They’ll also note that the main thing separating those regimes from today’s Wokified institutions is the element of government coercion. Yes, there can be immense pressure to conform in places like Yale Law School, where no microaggression is too small not to invite the wrath of censorious administrators. Ultimately, though, Americans are still free to reject the Woke ethos, even if they sometimes have to leave their institutions as a result.

This is why Wokeness will fail. For every attempt to cancel certain writers, others will publish them. For every diktat to fix language by replacing some words with others, people will merely find more subversive ways to say the same thing. For every effort to turn high schools and universities into Wokeness factories, there will be efforts to start afresh. Because technology, capital and good ideas move faster than ideology, those efforts will succeed more quickly than their skeptics imagine.

In the long run, Americans have always gotten behind protest movements that make the country more open, more decent, less divided. What today is called Woke does none of those things. It has no future in the home of the free.