A vibe shift around Christmas time

After the election of Donald Trump, many people have been noticing a vibe shift throughout the popular culture. Recently, Disney has decided not to push the transgender agenda; more corporations have retreated from the DEI agenda as they line up to talk to Trump. Bible sales are up about 22% in the last few months. Even young people are buying the Bible.

On the left-wing side of things, there haven’t been any riots led by BLM types. Also, 90% of liberals believe that the 2024 election was legitimate.

Some say that we are beyond peak Wokeness. I suspect that we are, based on predictions I made five years ago. I wrote an essay near Christmastime predicting that Wokeism would eventually recede because it made everyone unhappy. I wrote about how Christmas traditions affirmed family, community and, to some extent, religious belief. Basically, all the things the Woke hate.

As I wrote about Christmas time,

At this time, women are watching incredibly sappy Hallmark movies, the men are watching Die Hard, and the children are unusually well-behaved. We go out wearing gaudy clothes and singing strange songs about figgy pudding, even though no sensible person has eaten figgy pudding for decades. A visitor from Mars would find American Christmas strange and ridiculous. Of course, he would be right.

But through all the silliness and tinsel and wrapping paper, the traditions are based on something that connects human beings to each other.

Think of anything in Wokeism that makes people even remotely happy. … Yeah. That’s what I thought.

Being Woke is like watching Schindler’s List, Sophie’s Choice and the ending to Old Yeller twice a week and listening to the song Strange Fruit and a mix of Robert Johnson in your car everyday. No one can function with that kind of concentrated depression floating around in their head.

Jordan Peterson recently interviewed an evidence-based psychologist called Lee Jussim. Apparently, you could tell left-wing authoritarians from regular left-wing people by showing them two cartoons. The top panel was a long-distance depiction of the Statue of Liberty. The second panel was a close-up of the crown of the Statue of Liberty is wearing. The people on the crown were all wearing KKK uniforms. The other cartoon had a different second panel, which depicted a racially diverse group of people dressed as lawyers, and cooks, and doctors, and so forth. They all had their arms around each other under an American flag. (They discuss this at around 13:30 into the podcast.)

The regular leftists liked the second cartoon and would want to share it on social media, whereas left-wing authoritarians wanted to share the first KKK cartoon. It’s no wonder that young white people who identified as “very liberal” were almost one-and-a-half times more likely to report mental health problems than those who considered themselves “liberal.”

Suffering is an inevitable part of life. Maybe a necessary part. Suffering inspires artists, and it makes philosophers strive for Truth. But Wokeism is a kind of self-destructive despair. There’s no wholesome hug at the end of that pride rainbow.

As corny as that optimistic cartoon sounds, you can build a prosperous and peaceful multiracial society on that vibe. As ridiculous as all those Christmas traditions are, they bind Americans together and affirm what makes people happy.

Wokeism is an empty despair that can’t build anything. Eventually, people will turn away from it and celebrate something like Christmas.