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Past peak woke? Don't count on it
This is an essay on the long-term state of the culture war, written as a post for TheMotte.
1. The culture war
In December 2021, engineer-entrepreneur Elon Musk made the following enigmatic tweet: "traceroute woke_mind_virus". The term "traceroute" is an inside joke for fellow computer geeks; basically, it is a request for information about where something came from and how it got here. The phrase "woke mind virus" refers to the woke movement, aka social justice movement, aka political correctness. I define wokeness -- or, as Tom Klingenstein has called it, woke communism -- as an ideology incorporating the following elements:
America, and, with it, all of Western civilization, is now embroiled in a culture war. This war is often portrayed as left vs. right; indeed, pundits on both sides of the corporate media make their living peddling the left vs. right drama in the style of a pro-wrestling production. But the reality is that, in a sane world, conservatives and progressives are not natural enemies. They are people of different temperaments, who tend to have different blind spots, and therefore tend to make different sorts of mistakes -- and who need each other's input to see into those blind spots and to temper those mistakes. Of course, conservatives and progressives often hold different opinions about how to achieve their common objectives, but that is not what makes people enemies. My wife and I often hold different opinions about how to achieve our common objectives, but that certainly doesn't make us enemies. At the end of the day it makes us a better team, when we can put our egos aside and work together.
In the long run, the real culture war is a war against fundamentalism -- aka radicalism, extremism, or supremacy movements. As Solzhenitsyn wrote, the line between good and evil is not a line between nations, classes, or political parties, but a line that passes through every human heart. Fundamentalists are people who have worked themselves into a sustained frenzy, in which they've redrawn the line between good and evil to lie between their people and certain other people. Fundamentalism, thus defined, has two broad consequences. First, because fundamentalists vest ultimate moral authority in people rather than principles, they tend to actually abandon the precepts of the ideology from which their sect sprang up. For example, the woke movement has abandoned liberal principles like free speech and equal treatment under law -- just as Christian fundamentalists often abandon Biblical principles like grace, charity, and loving their enemies. Second, fundamentalists often feel entitled to suppress the speech of their ideological adversaries -- the bad people -- as well as to forcibly control their behavior, seize their property, and target them for oppression of any sort they can get away with. These oppressive sanctions are administered by the fundamentalist regime, not as punishment for any crime the target has committed as an individual, but simply for being a member of the targeted class -- whether that class consists of the Jews, the "bourgeoisie", the Tutsis, infidels and heretics, straight white males, or the unvaccinated.
Any ideology or identity -- from progressivism, to conservatism, to Islam, to Christianity, to being black, to being white, to being German, etc. -- can spawn a degenerate, fundamentalist strain. Wokeness is such a degenerate strain. Wokeness is not progressivism, or even "extreme" progressivism, and it is certainly not liberalism. Essentially, wokeness is a fundamentalist leftist cult masking itself as compassionate progressivism. Wokeness is not too much of a good thing, or even too much of a decent thing; it is a warlike tyranny that has infected the progressive political parties of the West and begun to transform them into something unrecognizable to their well-meaning forebears.
Unfortunately, many progressives today have cozied up to the woke vampire, holding their tongues about its obvious dark tendencies for the sake of forming a political coalition. I assume they believe this is a price worth paying to accomplish otherwise laudable aims, and that the insanity can only go so far. I believe they are woefully mistaken.
2. The (probably growing) danger of woke communism
It is human nature to assume that our children's future, and their children's future, will be fundamentally like the past we grew up with -- even when we have good reasons to believe otherwise. For example, it would have seemed alarmist to most Russians in 1900 to talk of omnipresent secret police, mass torture, and death camps on the horizon in their country. Yet, these developments, though they may have seemed far-fetched at the time, were in fact less than twenty years away under the grip of the Bolshevik communist ideology -- which at the time appeared to be nothing more than a fringe movement. As Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn would later write,
I believe that wokeness represents a grave and growing threat to Western civilization. I am not saying that we are going to have death camps in the United States in a generation or two. I am saying that, if we continue down the path we have been on, America's future is going to be considerably less safe, less comfortable, and less free than its past, as a result of the influence of woke communism.
