.
Here’s a bit of that section; the topic is the Jyllands-Posten cartoons in Denmark that satirized Islam and Muhammad and eventually provoked offended Muslims to rioting and murder:
When Hitchens discussed the violence on CNN, he was not in the least surprised that the station refused to show the cartoons. CNN was not censoring to spare the feelings conservative Muslims, he told the host, but “because you’re frightened of retaliation and intimidation”.
Astonishingly, the host agreed. I cannot overemphasise how rare it is to hear admissions of fear. Journalists, writers and artists of all kinds want to pose as truth-tellers. They do not admit that fear drives them to self-censor. The first and hardest task in fighting censorship is to admit that censorship exists, and they regularly fail it.
Instead of facing reality, the liberal media of 20-years ago accepted a justification from the regressive left.
In the 1990s/2000s, exposing an ultra-reactionary Islamist movement was “punching down,” it said. Satire or indeed sober secular critiques hurt the feelings of religious conservatives in the UK or US and inflamed racism. There was truth in this, the far right of the day did indeed begin to target Muslims above any other minority. But the regressive left of the time showed virtually no concern for the interests of secular people of Muslim heritage or of the victims of the theocracy in Iran and Afghanistan, whose oppressors were men with terrifying power. (Punching them could not plausibly be described as “punching down”.)
I still think that Leftists and liberal feminists don’t pay nearly enough attention to the oppression of women elsewhere in the world, especially when the women are oppressed by Muslims, who, considered “people of color”, must be excused of all oppression. One of the most cringeworthy aspects of the Left is its love of Palestine while calling Israel an “apartheid state.” (I’d say I’m guilty of “whataboutery” in saying this except that the oppression faced by many women in Muslim countries is so much more severe than that facing women in the West.)
Cohen, who can be seen as the heir of Hitchens without the soaring rhetoric, then takes the New York Times to task for its ridiculous behavior in the Tom Cotton affair of 2020:
The fear that drove the New York Times to grant a veto to anyone determined to find offence was not a fear of an assassin planting a bomb in the office but of denunciation from “their side”. Kingsbury’s predecessor had lost his job because the New York Times had breached a new tenet of progressive philosophy that severely limited debate. Once liberals believed that speech should be free unless it was a direct incitement to crime: a demagogue whipping up a mob outside a mosque or synagogue, for instance.
In the 21st century, as the protesting New York Times journalists showed, “liberals” were willing to ban any statement or article that, however indirectly, might lead to violence or prejudice. There was a theoretical possibility that if the US army was deployed to quell riots, and if a racist soldier saw a black New York Times reporter, he might open fire. Fortunately, if unsurprisingly, nothing of the sort happened.
Again, you can see the seeds of the woke movement’s passing. It has no argument against the right and far-right when it uses its power to censor and control as Ron DeSanits is doing in Florida today. As significantly, heresy hunting leads the left to devour its own. Radical feminists, who once demanded the banning of pornography, have learned the hard way in the Terf wars that the sanctions you want to inflict on others may one day be inflicted on you.
I’m not sure what Cohen means about the Left’s impotence to criticize what Ron DeSantis is doing; there is plenty of criticism of that from venues like the NYT or Washington Post. But it is true that the Left is devouring its own. It’s not just the far Left (the “woke” segment) devouring the center left, but the woke devouring other woke, so that in the end the Left will be severely fragmented—handing the Right a political advantage.
One of the aspects of wokeism that has the potential to convert those in the center to denizens of the Right is the ease with which the term “harm” is used as a hyperbolic synonym for “offense”. There is no way in hell, as Cohen notes, that NYT staffers were going to suffer harm from Cotton’s editorial, but that’s what they claimed, and that’s what got the editorial-page editor, James Bennet, fired from the paper. The propensity of the Left to use the word “harm” as often as possible, despite its implausibility—as well as the abject failure of Left-centrists to call out this hype—is why its usage will increase, and with it the advantage of the Right.
At any rate, Cohen sees the woke harboring the seeds of their own destruction, though once again I don’t completely get the relevance of DeSantis (perhaps Cohen’s claiming that the woke have no credibility to criticize DeSantis when it’s doing its own censoring):
Again, you can see the seeds of the woke movement’s passing. It has no argument against the right and far-right when it uses its power to censor and control as Ron DeSanits is doing in Florida today. As significantly, heresy hunting leads the left to devour its own. Radical feminists, who once demanded the banning of pornography, have learned the hard way in the Terf wars that the sanctions you want to inflict on others may one day be inflicted on you.
