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Dave Chappelle May Help Tame Wokeness
There are other signs, too, that our revolution may be moving past its Terror and toward its Thermidor.
Oct. 14, 2021 6:54 pm ET
Captain Kirk was in space. âI hope I never recover from this,â William Shatner said after the capsule set down in scrub near Van Horn, Texas. Heâd seen the blueness, the thin ribbon of earthâs atmosphere, the delicacy and majesty. âI hope I can maintain what I feel now, I donât want to lose it,â he told Blue Origin founder Jeff Bezos. What a triumph at age 90 to be still so hungry for life, to yearn to be in its thick, even its uncertainty. What a great man. I watched the launch and touchdown on TV, was surprised to be moved, and near the end walked toward the screen to miss nothing. âI got a little choked,â I said to a friend that afternoon. âI got choked,â she said.
The night before, in the theater for the first time in two years with a friend whose hand I hadnât touched in 22 months, I saw âThe Lehman Trilogy,â which surpassed all praise thrown its way. So spare and modest in its presentationâthree actors, one setâand yet so theatrical and transporting. Over 3½ hours I checked my watch only once, at 10:05, hoping there was more time and it wasnât about to end. I used to do that when âThe Sopranosâ first aired, hoping there were 20 minutes left and not eight. Itâs a masterpiece when you donât want it to end.
Art and human aspiration abide: autumn 2021.
Maybe this mood is having an impact on my thinking on what is actually my topic. But I think I see something good happening in the woke wars.
The past few years Iâve held two different and opposing thoughts in my head. One is that the woke regime cannot continue forever, it is unsustainable, it will fall of attrition and exhaustion. The suppression of thought and speech, the insistence on ideology when minds and souls arenât ideologicalâall this is against human nature. So it will end. The other is that I cannot think out how it ends: I canât explain to myself what that looks like, canât translate what I believe to be inevitable into a story I can believe.
But the past week left me wondering if we arenât inching toward Thermidor.
Thermidor was the moment France began to turn away from the violence and mayhem of the Terror that followed the French Revolution. (In this space the woke regime is the Terror; the French Revolution is something thatâs been rolling over us and attempting to gain electoral traction since 2008. We have mixed feelings on the Revolution, but we hate the Terror.)
Dave Chappelleâs latest Netflix special debuted Oct. 5. In it he was, as is his way, avowedly antiwoke, especially on gender issues including the LGBTQ movement, which he has called âthe Alphabet people.â He knew heâd get in trouble. He has in the past. âThey dragged me on Twitter. I donât give a [blank] because Twitterâs not a real place.â The special is a hit, and he seemed comfortable because he knows he is talking to regular people, not ideologues. The past week he has been castigated by LGBTQ activists inside and outside the company, and by social-media mobs.
Netflix CEO Ted Sarandos pushed back. The special wonât be pulled: âChappelle is one of the most popular standup comedians today,â Mr. Sarandos wrote in a memo. âHis last special . . ., also controversial, is our most watched, stickiest and most award-winning standup special to date.â The mob pushed back: Mr. Chappelle makes them feel unsafe. Mr. Sarandos doubled down. Next week Netflix employees and their allies plan a walkout.
It would have been more powerful and certainly less crass if Mr. Sarandos had hit harder, had hit solely, on the issue of artistic freedom, and not profit.
But he did push back. If he stands firm it will be progress: Free speech won and the mob lost.
In truth some people are probably too big to cancelâMr. Chappelle is one, J.K. Rowling another. But standing firm helps those who arenât too bigâwho know, for instance, that theyâd be sacrificed by their employer in a nanosecond if trouble starts and the Twitter mobs come. But if the too-big-to-cancel grow in number and regularly start to avoid the guillotine, that becomes a story. Maybe in time the crowds that show up to cheer the blood being spilled (in the Place de la Concorde then, on Twitter now) will become less interested in that than in seeing who wins, the woke executioners or the swift prisoner who leaps from the tumbrel and escapes into the crowd. The whole event changes from the fun of a death to the fun of a race. Progress!
There was last weekâs Ezra Klein column in the New York Times on the data analyst David Shor, who warns the Democratic Party it faces long-term disaster if it continues to press its progressive agenda. In Mr. Kleinâs paraphrasing of Mr. Shor, the party is trapped in an echo chamber of Twitter activists and woke staff and consultants. None of this is precisely new, but this iteration of Mr. Shorâs argument carried an electoral charge and spread through the political class. Its relevance here is that Mr. Shorâs work allows Democratic politicians and operatives to work with their friends in media, the academy and the activist world to send the word: Cool it, youâre hurting the larger project. Robespierre, thereâs too much blood, put the guillotines aside. Or weâll kill you.
Bill Maher is still speaking truth through comedy and continues uncanceled on HBO; Substack brims with brilliant antiregime talent.
We have written in this space of how much people in the arts and entertainment hate the regime and its rigid and capriciously imposed censorship. They know a new McCarthyism when they see it; they know a new Hays Office when they see that too. But they have to be careful, and they tell their writers and artists to be careful. Theyâre all walking on eggshells because they canât always anticipate what will be Bad Thought next month. Have you noticed a strange repetition in story lines and themes in what you watch, an over-rotation of material and subject matter? This is because executives and artists are hoping what was safe last time is safe this time, so they do it again.
The whole woke project changes artistic decisions and misshapes art.
They know it. But people in entertainment have the best jobs in Americaâtheyâre well-paid, work with creative people and invent whatâs on the screens in a nation of screens. They donât want to jeopardize their positions. They know no one really has their back. So theyâre pliant.
And the woke brigades know, and push.
If I am right, if we are inching toward Thermidor, it will be a partial Thermidor, as Thermidor itself was not a wholesale renunciation of all that preceded it but a corrective. It signaled a new popular resistance to the excesses of the Revolution, but the general principles of the Revolution maintained. They entered Franceâs bloodstream in ways constructive and not. In the same way the revolution weâre living through will not fully disappear; it has entered the bloodstream. But it can be knocked from its most brutal phase, the Terror. And that would be good.
This is a good time to be brave, to be hungry for life and its uncertainties, like Captain Kirk.