Since the victory of Donald Trump in the 2024 US Presidential election, there is speculation that the worst of wokeness might now be behind us. History suggests otherwise. Tyrannical ideologies often endure political setbacks, even seemingly crippling setbacks, only to later reemerge with renewed strength. Soviet communism seemed all but dead when its leaders were exiled in the 1890's. Nazism took a direct hit when an attempted Nazi coup d'etat was thwarted in 1923 and the party leader, Adolf Hitler, was sentenced to prison. Shia fundamentalism ebbed for a time in Iran when its leader, Ruhollah Khomeini, was exiled in 1964. But each of these movements came back with renewed strength within a generation -- because the culture was invisibly moving in a direction that was susceptible to their influence, even while their leaders were temporarily out of the picture.
Most Americans are not actively advancing the woke agenda. In 2018, around eighty percent of Americans, including a majority of Democratic voters, affirmed the statement that "political correctness has gone too far" [source]. But this matters less than it might appear. The vast majority of Russians were not communists in 1917, and most probably thought communism had gone too far, when the October Revolution swept away democratic governance in Russia. Most Germans were not Nazis in 1933, when Hitler was appointed Chancellor of Germany, and most never became Nazis -- but World War II and the Holocaust happened all the same. Most Iranians were not Islamic extremists in 1979 when the Ayatollah came to power in the Iranian revolution. Only 2% of Vietnamese are members of the communist party today -- and yet the party rules that country with an iron fist. Tyranny grows from the seeds of a militant and vocal minority, in the soil of a fearful and silent majority. As long as the majority remains fearful and silent, it is naive to expect a tyrannical ideology to fade away just because its leaders have been removed from power for a time.
Though its devoted constituents were a minority of the population, the hydra of political correctness -- or social-justice, or wokeness, or whatever you want to call it -- got its way more and more in the period from 1990 to 2020. For a thumbnail sketch of the cultural shift that occurred over that period, consider the following public statements by leading American politicians in 1987, 2012, and 2020:
Each of the last two statements might have been considered unthinkable for a national leader in America just a generation before it was made. Yet, wokeness kept gaining ground over the American mind -- even while most Americans believed it had already gone too far. And, of course, the cultural shift toward woke insanity was not just talk. As Richard Weaver famously wrote, ideas have consequences -- and crazy ideas have crazy consequences. If you once believed, as I did, that woke bureaucrats would never allow DEI (diversity, equity, and inclusion) to override meritocracy in safety-critical professions such as those of physician and airline pilot, you'd have been wrong. If you once thought they would never defund and demoralize the police to let criminals rampage against law-abiding citizens in broad daylight, you'd have been wrong again. If you once thought they wouldn't open the Southern border of the United States to invite millions upon millions of illegal aliens into the country with no immigration enforcement whatsoever, you'd have been wrong again. If you once thought they would never push aggressively for biological males to compete in women's sports, or house male sex offenders in women's prisons because the convicts claim to have gender dysphoria, you'd have been wrong again. If you once thought they would never arrest hundreds of people each year in a Western democracy [the UK] for political speech posted on social media, you'd have been wrong again. If you once thought they would never advocate rationing lifesaving medicine based on race (whites to the back of the line), you'd be wrong yet again. If you thought they would never let immigrant gangs rape tens of thousands of young girls, while police deliberately ignored the situation on the grounds that it would be "Islamophobic" to intervene, you'd have been wrong yet again. As Sam Harris has asked, if we will allow our daughters to be raped in the name of diversity and inclusion, what won't we allow? And if the rapists' woke government benefactors give them high cover for their crimes, what won't they do if we allow them? Can you look in the mirror and say out loud what you still think they'll never be willing to do? or what they will never be able to get away with -- even if most people know it's wrong, and secretly, silently oppose it?
