Kiwi Farms

The emergence of SJW's and the Woke Left has been fiercely debated multiple times and I've always leaned to the idea that it's largely a backlash against the Religious Right of the 80's and 90's. Or more accurately, the neocon-adjacent form it took in the Bush years when so many Millennials were in their adolescent years.

Others think differently.

Traditionalists and wignats will preach that it's an entirely manufactured phenomenon that began with the Sexual Revolution/Frankfurt School/KGB/the Jews/humans discovering the concept of entertainment/insert trad boogeyman here.

Tankies and TERF's will preach that it's merely a generational overreaction to "late stage capitalism" and point to the Great Recession and Occupy Wall Street, which was the origin point for a lot of Millennial and older Gen Z SJW's.

Over the years, I've slowly realized it's actually all of the above.

The Woke Left as we know it today emerged as the result of a perfect storm of conditions.

Yes, we all know about McCarthy's failed attempts to fight communist subversion in the 1950's and Uncle Yuri would later reveal the problem was worse than any of us thought and that the KGB specifically targeted academia and the media for subversion and did so in a way that their efforts would become self-sustaining after so many years, an experiment that would outlive the Soviet Union itself.

But prior to the Obama years, this was all largely confined to the fringe and niche corners of society. Outside of higher academia and niche groups like the punk subculture and radical feminists or extreme environmentalists, these sentiments didn't really reach the general public in America. Even the media was more concerned with making money and keeping a middle of the road viewpoint that could make the most money and reach the broadest audience.

The Great Recession and the corporate bailouts soured an entire generation on the mere concept of capitalism, which was often intentionally conflated with corporatism by both neocon pundits and hard left college professors. The Millennials went to college more than any other generation and were hit hardest by the Great Recession alongside the Baby Boomers.

Contrary to popular belief, the Boomers didn't coast through the Recession but were hit by it almost as hard as the Millennials. It was Generation X who coasted through and then used the Boomers as a scapegoat since they already hated the Boomers but were outnumbered by the Millennials culturally speaking. Seriously, most of the problems Boomers get blamed for were actually the fault of Gen X.

The New Atheism movement really exploded in the 2000's thanks to the Religious Right still being a major force in American politics and culture despite their unpopularity outside of Appalachia and a few parts of the rural Deep South and Midwest. The New Atheists were a major breeding ground for both the Woke Left and the so-called Skeptics of the 2010's.

The venomous sentiments towards conservatism and the non-coastal urban regions of the United States these days really feels like the 2004-era "Real America vs. Dumbfuckistan" rhetoric cranked up to 11, and I'm wondering how much of it is due to unsettled resentment over the 2004 election (the first election that the oldest Millennials would've been voting in) where Bush won a second term and the popular vote and did so by pandering to the fundie crowd at the time.

I think SJW's and the Woke Left would still exist in some form if things played out a little differently, but it was the unique combination of both organic generational backlash against the religious conservatives of the Millennials' Reagan-Clinton era childhoods and Bush era adolescent years and the Great Recession that made the Woke Left as a whole so numerous and powerful.

Media and academia can only go so far, there needs to be a genuine organic movement as well to underpin it.

The Woke Left came about due to a freak set of perfect conditions. It wasn't entirely the fault of the Religious Right and McCarthy didn't go far enough.