Monitoring Biden and other Contemporary Events

From The Economist

THE THREAT OF THE ILLIBERAL LEFT

"SOMETHING TO very badly gone with Western liberalism. Basically, classical liberalism believes that human progress is brought about by debate and reform. The best way to navigate disruptive change in a divided world is through a universal commitment to individual dignity, open markets, and limited government. Yet a resurgent China scoffs at liberalism for being selfish, decadent, and unstable. In our country, right-wing and left-wing populists attack liberalism for its elitism and its supposed privileges.


Over the past 250 years, classical liberalism has contributed to unprecedented progress. It will not disappear in a cloud of smoke. But it is undergoing a severe test, just as it was a century ago when the cancers of Bolshevism and fascism began to eat away at liberal Europe from within. It is time for the Liberals to understand what they are up against and to fight back.

Nowhere is the fight more fierce than in America, where this week the Supreme Court chose not to repeal a draconian and bizarre anti-abortion law. The most dangerous threat to the spiritual home of liberalism comes from the Trumpian right. Populists denigrate liberal edifices such as science and the rule of law as fronts for a deep state plot against the people. They subordinate facts and reason to tribal emotion. The persistent lie that the 2020 presidential election was stolen indicates where such impulses are leading. If people cannot resolve their differences using debate and trusted institutions, they will resort to force.

The attack on the left is harder to grasp, in part because in America the term “liberal” has come to include an illiberal left. We describe this week how a new style of politics has recently spread to elite university departments. As recent graduates accepted jobs in high-end media and in politics, business and education, they brought with them the horror of feeling “in danger” and a program obsessed with narrow vision. to obtain justice for oppressed identity groups. They also brought in tactics to enforce ideological purity, by not setting up their enemies and nullifying allies who transgressed, with echoes of the denominational state that dominated Europe before classical liberalism broke out. rooted at the end of the 18th century.

Superficially, the illiberal left and classical liberals like The Economist want a lot of the same things. Both believe that people should be able to thrive regardless of their sexuality or race. They share a hint of authority and strong interests. They believe in the opportunity for change.

However, classical liberals and illiberal progressives could hardly disagree more on how to bring about these things. For classical liberals, the precise direction of progress is unknowable. It must be spontaneous and from the bottom up – and it depends on the separation of powers, so that no one or any group can exercise lasting control. In contrast, the illiberal left has placed its own power at the center of things, believing that real progress is only possible after first ensuring that racial, gender and other hierarchies are dismantled.

This difference in method has profound implications. Classical liberals believe in establishing a level playing field and letting events unfold through competition, such as eliminating corporate monopolies, opening guilds, radically reforming taxation, and making law. education accessible with vouchers. Progressives see laissez-faire as a pretext that powerful interest groups use to preserve the status quo. Instead, they believe in imposing “fairness” – the results they deem fair. For example, Ibram X. Kendi, a scholar-activist, argues that any color-blind policy, including standardized testing for children, is racist if it ends up increasing average racial differences, regardless of the clarification of the intentions behind it. underlying.

Mr. Kendi is right to want an anti-racist policy that works. But its blundered approach risks depriving some underprivileged children of the help they need and others of the chance to realize their talents. Individuals, not just groups, must be treated fairly for society to flourish. In addition, the company has many goals. People worry about economic growth, well-being, crime, the environment and national security, and policies cannot be judged simply on whether they are advancing a particular group. . Classical liberals use debate to determine priorities and tradeoffs in a pluralistic society, then use elections to set a course. The illiberal left believes that the market for ideas is rigged like any other. What masquerades as evidence and argument, they say, is actually another elite assertion of raw power.

Old-school progressives remain the champions of free speech. But illiberal progressives believe that fairness requires that the field be tilted against those who are privileged and reactionary. This means restricting their freedom of expression, using a caste system of victimization in which those at the top must defer to those with the greatest right to restorative justice. It is also about setting an example of so-called reactionaries, punishing them when they say something that is taken to make someone less privileged feel in danger. The results are call, cancellation, and no platform.

