I came across this essay by N.S. Lyons and it took me a minute to realize that it was a reprint from three years ago on his Substack. Yet after all that time and all that has happened (and is happening) it remains as timely as ever.
Why?
As Lyons writes in his editor’s note to the reprint:
Today, with the second Trump administration in power, we have seen a sledgehammer taken to those DEI programs, as well as other manifestations of wokeness such as transgender mania. Again, many observers are pronouncing the demise of the revolution. It is always dangerous to declare victory prematurely, while the enemy can yet strike back.
Much, it is true, has changed; but much remains the same. The original essay lists twenty different reasons to be skeptical of the sudden demise of wokeness. Of those, several, including the observation that woke racial bookkeeping was effectively required by law (#15), that it maintained control of all the levers of power within government (#19), and that government was intent on leveraging the ideology to expand its bureaucratic power (#20), have perhaps now been largely overturned. But others, such as the observation that wokeness functions as a pseudo-religion that fills a spiritual and communal void in our culture, or that the “overproduction” of college-educated elites makes our society particularly susceptible to radicalization, seem as relevant as ever.