I don't agree that some centrist policies are in the spirit of the Enlightenment. They claim to be, but they ignore empirical observation and they don't question themselves, the latter of which is probably the biggest insight of the Enlightenment. I also don't agree we've had any "post-Enlightenment policies". The Enlightenment is at least as much about an ongoing process of introspection, doubt, and questioning as it is about any fixed directives.

For fun, here's something I read years ago, which I recall to have found quite entertaining. It's a treatment of how the Enlightenment is invoked by people who know little about it and internalise nothing from it: https://thebaffler.com/latest/peterson-ganz-klein Here's a snippet:

The strange paradox we face today is that the Enlightenment is being invoked like a talismanic object to thwart the very questioning of political hierarchies and norms that, for Enlightenment thinkers, was necessary for humanity’s emergence from tradition and subordination.

This is similar to what I claimed is bothering Graham more than the creation of new heresies: the questioning of old ones.

As for "a flood of crime", I'm not sure what you mean, at least in the US (https://www.statista.com/statistics/191219/reported-violent-...), and as for tribalism, here, too, I think context is necessary. Things may feel more tribal than in, say, the 1990s, but even if that could be quantified, America and other western countries have certainly been more tribal before (a particularly egregious example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lynching_in_the_United_States#...), and it may be that if things are indeed more tribal than recent history, it is recent history that's the anomaly.

> do you think you can seriously think your "woke" frameworks can compete?

I don't know what you mean by my woke frameworks (or even by woke frameworks, but that would take much to define, I expect). I've never implemented a DEI process, never seriously studied the effectiveness such practices (and so I cannot have any strong opinions one way or the other about them), never put any kind of banner or flag on my social media avatar, and I've never advertised my preferred pronouns.

My contribution is merely that I spent a few years in a former life academically researching history, and I have little patience for superficial "analyses" by people who have far too little knowledge of the matters they write about, and rather than acknowledge their superficial familiarity, resort to assertions that only show how much context they're missing (and do so with a straight face and no trace of humour). My purpose was only to highlight some glaring flaws in Graham's treatment.

For someone with even some training in historical analysis, Graham's article reads like what an article about the nuances of memory safety in programming written by a historian (and one that doesn't pretend to be even an amateur programmer yet writes undoubting conviction) would read to a programmer. Graham's piece doesn't even rise to the level you'd expect from an amateur. It's more a rant you'd hear from your grandfather about the good old days after he'd seen something in the news that upset him.

As to modernity, much of it was brought about by things that were called the analogous of "woke" by the centrists and conservatives of the time. As I wrote in another comment, claims of empty performance were contemporaneously levelled at the very same movements that Graham now characterises as substantive (radical chic). The way the arguments were presented were also similar: the feminists of the interwar period fought for something real but now it's all a show. You speak of the Enlightenment, but many things we take for granted were heavily debated in the West until the late 1960s at least, and those debates seem to be making a comeback. Many of the places you mentioned certainly have yet to accept some of the most basic ideals of the Enlightenment.

As to whether or not I think wokeness (once properly defined) is purely performative or also contains some substance, I hope to form a reasoned opinion in twenty years' time, but until then, I find it more helpful to discuss these matters with people who actually study the subject more rigourously (and comparatively to historical events with the appropriate rigour) and may have valuable insight rather than an opinion based on gut feelings.