Great Awokening

= "the Great Awokening constitutes the most rapid change in elite culture in recent history". [1]

Description

Noah Carl:

"The Great Awokening is the most rapid cultural shift in the English-speaking world in modern times. It has given us Social Justice, cancel culture, Diversity Inclusion and Equity, the decolonisation movement, Black Lives Matter, and a whole lot more. The pace and suddenness of the Great Awokening are evident in six quantitative indicators: social attitudes among white liberals/Democrats; the left-right tilt of the Democratic Party manifesto; the left-right position of Supreme Court justices; speaker disinvitation attempts at US universities; Google search interest for woke terms; and newspaper word usage frequencies."

(https://noahcarl.substack.com/p/indicators-of-the-great-awokening)

Discussion

BY ZACH GOLDBERG :

“In a recent Vox article based partly on the dissertation research I’ve been doing as a Ph.D. candidate in political science at Georgia State University, Matthew Yglesias described this ongoing transformation as “The Great Awokening.” In Yglesias’ account: “In the past five years, white liberals have moved so far to the left on questions of race and racism that they are now, on these issues, to the left of even the typical black voter. This change amounts to a ‘Great Awokening.’” There is no simple or single explanation for how this process got started. It appears to be driven by an interplay of factors: preexisting tendencies among white liberals; a series of polarizing events like the police shooting of Michael Brown and subsequent riots in Ferguson, and the migrant crisis; the rise of millenials as a political force, and the explosion of social media and “woke” clickbait journalism. “

(https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/americas-white-saviors )

Statistics

Can this shift be measured. Stats compiled by Noah Carl:

• The first indicator is social attitudes among white liberals/Democrats in the United states. (Note that the following charts were taken from an article by Eric Kaufmann, and were I believe originally created by Zach Goldberg.) As the first chart indicates, between 2010 and 2016, the percentage of white liberals who disagree with the statement that blacks should work their way up without special favours went from about 23% up to 46%. In 2016, white liberals were therefore more likely than blacks to disagree with this statement.

• the shift among Democrats on issues relating to identity groups – notably racial minorities – has been particularly stark. And in this article, The Economist notes that both white and non-white Democrats have become substantially less favourable to white people (measured on a feeling thermometer) since the late 2000s.

• disinvitation attempts: the number of attempts made by right-wing activists has remained constant at a relatively low level. By contrast, the number of attempts made by left-wing activists has increased over time, particularly since around 2012. In his recent report for the Centre for the Study of Partisanship and Ideology, Eric Kaufmann plotted the data up to 2019, and observed that the number of attempts made by left-wing activists remained elevated in 2018 and 2019 (albeit at a slightly lower level).

• Google search interest for woke terms ... rose in the mid 2010s, suggesting that the relevant concepts became more ingrained in the public mind. Graph at [2]

* Newspaper word usage frequencies: The sixth indicator, which I would call the pièce de résistance, is newspaper word usage frequencies. (Note that the following charts were taken from a recent paper by David Rozado, Musa Al-Gharbi and Jamin Halberstadt; though similar ones have been published by Zach Goldberg.) As the first chart indicates, the frequency with which the New York Times and the Washington Post (the two most prominent US newspapers) use various woke terms has skyrocketed since 2010. In 2019, for example, the NYT used ‘white supremacy’ 4196% more than nine years before. Graph at [3] ; Graph 2

(https://noahcarl.substack.com/p/indicators-of-the-great-awokening)