By Nathan Cofnas
edit: essay was published on Oct 29, 2024
Meh. Not convinced. Robby Starbuck’s sweep through major corporations indicates the support for DEI in the boardroom is not very solid. Trump’s astonishing levels of support from younger voters is also a serious counterpoint.
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I hope you are right but I am not so optimistic.
Zoomers who voted for Kamala have no plans to roll back. These are holy warriors who plan to double down on woke and if and when they take over boardrooms they will implement a woke fascist regime.
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So? Young adults always think they already know everything, and don’t plan to change their minds. But most do, as they gain life experience. For me, I’m and quite optimistic about the trends in young adults.
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Milennials and Gen Z are different from Boomers and Gen X. Either they don’t gain life experience or experience won’t change their views. Their views on free speech and censorship and cancellation diverge from previous generations, from your generation.
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What is your evidence for this? My experience with younger adults says otherwise.
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Nathan Cofnas:
There may have been a historical tendency for Americans and Brits to increasingly vote for conservative parties as they got older. Regardless of how one interprets this, millennials did not follow the same trend, and there is nothing to indicate that either they or zoomers will turn conservative.
“If you are not a liberal at 25, you have no heart. If you are not a conservative at 35 you have no brain.” So said Winston Churchill. Or US president John Adams. Or perhaps King Oscar II of Sweden. Variations of this aphorism have circulated since the 18th century, underscoring the well-established rule that as people grow older, they tend to become more conservative.
The pattern has held remarkably firm. By my calculations, members of Britain’s “silent generation”, born between 1928 and 1945, were five percentage points less conservative than the national average at age 35, but around five points more conservative by age 70. The “baby boomer” generation traced the same path, and “Gen X”, born between 1965 and 1980, are now following suit.
Millennials — born between 1981 and 1996 — started out on the same trajectory, but then something changed. The shift has striking implications for the UK’s Conservatives and US Republicans, who can no longer simply rely on their base being replenished as the years pass.
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Financial Times? Sorry, not a reliable source in my book. DailyWire says the opposite.
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I also am not optimistic. I have taken to forwarding pictures of the demonstrators to my friends and family that don’t realize which demographic dominates these demonstrations. It is white woman between the ages of 25 and 35. Don’t use mainstream media representation, just take any X video and stop it and count.
I also use another none scientific method which is to view the comments on X or Youtube. It appears to me that even the so called conservative Millennials are a strange bunch. Every generation will criticize their parents generation or their grandparents generation, but this passes as they mature. The Millennials are well into their thirties and are still full on critical of all previous generations. Ok, Boomer! More and more I see them being critical of the Boomers for not giving them their wealth. Some grown ass man, publicly crying that his parents won’t give him their wealth.
I believe woke is the logical conclusion of DEI which is just the current name of something that was happing in corporations since I started working 37 years ago. Initially where I worked the program was called tolerance and it soon included zero tolerance for harassment. What normal person would be for harassment? But we were all taught that harassment was whatever the person that was being harassed felt it was.
It is pretty easy to see how this could be leveraged against white males. It is pretty easy to see how it would lead to a sort of hierarchy of the oppressed. Is the reason you don’t want to work with Mary because she is a woman? Are you not promoting Mike because he is black? Feel free to substitute any group other than straight white males. Whichever minority is not fully represented can then ask the same thing. If there are enough females, then blacks can still ask whether they are being passed over due to their color.
There are a certain percentage of people that will realize they can use that system to gain promotions, money and power. They found they could take control of HR and demand that they do the hiring else the company would be at risk of being caught being prejudicial. They went to the Universities and told them they would not recruit from University that didn’t have a class that reflected the diverse world in which we live. They sat on all the promotion boards and asked if the distribution of promotions was diverse enough.
I don’t think a little blow up at AB is going to remake that structure that was built up over 40 years. Which mid level manager is going to push back against the system?
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I have to say I think this guy is right.
Sometime back in the 1970s, I read an article in American Scholar magazine, by a physician. He said during his career he had witnessed his profession’s participation in two incidents of mass hysteria: the recovered memory phenomenon, and surgical sex changes.
Whew! Thank GOD those two madnesses had run their course!
Because as any doctor should have known,
the idea that you “repress”,or discard memories of childhood experiences coupled with physical pain is erroneous. We all jettison many memories, just because we can’t store everything and we don’t need the information. But any kind of trauma is the LAST thing you’re gonna forget. Personally I believe this to be true.
And with regard to doctors cutting off healthy body parts……this physician could hardly believe his profession had gone along with mayhem—
But he thought it was OVER.
And it wasn’t! The hysteria about alleged witchcraft in the 1980s. Our own insane era of widespread genital mutilation, condoned and enthusiastically even recommended by medical doctors, was still to come.
So yuh. As a wise woman of my acquaintance liked to say: There’s no stopping a bad idea.
I would SO like to believe we’re returning to an era of—I was gonna write “common sense” but I can’t help knowing that often such wisdom is neither common nor sensible, so I’ll say…an era of being guided by experiential natural,phenomena.
But I’m afraid maybe we aren’t.
i hope I’m wrong. It’s my New Year’s wish!
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I’m not sure if Ben Shapiro and the other conservative thought leaders at the Daily Wire are more reliable sources for understanding the cultural and political zeitgeist of Milennials and Zoomers.
The author of this essay, Nathan Cofnas, graduated from Columbia in 2011 (which means he is a Milennial). He also studied at Oxford, Cambridge and Lingnan. He is currently Leverhulme Early Career Fellow in the Faculty of Philosophy at the University of Cambridge. Every year or so there is a campaign to retract one of his papers or to get him fired. He understands the enemy and how they operate and how they are intent on creating a woke dystopia.
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Totally agree. I trust the Daily Wire about as much I trust CNN.
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Lionel Shriver argues for making woke unfashionable:
So they won’t spout lingo like “cisgender” if that might risk an eye-roll at parties. They won’t want to seem behind the times. If we convince them that woke is over, that their BLM lawn signs are passé, that maundering about “white privilege” is boring and old hat, they’ll drop the whole patriarchy/neurodiversity/heteronormativity et al package in a New York minute.
We just have to persuade them that woke is unhip. Which it always has been, but some people are slow.
I’m not sure her strategy will work.
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I read somewhere, I think in one of Paul Johnson’s books, that during the civil rights era, people who wanted to change racial bigotry employed this kinda technique: when you hear somebody make a bigoted remark, frown. Shake your head, just perceptibly, in silent disapproval. Instead of laughing at ethnic jokes, simply look bored and puzzled. Negative reinforcement! You dont wanna pay TOO much attention to the behavior because any kind of attention can be a reinforcement. You just wanna convey…distaste.
Well, THAT sure worked!
But—who can say, in retrospect, whether attitudes changed because of such behavior, or whether the behavior was the consequence of a change in attitudes?
We the Rightly-guided have been voiciferously making fun of wokism since its Nosy-fingered dawn—remember “political incorrectness”? But WE, the mockers, weren’t considered cool, so our attitudes only reinforced and nourished the phenomenon.
Nah: we stabbed it with our steely knives but we just couldnt kill the beast.
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Posts like this make me happy to be a part of this community. Thank you, Hypatia, for sharing wisdom that transcends generations.
Using a gun doesn’t guarantee victory, but not using a gun guarantees defeat.
Here’s a brilliantly written thread that shows who’s had enough of wokeism:
Economy matters, and Harris was too privileged to care about it, fed by the technology money that fuels far-left ideology in California, and that many of us worked to create, yet gave up the control over it.
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