Last line of pretence

How sanctimony undermines the anti-woke resistance

Photo by Jon Tyson on Unsplash

By Anonymed (an anonymous Canadian Doctor)

In the great after-school special, Sabrina The Teenage Witch, the title character’s nemesis is highschool cheerleader Libby Chessler, a mean girl who torments Sabrina on a daily basis. In one episode, Sabrina has had enough and decides to use her witch magic to turn Libby into a school nerd. She believes showing Libby what it's like at the bottom of the social pecking order will induce some empathy for those she spends so much time dismissing. But something unexpected happens. Libby rallies the bullied to become the new bullies. She mocks the popular girls for being stupid and superficial and insecure. She knows where and how to hit them. All those personality quirks that brought her to the top of the heap as a preppy cheerleader are used to turn the tables on that same clique. The lesson (the show has so many!) is that people don’t really change, only their circumstances. It wasn’t social status that made Libby a mean girl. It was being a mean girl that facilitated her social status.

“That’s quite a segue,” as Jordan Peterson might say, but for a long time I’ve been bothered by the fact that, especially in Canada, much of the anti-woke resistance is fronted by disaffected members of the political Left. It’s not that the right is inherently good or that I wouldn't have placed myself in the left-wing camp at various points in my life. It’s that those characteristics that accompany lifelong leftism - utopianism, moral gatekeeping, emotional reasoning and the like - tend to persist no matter their relative position on the political spectrum. I dislike, for instance, the habit of trumpeting left-wing bona fides as a precursor to criticizing the destructive tendencies of that very ideology. How many times have you read (or said) something to the effect of: “I’m a lifelong progressive and I think X about the woke movement”…or, “my whole life has been dedicated to left-wing causes, and now I’m being called a white supremacist,” and so on. In this worldview, the Woke have bastardized leftist principles. Disaffection thus comes not from a recognition that perhaps the original philosophical premise was, to borrow a phrase, problematic, but rather that the political earth itself has shifted. 

This mindset is well-illustrated by a popular anti-Woke Twitter-meme. Created (I think) by activist and biologist Colin Wright, the cartoon features a bewildered left-of-centre stick figure looking on helplessly as the political spectrum shifts under his stick feet. The new normal places this figure firmly on the right, condemned as a bigot and monster by his former peers, despite the fact that his ideological position has remained the same. There is some truth to this of course, but it’s still a touch self-regarding. It implies that such people were right then and right now - that they’re the good guys - it’s just that the world has gone mad. The fact that they were of the left to begin with (many, I might add, at a time when their tribe had already lost most of its mind) is never questioned too deeply. The possibility that they might have been wrong all along, and are just getting things right this time by accident, doesn’t seem to feature. There is no real self-critique, or even reflection, about their own (possible) permissiveness in bringing about our current situation.

The present political landscape is full of paradoxes. I know I’m not the only one unnerved by the fact that Glen Greenwald (who previously included the Islamist Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) in his list of favourite organizations) is now considered an honest interlocutor and championed as a brave truth-teller. Heinous anti-West figures like Julian Assange and (alleged) traitor Edward Snowden are venerated. Cries of “Bush lied” and passing reference to the WMD canard, once the province of the Left, now routinely come from the “new” right. It’s disorienting when those who were for years steeped in the quasi-conspiracy theories of one side of the political spectrum are now doing the same thing from the other end. To my mind, the likes of Bret Weinstein, David Rubin, Tim Pool and other ex-Lefist internet personalities haven’t really changed their minds so much as applied their same flawed paradigm to a new reality. There are things I like about all of them, but I still see their thinking as skewed in the same way it always was, it’s just that now instead of Mother Jones, they read The Post Millennial.

I suppose it isn’t surprising. Basic human psychology suggests we are evolutionarily predisposed to center ourselves in the universe. We forgive ourselves for things we indict others for. We attribute our failures to external forces and our successes to internal ones. We retroactively rose-ify difficult or terrible things, at different times making ourselves the hero or the victim, but rarely the villain. We are all the stars of our own little movies. No one wants to admit not just that they got it wrong, but that they shouldn’t have - that the evidence was right in front of their face.

A few months ago, an MD/PhD student and Twitter personality named Kevin Bass published an article in Newsweek saying he was wrong about COVID policy. He spoke of the callousness of lockdowns toward the poor and toward children, and the arrogance and insolence of our medical bureaucracies. It was a decent piece, and I agreed with much of it. But by his own admission, Bass was a “COVIDian” (a stupid term for people who thought Covid was worse than airborne AIDS) throughout the pandemic, only coming to his heterodox realization as it waned. This suggests that when people were losing their careers for suggesting a less draconian response to the virus and vaccines, he was on the side of the hall monitors in the medical and public health bureaucracy. Given how entrenched COVID craziness is, I’m sure he still takes a lot of guff for his newfound positions, but it feels a little like cake-and-eat-it-too-ism. 

