Faulty reasoning signals

• Confirmation Bias - 2.7% (9 hits)
• Anchoring Bias - 0%
• Availability Heuristic - 13.7% (45 hits)
• Representativeness Heuristic - 6.4% (21 hits)
• Hindsight Bias - 5.2% (17 hits)
• Overconfidence Bias - 5.5% (18 hits)
• Framing Effect - 10.7% (35 hits)
• Loss Aversion - 0%
• Status Quo Bias - 0%
• Sunk Cost Effect - 0%
• Optimism Bias - 0%
• Pessimism Bias - 0%

Article text

The Destructivists: Wokeism Turns to System Destruction

In February 2022, Tyler Cowen made a prediction that sounded premature to many people: wokeism had peaked.

At the time, this seemed far from obvious.

The elite institutions most associated with wokeness as a kind of new moral politics—universities, media organisations, nonprofits, foundations, publishing houses, museums, professional associations, and large corporations—still seemed firmly under its grip.

DEI bureaucracies were still expanding.

"Cancellations" still carried real social and professional force.

Corporate America still spoke the language of "equity" with missionary confidence. 

In Cowen's original 2022 formulation, he suggested that the movement would survive as a subculture: educated, affluent, disproportionately white, and institutionally influential.

But no longer commanding the country’s morality.

The pendulum, he thought, had begun to swing.

School-board revolts, growing impatience with cancellations, the backlash to progressive overreach and lawlessness in cities like San Francisco and Los Angeles, and the sheer unattractiveness of the movement’s cultural style all suggested that wokeism had passed its high-water mark. 

Four years later, in <em>The Free Press</em>, Cowen returned to the subject with a darker twist.

In retrospect, he was right that wokeness was peaking.

DEI retreated in many institutions.

Universities became more cautious.

The public appetite for cancellation declined.

Trump defeated Kamala Harris, and the Trump administration moved aggressively against DEI and affirmative-action-style policies.

Elon Musk’s purchase of Twitter, now X, shifted one of the central arenas of elite discourse sharply rightward.

But the successor to wokeism is not socialism, at least not in any classical sense.

Socialism wanted to reorganise society—often disastrously—but it did want to organise it.

It had a programme: who should own the factory, how production should be planned, how economies should be structured.

The new radical mood is different.

It has little interest in designing a replacement order—its instinct is punitive and obstructive.

The danger now is what I would call <em>destructivism</em>: the belief that the most necessary form of political action is to destroy the systems one regards as oppressive.