The Thaw

 When future cultural historians try to write the story of our era, I have no doubt that AOC's use of the phrase "woke 1 was crazy" over the summer will stand out as a critical turning point. The moment conveniently bookended the early 2020s era of "peak woke" or "the Great Awokening" or whatever you want to call it—and while most of us knew on some gut level that this epoch had already ended long before, it helped to have someone within the progressive movement declare its death officially so we really knew it was over and not coming back.

Most people reacted to the news of its demise with something like relieved chatter. A shadow had been lifted. It was "ding dong, the witch is dead." "Woke 1," if we are calling it that now, was really a period of cultural revolution—and like any other revolution, it made great and ultimately unsustainable demands on our conscience and idealism. And so, when it was behind us, we all relaxed a bit into our "normal shapes" (to quote Dwight Macdonald—more on that below), like someone holding in their paunch in company who now finds themselves home in front of the TV again. 

Of course, what people relaxed back into varied, depending on the natural shape they had had before. Tech bro reactionaries promptly discovered that they could be hyper-masculine right-wing douche-bags again. As Chrystia Freeland put it in a recent interview with Ezra Klein: "I think part of what was kind of pent up was very well expressed in a great piece that the Financial Times ran right after Trump’s re-election, where they quoted an anonymous top banker saying: 'We can say "retard" and "[expletive]" without the fear of getting cancelled. It’s a new dawn."

(Apparently, the New York Times does not feel the same degree of freedom. Their transcribers could not bring themselves to type out one of the words Freeland actually uses here, though they could write the "r-word" for some reason. But perhaps it's just that the Times's "normal shape" is not to be quite as big of an asshole as this anonymous investment banker.)

The anecdote is indeed an apt illustration of the psychology of Trump's most elite backers. Freeland and Klein both spend time in their interview trying to understand the origins of what Freeland aptly calls "the hurt feelings of the superrich." The "woke" period in American culture apparently left some of the most powerful and wealthy people in our society feeling deeply wounded, aggrieved, and furious in a way that seems totally disproportioned to anything that actually happened to them, or to the objective level of comfort and privilege they still in fact enjoy in our society. 

Freeland suggests their beef is that in some inchoate way, wokeness denied them "main character energy." Ezra Klein, meanwhile, in a recent opinion column that serves as an apt companion piece to this interview, refers to the "the fury of the politically radicalized rich." He concludes that they can't be mad about not being rich enough, since most of them only gained in wealth during the "woke 1" era. Their grievance about "woke" cultural politics seems to be that in some more spiritual sense, it denied them status—or what Klein calls in this piece a sense of "the recognition they believed [their wealth] would accord them."  

Plainly, here, we are in the presence of what the philosopher Max Scheler (drawing on the ideas of Nietzsche) called the "political dynamite" of ressentiment. Scheler appeals to what he calls "the important sociological law that this psychological dynamite will spread with the discrepancy between the political, constitutional, or traditional status of a group and its factual power." (Holdheim trans.) 

Plainly, among those "politically radicalized rich" (people like Elon Musk, or the Airbnb cofounder who used to be a Democrat but who is now, in the words of Zeteo, reportedly a "red-pilled billionaire helping Trump"), we are confronted with people who experience some "discrepancy" between the "recognition" and status and praise they feel they are getting from others, and the "factual" wealth and power they actually still possess in our society. 

Most of us, though, who are not superrich and have not become politically radicalized right-wing extremists, never felt that being asked not to use slurs against women or people with disabilities was a great inconvenience. And most of us have not in fact gone back to using these terms just because we "can," in some sense, "without being cancelled." What was "woke" to one closet-fascist right-wing investment banker was simply "not being an obnoxious jerk" to the rest of us.

Nevertheless, even people in the middle or on the left of the political spectrum felt some relief from the end of the "woke 1" period too. A centrist or "moderate" political pundit like Nate Silver still regularly licks his wounds in public on his podcast about how annoyed he was with peak "wokeness" and "Bluesky liberals" and all the rest—to an extent that suggests some profound raw grievance that I don't really even understand at this point. "Cancel me if you want to for this take, but..." he says; and I'm like: "but nobody wants to! I don't know who you're talking to, Nate!"

Here, too, we feel we are in the presence of ressentiment, though its origins in this case seem even harder to trace. 

