Woke Woes: The necessity of beauty and strength in art and politics

Since the election I’ve written five posts (including this one) about changes in the culture. Everywhere on YouTube, I am observing a renewed fight against the joylessness of Wokism. I feel like a journalist reporting from a foreign country.

I don’t think the move against Woke is only on YouTube. The Oscars had the lowest ratings ever this year, but the members of the Academy of Motion Pictures voted for independent pictures. The rumor is that they were mad at the restrictive impacts of DEI mandates.

Mainstream video games are undergoing a similar treatment. For those of you who aren’t gamers, video game companies in the West since 2020 have been creating unattractive characters in order to be more realistic. Predictably, these video games are bombing, and more people are turning to independent games and Japanese games that are comfortable with depicting unusually attractive people in a medium designed for escapist fantasy.

For those of you who have never played video games, let me assure you that making characters look less sexy and interesting is a bad idea. Gaming is a hobby that is all about fun. As looking at interesting and attractive people is fun, looking at uninteresting characters is a sub-optimal strat.

As we do plain-looking people, we see modern identity politics all the time. Worse than unattractive characters, identity politics draws us out of the suspended disbelief of a video game. In the recent game, Assassin’s Creed: Shadows, three of the seven romance options are gay or non-binary. So the new game is 42.8 percent LGBTQ+KonamiCode people.

Worse is that you can romance a non-binary samurai ronin. Now I respect both non-binary people and samurai ronin. They have a tough road to hoe. But during the Sengoku era (1467-1603), I quite doubt there were very many nonbinary ronin. In fact, I suspect there might be more people who call themselves nonbinary in a large corporate game company than among the samurai in Sengoku era Japan.

These examples indicate that Wokism is in retreat. However, Trump’s statement that “Wokism is dead” is exaggerated. However, his joint address to Congress and the reaction to it demonstrated the weaknesses of Wokism. Being Woke just isn’t fun. Videogames with unrealistically attractive people are fun. Movies with tough dudes killing bad guys are fun. To put it simply, people like beauty and strength. They also like feeling good about themselves and where they live. The left believes that human nature is malleable and they can make us want to watch or hear stories that they approve of. In reality, we are designed to want stories with strong men who protect their communities and beautiful women who are kind. That won’t change.

This is a huge problem for the left, as it relies on art and media to sustain itself. And the reason artists love leftism so much is that leftism has better vibes than most varieties of conservatism. Conservatism has axiomatic and evidence-based varieties, but Wokist impulses now express themselves not in ideas but in irritable mental gestures that seek to resemble ideas. (Hat tip to Lionel Trilling.) As such, the left is even more reliant on art than usual, as art can appeal to emotion more effectively than policy arguments.

But for art to be truly effective in pushing a narrative, it needs high artistic quality. When was the last time that you yourself felt that a leftist piece of art or a leftist speech was inspiring? By inspiring I do not mean that it is necessary that you felt inspiration, but that you could understand how other people would be inspired by the art or speech.

The seemingly separate decline in Oscar viewership, the unpopularity of Woke video games and the box office failure of Snow White are related to the current weakness of the left in general and are therefore all connected. Modern leftism can’t inspire people anymore.

P.S. The new TV show "Adolescence" on Netflix has fantastic acting and camera work while promoting Woke ideology. I still think the show would be better if it didn't have Woke politics.