Anti-Woke Intellectuals
Typology
Scott Barry Kaufman:
"There are, I argue here, two distinct types—and the difference between them has almost nothing to do with their stated positions, which often overlap, and almost everything to do with what’s driving the engine underneath.
The first type of anti-woke intellectual criticizes ideas; the second type is consumed by them.
The first type can tell you, specifically, which policy or claim or practice they object to and why—and they can also tell you, without choking on the words, what the other side gets right. This is the critic who goes after a practice (a mandatory diversity statement, the erosion of institutional neutrality) rather than after the souls of the people who hold it; the scholar who writes a whole book arguing that left and right are each tracking real moral goods the other is half-blind to, which is not a book you write if your aim is to humiliate anyone. You can imagine this person being talked out of a position by a better argument.
The second type is different, and you sense it before you can name it. The fight isn’t part of their work; the fight is the work—and you can watch the arc unfold in public. There’s the scholar who raised a reasonable campus objection, was treated abominably for it, left academia over it, and whose public thinking has since widened into a steadily more totalizing suspicion of nearly every mainstream institution. There’s the writer who genuinely named something real about the culture and then built a combative public identity around an enemy that only ever expands—because naming a real problem and being consumed by it are not mutually exclusive. There’s the public figure for whom a private grief and a civilizational crusade have fused into a single object, so that one enemy now explains even a death. In each case, a suspicion that began aimed at one bad idea has metastasized into a distrust of whole institutions, whole classes of people, anyone who won’t agree that the virus is everywhere."