Milton Friedman once said that “a society that puts equality ahead of freedom will have neither.” He was right. Illiberal progressives believe they have a plan to liberate oppressed groups. In reality, it is a formula for the oppression of individuals – and in this it is not that different from the plans of the populist right. In their own way, the two extremes put power before the process, the end before the means and the interests of the group before the freedom of the individual.

Strongman-led countries that populists admire, such as Hungary under Viktor Orban and Russia under Vladimir Putin, show that unchecked power is a poor basis for good government. Utopias like Cuba and Venezuela show that the end does not justify the means. And nowhere do individuals voluntarily conform to state-imposed racial and economic stereotypes.

When populists put partisanship above truth, they sabotage good government. When progressives divide people into competing castes, they turn the nation against itself. Both diminish the institutions that resolve social conflicts. This is why they often resort to coercion, even if they like to talk about justice.

If classical liberalism is so much better than the alternatives, why in the world is it fighting? One of the reasons is that populists and progressives feed off each other pathologically. The hatred that each side feels for the other inflames its own supporters, to the benefit of both. Criticizing the excesses of your own tribe sounds like betrayal. In these conditions, the liberal debate lacks oxygen. One need only look at Britain, where the politics of recent years have been consumed by feuds between hardline Tory Brexiteers and Jeremy Corbyn’s Labor Party.

Some aspects of liberalism go against human nature. It forces you to stand up for your opponents’ right to speak, even when you know they are wrong. You must be prepared to challenge your deepest beliefs. Businesses must not be immune to storms of creative destruction. Your loved ones should come forward on merit alone, even if your instinct is to bend the rules for them. You have to accept the victory of your enemies at the polls, even if you think they will ruin the country.

In short, it is hard work to be a true liberal. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, when their last ideological challenger seemed to crumble, the arrogant elites lost touch with the humility and self-doubt of liberalism. They got into the habit of believing that they were always right. They designed American meritocracy to favor people like them. After the financial crisis, they oversaw an economy that grew too slowly for people to feel prosperous. Far from treating critics of the white working class with dignity, they laughed at their alleged lack of sophistication.

This complacency allowed opponents to attribute lasting imperfections to liberalism and, because of the treatment of race in America, to insist that the whole country was rotten from the start. In the face of persistent inequality and racism, classic liberals can remind people that change takes time. But Washington is shattered, China is rushing forward, and people are restless.

A lack of liberal conviction
The ultimate complacency would be for classical liberals to underestimate the threat. Too many right-wing liberals are inclined to choose a shameless marriage of convenience with the populists. Too many left-wing liberals focus on how they too want social justice. They take comfort in the idea that the most intolerant illiberalism belongs to a fringe. Don’t worry, they say, intolerance is part of the mechanism of change: by focusing on injustice, they displace the central ground.

Yet it is precisely by counteracting the forces that push people to extremes that classical liberals prevent extremes from strengthening. By applying liberal principles, they help to solve many problems in society without anyone resorting to coercion. Only the Liberals appreciate diversity in all its forms and know how to make it a force. They alone can deal fairly with everything from education to planning and foreign policy in order to unleash the creative energies of people. The classic liberals must regain their fighting spirit. They should face bullies and nullifiers. Liberalism remains the best engine for equitable progress. The Liberals must have the courage to say it. "

it would seem to me that even the liberal Economist is starting to realize that the so-called progressive wing of the Democratic Party is a threat to America's democracy.

She has been expelled. You just don't want to face up to the reality that teachers run the risk of being expelled if they balk at teaching CRT .

You far-left nutcases are deniers. Even The liberal Economist doesn't side with you anymore.

Are you going to sue me for watching Fox News? I also watch MSNBC. So?

"SOMETHING HAS gone very fallacious with Western liberalism. At its coronary heart classical liberalism believes human progress is led to by debate and reform. One of the simplest ways to navigate disruptive change in a divided world is thru a common dedication to particular person dignity, open markets and restricted authorities. But a resurgent China sneers at liberalism for being egocentric, decadent and unstable. At dwelling, populists on the correct and left rage at liberalism for its supposed elitism and privilege.



