Manias upon Manias

The Rise of the Counter-Woke Collective

For those charting the intellectual mood of the mainline American left, it is hard to avoid sensing that a specter is haunting liberal sensibilities—the specter of wokism. Indeed, a stream of anecdotes highlighting this foreboding development has been frequently relayed and expounded upon in the pages of prestige publications such as The New York Times and The Atlantic. Similarly, The Economist weekly has joined the fray using its September 4 cover to warn of the burgeoning 'illiberal left' and its pernicious designs. It does seem that this term, illiberal, has come to signal an allegiance with a particular form of derision towards contemporary activism while avoiding the more pedestrian (and perhaps Don Jr.-sullied) terms, woke or wokism. Even so, lest we engage in yet another exercise of linguistic sanitization, let us employ the terms woke/wokism since they are the very words that have, for better or not, come to shape and define the debates at hand. In this vein, I hope the reader will allow me to coin just one more derivative term to capture the emergent left-wing-adjacent critique of what they deem to be an 'illiberal' contamination of civil society, namely counter-wokism.

Certainly, this singular term glosses over the diversity of its adherents, from John McWhorter to Anne Applebaum to Bill Mahr to whoever creates The Economist's cover. However, despite these differences, the counter-woke collective shares the view that social and political discourse in the U.S. is being curtailed to appease a rapidly metastasizing mob of woke (or illiberal) activists. As Applebaum surmises in her October 2021 feature in The Atlantic, the illiberal mob is a realm governed by "rapid conclusions [and] rigid ideological prisms" that "favors neither nuance nor ambiguity." Without a doubt, Applebaum's denunciation of "modern mob justice" in her counter-woke manifesto captures the mounting antipathy towards the form and content of left-activism in the internet age. Beyond the well-honed prose one is accustomed to finding in her work, this piece is praiseworthy by dint of its simultaneous invocation of the Puritans, Hawthorn's parable of the Scarlett Letter, Easter European Communist regimes, and Mao's Cultural Revolution in weaving a foreboding tapestry of internet activists gone wild.

Alas, I wish to argue that by adeptly articulating the counter-woke worldview, Applebaum's essay provides a clear explication of its substantial defects. But first, let's briefly recapitulate what I understand to be the core features of her argument. In sum, the forces of an overly reproachful cadre of social activists have seized upon the emergent capacities of social media to shame their targets and cow onlookers. On the whole, these actions cast a pall over civil society and suffocate open discourse. In making her case, Applebaum employs several compassionate, nuanced accounts of those who have faced the wrath of censorious Twitter denizens demanding their pound of retributive flesh. As noted, the most unsettling prospect is that these "genuine victim[s] of modern mob justice" serve as a cautionary tale for onlookers. Applebaum ponders the books that go unpublished or the degree to which "intellectual life is now stifled" more generally for fear that the mob may come for them next.

Although I intend to critique this outlook from several vantage points, it is best to start with the glaring logical contradictions. For example, Applebaum goes to great lengths in her piece to emphasize that none of the individuals in the cases she is highlighting have broken any laws. Indeed, several revealing aspects emanate from this framing. Still, for now, the key issue is that the exact same defense is available to pretty much all of those who have participated in the 'mob-like' behavior that is under scrutiny. More pointedly, while the chief concern voiced in the article is the curtailment of free expression, the main culprit seems to be individuals employing their right to free expression to effectuate change. In this sense, after reading more than a few think pieces in the counter-woke genre, I am always left wondering what exactly they want to see done to combat the problems they identify?

The irony is that one way to effectively stem the tide of internet activism would be to dramatically scale up libel laws, which of course, portends a rather chilling effect on free speech and open discourse. But barring that, speaking out on Twitter or making a poster and hitting the streets remains a perfectly legal and protected utilization of the right to free expression at the center of the counter-woke concerns. What's more, the ability to organize and speak in unison serves as one of the few mechanisms available to the common citizenry to effectuate a genuine response by those who sit atop the social hierarchy's various pinnacles. Now, I do not doubt that Applebaum would voraciously defend the use of free expression in the manner recounted above. And, indeed, this is precisely where the glaring logical pitfalls suffusing the standard liberal counter-woke perspective become readily apparent. To escape this not-so-subtle logical pitfall, we are entreated to co-sign onto Applebaum's pretzel logic that guides us to the validation of the pre-ordained premises. In this sense, even though her essay represents one of the more rhetorically skillful expositions of the counter-woke case, the argument hinges almost entirely on one three-letter word, mob—a word that is as politically fraught as it is imprecise. Undoubtedly, words like mob derive their efficacy as tools of political suasion precisely from their chameleon-like nature. Though the specter of the mob is deployed in a wide range of rhetorical contexts depending on the ideological valence of those employing it, what does unify its panoply of invocations is the intimation of danger born from the suspension of critical faculties.

