The Economist and “Wokeness”

The September 4^th issue of The Economist has an editorial (“leader”) and article on “the threat from the illiberal left” in the United States. These articles are particularly irritating because they exaggerate the influence of the far left in the U.S., buy into the right’s hysteria about wokeness, and minimizes by implication the real threat to liberal democracy from the far right, both in the U.S. and in Europe.

The editorial, while putting forth high-minded ideals of “classical liberals” (with which I agree), is amazingly fact free in making its case for its subtitle – “ Don’t underestimate the danger of left-leaning identity politics.” The article in the “Briefing: the illiberal left” – “Out of the Academy: How did a loose set of radical idea leap from campus to American life? – is a mishmash of ideas and facts. It is difficult to discern a coherent argument.

The article appears to be mainly a complaint about an emphasis, misguided in its estimation, on diversity in academic faculties and the media and implies that systemic racism is not the problem that some think it is. It also posits that “special favors” for the systemically disadvantaged is not good policy, but it assumes that is obvious rather than making an argument for this point of view. It also does not seem happy with efforts of corporations to deal with racism and gender discrimination, without ever quite saying why this is wrong.   

The article begins and ends with the San Francisco School Board, which is an easy target. The Board’s effort to rename schools were widely derided, and no less a liberal than Laurence Tribe joined a legal effort to stop the Board. It so happens that Mr. Tribe, a retired Harvard Law School professor, attended Lincoln High School in San Francisco and objected to it being renamed. The mayor of San Francisco, an African-American woman by the name of London Breed, also criticized the School Board for focusing on renaming schools which were empty due to the pandemic rather than figuring out how to get the schools reopened. At one point the City and County of San Francisco was threatening to sue the school board because of its slowness in reopening the schools.

While San Francisco is hardly the obvious pick for demonstrating a political trend in the U.S., the example does not work. The article admits that at the end, when it notes: “There are some signs of a backlash. Three members of San Francisco’s board of education, including its president, are under threat of a recall election.” Then the article concludes: “however, the underlying engine—the questionable ideas of some academics, and the generational change they are rendering—is not shutting off. America has not yet reached peak woke.”

The article does not make a case that the ideas of the academics are dangerous or even describe in any detail what they are. It also does not make the case that left-wing academics are having an increased role in making public policy. Why the writer or writers think that the U.S. “has not yet reached peak woke,” whatever that is, remains, as math textbooks annoyingly often say, an exercise left to the reader.

While the author(s) of this article seem unhappy at what they perceive to be a left-wing turn in public discourse, they might usefully look at the New York Times nonfiction bestseller list, on which right-wing books are well represented. They might also consider the popularity of Fox News and its current brightest star, Tucker Carlson.

Yes, the American left sometimes has crazy ideas and demonstrates political stupidity. That does not mean that it poses any real danger to liberal democracy at the current juncture, though, it admittedly may make certain people in certain milieus uncomfortable. One suspects that is the case with those responsible for this article. The real danger to liberal democracy in the U.S., as it has been in the past (remember the Palmer Raids or the McCarthy era?), is from the right not the left, as anyone who has been paying attention should know, though I continue to be optimistic that the current influence of the right will fade in time.

The problem for The Economist in publishing silly articles such as these is that it hurts its credibility. The U.S. is its biggest market; its American circulation is larger than that of the U.K. While many subscribers probably may be more interested in its foreign coverage, which is not easily found elsewhere, simplistic, biased, and poorly argued articles about the U.S. may create some skepticism about the fairness of articles about less familiar parts of the world.