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ArticleEconomist: America is becoming less “woke”
Link: https://www.economist.com/briefing/2024/09/19/america-is-becoming-less-woke
(Sorry not sure how to share an archive link? - wayback machine seems to not show the whole thing)
It's a really interesting article, it looks at metrics of 'woke' discourse (including, but not focused on, gender woo), and a whooooollle lot of proxies (journal references, media references, television transcripts, calls for academic cancellation, DEI policies from universities and corporations), and by all of them 'woke' (not just the word itself but concepts associated with it) experienced a sharp uptick around 2015, and peaks around 2021 and has been on a gradual decline since.
This is the impression I generally get from vibes...but I try not to trust vibes due to the echo chamber effect.
Now I (like most people on here I imagine), am more interested in 'woke' as it pertains specifically to gender woo. A lot of the article talks about race in the US. It's possible that different themes within the broad tent of 'woke' will live on to different degrees. Although I made a previous post about trends in polling data on gender woo topics specifically, and they're following the same pattern. The article also cautions that some things may be being discussed less because they're now 'normal', and also that Trump being re-elected could cause a resurgence of left-leaning backlash.
But overall, I'd definitely count this as a positive for people looking for empirical indicators that the fad is dying out. There's a chance in a few decades this'll all look a bit like hippie-ism. Only with more surgery scars and middle-aged women with osteoporosis...