In this sense, the mob and the attendant notion of 'mob psychology' speak to our everyday intuitions about human behavior while at the same time alluding to a mystical force that temporarily transposes a collection of individuals into a unitary corpus. Notably, the specific line demarcating a more 'acceptable' collective political action (what some people may call a protest) from a mob seems quite tricky, if not impossible, to draw with any precision. Indeed, as we witnessed during the direct action in response to the murder of George Floyd, locating a collective political activity on the mob/protest axis often merely functions as a proxy for one's political inclinations. From this vantage point, Applebaum's continuous employment of the term mob (a total of 17 times in all, including the derivations: office mob, peer-group mob, angry mob, social media mob, online mob, internet mob, mob justice, etc.) constitutes not only a political determination but an intellectual and ethical judgment on the standing the activists she in engaging with. For casting them as mobs expels them from the domain' civil discourse' which Applebaum and her counter-woke cohort have anointed themselves the defenders of.

Thus, on the one hand, it is clear that Applebaum finds a certain form of speech objectionable and antithetical to what she sees as a commodious public discourse. On the other hand, and somewhat paradoxically, this defense of free speech involves sullying certain instantiations of these rights through association with religious dogmatists and murderous authoritarian regimes. However, it is amid this contradiction where the word mob, and all that it connotes, comes to the rescue in Applebaum's effort to sidestep this logical conundrum. For if the interlocutor is an irrational (and hence irredeemable) mob rather than a collection of individuals who feel strongly about something and thus compelled to act, then the act of branding them with the Scarlet M (for mob) works to preclude the need for any substantive engagement. And this leads us to an equally potent element of Applebaum's mode of argumentation. The examples she builds around are filtered through the eyes and experiences of individuals who were targeted and significantly affected by internet activism.

When the story of almost any individual is conveyed with texture and nuance and juxtaposed to a 'mob' it is hardly surprising that it tends to evince sympathy for the former and loathing for the latter. Put differently, one framing is humanizing in the very way that the other is dehumanizing. However, how would things look if we could better apprehend the motivations and rationales underpinning the individual constituents of these 'mobs'? What if we were to allow for the same depth and nuance in understanding their feelings and experiences? Of course, we cannot say that this would necessarily sway someone's opinion in one direction or another. However, I do think that providing a more expansive space for explanation would strongly vitiate against the simplistic reduction of the individuals involved to undifferentiated elements of a ravenous mob. Is not the lack of nuance one of the major complaints that Applebaum lodges at the mobs she chastens?

At this juncture, we arrive at one of the more troublesome facets of Applebaum's essay and the tenor of the counter-woke collective more generally. At the heart of Applebaum's clarion call to rebuff the dictates of the mob is a deep concern about the rise of self-censorship. Indeed, this is the very aspect of her account that functions as the hinge to smuggle in the allusions to some of the twentieth century's most abhorrent regimes to bolster her claims. In this way, we are asked to consider how the conditions cultivated by the mob may serve to stifle intellectual activity for fear of its censure. In a dramatic, if somewhat awkward, narrative apex, the experiences of a scholar in Turkey are repurposed to the American context to induce our consideration of how many manuscripts lay in desk drawers effectively furloughed by ever­ looming censure of the rapacious mob.

This hypothetical intimates that the work of 'great intellects' is being muzzled by the base inclinations of the mob. But again, one is left wondering about the individuals constituting these mobs. Setting aside for the moment what we may personally feel about the merit of the cause or action being advanced, what should these actors (or activists) do if they feel a specific action or behavior warrants some form of censure or sanction. Should they (metaphorically) bury their feelings in a desk drawer? Does anyone who participates in an action that coincides with what Applebaum labels as 'mob-like' stand guilty of collaboration with the mob, regardless of their specific actions or intent? Who or what specifically renders judgment upon what constitutes a legitimate collective political action versus those who are worthy of denigration and dismissal as a mob?

These questions point to the slippery nature of the arguments advanced by Applebaum along with her fellow counter-woke luminaries. To be clear, I do not deny that there are social phenomena worthy of the label mobs or that these collectivities can engender individuals to act in rash and even violent ways fueled by the behavioral license such agitated collectives seem to grant. However, as argued above, it is equally valid that branding a collective political action as a mob serves to delegitimize it as out of bounds and thus not even worthy of considering its aims or the merit of the specific grievances put forth.

