Wokeness is Eroding Accountability

Victimhood as a pathway to Procedural Tyranny

Another day, another progressive institutional leader crying victim. Not long after Claudine Gay was ousted from her role as President of Harvard, NPR journos are claiming their #ResistanceLib CEO, Katherine Maher, is being “targeted” by conservatives with the audacity to…..read her tweets from the past few years.

The Paradox of the GirlBossVictim

NYT journos had previously followed a nearly identical script with Claudine Gay, with claims she was being “persecuted” by those pesky conservatives with their audacious pouncing on…her paper-thin academic record, waffling approach to campus antisemitism, and rampant plagiarism. It’s worth noting that Claudine still gets to pull down a $900k salary even after her demotion; a degree of ‘persecution’ most could only wish for.

This playbook arguably originated during Hilary Clinton’s 2016 presidential run, where anyone who failed to YassKween her coronation with sufficient enthusiasm was branded a misogynist. It’s a Stunning-And-Brave New World when presidential candidates, CEOs, and Ivy League Presidents can ostensibly be counted among societies’ most downtrodden and marginalized should they face even the slightest bit of public criticism.

This strategy is by no means limited to only female leaders; when Liberal politician Han Dong was found to be an asset of the Chinese Communist Party, the Liberal party line was that Han Dong was being victimized by racists, and anyone who wanted any defenses against Chinese electoral interference was also, you guessed it, a racist.

There was a time when Roman generals would fall on their swords when they knew they’d fucked up, and samurai would commit seppuku at the slightest faux pas, but today’s elites cry that they’re being ‘victimized’ whenever they are called to face accountability. Natalia Dashan drew on her experience at Yale to write about how modern elites have managed to convince themselves that they’re ackshually not elites at all:

“The rich and powerful are expected to take responsibility for things, and blamed when they go wrong”

“In times of political uncertainty, when things are not going well, elites face more scrutiny…It becomes a bigger liability to be openly elite…Better to present themselves as just another member of the “upper middle class,” or even an underdog”

“Western elites are not comfortable with their place in society and the responsibilities that come with it, and realize that there are deep structural problems with the old systems of coordination…What you have is a blind and self-righteous upper class that becomes structurally unable to take coordinated responsibility”

“This ideology is promulgated and advertised by universities, but it doesn’t start or stop at universities. All the fundraisers. All the corporate events. The Oscars. Let’s take down the Man. They say this in front of their PowerPoints. They clink champagne glasses. Let’s take down the Man! But there is no real spirit of revolution in these words. It is all in the language they understand—polite and clean, because it isn’t really real. It is a performative spectacle about their own morale and guilt”

“If you were the ruler while everything was burning around you, and you didn’t know what to do, what would you do? You would deny that you are in charge. And you would recuperate the growing discontented masses into your own power base, so that things stay comfortable for you”

A Culture of Professional Victims

In order to facilitate their abdication of accountability, Laptop Class Elites have developed an entire culture of performative crybullying. ‘Criticism = Persecution’ really starts with what sociologists Bradley Campbell and Jason Manning described as "victim culture" as a recent evolution in Western societies, which started as "honour cultures" and became "dignity cultures" before recently transitioning to victim cultures.

To borrow from Kevin McCaffrey:

"In contrast to honor cultures that expect victims to be strong and stern enough to defend themselves, and dignity cultures that expect victims to be calm and charitable when in a dispute or disagreement, victim cultures emphasize how complainants are emotionally or physically fragile, vulnerable, and weak....Confidently espousing one’s own weakness, frailty, and suffering might seem, perhaps, dishonorable or shameful from an honor culture perspective, or gratuitous and self-absorbed from a dignity culture perspective."

Victim culture has two useful attributes for elites: It allows for a very flexible, identity-based definition of victimhood (being rich/influential is not a dealbreaker), and it is tailor-made for weaponizing elite-dominated bureaucracies.

Victim cultures are all about being very easily offended (similar to honour cultures where getting ‘dissed’ warrants responding with violence), but rather than engaging in direct interpersonal dispute resolution, victim cultures encourage appealing to institutional authorities to demand disciplinary action against those alleged to have caused offense. Think tattling to the teacher, complaining to college admins, filing a complaint with HR, flagging social media posts for content moderators, etc.

