Your book project is very timely. There are a few others exploring the future of liberalism via conferences, etc. They are struggling, as far as I can tell. I’d welcome the chance to participate in you fall Zoom series. Let me know if I’m the right fit.
I'd also be interested in participating. An interesting book somebody should write would trace the history of the intellectual, strategic, social, political, tactical, ideological and personal connections between the succession of movements of minority groups and others that have been major components of American liberalism, starting, I guess, with African Americans and moving on to Jews, women, Hispanics, Native Americans, gay men and women and, more recently, trans people. The history of each group's struggle is complex and unique, but they have also competed, cooperated, copied, influenced, inspired and fought with each other. They've also done the same with the other major social movements, including the union movement, anti-war movement and now the anti-genocide movement. Both activists and the public sometimes see them as a sort of continuum, as the Trans movement seemed to be a natural development of Gay Liberation, which somehow came out of Women's Liberation which grew from Black Liberation. Seeing them this way, while it can inspire and create solidarity, can also lead to significant wrong turns and miscalculations, both ideological and tactical, as in the transition from Gay Liberation to the Trans Movement. This can hurt the progress individual movements as well as "The Left" as a whole. Anyway, it could be an interesting and useful book, which to my knowledge has not been written. Doing it right would almost certainly be a politically thankless task, but important.
I'm very interested in all that and am thinking one way to parse it and make it more simple is to focus on 1) the underlying political theoretical framing for each different movement or phase of the same movement, and 2) the larger constellation of economic issues and class-based politics and identities each was interpolated with.
For example, the civil rights movement operated within a liberal / humanist / Christian-based framework and attempted (but failed) to align with labor and form an interracial class-based coalition. (At least that is the argument I make in my race and American liberalism book.) BLM, in contrast, operated within a post-modern / Foucaultian / queer theory-based framework and was hostile to old-fashioned class-based politics and primarily aligned with the professional-managerial class (PMC).
In second versus third-wave feminism, which I know less about, it seems like the deeper political framing changed substantially, but the class location remained more PMC. I'd have to research each case more thoroughly to see if this really works, though.
Overall, I'm increasingly think that the roots of wokeism go back to the cultural politics of the New Left in the 1960s. Revisiting the "political correctness" and "tenured radicals" debates of the 1990s, which I completely wrote off as a right-wing nothingburger at the time, in light of what we now know about the evolution of these ideas through the academy and then via the internet out into youth culture, and then society at large, is pretty fascinating.
I'm also interested in participating and find it curious that neither your post nor the linked syllabus provides an opportunity or instruction on how to sign up or express interest.
Yes, my mistake, I was thinking that it would take more repeated prompts and reminders to spark that level of interest. I do have a form pretty much ready to go, though. I'll try to get that up as part of a new post and then edit this one later today or tomorrow. Thanks for your interest! This is a good problem for me to have :)
Hi Carol, I’ve been a paying supporter for quite a while and I’m interested to participate in the autumn discussion group. I have great respect for your insights and the clarity of your thinking.
I’ve reviewed the syllabus. I would hope the discussion group will be empirical and rigorous, not merely theoretical.
You may have seen Marc Andreessen’s recent comments about the malign conjunction of DEI (into which he subsumes fifty years of affirmative action) and immigration. I’m sure you know who the father of his business partner was, and I respectfully suggest you consider adding one of his books to your syllabus as I am sure it will help you answer the very question you are asking.
Thanks for your interest and kind words! Much appreciated.
As far as empirical versus theoretical goes - my main interest is historical, which means trying to process a lot of facts but then simplify them to tell a compelling, yet empirically based story. Doing that requires theory in the sense of clarifying key terms and concepts, and having an intellectual through-line that makes an argument about what is most important and why.
As far as Marc Andreesen goes, I had no idea about this connection, as detailed in my reply to Guy below. Very interesting! I really only know a bit about Andreesen from a few podcasts (I think I saw him on All In?) and reading his "techno-optimist" manifesto (which I wasn't persuaded by, as I have a lot of worries about where technology is taking us). But he's clearly a brilliant guy.