To demonstrate the counter-woke perspective's logical paucity, let's turn to one of the specific examples cited in Applebaum's piece, the case of the comments by a faculty member at Georgetown Law School that were captured on a Zoom session recording after the class was finished. Ultimately the actions led by student organizations resulted in several faculty members involved being removed from their positions at the school or resigning. Now, again, for the sake of homing in the issues at hand, let's all agree to put aside what we feel about the professors' actions, or the consequences meted out, and turn our attentions to whether or not this represents the furtherance of mob justice as characterized by Applebaum.

In this light, the crucial question becomes whether we find it unreasonable that students at Georgetown Law, and Black students, in particular, could have come to a reasonable conclusion that they did not want the institution they attend to continue employing a faculty member who expressed their continual 'disappointment' in the quality of Black students in her classes. Put differently, is collective political action calling for their termination only possible in the context of a feverous mob? Further, to return to a point raised earlier, do ALL the participants in the actions calling for the faculty members' removal bear responsibility for ALL the activities employed by others involved in attaining similar objectives? But again, the individual students of Georgetown Law are not granted the same texture nor given the space to explain why exactly they believe that the faculty members in question should be removed from their positions at the school.

Applebaum certainly could have reached out to the Georgetown Law Black Law Students Association (who headed up efforts to have the faculty members in question investigated), affording them the same nuance bestowed upon those she ordained as the rightfully aggrieved. Or she could have talked to Black alums such as Tiffany Wright, a former Supreme Court clerk and current co-director of the human and civil rights clinic at Howard University's law school, who was quoted in a March 11, 2021, Washington Post article saying, "I can't say I was surprised by it... there is sort of this perception [in academia and in practicing law] that maybe the Black folks, like, we just don't belong." Dr. Wright hardly comes across as someone who is part of a ravenous mob, but rather a frustrated individual who sees this incident as inexorably linked to her wider experiences as a Black woman in the legal profession. Of course, this does not mean that one is not free to take a different view, but I think it does demonstrate how these anecdotes may come across somewhat differently if we peel off the protective layer of the mob label and see the individuals beneath it.

Instead, they are collapsed into the unitary variable, mob, and all the attendant pathologies carried with it. Though I doubt these are Applebaum's specific intentions, her arguments tend towards a high-handed dismissal of large swaths of individuals. Philosophically, the essay's tenor emotes Nietzsche's notion of a 'slave morality' whereby the great are cowed and restrained by the constrictive, arbitrary ethical chains hoisted upon them by the mediocre masses. Towering intellects succumb to the base and unruly passions of the public and their mobs as they self-censor—leaving great intellectual tomes in the drawer and depriving the world of their creative output.

Winnowed down to its essence, the heart of the matter resides in power, expressions of power, and verdicts regarding the ethical bearings of such actions. Firstly, it is essential to reiterate that collective political action is generally the sole recourse for those who lack the power and social standing to effectuate meaningful change through individual initiative. As noted, I have no doubt that Applebaum and the other counter-woke partisans fully endorse the employment of collective political action in seeking to redress some wrong or injustice. As such, the real rub lies in different ethical valuations regarding what exactly constitutes a 'wrong' or 'injustice' and perhaps more importantly, what sanction, if any, befits something deemed a transgression. From what I can gather in reading a great deal of burgeoning counter-woke canon it seems that there is some clear qualitative distinction between righteous indignation and overheated caustic vengefulness. But at the same time, what specific elements determine which bucket a collective political action falls into comports with the classic dictum of ad­ hocery, "I'll know it when I see it."

From here, we can peel back a few more layers and bore further into the counter-woke worldview. To this end, Applebaum's handling of these issues is further revealing in several important and interlocking ways. First, her essay continually points to the lack of 'due process' and the fact that 'no laws were broken' in the instances she highlights. In terms of the 'legalistic' framing, we just end up back on the same logical merry-go-round. It seems indisputable that there is a litany of 'legal' actions that would be widely considered as grounds for dismissal from one's job—even amongst the ranks of the counter-woke collective. So once again, the real crux of the matter resides in a judgement about what distinguishes offenses warranting dismissal and those that do not.