Because progressives tend to work/live in large bureaucracies, and tend to practice victim culture, progressives spend a LOT of time perfecting the subtle art of 'gaming the system' of institutional disciplinary mechanisms. For example, when progressive NYT staffers were offended by the Tom Cotton riot editorial, the notoriously elitist staffers figured out very quickly that framing their complaints as a "workplace safety issue" limited upper management's ability to shut down Slack channels, punish Tweets disparaging the company, etc. So they landed on “This puts Black NYTimes staff in danger” as their go-to phrasing to complain about his op-ed.

As Erik Wemple later wrote in the Washington Post,

"The [Black nytimes staff in danger] formulation came from the internal group BlackNYT and received the blessing of the NewsGuild of New York as “legally protected speech because it focused on workplace safety”

So rather than saying "I disagree with this op-ed" or even "this op-ed makes me feel emotionally uncomfortable", NYT staffers/mutineers coalesced around a "LIVES ARE IN DANGER!!" talking point as a way to game the system of HR regulations. It worked perfectly; the only person who got fired was the editor who approved the op-ed, and the NYT retracted the op-ed in fairly short order.

To someone who hasn't dedicated their lives to perfecting the art of manipulating institutional authorities, this type of histrionic victimhood rhetoric seems like snowflakery of the highest order. How exactly does an op-ed calling for law and order put black NYT journalists' lives in mortal peril? But when properly understood as a tactical decision to game the system, “This puts Black NYTimes staff in danger” starts to make a perverse kind of sense. It's not about whether the victimhood complaint is truthful per se, it's about whether the victimhood complaint succeeds in manipulating the proverbial adults in the room into responding the way progressives want them to.

Progressives understand intuitively that whenever they feel offended or are hearing discourse they'd rather not hear, the way to achieve their desired response from institutional authorities (censorship, cancellation, etc.) is to lean heavily into victim culture when lodging their complaints. The four major avenues they use to get speech shut down are:

1. This speech is putting [black/trans] lives in danger

2. This speech is misinformation/conspiracy theory

3. This speech is hate speech

4. This speech is violence/targeted harassment

Sometimes they're combined, as was the case with lab leak. Progressives flagged lab leak discourse as misinformation and also as anti-asian racist hate speech, and the strategy worked to achieve the desired institutional censorship. An account like LibsofTikTok only recirculates content that progressives have already posted online, but progressives can (and have!) got the account shadowbanned and suspended by claiming various iterations of the above 4 go-to victimhood complaints. When Taylor Lorenz doxxed LibsofTikTok by publishing Chaya Raichik’s personal contact information, the resulting pushback was of course chalked up as those mean conservatives attacking Taylor Lorenz for being a woman.

Identity Politics means elites can behave however the hell they want to, safe in the knowledge that anyone who dares to critize today’s upper castes can be handwaved away as something something enacting fascism.

Your Top Priority is The Emotional Comfort of the Most Powerful Elites, Which You Fulfill by Never Criticizing Them.

This strategy of 'gaming the system' does have the side effect of discrediting progressives in the eyes of the general public, as they look like out-of-touch crybullies, and it does seem like progressives tend to eventually cross an event horizon of believing their own bullshit. Somewhere along the way, at least some percentage of progressives really do seem to believe that conservative op-eds put black journalists' lives in mortal peril.

It’s tough to say at this point whether elites like Hillary Clinton, Claudine Gay, Taylor Lorenz, and Katherine Maher truly believe they are marginalized victims, or whether they just lean into victim culture as a Hail-Mary attempt to dodge accountability. Either way, crying victim ultimately didn’t help Hillary win the 2016 election, and it didn’t help Claudine Gay keep her position as President of Harvard. Time will tell whether Katherine Maher is able to ride out her self-parodic levels of partisanship and remain at the helm of NPR.

Rigging the System through Strategic Victimhood

Victimhood culture as a get-out-of-accountability-free card isn’t just deployed at the level of individual elites; it’s also applied systemically when elitist activists want to repurpose institutions away from their core mission in pursuit of niche, unpopular political agendas. Woke schoolboards in particular have become notorious for kabuki public input sessions, where feedback from parents is welcomed on the condition that it is ‘civil’ and ‘decorous’. Who decides whether feedback is sufficiently decorous? That would be the people on the receiving end of the feedback, as the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) has pointed out:

“FIRE has observed a troubling trend sweeping the nation in recent years, particularly since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic: School boards and city councils are increasingly shutting down criticism from their constituents at public hearings, often interrupting them, forcing them off the podium, and even having them arrested. When elected officials shut down speech, they often cite so-called “decorum” policies that vaguely ban “abusive,” “obscene,” or “personally directed” comments during public comment periods.”

