For a while, it seemed reasonable to wonder whether our society had reached peak woke. But what if wokeness comes in waves, and the next one is a riptide? In “The Future of Woke,” the cover story of the new issue of National Review, Noah Rothman sizes up the threat.
“Woke 1 was crazy.” So declared Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez on a Sunday show this summer, setting off something of a reckoning on the left, but also anger. Republicans should never let anyone forget what it was like. Noah writes:
Why should anyone forget the craziness we are now allowed to acknowledge? Perhaps wokeness’s diehards think the backlash against their philosophy is unfair. Maybe those on the left now denouncing wokeness are only going through the motions. Aside from a few examples, we aren’t hearing a lot of regret from the participants in that prolonged moral panic. So how can anyone call woke a thing of the past, as AOC implied? Perhaps she and her compatriots believe that true wokeness has never been tried.
If the activist class acknowledges only that their methods were flawed but insists that their motives were pure, we’re likely to see the phenomenon return in a more bitter, aggrieved, and, ultimately, vindictive form.
And we’ve begun to see it: “The new wokeness is a modern form of a very old radicalism. . . . It has fetishized violence, for example, particularly against what it construes as the symbols of the dominant American political culture. . . . New Woke is a more exclusive club and therefore likely to be a smaller one. But it will not be commensurately less menacing.”
Elsewhere in this issue, in “Your Data Center Life,” Charles C. W. Cooke explains what it is that data centers actually do. He takes us through a typical set of actions that most people perform every day, and he shows us how data centers make it all possible. Americans “expect their entire photo library to survive a lost phone, their documents to appear on whichever computer they happen to be using, and the 107 videos of their child’s first steps to remain available indefinitely.” We speak of “the cloud,” not realizing: data centers.
In a remarkable installment of NR’s Our Spacious Skies feature, “Like It Was, Yesterday,” Vahaken Mouradian visits New York City’s unofficial 9/11 memorials. O’Hara’s is “300 feet from the New York City Fire Department’s Ten House: first among first responders on that Tuesday when our skies fell.” The pub is home to “the book,” an album of “news excerpts and photographs, poems and notes of grief and gratitude: offerings from those who were spared that day or on behalf of those who weren’t.” It’s also where “military badges and emergency crews’ insignia have overgrown the walls, the ceiling”: an homage to the city’s, and our country’s, heroes; an unofficial museum of remembrance and righteous anger. Vahaken’s piece, written for the 25th anniversary, is itself a moving memorial.
And there’s much more in this issue:
- Andrew C. McCarthy, in “The Forgotten Lessons of 9/11,” reminds us why the judiciary is unfit to oversee the nation’s counterterrorism operations.
- Dan McLaughlin recognizes that Richard Nixon was a “brilliant, combative, self-made man.” Still, for conservatives who seek a role model — even by the standards of today’s populist right — “Nixon’s Not the One.”
- Jeffrey Blehar looks ahead to the November midterm elections and predicts a “Red Harvest.”
- Rebeccah L. Heinrichs makes the case for “Weapons of Mass Construction,” arguing that to maintain and, sometimes, use the Arsenal of Democracy is in the national interest.
In this month’s exceptional Books, Arts & Manners section, Roger Berkowitz reviews a new biography of Hannah Arendt. Helena Rosenblatt ponders the future of liberalism alongside Adrian Wooldridge and Daron Acemoglu. Algis Valiunas celebrates the tricentennial of the singular architect John Vanbrugh. Max Skjönsberg revisits David Hume’s essays. Jeremy Black deconsecrates the cult of the overpraised historian Howard Zinn. Our own Philip Klein explains why Rocky, Sylvester Stallone’s big break, still inspires us 50 years after its release. And Giancarlo Sopo makes his debut in the magazine by introducing us to a new documentary on the transcendent beauty of Gothic cathedrals.
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