Jamelle Bouie almost never misses. In this video that’s just shy of 10 minutes long, he chastises American political & cultural pundits for their lack of moral seriousness w/r/t their focus on “wokeness” instead of the real harms being done by the authoritarian Trump regime. (And he worked in a reference to Jonathan Frakes saying no.)
I bring this up because this is just a great example of a phenomenon I’ve been struck by over the past year. Which is that, in the midst of a government that is systematically dismantling Americans’ rights, that is systematically dismantling the post-World War II world order, that is systematically tearing apart the social safety net, that is trying to exert nearly totalitarian control over large parts of American life, which is constructing concentration camps and throwing migrants into them, which has killed two Americans on the street and is looking to suppress as much as possible dissent, even bringing the full force of the federal government against people it wrongly accuses of wrongdoing — as we observe all of this, so many of our pundits and professional commentators are still obsessed with people they got mad at in 2020 and 2021.
They are obsessed with fighting the specter of wokeness — whatever that misappropriation of African American vernacular means. They look at overzealous college students, overbearing HR departments, or colleagues who put pronouns in their signatures as tantamount to a Cultural Revolution. And meanwhile, as the Secretary of Defense quite literally purges Black people from the highest reaches of the military, it doesn’t look like anything to them.
They don’t even comment on it. The Republican Party has turned pretty openly against liberal democracy. Republican lawmakers are confirming election deniers to lifetime appointments. They’re nominating election deniers to high-ranking offices like governor. And meanwhile, pundits, reporters, the press — they’re obsessed with “Hey, did Francesca Hong once say that she thought we should cancel Thanksgiving?”
I would note that the free speech absolutists are awfully quiet these days too.
Bouie was reacting specifically to this David Brooks piece and this one from from Ross Douthat (with the amazing titular admission that he can’t tell the good guys from the bad guys these days)1 and possibly this one too. Michael Hobbes has been talking about this on Bluesky as well:
There were excesses in 2020 but they were mostly low-stakes efforts by well-intentioned people to address real injustices.
The excesses of the right during the same era were far more harmful. The reckoning we need now is about how elites lost sight of that.
…
Centrists convinced themselves annoying leftists on twitter were an equivalent threat to Jan 6 insurrectionists. They wildly inflated the threat of left-wing authoritarianism while ignoring how it was taking hold on the right.
Meanwhile, the right never meant any of it. They moaned about “cancellation” for a decade but embarked on mass firings as soon as they took power. They pretended to care about “free speech restrictions” and “educational indoctrination” while embarking on them every chance they got.
The excesses of the Woke 1 era mostly amount to cringe public statements, harmless vocabulary updates and loss of prestige for public figures.
The backlash to Woke 1, on the other hand, is imprisoning dissidents, dismantling public education and eroding democracy. That’s what needs reckoning.
Like many others, I became a little obsessed with Andor over the past few months. I was lukewarm on the first season when it came out, but a pre-s02 rewatch completely changed my tune — I think it’s one of the best things I’ve ever seen on television. Season 2 was almost as good and the whole thing together was really affecting, thought-provoking, and just marvelously well-done.
In this interview with conservative NY Times’ columnist Ross Douthat, series creator Tony Gilroy nails why the show was so interesting:
The five years that I have been given are extremely potent. You have the Empire really closing down, really choking, really ramping up. The emperor is building the Death Star.
They are closing out corporate planets and absorbing them into the state. They are imperialistically acquiring planets and taking what they want. The noose is tightening dramatically.
There still is a Senate. There are senators that are speaking out impotently.
The Senate has been all but completely emasculated by the time this five-year tranche is over.
And there are revolutionary groups, rebellious groups, and people who are acting rebelliously, who wouldn’t even know how to describe themselves as part of any movement. There is a completely wide spectrum of unaffiliated cells and activists that are rising independently across the galaxy.
At the same time, you have a group of more restrained politicians who are trying to make an organized coalition of a rebellion on a place called Yavin, which will end up being the true end of the true victory of the Rebel Alliance.
I wanted to do a show all about the forgotten people who make a revolution like this happen — on both sides — and I want to take equal interest and spend as much time understanding the bureaucrats and the enforcers of the rebellion. I think one of the fascinating things about fascism is that, when it’s done coming after the people whose land it wants and who it wants to oppress and whoever it wants to control, by the time it gets rid of the courts and the justice and consolidates all its power in the center, it ultimately eats its young. It ultimately consumes its own proponents.
The rest of the interview is very much worth a read as well, particularly the bits where, for example, Douthat presses Gilroy on Andor being a “left-wing show”, Gilroy says no, Douthat scoffs, and, sensing Douthat is telling on himself, Gilroy fires back, “Do you identify with the Empire? Do you identify with the Empire?” And Gilroy continues later:
You could say: Why has Hollywood for the last 100 years been progressive or been liberal? I think it’s much larger. I’ll go further and say: Why does almost all literature, why does almost all art that involves humans trend progressive?
Let’s stick with Hollywood. Making a living as an actor or as a writer or a director — without the higher degree of empathy that you have, the more aware you are of behavior and all kinds of behavior, the better you’re going to be at your job. We feed our families by being in an empathy business. It’s just baked in. You’re trying to pretend to be other people. The whole job is to pretend to be other, and what is it like to look from this? People may be less successful over time at portraying Nazis as humans, and that may be good writing or bad writing, and there may be people that have an ax to grind. But in general, empathy is how I feed my family. And the more finely tuned that is, the better I am at my job.
That is what actors do: I’m going on Broadway, I’m playing a villain for six months. I got to live in that. I’m playing the slave, I’m playing the fisherman, I’m playing the nurse, I’m the murderer — you have to get in there. You have to live lives through other people. I think that the simple act of that transformation and that process automatically gives you what I would describe as a more generous and progressive point of view. It just has to.
Like I said, well worth a read/listen. (via sippey)
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