So much for the political right and center. What about the political left? I would posit that even here, people have felt some definite relief and unwinding of spiritual tension in the wake of AOC's declaration that "wokeness" is officially over. 

No matter how much people's ideology outwardly aligned with the tenets of the "woke" left circa 2020, nearly everyone had some core belief they secretly nursed that was just slightly out of step with progressive pieties. And, like all stigmatized and suppressed beliefs that cannot be outwardly expressed, these only grew and became more cherished for being heterodox. As George Eliot observes in Felix Holt: "Our pet opinions are usually those which place us in a minority of a minority amongst our own party:—very happily, else those poor opinions, born with no silver spoon in their mouths—how would they get nourished and fed?"

My own pet grievance with the rest of the left circa 2020 was with all the people who declared themselves in favor of "prison abolitionism" out of one side of their mouths, and then went around preaching democratic socialism out of the other. How exactly—I always wanted to know—did they expect the government to levy taxes and provide all these services if it had no coercive apparatus whatsoever? Would it rely on a system of voluntary donations from the superrich—in which case, we have socialism already, in the form of charities. Or would we simply hope that no billionaire ever cheats on their taxes, even after we've abolished all penalties and sanctions for doing so? 

So even those of us on the left felt somehow freer once the reign of "woke 1" finally came to an end. Our secret heterodoxies and impieties could flourish at last. Let a thousand flowers bloom. This is why the last few years have been a great heyday for "pet opinions." 

There was also a subtler form of psychological relief for the left that came from the fact that other people were no longer trying to be as left as we were; there was less competition for our social role, and so it became easier to feel like one was a good person again. When everyone else is now using slurs in public, the bar for being a minimally politically decent person suddenly came to seem achievable again. One could look at what the Trump administration and the "politically radicalized rich" were doing and say: "well, at least I'm not like that!" 

This, then, is one side—let us call it, the positive side—of the great cultural Thermidor we are living through now. The cultural revolution is over. We can relax and go back to being normal again. The Restoration has come and replaced the Puritans. Khrushchev has delivered his "secret speech," and now even us good comrades are free to admit to ourselves in public, "you know, certain excesses were perhaps committed during the period of the great purges.... what can I say? Bolshevism 1 was crazy."

AOC uttering those simple words really was the "secret speech" of our time (to appreciate the power of hearing her say it, we have to recall that even using the word "crazy" was verboten for a time on the left, because it was seen as ableist and stigmatizing of people with mental illness). And now we are living in the midst of a Khrushchevian "Thaw." 

But here's the thing about every "Thaw." It may mean the end of repression, which most of us welcome as a great psychological relief. But it often also spells the death of idealism. During a time of revolution—cultural or otherwise—people grow weary of "the boring repression in the name of revolutionary virtue of all human, lively instincts," as Dwight Macdonald writes in his essay on the Khrushchev Thaw. People are relieved when the Thermidor sets in because, he writes, they "simply wanted a chance to enjoy their power safely, selfishly, and corruptly." 

That's plainly what our aggrieved right-wing billionaires and their allies in the Trump administration wanted—and that seems to be what they have gotten from the end of the period of "wokeness." Now they really do seem to be just reveling in their wealth and power as selfishly and corruptly as any hog could wish. 

Revolutionary idealism "bends human nature, puts a terrible strain on the normal, mediocre man," Macdonald continues. "When the pressure is removed [...] then human nature springs back to its normal shape, which is perhaps not very inspiring, but is certainly preferable to the nightmare form given it by the totalitarians."

Indeed, that seems to be what's happening to our culture now. We are all springing back into our "normal shapes" again. For some of us, that means being leftists with one or two heterodox "pet opinions." For others, it means being centrists who now get to vent their bottled up outrage against self-righteous progressives. For still others, it means using slurs against stigmatized out-groups and women and people with mental disabilities that they apparently always wanted to say, but felt they couldn't previously get away with before. 

We can all be glad in our different ways, then, that the "nightmare" period of "repression" in the name of "revolutionary virtue" is over. But what it has left behind is not exactly "inspiring" either—a detritus of crank hobbyhorses, impotent rage, and ressentiment. 

The worst part of the "Thaw," then, is that we don't seem able to keep any of the gains of the period of revolutionary idealism, after we have jettisoned its burdens. For instance, as stated above, I always had a problem with the absolutism of "prison abolitionism" or "police abolitionism" on the left. But it's rather disturbing to me that as soon as the Left lost interest in defending these positions—they also seem to have lost any sustained interest in reforming prisons or addressing police brutality. 