Over the previous 250 years classical liberalism has helped result in unparalleled progress. It won’t vanish in a puff of smoke. However it’s present process a extreme check, simply because it did a century in the past when the cancers of Bolshevism and fascism started to eat away at liberal Europe from inside. It’s time for liberals to grasp what they’re up in opposition to and to battle again.

Nowhere is the battle fiercer than in America, the place this week the Supreme Courtroom selected not to strike down a draconian and weird anti-abortion legislation. Populists denigrate liberal edifices comparable to science and the rule of legislation as façades for a plot by the deep state in opposition to the individuals. They subordinate details and purpose to tribal emotion. The enduring falsehood that the presidential election in 2020 was stolen factors to the place such impulses lead. If individuals can not settle their variations utilizing debate and trusted establishments, they resort to drive.

The assault from the left is tougher to know, partly as a result of in America “liberal” has come to incorporate an intolerant left. We describe this week how a brand new fashion of politics has lately unfold from elite college departments. As younger graduates have taken jobs within the upmarket media and in politics, enterprise and training, they’ve introduced with them a horror of feeling “unsafe” and an agenda obsessive about a slender imaginative and prescient of acquiring justice for oppressed identification teams. They’ve additionally introduced alongside ways to implement ideological purity, by no-platforming their enemies and cancelling allies who’ve transgressed—with echoes of the confessional state that dominated Europe earlier than classical liberalism took root on the finish of the 18th century.

Superficially, the intolerant left and classical liberals like The Economist need most of the identical issues. Each consider that folks ought to be capable to flourish no matter their sexuality or race. They share a suspicion of authority and entrenched pursuits. They consider within the desirability of change.

Nevertheless, classical liberals and intolerant progressives might hardly disagree extra over how you can carry this stuff about. For classical liberals, the exact path of progress is unknowable. It should be spontaneous and from the underside up—and it is dependent upon the separation of powers, in order that no one nor any group is ready to exert lasting management. In contrast the intolerant left put their very own energy on the centre of issues, as a result of they’re positive actual progress is feasible solely after they’ve first seen to it that racial, sexual and different hierarchies are dismantled.

This distinction in technique has profound implications. Classical liberals consider in setting honest preliminary situations and letting occasions unfold via competitors—by, say, eliminating company monopolies, opening up guilds, radically reforming taxation and making training accessible with vouchers. Progressives see laissez-faire as a pretence which highly effective vested pursuits use to protect the established order. As an alternative, they consider in imposing “fairness”—the outcomes that they deem simply. For instance, Ibram X. Kendi, a scholar-activist, asserts that any colour-blind coverage, together with the standardised testing of kids, is racist if it finally ends up rising common racial differentials, nevertheless enlightened the intentions behind it.

Mr Kendi is correct to need an anti-racist coverage that works. However his blunderbuss strategy dangers denying some deprived youngsters the assistance they want and others the prospect to grasp their skills. People, not simply teams, should be handled pretty for society to flourish. In addition to, society has many targets. Folks fear about financial progress, welfare, crime, the surroundings and nationwide safety, and insurance policies can’t be judged merely on whether or not they advance a specific group. Classical liberals use debate to hash out priorities and trade-offs in a pluralist society after which use elections to choose a course. The intolerant left consider that {the marketplace} of concepts is rigged similar to all of the others. What masquerades as proof and argument, they are saying, is absolutely one more assertion of uncooked energy by the elite.

Progressives of the old-fashioned stay champions of free speech. However intolerant progressives suppose that fairness requires the sector to be tilted in opposition to those that are privileged and reactionary. Which means proscribing their freedom of speech, utilizing a caste system of victimhood through which these on prime should defer to these with a higher declare to restorative justice. It additionally entails making an instance of supposed reactionaries, by punishing them after they say one thing that’s taken to make somebody who’s much less privileged really feel unsafe. The outcomes are calling-out, cancellation and no-platforming.

