Reminder: You’re invited to my London meetup today (Thursday) at 7pm. Please register here.
AOC recently said that “Woke One was craazy.” What happens after “Woke One,” and does this imply the existence of a forthcoming “Woke Two?” In this conversation, Louise Perry and I discuss how the answer may be more unsettling than most people want to admit.
We start with AOC’s attempt to wave away the excesses of 2020 as a strange moment with bad rhetoric. But even if the rhetoric has changed, the underlying ideas remain the same.
We talk about Trump as both a reaction to wokeness and an accelerant of it, the collapse of old-fashioned colorblind liberalism (aka “Star Trek liberalism”), and the fantasy that a more diverse society would automatically retain the same values.
The conversation then gets darker. We discuss ethnic loyalty, group narcissism, anti-Semitism, successful minorities, white guilt, demographic change, and how people react when their own group loses status or power.