So now we are left with a situation in which we seem to be faced with a wholly needless choice between two untenable extremes: either we march in the streets to have no police or prisons at all—or else we simply passively accept the monstrous apparatus of surveillance, mass incarceration, and lawless violence that the criminal legal system regularly inflicts on people in our society. 

Take your pick of other "woke 1" issues that the Left seems to have moved on from in the last few years. Maybe the Left doubled down too hard on racial identity politics during the "peak woke" era, for instance. By the time we were yanking a new release from book tours because it happened to be written by a white woman but involved Mexican immigrants, I for one thought: "this woke era cannot end soon enough." But, now that "woke 1" is over, we seem to have shifted instead into a world where overt white nationalists run the government, and are actively sabotaging all of the most basic gains of the twentieth century civil rights movement. 

Wasn't there a reasonable middle somewhere in there that we blew past, as we lurched from one extreme to the other? 

Many people in the political "center" are still re-litigating intra-liberal debates over trans athletes in women's sports. They ignore the fact that we now live in a society where many trans people are having their passports and drivers licenses revoked, and their legal existences denied, and the federal government is even trying to ban trans people from the military on blatantly discriminatory grounds, publicly smearing the character and honesty of trans service members who have put their lives at risk to keep the rest of us safe. 

In a matter of a year or two, our society went from being in the throes of a progressive cultural revolution to being a neo-reactionary white nationalist fascist autocracy, and it seems to have happened so fast that many centrists and moderates still haven't noticed the change. They are still out their complaining about how "liberals denied the thing about Biden's age" and how "Biden opened the border" (he did not, he just briefly restored Congress's asylum law and then tried to unilaterally violate it again in his final months in office, but that's a rant for another day). 

It's like: okay, okay, people, we all agree now that "woke 1 was crazy." Even AOC has said it. But does that mean we now just accept authoritarianism, brutality, racism and sexism and discrimination as the law of life? Just because people got tired of hearing people adopt needlessly absolutist opinions on policing, prisons, race, gender, etc.—does that mean that now we suddenly conclude we don't care about any of those issues at all, and we're happy to just leave the city walls undefended as the right-wing barbarians storm in and destroy everything we had gained over the course of modern liberalism? 

In his essay on Godwin in his book on the Spirit of the Age, William Hazlitt addresses himself to the members of his generation who once believed in the ideals of liberty and reason, but who then recoiled from them due to their disappointment with Jacobin extremism in France. Hazlitt points out that all those erstwhile revolutionaries and pantisocrats who ended up becoming true-blue Tories were perhaps guilty of an overreaction. "[I]t by no means follows," Hazlitt points out, "because reason is found not to be the only infallible or safe rule of conduct, that it is no rule at all; or that we are to discard it altogether with derision and ignominy."

I think too of Thomas Love Peacock's observation on a character in his Nightmare Abbey (whom he doubtless intended to be a parody of Coleridge or Southey):

He had been in his youth an enthusiast for liberty, and had hailed the dawn of the French Revolution as the promise of a day that was to banish war and slavery, and every form of vice and misery, from the face of the earth. Because all this was not done, he deduced that nothing was done; and from this deduction, according to his system of logic, he drew a conclusion that worse than nothing was done; that the overthrow of the feudal fortresses of tyranny and superstition was the greatest calamity that had ever befallen mankind; and that their only hope now was to rake the rubbish together, and rebuild it without any of those loopholes by which the light had originally crept in.

This, surely, is what has happened to us on a society-wide scale today. Six years ago, we were heralding the dawn of total human brotherhood, when the walls of all prisons and borders would fall, and the reign of universal peace and equality would be imminently established. Of course, that didn't happen—at least not all at once. And so, we have concluded "that worse than nothing was done," and now we've simply gone back to repeating the worst chapters of our history—Jim Crow-ism, white supremacy, macho violence, plutocratic corruption, illiberal authoritarianism, militarism, imperialism, and cultural nihilism—except this time, without even those "loopholes" of liberalism by which "the light had crept in" the last time around. 

Is it all worth it—we are inclined to ask our anonymous investment banker—for the privilege of being able to say the "r-word" again?