Milton Friedman as soon as stated that the “society that places equality earlier than freedom will find yourself with neither”. He was proper. Intolerant progressives suppose they’ve a blueprint for releasing oppressed teams. In actuality theirs is a formulation for the oppression of people—and, in that, it’s not so very completely different from the plans of the populist proper. Of their other ways each extremes put energy earlier than course of, ends earlier than means and the pursuits of the group earlier than the liberty of the person.

International locations run by the strongmen whom populists admire, comparable to Hungary underneath Viktor Orban and Russia underneath Vladimir Putin, present that unchecked energy is a nasty basis for good authorities. Utopias like Cuba and Venezuela present that ends don’t justify means. And nowhere in any respect do people willingly conform to state-imposed racial and financial stereotypes.

When populists put partisanship earlier than fact, they sabotage good authorities. When progressives divide individuals into competing castes, they flip the nation in opposition to itself. Each diminish establishments that resolve social battle. Therefore they usually resort to coercion, nevertheless a lot they like to speak about justice.

If classical liberalism is so significantly better than the alternate options, why is it struggling world wide? One purpose is that populists and progressives feed off one another pathologically. The hatred every camp feels for the opposite inflames its personal supporters—to the good thing about each. Criticising your personal tribe’s excesses looks like treachery. Below these situations, liberal debate is starved of oxygen. Simply have a look at Britain, the place politics up to now few years was consumed by the rows between uncompromising Tory Brexiteers and the Labour Get together underneath Jeremy Corbyn.

Elements of liberalism go in opposition to the grain of human nature. It requires you to defend your opponents’ proper to talk, even when you already know they’re fallacious. You should be prepared to query your deepest beliefs. Companies should not be sheltered from the gales of artistic destruction. Your family members should advance on advantage alone, even when all of your instincts are to bend the principles for them. You should settle for the victory of your enemies on the poll field, even in the event you suppose they’ll carry the nation to smash.

Briefly, it’s laborious work to be a real liberal. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, when their final ideological challenger appeared to crumble, conceited elites misplaced contact with liberalism’s humility and self-doubt. They fell into the behavior of believing they had been all the time proper. They engineered America’s meritocracy to favour individuals like them. After the monetary disaster, they oversaw an economic system that grew too slowly for individuals to really feel affluent. Removed from treating white working-class critics with dignity, they sneered at their supposed lack of sophistication.

This complacency has let opponents blame lasting imperfections on liberalism—and, due to the therapy of race in America, to insist the entire nation was rotten from the beginning. Within the face of persistent inequality and racism, classical liberals can remind people who change takes time. However Washington is damaged, China is storming forward and persons are stressed.

A liberal lack of conviction
The final word complacency can be for classical liberals to underestimate the risk. Too many right-leaning liberals are inclined to decide on a shameless marriage of comfort with populists. Too many left-leaning liberals give attention to how they, too, need social justice. They consolation themselves with the thought that probably the most illiberal illiberalism belongs to a fringe. Don’t fear, they are saying, intolerance is a part of the mechanism of change: by specializing in injustice, they shift the centre floor.

But it’s exactly by countering the forces propelling individuals to the extremes that classical liberals forestall the extremes from strengthening. By making use of liberal ideas, they assist remedy society’s many issues with out anybody resorting to coercion. Solely liberals recognize range in all its varieties and perceive how you can make it a energy. Solely they’ll deal pretty with every little thing from training to planning and overseas coverage in order to launch individuals’s artistic energies. Classical liberals should rediscover their preventing spirit. They need to tackle the bullies and cancellers. Liberalism continues to be the very best engine for equitable progress. Liberals should have the braveness to say so. ■

This text appeared within the Leaders part of the print version underneath the headline “The risk from the intolerant left”

Both articles have typos. I found it online. Duh! You guys could visit the website of The Economist to read the original version.

She was not expelled. She quit. And the school board had nothing to do with it. You’re a liar.

Non. She's forced to resign. Thus one could say she has been expelled. You far-left liberals are obscurantists in the words of The Economist.