This observation brings us to the matter of 'due process.' Here I must confess some genuine confusion. If the chief concern is centered on the ability for employers to arbitrarily dismiss workers with little or no substantive cause—save for the whims of the employer's utility calculus—then I would say welcome to the U.S. political economy. Certainly, someone as sophisticated and politically astute as Applebaum realizes that thousands of U.S. workers are summarily dismissed from their jobs every year. Further, in most of these instances, the notion of due process, or a right to it, would be absent from the proceedings. To this, we can add the thousands of workers who have their schedules and hours altered weekly with nary a thought of ‘due process.’ Lest you think I am jumping domains and simply reverting to a base set of class politics to besmirch Applebaum or the counter-woke cohort, I contend that these simple facts about the U.S. labor market are highly germane to the discussion at hand.

Though indeed what tends to be labeled 'neoliberal' policies have worked to roll back labor protections around the globe, the U.S. remains an outlier (particularly among OECD economies) in terms of the dearth of protections afforded to employees. A large swath of workers in the U.S. has little or no right to ‘due process’ when being laid off. Now for individuals in the kinds of positions that Applebaum's essay highlights, there is a professional etiquette that tends to assume that termination should only be the outcome of a process that involves some right to 'due process.' Thus, rather than being simply a rhetorical cudgel, there is indeed a distinctive class element to the way Applebaum's, and similar pieces evince an indignity that the arbitrary and feckless behavior of employers vis-a-vis their workers can and does happen to 'people like them.' Further, it strikes me as instructive that the focus of the ire tends to be trained on the 'mob' or, in other words, people who lack to social power to effectuate change through individual action-or a platform with millions of readers such as The Atlantic or The New York Times.

And from my perspective, this encapsulates the errant path of the counter-woke offensive. To be honest, part of the issue is that it is not at all clear what end the counter-woke path is advancing towards. Is it an exercise of reverse shaming? Are they calling on employers to protect workers? Are they simply aghast that learned, professional people are also becoming grist for the mill that debases and chews up countless workers each year? It seems to me that regardless of which it is, or if it is some mix of them, the tactics employed—i.e., reducing your presumed opponents to a heedless mob devoid of substance and thus induced to act by mere virtue signaling—is hardly a far cry from the types of summary degradation the counter-woke collective claims to abhor. What's more, if the concern is with arbitrary dismissal, why not focus on a total overhaul of the wholly inhumane institution of 'at will' employment that would do a great deal of social good and indeed would also protect the counter-woke collective's professional friends and colleagues much more than the clearly thin reed of a good faith commitment to 'due process' on the part of employers.

Lastly, what strikes me most is that Applebaum is ultimately making an ethical argument in favor of mercy, understanding, and forgiveness but couches her claims in legalisms such as 'due process' or drawing overwrought (to the point of absurdity) comparisons to Stalinist campaigns to silence enemies of the state. In fact, in terms of extending mercy, forgiveness, and understanding to others, I am fully on board. And indeed, I do see an overly censorious society as a problem that needs to be considered in tandem with genuine efforts to recognize, understand, and incorporate voices that have long been (and sadly in many ways still are) systemically silenced in the public discourse. But that needs to come through engagement with these emergent voices and younger generations rather than excommunicating them from the realm of rational discourse with terms like 'mob'. Indeed, one of the chief limitations of the type of Liberal Enlightenment views (to which the high-brow barb of illiberal is supposed to stand in contrast to) that undergird the counter-woke program is avoiding direct engagement with ethical and moral considerations in the name of a more 'rational' legalistic discourse. To my mind, this excision of a pointed moral discourse has far more to do with the current convulsions Applebaum documents than the 'mobs' she places at the center of her critiques.

As Iris Murdoch poignantly observed in a 1959 essay, "It is dangerous to starve the moral imagination of the young." In this way, Applebaum and others' retreat to a high ground of legalism and process coupled with the avoidance of the extremely complicated ethical questions involved only further inflames the very social disquietude they wish to tamp down. An ethics­ centered discourse that unflinchingly wades into the borderlands between universalism and relativism presents a far more complex terrain but one that would allow for a more fruitful engagement. I would not be so naive as to assume such a shift would hasten some new era of total reconciliation and unity. Nonetheless, I am confident that it would produce more light than heat. As with ethics, politics in motion tends to reside in some netherworld betwixt accommodating pluralism and confrontational righteousness. Perhaps the counter-woke collective can use their lofty positions in our public dialogue to explore the genuine difficulty in trying to make these contradictory impulses coalesce. Of course, this would entail a politics of humility, something that seems in short supply across all gradations across the woke-spectrum.

note: post-image is AI generated

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-Kevin