I've said it before, and I'll repeat it now. The cryptowoke are right that the *cultural* conditions are much more favorable to pushing back on Wokeness than they were under Trump, but they don't understand the conditions we live in now, this make a losing argument.

The Very Smart People and the cryptowoke operate under the assumption that we're still in a liberal order. We are not. Politics being downstream from culture is a condition of liberal orders, really. Winning a culture war when disempowered in an illiberal situation is irrelevant.

(Fwiw, culture is downstream of both education and policy, but this is a digression.)

We haven't yet lost the ability to regain a free/liberal order, but the basic tools that work with "liberal order privilege" don't work well under illiberalism like we're in now.

You may recall when I decided to vote for Trump my saying repeatedly that I'd agree with the anti-Woke Biden argument if things were normal, but they aren't normal. They're profoundly illiberal already, and this will now accelerate rapidly, in part due to their miscalculations.

Put otherwise, we have entered the problem Popper describes in his Paradox of Tolerance: being dominated by a movement that is intolerant and absolutely unamenable to argument or debate and already applying violence in its service. Crucial to realize this and what it implies.

I did a thread a while ago about how the Woke literally flipped the Paradox of Tolerance over and used it to advance their intolerance. You should read it. https://twitter.com/ConceptualJames/status/1348089536778285059?s=19

It may end up being that the vote for Biden was necessary to defeat Wokeness. I honestly don't know. If so, it's not because of what the Very Smart People and cryptowoke are arguing. It's because they'll overreach grotesquely with virtual certainty now.

It is not at all clear if this overreach will be the end of the free West, though. That's the problem. Trump offered a flimsy bulwark for Western values and law while the Woke threatened to expose themselves (they cannot be exhausted). That bulwark is now gone.

Trump Derangement Syndrome, which is mostly a creation of the media and their "cabal" (their word) now in power, proved very effective at acceleration but also at preventing people from understanding what was actually happening. Even still. (See the TIME "confession" piece.)

The trouble is, while people will now wake up to the nightmare much faster and more completely, there are virtually no checks on its power and what it can do. The fire is now out of control, and it's an open question what will survive the conflagration. Significant damage likely.