In the end, and I can’t really agree with this, Cohen forecasts that wokeness will dissolve because it doesn’t deal with problems of class, which occupy the British Left far more than its American counterpart:
The most relevant difference between the US and Europe is that the US never had a mass socialist party. Class matters more in Europe. The failure of American progressives to think about class is a great weakness. You see the ignorance manifested in their awkward academic language and insistence on coining neologisms that exclude working people, and in their willingness to drive workers from their jobs. Anyone brought up in a trade-union tradition instinctively defends workers against management. The woke movement will use the power of management to discipline and fire to secure its ends. The modern phenomenon of woke capitalism is not an oxymoron. It is the terminus of a movement that believes it can co-opt corporate power to enforce its values.
I can’t see the future and am not an American, but my best guess is that the next movement on the US left will react against the woke failure to take class seriously.
I don’t agree. If wokeness goes away—and I hope it does—my own best guess is that the reason will be its ineffectiveness. After endless palavering, spending on DEI initiatives, and policing language, people may simple tire of the whole futile endeavor. But I don’t think this will happen in my lifetime, which—and again this is my best guess—will last about a decade more.
In the end, the Cohen piece is okay, but not the masterpiece that a couple of readers have touted. It’s simply too disjointed.
***********
BONUS HITCHENS VIDEO (included at top of Cohen piece); the topic is the Jyllands-Posten cartoons and Hitchens’s acrid response to an appeaser.
One of the comments under the video says, “Stop missing Hitchens, and become a Hitchens; Its what Hitchens would’ve wanted.” True, and we should adopt his attitude of calling out nonsense when we see it. But none of us have the rhetorical power of this man that made him so effective. Still, where are the Leftists who insist on calling out Islamic countries for their apartheid nature, and where is the derisive laughter from the Left when the Perpetually Offended claim that they’re “harmed”?
One thing’s for sure; all of us would dearly love to hear Hitchens’s observations on the culture wars that he missed.
Germane to the topic of the press and free speech is the latest from Tara Henley.
https://open.substack.com/pub/tarahenley/p/weekend-reads-newsroom-confidential?utm_source=share&utm_medium=android
Cohen’s article was not great, but it captures some of the problems with wokeness. I disagree with his claim that wokeness will collapse upon itself.
Regarding the interviewer tactic of demanding a definition of “woke” from those who deride it, I think that critics would be better served by diverting the question away from definition toward one of *characterization.* A formal definition would be a sterile legalism (even if one could be contrived), whereas a list of wokeism’s *characteristics* would be more powerful.
For instance, when the inevitable demand comes for a definition, the respondent should state (list of characteristics) something like:
“Wokeism” is the virtue signaling, the hypersensitivity over word usage, the feigned “harms,” the categorization of people as either oppressors or oppressed, the white self-loathing, the policed speech, the compelled DEI statements, and the vicious cancellations demanded by an ultra-left mob of self-righteous moralists.”
I’m not saying that one should use the exact list that I use above. My main point is that critics should not stumble for a definition. They should launch—machine-gun-style—into a prepared characterization (as above) that gets right to the egregious behaviors themselves.
It is highly unlikely indeed that wokeness will “collapse upon itself”, the “woke industrial complex” being so insanely lucrative and DEI being so heavily embedded in nearly all institutions public and private (“systemic woke-ism”), with the DEI nomenklatura fully intent on maintaining its power and its privilege. On the issue of the contemporary left’s obsession with race and its unwillingness to address class, the writings of Batya Ungar-Sargon are very instructive.
Yes, it is certainly lucrative. But it is also counterproductive.
There was a recent story about a big tech company hiring minorities but not actually having them do anything. I guess it was about diversity quotas. Paying people to do nothing is a waste of money, but it does not necessarily change the productive part of a company.
DEI staff are expensive, plus they reduce the efficiency of everyone else.
When times are lean, the bloated management staff are going to resist firing themselves. If they need to cut expenses, and find that they need to cut the diversity staff or the few people who actually design and make the widgets, it would be sensible to get rid of the DEI folk. If they fire the workers, it would be much harder to sell widgets that do not exist to pay each other executive bonuses.
I guess there are lots of organizations where this might not apply, where funding is independent of output or productivity.
Excellent comment, Norman. Woke is as woke does. If anybody wants to now what wokism is, just tell them how the woke act and what they advocate. Your list is a good one, though, as you admit yourself, not exhaustive.
Maybe. The Achilles’ Heel in the Oppression Olympics is that the winning teams (i.e. the most oppressed) contain members who don’t seem very oppressed to the viewing public — and that could trip them up. When wealthy, privileged black people complain about the microaggressions of poor, marginalized white people, it’s not just Trump supporters who feel that something is off. Trans Folx in comfortable academic universities using the statistics from transgender South American prostitutes in impoverished areas to claim their risk of being killed “for being trans” is alarmingly high run the risk of looking ingenious, if not paranoid.
