The Intuitiveness of the "Go Woke, Go Broke" View

Writing about the "Go woke, go broke" view I have tended to emphasize the difficulties of making a really robust judgment about the matter one way or the other--because of the problems one faces in defining key terms, the uncertain standard by which to judge the commercial success or lack thereof of particular pop cultural products, the difficulty of explaining commercial success and failure. Yet it seems only fair to acknowledge that the idea is for at least far from implausible reasons highly intuitive for some. One reason is that, if as many observers of the matter (correctly) do, they identify "wokeness" with championing particular identity politics in opposition to the position and claims of the White, male, and cisgendered/heterosexual, it is the case that some 98 percent of the U.S. population identifies itself as a member of at least one of the three aforementioned categories. To "go woke" is therefore to put oneself in opposition to nearly all of the country's population in some degree. The other is the confidence in the discipline of the market, in which the Consumer is supposed to be King and those who defy his Majesty promptly punished.

However, against these two factors there are three others. One is that if 98 percent of the population is White, male and/or cisgendered/heterosexual not quite a third are all three--leaving a vast gray area in between, to which particular attitudes out of the grab-bag of them that is the far from monolithic wokeness may appeal. (That gender is an area where wokeness has been more resilient than ethnicity, for example, certainly reflects demographic realities and all the weight with which that endows some interests as against others.) Another is that attitudes about these matters are uneven across the population as a whole, with popular culture paying much more attention to the opinions of some parts of the population than others--with class relevant here, and the petty bourgeois setting the tone, particular the "upper middle class" petty bourgeois of the big urban centers, especially those to be found along the coasts. Exposed to postmodernist ideas as a matter of course during the college education that is a near prerequisite for membership in that stratum; priding themselves on their (supposed) urbanity and cosmopolitanism and tolerance as setting them apart from working people, such that the display of certain prejudices is socially gauche; and in the combination of conformism and frustration to which that stratum is notoriously prone attracted to the weaponization of race and gender where this can seem an asset in the struggle for the "success" they worship (indeed, this group famously identity-obsessed); the petty bourgeois sees in it advantage in accommodating themselves to it. Finally there is the plain and simple reality that if orthodox economists hear the music of the spheres in their textbook notions of how markets work these have little to do with the reality in which human beings actually live, the Consumer not King, but rather taking what Big Business wants to sell them, take it, or take it. Indeed, one finds that economists' conceptions work especially poorly in an area like culture, for many reasons--with movies one of them, for if you walk out of a movie hating it, the studio has got its money, if you complain online you only give them free publicity, and if your spouse or your children want to see it again, or get it on video, or buy the merchandise, or even drag you to the sequel, well, your reaction does not decide your exercise of your purchasing power in the tidy fashion associated with the rational individual actor readily able to act in line with their satisfactions or lack of same.

The result is that one can go woke, offend many, and still not go broke--and that often enough to cloud the discussion so that people can keep on tearing at each other over it online forever. Which is, of course, exactly the job that the whole mess we call the "culture war" has been meant to do from the start--one it has never done so effectively as its champions would like (as election after election reminds us, "It's the Economy, Stupid" when push comes to shove--always) still effectively enough to mean a good deal less discussion of all those things that really matter, the more easily in that discussing them with any intelligence requires a good deal of thinking and learning that isn't going on when instead people are screaming their "subjective" reactions at each other in that way any intelligent person can only find a bore.