Hitting Woke Herd Immunity? By Victor Davis Hanson for American Greatness
We have become an absurd society obsessed with race but without any mechanism to develop a logical category of victimization and reparation.
Two recent polls suggest wokism is beginning to recede on a variety of fronts, from less trust in Black Lives Matter and more confidence in the police, to suspicion that the Capitol “insurrection” account is being used to unfairly suppress political expression while Antifa, increasingly, is seen as a terrorist organization whose violence has been ignored improperly by authorities.
There are tens of millions of Americans who either have been stung, or turned off, by McCarthyite wokeness (and thus have anti-wokeness antibodies). More have been vaccinated from its latest virulent strains by their own values of judging people as individuals, not as racial or gender collectives. So lots of Americans have developed peremptory defenses against it. The result is that daily there are ever-fewer who are susceptible to the woke pandemic. And it will thus begin to fade out—even as the virus desperately seeks to mutate and go after more institutions.
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Peak wokeness is nearing also because if it continued in its present incarnation, then the United States as we know would cease to exist—in the sense that 1692-93 Salem or 1793-94 Paris could not have continued apace without destroying society. Woke leftism exists to destroy and tear down, not to unite and build. It is not designed to play down and heal racial differences, but to accentuate and capitalize on them.
Scattershot Immunity
The methodology of cancel culture is utterly incoherent and unsustainable. The shark was jumped by the case of the Dr. Seuss books—banned by some local school districts, even as Dr. Seuss Enterprises, in terror, pulled some of the late Theodor Seuss Geisel’s publications of its own accord. If the author of The Cat in the Hat is now an enemy of the people, then anyone and all can be so designated.
That is, after 70 years and millions of books in the houses of millions of Americans, our generation’s new Soviet censors have now decided that Seuss’s books of the late 1940s and 1950s do not conform to our 2021 sensibilities and thus should be banned. The same kind of canceling of Disney films and cartoons, and of particular novelists and social critics is now a matter of record.
But what are to be the new standards of Trotskyization as we go forth? Can the Governor of New York be excused for months of policies that led to nearly 15,000 unnecessary deaths, but not for inappropriate kisses and touching of women? Or will he, as an Emmy-winning woke official, be exempt from punishment for both types of transgressions?