I think you are educated. Don't lie to yourself.

No. Her decision. And. Her political stance is rigid and definitely out of step with this millennium so that is kinda what happens to dinosaurs.

Biden attempting to force Americans into a medical experiment they want no part in.

He must be heavily invested in Pfizer, as well as his interests in Chinese lithium battery tech, which is why he's pushing EV use.

His shares have risen 300% since abandoning Americans in Afghanistan.

Biden's biggest covid failure is not pushing stimulus and rescue money and not locking us down.

What’s his biggest Covid success?

There was no plan to distribute the vaccine when he took office. They had to start from scratch.

What did you mean by “lock us down”?

Do some kind of nation-wide quarantine by executive order?

The kind of lockdown done in China and New Zealand.

Australians in Victoria and NSW feel they're in an open-air prison.

Not so bad for QLD, but things are getting weirder by the day.

The terminology is what I find disturbing. Lockdowns are for prisoners. Curfews for citizens.

They're already talking about privileges for the jabbed. Meaning penalties for those of us choosing not to be part of Pfizer's experiment.

And for the record, historically speaking, Pfizer is a criminal corporate entity, with zero history of learning anything from convictions and penalties applied. The profits to be made from multiple "booster" jabs into perpetuity, won't render them any more honest than any time in their past.

Google "largest criminal penalty in history", and see for yourselves.

Not quite. She could have kept her job and been another pliant teacher. Yet she chose not to deviate from her personal values by teaching something that's against her will.

Other teachers have also come out speaking out against CRT, arguing that a teacher is inciting hared against white people when he or she teaches something like CRT.

A liberal is supposed to plump for racial equality instead of racial superiority. BLM supporters have overstepped the mark; they snub Asian Americans while crying out for blackism. And they also resort to coercion to get what they want.

Didn't I tell you guys that the real leaders and sponsors-who actually hate America- of BLM yearn to create what a black writer calls Black America modeled on South Africa. And they are not giving up until non-white people capitulate to their outrageous demands.

I'm not saying all the black supporters of BLM fancy becoming instigators; the leaders of BLM just gull them and use them as their food soldiers to fight for them.

The Taliban have used this tactic as well. Their true leaders would prefer to go into hiding and demand that the the rank and file fight like a terrier.

Another well-written article from The Economist

How did American “wokeness” jump from elite schools to everyday life?
And how deep will its influence be?

"YOU COULD use a single word as a proxy. “Latinx” is a gender-neutral adjective which only 4% of American Hispanics say they prefer. Yet in 2018 the New York Times launched a column dedicated to “LatinX communities”. It has crept into White House press releases and a presidential speech. Google’s diversity reports use the even more inclusive “LatinX+”. A term once championed by esoteric academics has gone mainstream.

The espousal of new vocabulary is one sign of a social mobilisation that is affecting ever more areas of American life. It has penetrated politics and the press. Sometimes it spills out into the streets, in demonstrations calling for the abolition of police departments. It is starting to spread to schools. San Francisco’s education board, which for more than a year was unable to get children into classes, busied itself with stripping the names of Abraham Lincoln and George Washington from its schools, and ridding department names of acronyms such as VAPA (Visual and Performing Arts), on the ground that they are “a symptom of white supremacy”.

What links these developments is a loose constellation of ideas that is changing the way that mostly white, educated, left-leaning Americans view the world. This credo still lacks a definitive name: it is variously known as left-liberal identity politics, social-justice activism or, simply, wokeness. But it has a clear common thread: a belief that any disparities between racial groups are evidence of structural racism; that the norms of free speech, individualism and universalism which pretend to be progressive are really camouflage for this discrimination; and that injustice will persist until systems of language and privilege are dismantled.

These notions were incubated for years in the humanities departments of universities (elite ones in particular), without serious challenge. Moral panics about campus culture are hardly new, and the emergence of a new leftism in the early 2010s prompted little concern. Even as students began scouring the words of academics, administrators and fellow students for microaggressions, the oppressive slights embedded in everyday speech, and found them, complacency ruled. When invited speeches from people such as Christine Lagarde, then head of the International Monetary Fund, were cancelled after student activists accused her of complicity in “imperialist and patriarchal systems”, the response was a collective shrug.

