🔒 The unlikely Wokeness tamer – With insights from The Wall Street Journal

The night before, in the theater for the first time in two years with a friend whose hand I hadn’t touched in 22 months, I saw “The Lehman Trilogy,” which surpassed all praise thrown its way. So spare and modest in its presentation—three actors, one set—and yet so theatrical and transporting. Over 3½ hours I checked my watch only once, at 10:05, hoping there was more time and it wasn’t about to end. I used to do that when “The Sopranos” first aired, hoping there were 20 minutes left and not eight. It’s a masterpiece when you don’t 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 I’ve 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 aren’t ideological—all this is against human nature. So it will end. The other is that I cannot think out how it ends: I can’t explain to myself what that looks like, can’t translate what I believe to be inevitable into a story I can believe.

But the past week left me wondering if we aren’t 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 that’s 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 Chappelle’s 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 “the Alphabet people.” He knew he’d get in trouble. He has in the past. “They dragged me on Twitter. I don’t give a [blank] because Twitter’s not a real place.” 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 won’t be pulled: “Chappelle is one of the most popular standup comedians today,” Mr. Sarandos wrote in a memo. “His last special . . ., also controversial, is our most watched, stickiest and most award-winning standup special to date.” 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 cancel—Mr. Chappelle is one, J.K. Rowling another. But standing firm helps those who aren’t too big—who know, for instance, that they’d 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 week’s 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. Klein’s 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. Shor’s argument carried an electoral charge and spread through the political class. Its relevance here is that Mr. Shor’s 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, you’re hurting the larger project. Robespierre, there’s too much blood, put the guillotines aside. Or we’ll 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. They’re all walking on eggshells because they can’t 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 America—they’re well-paid, work with creative people and invent what’s on the screens in a nation of screens. They don’t want to jeopardize their positions. They know no one really has their back. So they’re 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 France’s bloodstream in ways constructive and not. In the same way the revolution we’re 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.