Intersectionalism tends to overemphasize the effects of being in a marginalized class. Wealth, education, a supportive network, and/or a good job may mitigate a lot of disadvantages. The general public can sometimes be pretty shrewd when it comes to detecting the hypocrisy in social contradictions.
It’s true that leftists and liberal feminists don’t pay enough attention to the oppression of women elsewhere in the world, but we need to attend to issues that aren’t strictly speaking oppression, but affect women disproportionately, right here. I’m not oppressed, but I was the victim of a violent rape. Women in countries that don’t oppress women systematically in the way Afghanistan (for example) does, or Saudi Arabia, do have substantial rates of violent attacks on women, including domestic violence, and cultures which still make it hard for a woman to go about life without being wary and constantly alert to the possibility of attack. Liberal feminists can be concerned with countries that systematically oppress women AND with the continuing serious threats to women’s lives in the US and the UK and similar places.
Yes, of course; I wasn’t suggesting that women in the U.S., for instance, neglect feminist issues here. I just think that not enough attention is being paid to other countries, not just because they’re other countries, but because the oppression in other countries is enacted by people of color.
Am I correct in thinking you’re saying that racism is the cause of neglecting oppressed women in less blessed (read Third World and/or Islamic) countries? Are the Wokies racist? (yes, I think they are, in several ways, but that is kinda immaterial to my question).
Cohen says this:
——————
The most relevant difference between the US and Europe is that the US never had a mass socialist party. Class matters more in Europe. The failure of American progressives to think about class is a great weakness. You see the ignorance manifested in their awkward academic language and insistence on coining neologisms that exclude working people, and in their willingness to drive workers from their jobs. Anyone brought up in a trade-union tradition instinctively defends workers against management. The woke movement will use the power of management to discipline and fire to secure its ends. The modern phenomenon of woke capitalism is not an oxymoron. It is the terminus of a movement that believes it can co-opt corporate power to enforce its values.
I can’t see the future and am not an American, but my best guess is that the next movement on the US left will react against the woke failure to take class seriously.
———————-
Cohen is correct that the U.S. never had a mass socialist movement. There are historical reasons that explain this. But, it is the pipe dream to think that should the woke disappear, for whatever reason, that leftists will take class seriously in the sense that their political messaging will be based on class conflict. Cohen should be aware that it is the MAGA Republicans that are playing class politics, but based on culture, not class. Leftists such as Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren actually do think in class terms without using the word class. Many of their economic proposals are class based, but couched in the terms of “fairness.” True economic far leftists (socialists that wish to dismantle capitalism) have been waiting with bated breath for well more than a century for the moment when the working class overcomes its false conscience to unite against their oppressors and overthrow capitalism. Perpetually disappointed that this hasn’t happened, socialists will be once again be at a loss to understand why the working class doesn’t grasp what is so obvious to them. If the day should arrive when the woke disappears and the working class abandons the Republicans to return to the Democrats (both big ifs, at least in the near term), economically based politics will return to what it has always been: disputation within the framework of capitalism. I suppose that two hundred years of American tradition could be overturned, but there is no evidence of this at the moment. No matter what may happen, capitalism in the United States has little to fear.
I think “woke” has been likened to plain old fashioned “political correctness”. I think there might be another familiar idea at play, that of plain old fashioned “social justice”.
As such, I found myself reading Sowell’s “The Quest for Cosmic Justice” in which he describes a particular “social” justice which is subsumed by a larger-scale “cosmic justice.” I’ll try some brief quotes :
“One of the few subjects on which we all seem to agree is the need for justice. […] we are only talking in a circle when we say that we advocate justice, unless we specify just what conception of justice we have in mind. […] so many advocate what they call “social justice” – often with great passion, but with no definition. All justice is inherently social. Can someone on a desert island be either just or unjust?”
“It was not a radical writer, but a free-market economist Milton Friedman, who referred to “gross inequities of income and wealth” which “offend most of us” and declared: “Few can fail to be moved by the contrast between the luxury enjoyed by some and the grinding poverty suffered by others.”**(ref. 1)”
[ end quotes]
Sowell notes that “convservative” thinkers express similar views, but in particular toward “extreme inequalities of power and respect.”
So that’s a long winded way to say, perhaps obviosly, that “woke” ideas are built into the ongoing “social justice” phenomenon.
ref. 1: Milton and Rose Friedman, Free to Choose (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1980), p. 146
A new book by philosopher Susan Neiman, to appear tomorrow:
Left is not woke. Polity Press, 160 pages
A foretaste of this book’s content is given here in this interview with Neiman, 18 minute long (I’m linking to the transcript as well). This video itself seems to show the first part of a longer conversation (which I suppose will become available soon).
Neiman mentions in the interview that a different title of her book (and in my own opinion a better one, because it is presumably more revealing of the book’s content) could have been: “Left is not woke and woke is not Left.”