The complacency was naive. America harboured a “Vegas campus delusion”, says Greg Lukianoff, president of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, an advocacy group. “What happens on campus will not stay on campus.” It has not. The influence of the new social-justice mindset is now being felt in the media, the Democratic Party and, most recently, businesses and schools.

How did this breakout happen? Three things helped prepare the ground: a disaffected student body, an academic theory that was malleable enough to be shaped into a handbook for political activism, and a pliant university administration.

First came a new generation of students keenly aware of unsolved social problems and willing to see old-fashioned precepts of academic freedom (such as open debate) as obstacles to progress. Various events—the financial crisis, the election of Donald Trump, the police killings of unarmed black men, especially that of George Floyd—fed frustration with traditional liberalism’s seeming inability to end long-run inequities. This hastened the adoption of an ideology that offered fresh answers.


In a book entitled “The Coddling of the American Mind”, Mr Lukianoff and a social psychologist, Jonathan Haidt, posit that overprotective parenting in the shadow of the war on terrorism and the great recession led to “safetyism”, a belief that safety, including emotional safety, trumps all other practical and moral concerns. Its bounds grew to require disinviting disfavoured campus speakers (see chart 1), protesting about disagreeable readings and regulating the speech of fellow students.

Many students latched onto a body of theory which yokes obscurantist texts to calls for social action (or “praxis”) that had been developing in the academy for decades. In 1965 Herbert Marcuse, a critical theorist, coined the phrase “repressive tolerance”, the notion that freedom of speech should be withdrawn from the political right in order to bring about progress, since the “cancellation of the liberal creed of free and equal discussion” might be necessary to end oppression. Another influence was Paulo Freire, a Brazilian educator whose “Pedagogy of the Oppressed” (published in English in 1970) advocated a liberatory pedagogy in the spirit of Mao’s Cultural Revolution in which “the oppressed unveil the world of oppression and through the praxis commit themselves to its transformation”.

The Great Awokening
Today the most prominent evangelists for what political scientists such as Zachary Goldberg call the Great Awokening are Ibram X. Kendi and Robin DiAngelo. Both these scholar-activists have written bestselling books that sketch the expansive boundaries of systemic racism. Both minimise the role of intent, but in different ways. In Mr Kendi’s Manichaean worldview actions are either actively narrowing racial gaps, and are therefore anti-racist, or they are not, in which case they are racist. “Capitalism is essentially racist; racism is essentially capitalist,” he concludes.

Ms DiAngelo is concerned with the racism of everyday speech. For her, the intent of the oppressor is immaterial if an oppressed person deems the conduct to be offensive. How “white progressives cause more daily harm [to black people] than, say, white nationalists” is the subject of her latest book, “Nice Racism”. She sees liberal norms like individualism or the aspiration for colour-blind universalism as naive: “Liberalism doesn’t account for power, and the differential in power,” she says.

The embrace of this ideology by students and professors might have remained inconsequential had it not been for the part played by administrative staff. Since 2000, such staff in the University of California system has more than doubled, outpacing the increase in faculty and students. The growth in private universities has been even faster. Between 1975 and 2005 the ranks of administrators grew by 66% in public colleges but by 135% in private ones. As their headcount grew, so did their remit—ferreting out not just overt racism or sexual harassment but implicit bias too. The University of California, Los Angeles, now insists that faculty applying for tenure include a diversity statement.

In 2018 Samuel Abrams, a political scientist at Sarah Lawrence College, published data showing that these administrators are even more left-leaning than the professors: liberals outnumber conservatives by 12 to one. For writing about this, Mr Abrams faced a campaign by outraged students aiming to revoke his tenure. Campaigns by a vocal minority of activists have cast a pall on campus life, he says. “Large numbers of people hate this. They just don’t know what to do,” he laments. “They don’t want the mob coming to them.”