As far as adding things to the syllabus goes, we'll have a group-source recommended readings and resources list for people to add to as they wish. I am trying to keep the suggested readings, videos, etc. on the shorter side as I know people are busy and it's a big ask to read 40 pages of a book like Gerstle's. (Not that it's overly academic, it's not. But it's not light reading, either.)
I used to teach political science at a liberal arts college and love the traditional open discussion-based, "there is no one right answer but there are some that are definitely better than others and some are clearly wrong" approach (which, I think, is pretty hard to find these days). Everyone is free to criticize the text, have different arguments, etc., provided equal grace is given to others to hold different views.
As far as the race, class, and nationality issues exemplified by your linked X post - yes, those are obviously all super-important and should be part of the discussion.
I had no idea either, so asked Google! Here's the result:
##########
AI Overview
Marc Andreessen's most well-known business partner is Ben Horowitz.
Ben Horowitz's father was David Horowitz, an American conservative writer and activist.
David Horowitz was a founder and president of the David Horowitz Freedom Center (DHFC), editor of the Center's website FrontPage Magazine, and director of Discover the Networks, a website that tracks individuals and groups on the political left. He also founded the organization Students for Academic Freedom.
###########
Now, I do know who David Horowitz is, but had absolutely no idea about this connection. Thanks to Chris for the prompt!
Hi Carol and Guy, the AI summary doesn’t do justice to David Horowitz’s outstanding career. He was born to fervently Communist parents in 1934 and initially exemplified the liberal movement that Gerstle analyses in his book (which I will read). From a “scientific” perspective his remarkable journey is highly anecdotal but it’s also powerful and exemplary of the kind of transformation which is the subject of Gerstle’s book. Horowitz bailed out of the Left long before the rise of Clintonian neoliberalism and the betrayal of the working class and the weaponisation of racial differences.
It’s instructive that David Horowitz’s son Ben married an African American woman and with Andreessen became one of the most successful venture capitalists of all time. Their firm could be viewed as an exercise in cynical neo-liberal game-rigging by oligarchs pretending to be adding value, but in the case of Andreessen Horowitz my observation is that they truly are creating wealth, jobs and enhancing the commonweal.
So the arc from David to Ben is a very interesting model, however anecdotal, to consider within the framework of Gerstle’s big-picture analysis.
Obviously you are wise to limit the size and scope of your syllabus, but I thought I’d bring to your attention the remarkable and relevant three generation political evolution of the Horowitz family from Communists to successful and unusually ethical venture capitalists.
Fascinating. I have to admit that I had slotted Horowitz into the "polemicist" box and never actually read one of his books. Which would you recommend? He has a lot.
I always enjoy your work and look forward to each new piece. As a Zimbabwean who has been reading and reflecting on how Americans talk about, theorize, and grapple with the word “woke,” I was especially interested in your references to it in this latest installment. As someone who values history and theory, I am curious about how you are engaging with the concept and tying it to illiberalism and anti‑racial liberalism, both in the American and international context.
Thanks for reading and commenting. While I wasn't aware of the NAACP declaration or the 1962 NYTs article, I have known for quite awhile now that many have seen the term "woke" as part of African American cultural history. And, while I'm no expert, the evidence for that seems convincing.
However, the word has also acquired a new meaning. Basically, it's what people who aren't on board with the shift to what's also been called "critical social justice" have come to call that movement. This seems pretty obviously true by this point.
In part, I think this happened due to a vacuum when it came to naming and discussing what was clearly a powerful new paradigm. Freddie deBoer's short post from 2021 expressing frustration with the dynamic resonated with me: https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/please-just-fucking-tell-me-what
Tellingly, he archived the post because he got too much flak for it.