Some readers here may also be interested in this older title:
Geoffrey M. Hodgson: Wrong Turnings: How the Left Got Lost. University of Chicago Press, 2018, 288 pages
https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/W/bo27168809.html
Available at the Internet Archive (a free online library):
Nick Cohen: What’s left? How liberals lost their way. Fourth Estate, 2007, 256 pages
https://archive.org/search?query=nick+cohen+what%27s+left&and%5B%5D=mediatype%3A%22texts%22
Hitchens called this book “exceptional and necessary” (in the Sunday Times).
There is also a long lecture by Neiman on her new book, which she gave at the University of Cambridge, about 4 months ago: Click here (includes transcript).
That stokes the fears that DeSantis will be a contender in the US presidential elections in 2024. He called the Ukrainian war a territorial dispute. On what planet is he living? Is this man – reportedly intelligent- completely ignorant of geopolitics, or is he also in Puckies pocket (like Tucky is)?
We have a great debt to Ukraine, they (the Ukrainians) protect us from WWIII, with their blood, and not a drop of our blood. And, as an aside, they are testing our weapon systems for free.
We are profoundly, deeply indebted to them. I can’t think how we can possibly pay back our debt to them.. I
I think the Biden admin does an admirable job, slowly blurring ay red lines Putin may have called. Yes I think he went too slowly and carefully, but Russia has a lot of nukes. He took them (nearly) out of the equation. The US is blessed to have such a great president in such dire times.
Thanks for the links, Peter!
I am acquainted with an elderly, retired author who used to teach a writing seminar at a very woke small university. She was hounded out by pompous, woke administrators over some trifling “microaggressions” of word use (said to “harm” imaginary students), subjected to struggle-sessions, sentenced to re-education camp with Robin DiAngelo catechisms, and finally cancelled right out of the academic program. Much embittered by this experience, she has undergone a change in political outlook: from old-fashioned, John Kennedyish liberalism to a Breitbartish obsession with the evils of the entire Liberal establishment, including its titular leader Hunter Biden’s father, and so on. No question that she would now vote for DeSantis or any similar GOP candidate.
I postulate that over-reach behavior by wokies in local governments (think of Chesa Boudin in SF), and particularly in the K-12 educracy, is leading to somewhat similar reactions by many individuals in various parts of the country. It is the old black comedy (is this phrase allowed?) in which pop-Left over-reach, performance rituals, and careerist maneuvers all generate an anti-Left reaction. But this time around, the extent of the original woke capture of academia was unprecedented. So one wonders what the inevitable reaction beyond academia will look like….
Yes, I think that the reaction against wokeness will unfortunately work to the favor of the far right, since the left has not distanced itself enough from it. Cohen thinks that there will be a class-based reaction against wokeism, but that will likely involve many members of the lower and middle classes being driven into the arms of politicians like De Santis. As extremism mounts both sides, America will become Dover Beach, “Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight, / Where ignorant armies clash by night.”
Here is my answer to the question Bethany Mandel couldn’t answer:
The Woke are “the New New Left” (the successors of the New Left of the 60s&70s). Their political ideology has resulted from a confluence of the “critical theory” of the Frankfurt School (which is based on and developed from Hegelian, Marxian, and Freudian thought) and postmodern theory (postmodernism) with its typical cluster of isms: skepticism (pessimism), relativism (anti-absolutism), particularism (anti-universalism), subjectivism (anti-objectivism), anti-realism (social or linguistic constructivism, anti-representationalism [R. Rorty, J. Derrida], semantic indeterminism), anti-rationalism, anti-scientism, anti-monism (pluralism, multiculturalism).
So “Wokeism” can properly be termed “postmodern critical theory”. Given that the Woke movement is a far-left one, it represents a form of socialism, and can hence be alternatively called “postmodern socialism”. It endorses socialist egalitarianism and liberationism (not liberalism!). Its adherents seek to end oppression and hegemonial domination (primarily through “white”, Western/European supremacy) by liberating all marginalized groups (people of color, women, sexual minorities, the disabled, the mentally ill, the obese, and whoever else) and thereby realizing global social justice. Max Horkheimer defined the political goal of his critical theory as “die Emanzipation des Menschen aus versklavenden Verhältnissen” (“the emancipation of man from enslaving conditions”). Wokeness as a state of mind is the “true consciousness” (as opposed to the “false consciousness”) of the omnipresent reality and causes of social injustice (inequity) and inequality, of social oppression and discrimination.
This article sheds more light on the reasons for his departure: https://www.theneweuropean.co.uk/lucy-siegle-nick-cohen-guardian-complaint/
Nothing to do with his arguments, but this may be why. https://www.nytimes.com/2023/05/30/world/europe/me-too-guardian-financial-times-madison-marriage.html