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Replying to
interesting. what is my thread wrong about or missing? is wokeness eating the world and meritocracy eating the world the same thing as "woke-and-anti-woke eating the world"? ...perhaps one point missing is that there is no center?
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In practice what happens is that an institution that's entirely taken over by wokies tends to fail functionally before it can do serious damage these days (so that's different from communism in the 20s) while an institution that's pwned by the alt-right/alt-light/NRx is stillborn
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Also, "meritocracy" is not the logical opposite of "woke", though it sometimes marches under that banner. The logical opposite is ethnonationalism, which is why it is very hard for those who take quillette-type positions at face value to avoid that slippery slope
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And so, whether they like it or not, and no matter how much they whine about being smeared, the co-option of "classical liberalism" and "meritocracy" arguments into ethnonationalist apologia is hard to resist. The middle is not a tenable position while hedgehogs eat the world
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The overall slight drift to the left (which you call new shapiro more left than old shapiro, yarvin calls cthulhu tending left, and MLK calls arc of history bending towards justice) is not the same thing as "more woke". Woke is a label for a specifically extremist new thing.
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Replying to and
So what’s the best label for the phenomenon—Egalitarianism eats the world? Leftism? And is that contra markets/meritocracy? Re your point about wokeness collapsing, I’m not sure you can have a fully market driven society either before that leads to some sort of revolution.
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my point with the entanglement thesis is that there isn't a there there with what you're trying to tag. It's bothsides or nothing. My best take on a bothsides version is hedgehogs are eating the world. It's a beef-only mindset that can only think in conflict mode
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which means it comes in pairs... (right/left, authoritarian/libertarian, globalist/nationalist etc) if you want to label only one side as a "thing" in isolation, you can only produce polemics, not insight (which is fine if that's what you want to do)
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My pre-weirding version of this argument, which was actually part of my sw-eating-world essays, was "principle of generative pluralism" (basically live-and-let-live in a more rigorous form). It is consistent with both software and markets eating world.