An upheaval in mass communication accelerated the trend. On Twitter, a determined minority can be amplified, and an uneasy centre-left can be cowed. “Weaponisation of social media became part of the game. But what I think nobody foresaw was that these tactics could so easily be imported to the New York Times or Penguin Random House or Google,” says Niall Ferguson, a historian at Stanford’s Hoover Institution. “The invasion…was just a case of the old problem: that liberals defer to progressives. And progressives defer to outright totalitarians.”

Mr Trump’s election added to centrists’ unease, leaving the poles to grow ever more extreme. “Anything but far-left progressivism was lumped in with Trump,” says one (Democratic) prosecutor in San Francisco. In the protest against Mr Trump’s handling of the Mexican border, for instance, the old Democratic line of enhanced border security and a path to citizenship for the long-term undocumented became passé. Progressives proved their sincerity by being in favour of abolishing immigration authorities entirely.

Having grown strong roots, social-justice consciousness has spread most readily to non-academic institutions largely peopled by those who have come through elite universities. As the students who have embraced this messy body of theory leave university, they enter into jobs and positions of influence. The question is whether, outside the ivory tower, the ideology will retain its intolerant and belligerent zeal, or whether it will mellow into a benign urge for society to be a little fairer.

Newspapers are a prime example. The digital revolution has devastated local newspapers and crowned new online-only champions. As newsrooms adapted by aping the upstarts, hacks who had risen through the ranks thanks to shoe-leather reporting were replaced by younger staffers stuffed with new ideas from elite universities. One prominent journalist argued for replacing “neutral objectivity” with “moral clarity”—making unflinching distinctions between right and wrong.

The urge to purge
Changes in newsrooms were also related to efforts to increase demographic diversity, on the assumption that this is the only authentic way to give voice to minorities. But the campus zeal for deplatforming voices deemed offensive and defenestrating those found guilty of violating the ethos has also been imported. (James Bennet, who resigned as editorial-page editor of the New York Times after one such row, now works for The Economist; he was not involved in this article.) Non-journalists on the staff of newspapers, including young engineers, can be even more activist in campaigning against colleagues judged to be producing content at odds with the new vision of social justice.

As with universities, this stridency met little rebuke from the heads of newsrooms. Lee Fang, a left-leaning journalist for “The Intercept”, an online publication specialising in “adversarial journalism”, was accused by a colleague of racism for posting an interview with an African-American supporter of Black Lives Matter who offered a personal criticism of the group. He was made to apologise.


The quiet cultural revolution has also affected the Democratic Party. A decade ago, around 40% of white liberals agreed that “racial discrimination is the main reason why many black people can’t get ahead these days”; today over 70% do (see chart 2). In 2013, according to Gallup, a pollster, 70% of Americans thought black-white race relations were going well; that has dropped to 42%. Among white conservatives and moderates, there has been little movement on such questions.


In the past decade a far greater share of white liberals than African-Americans came to believe that blacks should have “special favours” to get ahead (see chart 3). Ideas for promoting racial equity that once belonged to the Democrats’ left fringe have become mainstream. Cash reparations for African-Americans are supported by 49% of Democrats, for example, and 41% endorse reducing police funding.

Democratic politicians have responded. In 2008 Barack Obama criticised overheated sermons of his pastor, saying “they expressed a profoundly distorted view of this country—a view that sees white racism as endemic, and that elevates what is wrong with America above all that we know is right with America.” The pastor’s view is now ascendant among Democrats.

In 2016 Hillary Clinton started giving speeches on the need to end systemic racism. By 2020 this movement was the defining fault line of the presidential primary. Joe Biden, an avatar for Democratic consensus, won by taking positions far to the left of Mr Obama, including on matters of identity politics. That is why his administration speaks much more social-justice patois than Mr Obama’s ever did. And why it embraces reparations-adjacent policies like the creation of a $4bn fund to pay off the debts of only non-white farmers, and a proposal that 40% of benefits from climate-change investment go to previously disadvantaged communities.