“As described in FIRE’s brief, the definition of “abusive” was entirely up to the school board’s discretion, and one board member testified that the term was so broad that she didn’t “know that there even is an exhaustive definition of abusive.”

“For example, the board cited one Moms for Liberty member for using “unclean” language when reading from a school library book — even though her very complaint was that the book’s language was too inappropriate for school children. Another parent was cited for saying “penis” to describe and complain about a case of indecent exposure on campus.”

In 2021, when a Virginian father learned his daughter had been forcibly sodomized in a school bathroom by a serial predator classmate (who was transgender), that the schoolboard had been transferring between schools like a pedopriest to avoid meting out any real punishment (because apparently it’s transphobic to tell trans people they’re not allowed to rape girls), the dad (somewhat understandably) went ballistic. Schoolboard officials and a Soros-funded DA claimed he had traumatized the schoolboard bureaucrats with his indecorousness and incivility, and so the father was arrested and convicted of disorderly conduct (Republican Governor Glenn Younkin later pardoned him).

Matt Taibbi in 2021 reported how this same schoolboard had implemented “catch the runaway slave” gym classes to teach 3rd graders about slavery, as well as the usual abolishing of advanced classes for equity purposes.

“In the fall of 2020, a variety of pissed-parent groups, most politically conservative, began to form. With names like “PACT,” “The Virginia Project,” and “Fight For Schools,” they among other things began filing FOIA requests in hopes of a look at the particulars of the new “Action Plan.” Anger was accelerated by school closures. “All the kids got sent home with their laptops, and parents got to see what was really going on,” is how one parent put it.”

“the School Board’s one-size-fits-all, Scientology-like hostility to naysayers of any kind would end up becoming…a Nixonian enemies list of parents deemed insufficiently devoted to equity, school closures, and other causes”

“Time and again, the real issue in Loudoun came down to the impatience of officials with criticism. This dynamic reached a breaking point on June 22nd, when a man named Scott Smith was arrested for disorderly conduct and resisting arrest after a Board meeting. If you want to understand why the richest county in America soon after turned pitchfork, read the Washington Post account of the incident, entitled, “Loudoun school board cuts short public comment during unruly meeting; one arrested.”

The piece spent a lot of time talking about how “unruly” attendees violated “decorum,” implying throughout that the anger at the meeting was aimed at “initiatives meant to counteract… widespread racism,” or over the Board’s efforts to “protect the rights of LGBTQ students.” It ended with a quote from Board chair Brenda Sheridan about how she hoped these “politically motivated antics ought to end.”

It turned out, of course, that the man’s daughter had been sexually assaulted in a school bathroom.”

“Yet to some, this is progress. After the June 22nd disaster, the New Republic had this to say: “It turns out that decorum is the antidote to Trumpist agitation. A gentleman arrested in the previous fracas has now been convicted of disorderly conduct.”

A teenage girl may have been raped, but the real victims here are the schoolboard bureaucrats faced with the trauma of potentially being held accountable for their fuckups. Fortunately for them, it turns out that hiding behind Victimhood+Proceduralism makes for a very effective one-two punch to defend against accountability, for both elites running institutions and the institutions themselves. Schoolboards even successfully petitioned the Department of Justice to investigate those pesky parents as Domestic Terrorists. So much for Speaking Truth To Power, apparently.

Back at NPR, whistleblower Uri Berliner detailed at length how he tried going through official channels with his concerns, only to get blown off:

“Out of frustration, on November 6, 2022, I wrote to the captain of ship North Star—CEO John Lansing—about the lack of viewpoint diversity and asked if we could have a conversation about it. I got no response, so I followed up four days later. He said he would appreciate hearing my perspective and copied his assistant to set up a meeting. On December 15, the morning of the meeting, Lansing’s assistant wrote back to cancel our conversation because he was under the weather. She said he was looking forward to chatting and a new meeting invitation would be sent. But it never came.”

