What’s Left in the Culture Wars?

By Daniel Foster

Thursday, May 26, 2022

 

The other day National Review wunderkind/enfant terrible Nate Hochman asked on our little blog whether we might be seeing “woke capital blink.”

 

He had in mind a spate of recent reversals among corporations that had made hasty and panicked investments in fringe yet fashionable progressive causes. Among them: Exxon Mobil largely banning the promotion of campaigns du jour at corporate offices; Netflix’s brushback of employees who’d called for censorship of spicy content; State Farm’s sudden withdrawal of funds from a program that pumped books on gender and sexuality into schools; and, of course, Disney’s and other Fortune 500 companies’ relative silence on the news of the potential overturn of Roe.

 

Does such news signal a turn in the corporate community toward a new focus on the selling of particular goods and services to willing customers? Stranger things have happened!

 

On the one hand, a broader cultural retreat from wokeness makes sense for proximate and pragmatic reasons. Not only are Republicans poised for a big year electorally, but the likely to take office doesn’t worry as much about governmental “picking winners and losers” as the Ryans and Romneys of yesteryear. They’re openly, enthusiastically for the use of state power to . . . discourage private enterprise from butting in on political questions. So it makes sense for corporations to cover their bases and tread lightly. 

 

On the other hand, the amoebic political project we shorthand “wokeness” always seems to find new horizons and new methods of ingress and propagation. And my bet is that it will continue to do so.

 

Consider. This political project first required the media, the intellectuals, and the celebrities merely as endorsers. To give their imprimatur to a politics that was still by and large run by politicians. 

 

At a certain point, that wasn’t enough. As the project became more fundamental, more transformational, it required co-opting those institutions themselves and requisitioning their cultural output for directly and explicitly political purposes. 

 

It wasn’t enough that the professors were socialists. The universities had to manufacture socialism (and socialists) as their primary vocation. It wasn’t enough that actors and comedians were culturally left. Their films and their television and their comedy had to be in the business of advancing leftism, above, even, the business of entertaining. (How else to explain the wastelands of recent late-night television and Oscar-bait cinema?)

 

Eventually even these resources proved insufficient to the size of the task. To update Mrs. Thatcher, the problem with cultural Marxism is, you eventually run out of other people’s cultural capital. I’m using the fraught phrase “cultural Marxism” promiscuously, of course, but I’m amused enough by the paraphrase that I trust you’ll forgive me.

 

One way they dealt with this exhaustion was to do a kind of second pressing of the institutional pomace.

 

This is what the “fact-checking” glut of the last ten years was. An acknowledgment that the mainstream press, and its always-suspect veneer of post-war Cronkitean neutrality, had fully burned its brand. The hidden premise of all fact-checks is thus “We know you no longer trust the front page, so we’ve created a special new section for printing things that are true.”

 

The same tack is behind the administrative state’s “misinformation” efforts. Because every other organ of the state has exhausted our capacities to believe in or trust them, the hope is to get another ten years or so of order and compliance by specially designating particular agencies as concerned with not telling us lies. 

 

Another way we’ve seen the long march through the institutions get longer still is by its reaching farther afield. There used to be a time when “that stuff” was “only taught in grad schools.” No more. It’s not just the faculty at Yale, but the faculty at your middle school. And even more disastrously — calamitously — it’s not just the humanists and the social scientists. It’s the doctors and the biologists and the (shudder) epidemiologists who have given over their credibility, and quite cheaply, for the chance to be on the right side of history. 

 

Having reached into every corner of the firmament, the movement has turned to the extirpation of undesirables from recently occupied territories. “Cancel culture” is really a kind of special military operation in the longer culture war. It’s the only recourse when unwieldy and dangerous media like the Internet still exist, when there are at this very moment tweets being tweeted without proper supervision.

 

The same impulse is behind the final frontier in the culture war: the redefinition of words. If the medium can’t be controlled, then perhaps the message can be. Perhaps the people you’d like to persuade or seek redress from can be forced into strange semantic inversions and neologisms that rob you of the very language required for dissent. If they cannot compel your silence, they can maybe see to it that when you do speak, nobody important understands you.

 

This last battle reaches so far into our brain stems that it is understandably meeting stiff resistance, and not just from conservatives but from dissenters on the left. Maybe that will be enough to stop it in its tracks. Even if it is, I doubt the respite will be long. Woke never sleeps.