The experience of seeing anyone who questioned anything about what came to be called "woke" relentlessly attacked in ad hominem ways (and often far worse and more serious ways as well) is central to what many people (including me) have hated about the entire phenomenon. People needed to talk about what was happening despite what were shockingly high levels of intimidation and harassment. And the word "woke" became the only easy way to do that which was widely understood and not overly clunky and complex.
However, the problem is that a term like that only makes sense with a lot of complicated explanations and scaffolding. Without that, no one is going to understand what I mean by it. And that's a big problem if you're hoping to reach a general audience. So, I toggle back and forth between more formal language like "post-liberal progressivism" and the now super-common term "woke" depending on the context and what seems more likely to be accessible to readers within that.
In general, I find that there is a chronic terminology problem when it comes to discussing American politics - just the word "liberal" itself is very confusing, as discussed in my subsequent post. And it takes so much time to explain your terms carefully . . . there's not going to be a whole lot of people interested in that.
At this point, I would suggest that just as we have to differentiate between different ways of understanding the word "liberal" if we want to have an in-depth discussion, we also have to recognize that the word "woke" has different meanings in different contexts. While it's not ideal that these two meaning co-exist, culture evolves organically, and that's just the way it is now.
Your book project is very timely. There are a few others exploring the future of liberalism via conferences, etc. They are struggling, as far as I can tell. I’d welcome the chance to participate in you fall Zoom series. Let me know if I’m the right fit.
Here is the sign-up link: https://forms.gle/qhWsYPfzYNMaWvbP6
Thanks and sure! I am pulling together a form for those interested; the issue will be finding a time that works for as many people as possible.
I'd also be interested in participating. An interesting book somebody should write would trace the history of the intellectual, strategic, social, political, tactical, ideological and personal connections between the succession of movements of minority groups and others that have been major components of American liberalism, starting, I guess, with African Americans and moving on to Jews, women, Hispanics, Native Americans, gay men and women and, more recently, trans people. The history of each group's struggle is complex and unique, but they have also competed, cooperated, copied, influenced, inspired and fought with each other. They've also done the same with the other major social movements, including the union movement, anti-war movement and now the anti-genocide movement. Both activists and the public sometimes see them as a sort of continuum, as the Trans movement seemed to be a natural development of Gay Liberation, which somehow came out of Women's Liberation which grew from Black Liberation. Seeing them this way, while it can inspire and create solidarity, can also lead to significant wrong turns and miscalculations, both ideological and tactical, as in the transition from Gay Liberation to the Trans Movement. This can hurt the progress individual movements as well as "The Left" as a whole. Anyway, it could be an interesting and useful book, which to my knowledge has not been written. Doing it right would almost certainly be a politically thankless task, but important.
Here is the sign-up link: https://forms.gle/qhWsYPfzYNMaWvbP6
I'm very interested in all that and am thinking one way to parse it and make it more simple is to focus on 1) the underlying political theoretical framing for each different movement or phase of the same movement, and 2) the larger constellation of economic issues and class-based politics and identities each was interpolated with.
For example, the civil rights movement operated within a liberal / humanist / Christian-based framework and attempted (but failed) to align with labor and form an interracial class-based coalition. (At least that is the argument I make in my race and American liberalism book.) BLM, in contrast, operated within a post-modern / Foucaultian / queer theory-based framework and was hostile to old-fashioned class-based politics and primarily aligned with the professional-managerial class (PMC).
In second versus third-wave feminism, which I know less about, it seems like the deeper political framing changed substantially, but the class location remained more PMC. I'd have to research each case more thoroughly to see if this really works, though.
Overall, I'm increasingly think that the roots of wokeism go back to the cultural politics of the New Left in the 1960s. Revisiting the "political correctness" and "tenured radicals" debates of the 1990s, which I completely wrote off as a right-wing nothingburger at the time, in light of what we now know about the evolution of these ideas through the academy and then via the internet out into youth culture, and then society at large, is pretty fascinating.