When Berliner eventually gave up trying to go through the ‘proper’ channels, and went public with his (obviously valid) concerns about the organization being a woke echo chamber, Katherine Maher publicly accused him of “a criticism of our people on the basis of who we are…questioning whether our people are serving our mission with integrity, based on little more than the recognition of their identity, is profoundly disrespectful, hurtful, and demeaning.” NPR then suspended Berliner on the basis he had “failed to secure its approval for outside work for other news outlets”. Victimhood+Proceduralism strikes again; the wrongthinker is now gone from NPR after saying he “cannot work in a newsroom where I am disparaged by a new CEO whose divisive views confirm the very problems at NPR I cite in my Free Press essay."

The obvious lesson here is that while progressives love to defend cancel culture as ‘accountability culture’; the truth is the exact opposite. Cancel culture is how progressives hijack institutions, repurpose them into vehicles for woke activism, and neutralize any opposition they encounter.

The Long March through the Institutions

As Chris Rufo has meticulously documented, progressives have found a solution for the enduring unpopularity of their agenda: bypass elections by pervasively capturing institutional/bureaucratic chokepoints until the will of the people can effectively be ignored. As Jesse Kelly has rightly pointed out, it doesn’t matter if your overwhelmingly conservative community only has a mere handful of radical leftists if they’re all on your schoolboard. Even in deep red states, once progressive elites are the ones running the local Department of Child Protective Services, they can and will Try That in a Small Town. Should they face any pushback, rest assured they will claim they’re being victimized.

As Michael Lind put it:

“Woke activists, knowing that they would be defeated in free elections and in open public debates, have sought to infiltrate institutions to control key chokepoints or gateways, which empower them to be gatekeepers…Having entrenched themselves in massive, powerful bureaucracies, these zealots will not willingly relax their grip on bureaucratic chokepoints. Why should they?”

Cancel culture ensures that any holdouts of sanity within those institutions are afraid to speak out:

“Woke-ists use the threat of reputational damage to impose uniformity of opinion on the class of people like themselves, whose careers exist only insofar as they are backed by sufficient reputational capital. Unlike previously dominant forms of capital (like, say, land and cows), the reputational capital that is the professional class’s stock in trade — the ticket to the next job or fellowship — can be vaporised by a single tweet. In turn, the uniformity of opinion that the woke imposes within its own cohorts allows it to control those cohorts, and use them to bend powerful institutions to its will.”

Uri Berliner will, unfortunately, probably never work in mainstream media again. Cancel culture is perfectly suited to the form of covert, passive-aggressive conflict favoured by those elites that Machiavelli identified as Foxes, as NS Lyons did a great job summarizing:

“Some five centuries ago, Niccolò Machiavelli identified two psychological profiles of people who generally became leaders: the cunning but weak Fox, who was “defenseless against wolves”; and the strong and brave Lion, who could scare off wolves but was “defenseless against traps.””

“Foxes are unsuited to, and uncomfortable with, the employment of physical force; they prefer intellectual and rhetorical combat, seeking to overcome obstacles through clever persuasion or manipulation of people and narratives. By contrast, Lions possess an instinct for the preservation of existing forms and virtues, along with communal unity and “group persistence.” Valuing security and stability, they prefer caution and conservatism, “hoping little and fearing much from any change, for they know from bitter experience that they will be called upon to foot the bill for it.” Society’s natural warrior class, they prefer the honesty of open conflict to scheming and, while typically slow to anger, tend to favor the direct application of force to solve problems.”

“Our contemporary elite class is quite transparently dominated by Foxes—the same personality type that…come to avoid—and, indeed, abhor—virtues and methods other than the indirect and diplomatic. This soon favors the byzantine organizing, scheming, manipulating, and propagandizing of Foxes. With the inarticulate Lions eventually fully marginalized and excluded from governance by the Foxes, the instability of such societies then increases relentlessly, generating direct challenges that the Foxes, inept at using force, may lash out at but are unable to resolve.”

“If Americans today suffer under a sort of escalating “anarcho-tyranny”—in which uncontrolled immigration, crime, substance abuse, and other social pathologies proliferate alongside a state that seems to grow constantly larger and more determined to exert its dominance through control over, and manipulation of, information, ideas, and narratives—the undiluted rule of Foxes may be partly to blame.”

