How Wokeness Ends

Not with a bang. With an army of grinning goblins.

Sometimes you just have to quote Freddie deBoer because lord can that man turn a phrase. His latest, on how wokeness ends and who brings all this censorious nonsense to its knees, is one such piece. Short, evocative and brilliant.

Freddie notes that while the current woke (antiracism/socjus) movement has a “chokehold” on society, that won’t always be the case.

“There is no hope for reform in the expected manner,” he writes, “no chance that billowing Republicans or whining liberals or antique Marxists like me will talk the world out of it, will convince elite society to believe in freedom and nuance and forgiveness again. That will not occur.”

But—there is always a but!—there is a second hidden war being waged that will continue to heat up and intensify in the coming years. It’s not ideological, either. It’s simply human nature to bristle at scolds and to chafe at political correctness.

Quoth Freddie:

There is a second front in this war, a hidden battlefield on which the social justice movement is slowly losing to the forces of… not liberalism, not reaction, not conservatism, not civil liberties, not plain ol’ common sense, but anarchy, resistance, revulsion towards piety, the desire for revenge, the death drive, animal spirits, the id, the unheimlich, Jungian impulse, and most of all utter and total moral exhaustion. These are chip chip chipping away at the arrogant command of our moral betters. There are forces arrayed against the piety and vengefulness of social liberalism that cannot possibly meet it on the open field but which every day wage guerilla warfare and, slowly, the great shaggy beast is bleeding out, that creature of preening righteousness slowly crippled by its hubris and arrogance. What looks like the inevitable and impregnable demands of history right now will look in time like the decaying aristocratic mores they are. An army of grinning goblins marches against the woke, and they take up their knives and syringes with glee while the forces of social justice trudge on, miserable, one more joyless day after another, hating themselves and each other. I am not saying the forces of opposition are good; they are, indeed, bad by their elementary nature. But still, in the conflict ahead I have my money on chaos, the ever-turning gyre, and the will to disobey. Tomorrow will not be like today, and the ones who now indict the unclean and issue verdicts and dole out punishments and deny every application for parole will wake up one day and wonder where it all went wrong. The witching hours approaches, the rabbis will be chased from the temple, and no one can say how the wheel will spin. Take shelter and tremble, or better yet, enjoy.

This is why I subscribe to Freddie. Well, one reason anyways. This passage is so imagistic, its words leaping and careening like the “army of grinning goblins” he describes. Also “unheimlich” was not in my lexicon before today. That’s a good one.

You can subscribe to Freddie’s Substack here. He, rather humorously, tops his post with an image of Alex Jones.