Hi Carol
I'm also interested in participating and find it curious that neither your post nor the linked syllabus provides an opportunity or instruction on how to sign up or express interest.
Yes, my mistake, I was thinking that it would take more repeated prompts and reminders to spark that level of interest. I do have a form pretty much ready to go, though. I'll try to get that up as part of a new post and then edit this one later today or tomorrow. Thanks for your interest! This is a good problem for me to have :)
Sorry for the delay. Here is the sign-up link: https://forms.gle/qhWsYPfzYNMaWvbP6
Hi Carol, I’ve been a paying supporter for quite a while and I’m interested to participate in the autumn discussion group. I have great respect for your insights and the clarity of your thinking.
I’ve reviewed the syllabus. I would hope the discussion group will be empirical and rigorous, not merely theoretical.
You may have seen Marc Andreessen’s recent comments about the malign conjunction of DEI (into which he subsumes fifty years of affirmative action) and immigration. I’m sure you know who the father of his business partner was, and I respectfully suggest you consider adding one of his books to your syllabus as I am sure it will help you answer the very question you are asking.
This tweet is another example of the kind of practical, empirical fact pattern I trust you will be willing to address and discuss: https://x.com/jlippincott_/status/1945942587346485584?s=46&t=xMnOwxGvZQzkUiNZf6R4bA
Here is the sign-up link: https://forms.gle/qhWsYPfzYNMaWvbP6
Thanks for your interest and kind words! Much appreciated.
As far as empirical versus theoretical goes - my main interest is historical, which means trying to process a lot of facts but then simplify them to tell a compelling, yet empirically based story. Doing that requires theory in the sense of clarifying key terms and concepts, and having an intellectual through-line that makes an argument about what is most important and why.
As far as Marc Andreesen goes, I had no idea about this connection, as detailed in my reply to Guy below. Very interesting! I really only know a bit about Andreesen from a few podcasts (I think I saw him on All In?) and reading his "techno-optimist" manifesto (which I wasn't persuaded by, as I have a lot of worries about where technology is taking us). But he's clearly a brilliant guy.
As far as adding things to the syllabus goes, we'll have a group-source recommended readings and resources list for people to add to as they wish. I am trying to keep the suggested readings, videos, etc. on the shorter side as I know people are busy and it's a big ask to read 40 pages of a book like Gerstle's. (Not that it's overly academic, it's not. But it's not light reading, either.)
I used to teach political science at a liberal arts college and love the traditional open discussion-based, "there is no one right answer but there are some that are definitely better than others and some are clearly wrong" approach (which, I think, is pretty hard to find these days). Everyone is free to criticize the text, have different arguments, etc., provided equal grace is given to others to hold different views.
As far as the race, class, and nationality issues exemplified by your linked X post - yes, those are obviously all super-important and should be part of the discussion.
I give up. Who was the business partner of Marc Andreesen's father?
I had no idea either, so asked Google! Here's the result:
##########
AI Overview
Marc Andreessen's most well-known business partner is Ben Horowitz.
Ben Horowitz's father was David Horowitz, an American conservative writer and activist.
David Horowitz was a founder and president of the David Horowitz Freedom Center (DHFC), editor of the Center's website FrontPage Magazine, and director of Discover the Networks, a website that tracks individuals and groups on the political left. He also founded the organization Students for Academic Freedom.
###########
Now, I do know who David Horowitz is, but had absolutely no idea about this connection. Thanks to Chris for the prompt!
Hi Carol and Guy, the AI summary doesn’t do justice to David Horowitz’s outstanding career. He was born to fervently Communist parents in 1934 and initially exemplified the liberal movement that Gerstle analyses in his book (which I will read). From a “scientific” perspective his remarkable journey is highly anecdotal but it’s also powerful and exemplary of the kind of transformation which is the subject of Gerstle’s book. Horowitz bailed out of the Left long before the rise of Clintonian neoliberalism and the betrayal of the working class and the weaponisation of racial differences.