As the Substack Unprepared.life summarized the concept of anarcho-tyranny:

“In simple terms, anarcho-tyranny is when the state stops upholding its end of the social contract to use its monopoly on violence for its own ends...it was invented by Samuel T. Francis, an avowed white nationalist”

“As a term, “anarcho-tyranny” has always had a far-right connotation. That said, we all know the origins of Volkswagen, yet people still drive them. I cannot think of a better term than “anarcho-tyranny” to describe the current state of Western governments that are unable to solve real problems but have broad authority to harshly lord over the citizenry.”

One imagines Scott Smith, father of the girl raped in that Loudoun County school bathroom, would likely agree with that assessment. Francis, for his part, defined anarcho-tyranny as

“The combination of oppressive government power against the innocent and the law-abiding and, simultaneously, a grotesque paralysis of the ability or the will to use that power to carry out basic public duties such as protection or public safety.”

“It is characteristic of anarcho-tyranny that it not only fails to punish criminals and enforce legitimate order but also criminalizes the innocent,”

Personally, I prefer the term “Procedural Tyranny” to describe a society in which a man protesting his daughter’s rape too indecorously gets prosecuted with far more zeal than the actual rapist. Especially when parents criticizing schoolboards get mass-designated as Domestic Terrorists by the federal government for their alleged ‘incivility’.

Today’s elite Foxes have invested considerable effort in fine-tuning the Victimhood+Proceduralism playbook to avoid facing accountability for the various chaotic outcomes their policies have engendered. The road to hell may be paved with good intentions, but Procedural Tyranny is what prevents any course-correction.

All is Not Lost

As much as Laptop Class elites hope that hiding behind ostentatious claims of victimhood will insulate them from accountability, it’s far from a surefire strategy. Ultimately, the other shoe dropped for Claudine Gay, and Hillary Clinton learned the hard way you can’t browbeat people into voting for you. Nevertheless, She Persisted no longer.

Buta Biberaj, the woke DA who went scorched earth on Scott Smith, was ultimately turfed by voters, and key schoolboard leaders involved were either fired or resigned under pressure.

Despite their best efforts, the Liberal Party of Canada was unable to play the race card successfully to stave off a public inquiry into Chinese election interference; the findings are set to be released in the next month, and all indications are the results will be a far cry from the original rigged whitewashing.

At the institutional level, the price progressives pay for using cancel culture to hijack bureaucratic organizations is those captured organizations become brittle, distrusted, and prone to dysfunction and even paralysis. The rise of Big Woke occurred during a very unusual economic epoch; the 2010s were a decade when quantitative easing allowed major institutions to essentially behave as if money was free. A significant amount of that “Easy Money” wound up subsidizing wokeness in media, the tech sector, universities, nonprofits, and pretty much every DEI/ESG infested bureaucracy you can think of, but that party is over as stubborn inflation and terminal demographics force the elite gatekeepers of those aforementioned bureaucratic chokepoints to actually start thinking about economic value and return on investment once again. For-profit corporations are particularly vulnerable to the power of the purse as consumers abandon brands that prioritize their activist employees over their customers. The longer interest rates remain elevated above 2010-2020 averages, the more true ‘Get Woke, Go Broke” will be.

Richard Hanania also (just!) gave a political case for optimism on the basis that

“Conservative political power is getting better at coping with low human capital, and geographically and institutionally limiting the damage that an increasingly insane leftism can do.”

At the broader political level, the rise of global populism means elites are facing newfound electoral pressure to at least pretend to give a shit what normies want. Biden’s Disinformation Governance Board lasted all of about 3 weeks once his adminstration realized just how politically radioactive it was to establish a Ministry of Truth. Nina Jankowicz, the once and future Disinformation Tsarina, claimed she faced "gendered, sexualized violent rhetoric" until she was #BlueAnon in the face, but it didn’t ultimately save her DOJ gig (hence why she’s forced to attempt a comeback via the NGO sector).

As I’ve argued previously, the first step towards holding elites accountable is not letting yourself be deterred when they call you a deplorable and accuse you of victimizing them.

Embrace your Inner Barbarian

Victimhood culture is increasingly showing diminishing returns, and it’s incumbent upon all of us who wish to avoid being Tread Upon by Procedural Tyranny to continue holding work-from-home-slipper-clad Laptop Class feet to the fire, no matter how incessantly those elites try to dodge accountability by self-identifying as victims.