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Notes -
They weren't "late to discover wokeness" - they've been complaining about it - or its forebearers - since before I was born. They just were completely incapable of stopping it, for a variety of reasons that would probably take several large books to adequately address and provide supporting sources for. The TL;DR is that the circumstances of post-War America - chiefly, increasing technological and organization scale, along the mass suburbanization of America - meant that the Right largely couldn't articulate a real, workable answer to the rise of IdPol, because they believed in the conditions that would inevitably lead to its rise, and they didn't even know it. To paraphrase The Last Psychiatrist, the Right wanted to debate the conclusions ("schools should teach family values! the government should support traditional marriage!" etc.) but accepted all the premises, and the entire form of the argument (that we should have mass society that encourages hyperindividualism, that accepts it as given that kids are supposed to go to college far away and then have their own lives, etc.)
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