It’s instructive that David Horowitz’s son Ben married an African American woman and with Andreessen became one of the most successful venture capitalists of all time. Their firm could be viewed as an exercise in cynical neo-liberal game-rigging by oligarchs pretending to be adding value, but in the case of Andreessen Horowitz my observation is that they truly are creating wealth, jobs and enhancing the commonweal.
So the arc from David to Ben is a very interesting model, however anecdotal, to consider within the framework of Gerstle’s big-picture analysis.
Obviously you are wise to limit the size and scope of your syllabus, but I thought I’d bring to your attention the remarkable and relevant three generation political evolution of the Horowitz family from Communists to successful and unusually ethical venture capitalists.
Fascinating. I have to admit that I had slotted Horowitz into the "polemicist" box and never actually read one of his books. Which would you recommend? He has a lot.
I always enjoy your work and look forward to each new piece. As a Zimbabwean who has been reading and reflecting on how Americans talk about, theorize, and grapple with the word “woke,” I was especially interested in your references to it in this latest installment. As someone who values history and theory, I am curious about how you are engaging with the concept and tying it to illiberalism and anti‑racial liberalism, both in the American and international context.
I also wanted to share two resources that may enrich the conversation: this NAACP declaration on reclaiming the term “woke” as part of African American cultural history (https://naacp.org/resources/reclaiming-word-woke-part-african-american-culture) and William Melvin Kelley’s 1962 New York Times article (https://www.nytimes.com/1962/05/20/archives/if-youre-woke-you-dig-it-no-mickey-mouse-can-be-expected-to-follow.html). Both, in different ways, seek to situate the term within a broader history of justice and push back against what they see as mischaracterizations.
I would be very interested to hear how these might intersect with the arguments you are making.
Thanks for reading and commenting. While I wasn't aware of the NAACP declaration or the 1962 NYTs article, I have known for quite awhile now that many have seen the term "woke" as part of African American cultural history. And, while I'm no expert, the evidence for that seems convincing.
However, the word has also acquired a new meaning. Basically, it's what people who aren't on board with the shift to what's also been called "critical social justice" have come to call that movement. This seems pretty obviously true by this point.
In part, I think this happened due to a vacuum when it came to naming and discussing what was clearly a powerful new paradigm. Freddie deBoer's short post from 2021 expressing frustration with the dynamic resonated with me: https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/please-just-fucking-tell-me-what
Tellingly, he archived the post because he got too much flak for it.
The experience of seeing anyone who questioned anything about what came to be called "woke" relentlessly attacked in ad hominem ways (and often far worse and more serious ways as well) is central to what many people (including me) have hated about the entire phenomenon. People needed to talk about what was happening despite what were shockingly high levels of intimidation and harassment. And the word "woke" became the only easy way to do that which was widely understood and not overly clunky and complex.
I made the case that this overall movement would be better described as "post-liberal progressivism" in 2022, and still think that is true: https://open.substack.com/pub/carolhorton/p/whats-woke-part-i-of-a-series
However, the problem is that a term like that only makes sense with a lot of complicated explanations and scaffolding. Without that, no one is going to understand what I mean by it. And that's a big problem if you're hoping to reach a general audience. So, I toggle back and forth between more formal language like "post-liberal progressivism" and the now super-common term "woke" depending on the context and what seems more likely to be accessible to readers within that.
In general, I find that there is a chronic terminology problem when it comes to discussing American politics - just the word "liberal" itself is very confusing, as discussed in my subsequent post. And it takes so much time to explain your terms carefully . . . there's not going to be a whole lot of people interested in that.
At this point, I would suggest that just as we have to differentiate between different ways of understanding the word "liberal" if we want to have an in-depth discussion, we also have to recognize that the word "woke" has different meanings in different contexts. While it's not ideal that these two meaning co-exist, culture evolves organically, and that's just the way it is now.