America is becoming less "woke"

It gave the charts so you could make your own conclusion, so seems like the opposite of what you said for this article.

Like a floundering company, the US congress spends most of its time in these modalities:

- trying to convince you they're not part of the DC establishment

- Fund raising off cultural divisions, and exasperation of same for the same goal

- blaming the other side

- blaming congress' culture as polarized hence can't get anything done

- US electorate laboring under the delusion that changing the president is a solution -- maybe helpful at the margins -- but fundamentally unable to permanently circumvent law.

- the far left and right are equally culpable in culture fights while the right is more criminally culpable in how it uses its agency.

And that's exactly right: we're sick of it.

In a floundering company with no product, poor quality control, cost overruns, disdain from existing customers, and non existent cross functional coordination the first thing upper management must do is fire the people unwilling to stop whining, blaming, and take responsibility.

The focus must emphasize customer satisfaction through quality of service/product. In short the BS had to stop. Second focus must emphasize cross functional coordination. In-fighting is a fireable offense. No complicated product is made by one team. It takes coordination.

(I can name any number of examples from books to personal experience where this was done in US corporate history to get people to understand the old way is out).

Right now the US congress far left and right like the BS; it serves their goals. The middle 4 std deviations over the center stand around with their head down, hands in pockets, hoping nobody notices them. It's institutional incompetence.

In the world of belief systems untied to natural law and empiricism, even the Bible reminds: faith (beliefs) without works is nothing but cheap symbolism.

It's one thing to incorporate aspects of DEI into company culture and to have policy around it, but do you really need a role dedicated to DEI? I really doubt it. I've worked at a few companies with these DEI officers, and the value they bring to a company is extremely dubious, if existent at all. My last company let theirs go, despite the administration being highly leftist at the time, and it was painfully obvious why. It's insulting to everyone that a DEI officer makes more than a burger flipper considering their cushy duties.

DEI-based roles were destined to fail.

Also those responsible for ESG do not have any disciplinary power over other employees, which was different with DEI. PR of course has slightly different rules.

Still, it should be under scrutiny to not mutate into something more authoritarian again.

As a dev I can ignore ESG completely now and I don't believe I will ever become friends with it. I certainly do not change my language for them, they caused enough damage and I believe polite silence on certain topics on their part would be quite adequate.

- Boeing sucks at building stuff: blame woke hiring

- SpaceX has a landing failure: blame DEI hires at suppliers

I wouldn't be surprised if they shout at the sky screaming about woke clouds when they get caught in rain without an umbrella

Making it easier to characterise makes the characterisation easier to criticise, but that's not a meaningful target.

Use of unnuanced terminology creates battlefields far away from the positions that people actually care about.

Defund the police is used as a phrase by people who want a well regulated well funded police system. Only a very few extreme people want to eliminate police correctly

Microaggression is used in academia with a degree of specificity but there are those who will use it to mean "Thing I don't like". Dunning Kruger is a non partisan term that is misused similarly.

I don't particularly like the term woke myself but I also tend to agree with Godwin's second law.

On the flip side, the wanton "wokeness" of the right is equally abusive. Right wing grandstanders say exactly what their party wants to hear, absolve themselves of responsibility ("oh i'm anonymous" or "i don't believe this but it's my right to say it"), and then get thousands of unironic adherents that fully believe in their hyperbolic attention-seeking. It's the exact same mechanism on either side of the aisle, jerking off precisely the same insecurities for almost exactly the same reason.

At some indeterminate point in the future, all Americans will end up being conservative. Not because it's the right choice, but because the way politics are headed nobody will be encouraged to think outside marketing and empty platitudes. We already spend more time defending our echo chambers than we spend engaging with policy.

That said, ‘America’ is synonymous with the USA in writing and conversation here (and elsewhere in Europe in my experience).

The Economist is a British publication.

I suspect OP knows this, and is fighting a battle to try to change how Americans speak their own language — it’s not rare, in my experience, for people in other countries of the Americas to be annoyed by this usage.

There is a lot of distracting, dividing, and just trash-tier content in social media that society is only worse off for taking seriously.

Politically divisive articles such as ones encouraging identity politics tend to fall in that category. So do articles with emotionally loaded terms like “woke”. Maybe they are loaded not for us, but we all know they are loaded emotionally for many.

And it doesn’t matter much if many other people engage in it, it is likely healthier for you and society not to.

Now, I agree that maybe “irrelevant” should be grounded in context — it is irrelevant to a discerning reader. It is relevant in society and its discourse, unfortunately.

Take San Francisco as a prime example. It’s a place full of people who style themselves as progressive or “woke” or whatever but a starter home is unachievable to anyone without an exit event or a $400k salary. It has one of the widest rich/poor divisions of anywhere I’ve ever seen in the USA. Major industries include mass surveillance and addictive forms of media, and I have no idea how anyone who isn’t in a high six figure job can live well there let alone raise a family.

SF is not progressive at all, except in rhetoric.

I don't think I had ever heard of woke before the non-stop talking points from the 'Right'.

It always seemed like a drummed up issue to rile up their, Christian/Holocaust Denier/Civil War Loving, base.

There are/were attempts, such as thanking the Indians who lands we stole before every Kraken game.

People get caught up in it, and then think that those opinions are normal. There is no "normative" frame of reference.

This has, of course, infected politics itself over the past 10 years.

I'm coming around to the thesis that compulsory education is fundamentally systematic child-care to enable parents to participate in post-industrial employment and labor without needing to be around too much, attempting to raise their bothersome kids at home.

We had "latchkey kids" in the 1980s or so, and nowadays we've got parents ignoring their children at home while working from the kitchen table, or in the den.

With the rise of feminism, "equal pay for equal work", and girlbosses, there's basically nobody left who knows how to raise children, or wants to do it for free (not merely free, but the opportunity cost of skilled employment), so it makes sense for the State to expand public education as much as humanly possible so that children are mostly out-of-the-way and never home, except to sleep.

Can at least talk about it like "wow, the right is really willing to die for this, what are they on about"