Noam writes<p>Lee Siegel discusses David Rieff's new book <i>Desire and Fate</i>. An interesting and provocative piece about <a href="https://libranet.de/search?tag=woke" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>woke</span></a> culture.</p><blockquote>As a result of Black Lives Matter, more black people appear in adverts than ever before – an innovation not lost on legions of economically struggling white people who were abandoned, first, by an insular, self-infatuated neoliberalism, and then insulted by an insular, self-infatuated regime of diversity, equity and inclusion. Yet the reading and maths scores of poor black children remain as low, or lower, than they have ever been in the modern age. Everyone at the bottom still loses. ... Rieff rightly cherishes this quote from the “hard left” writer Adolph Reed: “The real project of Woke was to diversify the ruling class.”</blockquote><blockquote>Woke ideology appals him precisely because of the way its airy armchair radicalism – “subjective idealism” Rieff calls it – spins fantasies about the reality before its very nose. America’s “therapeutic culture”, Rieff writes, has been “weaponized politically as traumatic culture”. The central principle of this new moral atmosphere is “the idea that the psychological is absolutely equal – if not superior – to the material”. Historical injustice is more alive than present injustice; biological gender is fungible; “capitalism and White Supremacy are inseparable”, despite the fact of “outright Chinese pre-eminence within the capitalist global system”.</blockquote><p><a href="https://www.newstatesman.com/ideas/2025/02/david-rieff-foretells-fate-woke?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">newstatesman.com/ideas/2025/02…</a></p><p><a href="https://libranet.de/search?tag=justice" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>justice</span></a> <a href="https://libranet.de/search?tag=DEI" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>DEI</span></a> <a href="https://libranet.de/search?tag=DavidRieff" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>DavidRieff</span></a></p>