What is the difference between an audacious and a mediocre dead-horse take?
Frankly, I don’t know anymore. Some people may read what I have to say as the musings of a neoliberal bubble-inhabiting princess, and others may see them as a call from the Kremlin to stir workers of the world and unite against the master. Whatever you make of my positionality, I have an observation to share with my UC Berkeley compatriots in the Red Army: We may be deluding ourselves into thinking our particular tract of society is an egalitarian wet dream.
Oftentimes, when I talk doomsday anxieties with my campus peers about human rights backsliding and the rise of right-wing populism in the United States, I am met with a peculiar hopecore countervailance.
“At least we’re in California”; “At least we’re in Berkeley;” “Things could be much worse,” they’ll say.
This process of pitting a good state against a bad state is exactly what California needs for securing legitimacy. California exceptionalism — as opposed to provincial Midwesternness, gaudy Southernness and geriatric New Englandness — has become a familiar paradigm across the UCs, California State Universities, California Community Colleges and every other hotspot for highbrows in the Golden State. Many even extol the virtues of possible secession from the union.
Whom will we shine our merits against if we secede? California needs an impoverished and unenlightened United States in order to show off its development and the way it seamlessly blends liberal democracy and neoliberal technocracy. It is both the home of sanctuary cities and the headquarters of Meta, Apple, Amazon, Netflix and Google.
California’s recent proclivity for “illiberal means to a liberal end,” such as Gavin Newsom’s Prop 50, reminds me of Britain in the 20th and 21st centuries. The racist and populist UK Independence Party, founded on working toward the U.K. quitting the EU, leveraged British disaffection through the new millennium and helped realize Brexit in 2016. The lead-up to this can be traced to the Whig myth of the exceptional British Isles, which operated as a tool for self-definition against continental Europe, contributing to an inflated ego that was punctured through the decolonial process and establishment of the Commonwealth.
The Commonwealth system was intended to redress the dehumanization of “overseas subjects of the British crown” and revamp the British economy. They dismantled borders in hopes of attracting cheap labor and sanitizing reputation.
However, Britain was not ready for the extension of constitutional sameness to Black and Brown postcolonial migrants. The government plunged headfirst into colorblind utopia, overestimating how evolved its populace really was.
The expedition of democratic liberalization for public relations rather than as a natural product of meaningful and sustainable social policy is a recipe for right-wing populist backlash. We’ve seen this across Europe, South Asia and our own United States.
I am doubtful of the perpetual blueness of California. After all, this state has the darkest history in the ledgers of Indigenous people, for example. A state can transition from “wokeism” to ethnopopulism in a very short span.
UC Berkeley boasts bringing together the sharpest minds and most passionate, woke people. This fantastical combination manipulates prospective students into an oblivious self-contortion in the direction of progressive and technocratic excellence — the paradoxical and delusional project of the century.
Recently, one of my friends described this essay she came across on straight women performing “resistive lesbianism” as a subversion of the patriarchy. The theory of resistive queer existence, or “resistentialism,” is seductive, even if outrageous. It is something that a performatively woke state would endorse, a state that has not done the work necessary to enable justice but wishes to appear protective of minority rights — a federalist requisite.
Some UC Berkeley visionaries, after having read Judith Butler and Jean-Paul Sartre, may even adopt a gender-transcendent stance — rejecting all categories and unbridling their own subjectivity. This is more than fine and well. While gender is largely a social construction, some gender elements stick with people for long enough to become essential, yet flexible, parts of themselves. More importantly, some people ostensibly belong to demonized queer groups while others can bobble back and forth based on physiological and personality ambiguities — a significant political advantage that helps navigate a space and time of intense polarization.
What does not sit right with me is collapsing all gender-diverse people under the umbrella of “transgender” without acknowledgment of acute versus not-so-acute marginalizations on the political stage.
It’s like the color-, gender-, class- and caste-blind aspects of the Commonwealth: counterproductive mostly, useless completely. If it is only words and not substance, there is nothing.
Oftentimes, campus acts like a post-transphobia commonwealth — everyone is pronoun-ed in an effort to normalize transgender identities without the transformative uplifting of transgender individuals. Everyone agrees gender is a construct, and still it is the “clockable” people who get shamed for non- or improper conformity, who are instrumentalized as part of Turning Point USA campaigns. There are palpable differences in lived experiences across the spectrum.
So are we willing and ready to take on the system? Or are we biting off more than we can chew? If yes to the latter, then it is misleading to represent ourselves as the pinnacle of wokeness.
It is time to prioritize substance over appearance, radical change over radical normalization — not just to ward off false allegations of liberalism against UC Berkeley but also to effectively disable right-wing populism. We cannot extend sameness to one another without inspiring mistrust and backlash.