Thread by @Tinkzorg

These posts by comrade Baron are extremely relevant today to understand one of the loci of woke politics. I've noticed people on the Right have a ton to say about the wokies doing all kinds of crap to make school more woke, but they're conspicuously silent on the test question.🧵

https://twitter.com/Mssr_le_Baron/status/1486370939952635907

It just so happens that abolishing standardized testing is the #1 woke demand wherever they take power, way ahead of tranny bathrooms or drag queen story hour. Those latter things are negotiable, but the former point is very much NOT.

Now the reason you abolish testing (and then come up with some random explanation for why you have to) is because elite competition is at such a fever pitch that meritocracy just have to go. If it doesn't, you're locked in a rat race, like in Hong Kong or Korea. No good!

The issue though is that without meritocracy, the current political order has basically no real foundation at all. Standardized testing is the one way you can make it into the ranks of the shrinking (upper) middle class if you are born poor and/or without connections.

The right seems to have a very complicated relationship to this fairly simple and obvious dynamic. On the one hand, they oppose the left here on purely tribal grounds, but on the other, the *logic* driving the left is in fact fairly rational and easy to understand.

Moreover, that same logic is shared by everyone in the credentialist classes the left recruits from, who also make up the right wing leadership today. In such a rapidly polarizing society as the US, where there are no good working class jobs left, they feel the same pressures.

Of course, de facto abolishing the last vestiges of Actually Existing Meritocracy will have a massively destabilizing impact on the body politic, as the US more or less then becomes an open caste society, something that's completely incompatible with its legitimating framework.

Can you have a successful politics of contesting the left on the tranny bathroom issue while not doing anything meaningful about the abolishing meritocracy issue, hoping people are sated enough by the former to ignore the latter? Absolutely not, especially in the long term.

Two reasons: one, tranny bathrooms is the name of a single head of the mythical hydra. The hydra - the thing capable of growing new heads - is the search for a *replacement for meritocracy* that locks out the have nots from ever having a chance at moving upwards.

As long as meritocracy is actively being replaced, the hydra can grow as many heads as it wants in terms of cultural mores. Transgenderism, land acknowledgements, cultural appropriation, critical race theory: remove one of these things and the others quickly fill the void.

Two: people really care about their kids. They don't want their kids to be locked into some sort of lower caste existence permanently with no good reason. Ironically, love for one's kids is what drives the woke to abolish meritocracy, too.

The core issue here is just that there are only so many spots left on the economic lifeboat, and people are jostling for them, employing increasingly brutal or underhanded methods to make sure your kids don't get in while their kids do.

There's no reason to think that "abolishing wokeness" (even if it could be done, if you could sever enough hydra heads at once to prevent them regrowing) will lead to a less dystopian society, either. Here's elite overproduction *sans* wokeness:

americanaffairsjournal.org/2021/11/crises…

South Korea is an inhuman basket case where parents are forced to treat their own kids less humanely than prison guards in a Soviet Gulag. The average south korean student has *less* leisure time in real terms than Solzhenitsyn's Ivan Denisovitch.

If you have to subject your kids to drag queen story hour and have them recite woke sutras or whatever to get into Harvard, that is probably a deal you're willing to take as a parent, if the alternative is the South Korean scenario, which is where America was headed before 2020.

The right's silence on standardized testing, and the growing acceptance of wokeness among people like, say, David French, is not irrational. Again, their kids are standing around on the deck of the Titanic too, and are just as much in need of a spot on the lifeboat as anyone.

But crises of elite competition/overproduction eventually tend to shatter their societies and lead to some sort of conflict resolution - internal or external - that quite literally decimates the competition, again and again until things are brought back into balance.

You cannot stop this process with "red meat for the base", just as you cannot kill a hydra by cutting off one head at a time. The current disintegration of the old right wing coalitions isn't an issue of people not being "based", but rather the jostling for a lifeboat seat.

As the lifeboats into a now totally inept "overclass" (to borrow from Lind) get fewer and fewer, and economic dysfunction continues to wreak havoc on everyone outside of said overclass, the current - fairly tenuous - bonds that hold the broad right together will collapse.

And with the collapse of this coalition at odds with itself, so will the hopes of trying to draft the lower middle classes into the job of fighting the wokes to secure a spot in the lifeboat for *someone else's* kids, too.