Only the economic Left can beat the Woke

A Woke takeover of what, with apologies to President Dwight Eisenhower, can fairly be called the Academic-Cultural-Philanthropic Complex in the United States and throughout the so-called Anglosphere is now all but complete. This should be both surprising and unsurprising: surprising, because the dominant—that is to say establishment—conceptions of the purposes of education, culture, and even language itself have been transformed in such a short period of time; but also unsurprising, because Woke is an extremely powerful, coherent, and for many morally attractive, not to say morally imperative, worldview, especially to the young, which is something most of its critics can’t seem to bring themselves to fully acknowledge. And almost wherever you look, from K-12 teachers’ unions, to library associations, to museums, to, perhaps more surprisingly, medicine and other STEM disciplines, Woke’s inherent appeal—above all, its immensely seductive moral urgency—is being institutionalized by a bureaucracy whose reason for being is precisely to consolidate this worldview’s cultural hegemony. In these conditions, what will be surprising is if this new cultural system fails to prevail.

All that said, there is increasing resistance to Woke. Some of that resistance—above all, from conservative governors and state legislators—appears more powerful than it actually is, while other centers of opposition—above all, from elements of what remains of an anti-identitarian, class-focused left—are likely to prove strong and more resilient than they appear at first glance.

Before going any further, it is important to be precise about what wokeness is and what it isn’t, and, especially, to be careful with analogies. Somewhere between 500,000 and 2 million people died during the Chinese Cultural Revolution; millions more were stripped of their professions and livelihoods and deported from cities to the countryside, where they remained for as long as a decade. By contrast, not a single person has died from the insaturation of wokeness and of Ibram X. Kendi-style critical race theory in cultural and academic institutions. To insist on the point isn’t to say that ruined careers, forced early retirements, and self-censorship brought about by wokeness are of no importance. They are hugely important, above all, to the fate of the culture and the life of the mind. But it is a plea to keep things in proportion: Just as the McCarthy era, vile and, as with Woke, culturally and intellectually repressive and censoring as it was, wasn’t a reign of fascism, so this era isn’t a new reign of the Khmer Rouge. So here is a plea for keeping things in proportion and for eschewing the self-absorption and provinciality that so marks the American debate over Woke (and most everything else, it must be said) at every point along the ideological spectrum. I think Woke is a cultural disaster, but it is not a tragedy. Ukraine: That is what real tragedy looks like.