Similarly, the same Colin Wright mentioned above once recounted how, in 2015, after listening to Douglas Murray mock the narcissism of the gender-fluid types in a podcast with Sam Harris, he wrote an open letter criticizing Harris for failing to rebut Murray’s bigotry. He was self-deprecating about it, so I’ll give him that, and it’s certainly ironic given his position at the forefront of the “gender critical” movement, but this was 2015 - we were well (well!) down the rabbit hole by that point, even with respect to the trans issue. There was no good reason to think, ever, that it was reasonable to puberty-block minors based on a subjective perception, or that self-ID had any actual epistemological standing - and this had been going on for years. Anyone paying attention knew this. And so, while I have every respect for some of the same people I’m castigating here, when people cite 2015 (let alone 2021!) as their Damascene year, my feathers get a little ruffled.

Even the way in which such people admit they were wrong suggests they have convinced themselves they were wrong for good reason, or were misled, or have now seen the light because they are in some way special. The underlying message is that they are honest, truth-seeking, and should thus be trusted going forward. No one ever suggests that perhaps they were willfully blind and that, just maybe, their judgment ought to be questioned now and in the future. No matter how hard they try, there is a tone of voice they cannot shake. They still think they’re on the right side of history. They still think that such Trotskyist phrases have purchase.

Since the early 2000s it has been, I think, perfectly clear that the left in the western world was morphing into an authoritarian parody of a progressive movement. There are nuances therein, but for my entire adult life (and a bit before) the Left, broadly speaking, has been engulfed in identity politics, hostile to debate, and generally in favour of undermining the moral standing of the West. I am grateful to all those who have refused to follow the herd off the post 2020 cliff, but I dare say, since I started the metaphor, that if you jumped out of the car a mere fifty feet before the cliff, you probably had some role in planning the trip.

This may all sound like unnecessary friendly fire. Maybe it’s even a little uncouth. Sorry about that. My only point is that old habits are hard to shake, and smugness is unhelpful. Additionally, if people are willing to play the game on the left’s terms, then the game is over before it begins. The reality that someone was a progressive before they were mugged by reality isn’t a sign of virtue, and certainly says nothing about whether or not their new compass is properly calibrated. To be mugged by reality implies that prior to an awakening, they were not living in actual reality. This sounds a little like the “woke” epiphanies we have heard so much about, and, as always, there is a tendency for the zeal of the new paradigm to replace the old. The new one might be closer to the truth, but believing the right things for the wrong reasons is a liability. At best, the leftists now resisting wokeism with such energy are good comrades(?) who happened to be a little late to the party. At worst they are partly responsible for the kind of mayhem we have all endured and are continuing to endure. They are here to rescue the lot of us from the flames they themselves once fanned.

I will leave you with a reference to my beloved Israel. For months now there has been unrest in the country over judicial reforms proposed by the (new) Netanyahu government. For those unaware, Netanyahu was Israel’s longest-serving head of state, and is again at the helm. Over the years, with each successive election, Netanyahu (in many ways a liberal in the classical sense of the term) made peace with elements of the (far-ish) right in order to form coalition governments. But his most recent campaign went further - uniting with some truly zealous elements on the Israeli political fringe. It could be that he was so ostracized and defamed that he felt he had no choice but to do so, but there is also a common sense (from left-leaning commentators, mind you) that this was strategic. According to such commentators, Netanyahu has partnered with more extreme elements on purpose because, as a relative centrist and pragmatist, he is far preferable to the rabble rousers behind him. He will get his way, the theory goes, because he has made himself the last line of defense against right-wing zealots in the Knesset. He has positioned himself as the guardian of sanity, and pity the fool who would indict or otherwise try to remove him.

Left-wing anti-woke types are no Netanyahu. I don’t think there is anything strategic about their sanctimony. But their behaviour too often takes the posture that they are holding the line - that they are the good kind of “anti-woke brigade”. Those crazy conservatives are always banging on about black crime and the transgenders and the Muslims and the gays and the foreigners. But, look, the good guys are also concerned, and this should concern you, the moderates. Never mind that sane conservatives have been pointing out “woke” absurdities and contradictions for decades - they were likely doing it out of bigotry. We are doing it for the right reasons. We care.

Given my thesis, I’m tempted to tell you I’m not a conservative so that perhaps my own concerns will be heeded. But I won’t. I shall remain mysterious. I will say though that I think the broadest possible coalition is needed to beat back this menace. The anti-woke tent is a big one, so welcome, even if you were born yesterday. But you are not the last line of defense. The tent existed long before you, and there is no honour in pretending you helped erect it (he said erect). By all means call out genuine bigots (left or right) who would try to attach themselves to the resistance. But standing guard with halo in hand helps no one. #solidarity.

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Thanks for reading. For more from this author, read The Sun-docs and The Smoggies

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