What the woke revolution is — and isn't

Beyond that, I can see three potentially fruitful paths for further exploration of where the successor ideology comes from and where it might be going.

Religion: It’s become an interpretive cliché to describe impassioned social movements as forms of “secular religion.” But in this case, there’s something to it. The very name “woke” is a play on the Christian Great Awakenings that swept across the United States at various times in our past, revitalizing old faiths and giving birth to new ones. And as Yang and other thoughtful critics of the trend have noted, there are important sociological and moral connections linking the political sensibility of the woke activists, ensconced within elite institutions of American culture, to the old liberal Protestant mainline, and from there all the way back to the officially sanctioned moral rectitude of Puritan New England.

In many respects, the successor ideology isn’t a political movement at all. It eschews policy positions in favor of a call to individual moral purification. It proposes to achieve this end through denunciation of sinners who are invited to confess and give public testimony of their transgressions, with punishment taking the form of social ostracism. The purity of the accusers, meanwhile, is demonstrated by the severity of their denunciations and by their refusal to countenance mercy or forgiveness. The social dynamic has reminded some critics of the “struggle sessions” of China’s cultural revolution, but there’s no need to invoke secular totalitarianism and mass murder. The comparatively smaller-scale terror of the Salem witch trials is a more apt analogy.