Wokers of the world, unite!
This new political prominence makes the question of what happens to the ideology of social activism as it spreads beyond the ivory tower all the more important. Does it retain its purity and potency? Or does it become diluted?

The corporate world will be a big test. Businesses, particularly those in the knowledge economy, have been grappling with the challenge of how to respond to social-justice consciousness as young employees agitate for change and woke consumers threaten boycotts.

An increasingly common argument is that there is no trade-off between greater diversity and profits. “I’d like to get to a place where we thought that diverse representation was just as important as profitability, because we believed it was linked to so many things that were going to come back and drive value,” says Julie Coffman, the chief diversity officer of Bain & Company, a management consultancy. Others make an explicit business case. McKinsey, another consultancy, has released a stream of reports arguing that firms with greater ethnic and gender diversity have a greater chance of financial outperformance.

Since Floyd’s murder, American businesses have issued a dizzying number of equity-related missives and quotas for hiring and procurement. Facebook, a social-media giant, has promised to hire 30% more black people in leadership positions and has set a goal that “50% of our workforce be from underrepresented communities by the end of 2023”. Target, a retailer, has pledged to spend more than $2bn with black-owned businesses by the end of 2025. Walmart, another retail titan, has set up a Centre for Racial Equity and says it will give it $100m to “address the drivers of systemic racism”.

Importing the language of equity without university-style blow-ups can be difficult. “What you’re seeing is Gen Z or young millennials basically engaging in this collective war against the boomers and the Gen Xers who actually run the organisations,” says Antonio García Martínez, whom Apple fired in May after 2,000 employees circulated a petition questioning his hiring, citing passages they found to be misogynistic in an autobiography published five years ago. When Brian Armstrong, the boss of Coinbase, announced that workplace activism was to be discouraged, he was inundated with private messages of admiration from CEOs who felt that they could not do the same—and public criticism.

“Corporate wokeism I believe is the product of self-interest intermingled with the appearance of pursuing social justice,” says Vivek Ramaswamy, a former biotechnology executive and author of “Woke, Inc.”. He argues that Big Tech pursues corporate wokeism because appearing to embrace social justice suits such firms’ commercial interests—both in terms of recruitment and appeal to their customers. It performs allegiance to identity politics while simultaneously rejecting the left’s critique of capitalism. “A lot of Big Tech has agreed to bend to the progressive left,” he says, but “they effectively expect that the new left look the other way when it comes to leaving their monopoly power.”

Such hypocrisy is increasingly prevalent. The founder of Salesforce, a tech behemoth based in San Francisco, is known for championing social-justice causes like a surtax to fund homelessness services in the city. Yet the firm itself paid no federal taxes on $2.6bn in profits in 2020.

Wokeness’s next frontier, with the greatest potential to make a mark on the future, will be the classroom. In California’s recently approved ethnic-studies curriculum, which may become a high-school graduation requirement, one lesson plan aims to help students “dispel the model-minority myth” (the idea that to dwell on Asian-American success is wrong). Roughly one-sixth of the state’s proposed new maths instruction framework is devoted to social justice. It approvingly quotes from studies suggesting that word problems about boys and girls knitting scarves be accompanied by a debate about gender norms. Last month the governor of Oregon signed a bill eliminating high-school graduation requirements of proficiency in reading, writing and maths until 2024—justified as necessary to promote equity for non-white students.

Woker or weaker?
Such proposals hint at the difficulties of translating some of the theories embraced by the new left into policy. Because disparities are theorised to be the result of largely implicit discrimination, systems must be dismantled. This leads to odd conclusions: that racial test-score gaps in maths can be ameliorated by dialectic; and that not testing for the ability to read is a worthy substitute for teaching it. Material conditions that the old left cared about, such as persistent segregation in poor districts and schools, get little attention.

There are some signs of a backlash. Three members of San Francisco’s board of education, including its president, are under threat of a recall election. So is the city’s ultra-progressive district attorney. However, the underlying engine—the questionable ideas of some academics, and the generational change they are rendering—is not shutting off. America has not yet reached peak woke."