THE FEVER WILL EVENTUALLY BREAK.

David Brooks, who might have made his way to national pundithood documenting the bourgeois bohemians, suggests that the current manifestations of the counterculture will run their course.

In the 1960s, left-wing radicals wanted to overthrow capitalism. We ended up with Whole Foods. The co-optation of wokeness seems to be happening right now.

The thing we call wokeness contains many elements. At its core is an honest and good-faith effort to grapple with the legacies of racism.

Sixties activism, redux, and the hysterical parts run their course, while the excesses inspire corrections.  Steven Hayward has also seen the story play out.  "Liberals were slow to perceive the rising backlash to their misgovernment as the 1960s wasted away their long-run political dominance."

Rod Dreher is less optimistic.

Anyway, I don’t believe in the slightest that the core of racial wokeness is “an honest and good-faith effort to grapple with the legacies of racism.” I believe it is a naked attempt to exercise tribal politics, and to do so by (brilliantly) deploying moral language and victim status to disguise what is being done. It is a war on Deplorables justified by the same kind of linguistic chicanery that allowed, say, the Soviets to declare their subjection of Eastern Europe to be those countries’ “liberation.”

I truly don’t understand how my friend David can blithely hand-wave the effects of this poisonous ideology’s spread away, trusting that it will be co-opted by capitalism in the end.

It's likely that the deadliest toxins will prove destructive, as the communities rendered uninhabitable by reimagined policing, and the social lives rendered barren in the name of gender-fluidity, will be more powerful forces seeking a state of good repair than any ticked-off Deplorables will ever be.

Does David not understand that teaching an entire generation of white kids to despise themselves because of the color of their skin is likely to spark a bitter racial backlash? The only people who believe that any of this is in “good faith” are those who already believe it.

Fifty years ago, the counterculture, such as it was, argued with an establishment that was still strongly influenced by notions of a Vital Progressive Center and heirs to a Victory Dividend earned by Collective Action.  Today's Wokesters have no such establishment to contend with.

“We meant well” is the excuse that the Social Justice Warriors of the 1960s and 1970s made when their revolutionary plans produced destruction. Let’s say wokeness will run its course, and be co-opted by the establishment, and defanged. How long will that take? What will be its effects on the lives of real people?

I do call this “soft totalitarianism,” because this ideology’s proponents have to resort to totalitarian methods to impose it. David should ask himself how far someone would get in a university or corporation by challenging any of this, no matter how politely?

Yes, it all seems scary now, the way the late 1960s and early 1970s seemed scary to people who weren't into the Consciousness Revolution. And how quickly it passed, in part because of the counterculture's own excesses, and in part because there were plenty of people who could opt out, keep their heads down, and thrive.

A discussion of the classic themes of civil rights, Vietnam, the counterculture, and feminism—is longstanding. Glorifying the radical 1960s, however—the loud, exceptional, interesting, wonderful, psychedelic 1960s—gets in the way of getting to know everything else—the “Cs,” the contributors, the quiet producers, the innovators who don’t self-promote or march, are not brought forth by historians, and have no obvious advocates. These are the men and women who made the era what it was in a variety of fields including athletics, engineering, technology, science, medicine, entertainment, and others. It is these who are always left out, deserve credit, and to whom I want to pay some attention.

I hazard to state that the large number of less-written-about events, people, and inventions of this storied time are equally—possibly more—enduring than some of the higher profile things identified with the 1960s today.

It is as likely fifty years from now that the loudest voices and the most outrageous behaviors of today will not any longer be the principal stories. Reality is socially conservative.