Since the election of Donald Trump, there have been some encouraging signs in the struggle against woke communism. Several advertisers have come back to Twitter/X, who had previously boycotted the platform because it refused to censor what they call "hate speech" (broadly defined to include a great deal of right-leaning political speech). Many corporations, including Facebook/Meta, McDonalds, and Harley Davidson, have dismantled their DEI (diversity-equity-inclusion) programs, and so have several universities. Even Alexandria Ocasio Cortez has removed her pronouns (she/her) from her Twitter bio! But recall -- or be informed, if you are not old enough to remember -- that when Ronald Reagan left office in 1988, no advertisers were boycotting anyone for refusing to censor anything; few if any corporations or universities had active DEI departments, and no one of either party had pronouns in their bio. Yet, somehow, in thirty years or so we got from "Tear down this wall" [Reagan, 1987] to "You didn't build that" [Obama, 2012], to "Defund the police" [Kamala Harris, 2020]. On a crazy-scale from 1 to 10, if we seemed to be at 3 in 1987, and a 7 in 2020, we have perhaps now clawed our way back to a 5 or 6. And if long term momentum was in the wrong direction in 1988, after eight years of Reagan presidency, why would it be in the right direction now? In my opinion, wokeness isn't going anywhere -- at least not if our culture continues down the path of business as usual.
3. The constitution of the people
So how did we go from "tear down this wall" to "defund the Police" in just thirty years? I submit the root of the problem isn't wokeness itself, but the moral rot that gave wokeness room to breathe in the first place. Honest men and women, even honest men and women who lean left politically, do not become woke "social justice warriors", or indulge the woke's illiberal schemes in silent complicity for political or personal gain. Nor do brave men and women, of any political leaning, cower down and keep silent in the face of "cancel culture". If we had more honest men on the left like Michael Shellenberger, and more brave women on the right like Riley Gaines, we would never have been dragged into the swamp of wokeism in the first place. But we have too few, and I submit that is the heart of the problem. This condition of moral rot -- the soil in which tyranny grows -- does not change when the leaders of an extremist movement are exiled or imprisoned, let alone defeated in a single election.
In every nation, at all times, the militant, the tyrannical minority is there lurking in the shadows, ready to pounce upon weakness. That is an eternal given. What matters is what the rest of us do. Tyranny requires tyrants, of course -- but, more importantly, it requires a meek and passive populace, minding its own business while the tyrant and his minions eat away at the roots of their civilization. What arrests and beats back tyranny is not a policy written on paper, but the moral character of the nation. As Thomas Paine wrote in 1776, it is wholly owing to the constitution of the people, and not to the constitution of the government, that the crown is not as oppressive in England as in Turkey [Common Sense].
Our forebears, the first Americans, left their families and farms to go to war against the greatest military power then in the world. They did this not knowing whether they would die in battle, not knowing whether they would be hanged as traitors, and often not knowing whether they would even be paid for their service. None of them were conscripted; every one was free to let someone else bear the brunt of risk and sacrifice, while fully sharing in the liberty the Revolution would bring if it was successful. The continental soldiers risked all they had -- not for their personal gain, but to defend the natural rights of their countrymen and their posterity.
Today, by contrast, many of us -- that aforementioned posterity -- will not dare to speak the plain truth before our eyes if it means we might be passed over for a promotion at work, or be made to feel socially uncomfortable. In that respect, we are not living lives worthy of the sacrifice our forebears made for us, let alone living up to the example they set. Can such a nation dodge the bullet of tyranny for long? I doubt it. That is not how the world works, or ever has worked. As economist Walter Williams noted, the freedom of individuals from compulsion or coercion never was, and is not now, the normal state of human affairs; the normal state for the ordinary person is tyranny, arbitrary control and abuse. Why should the United States be any different, if it ceases to be the home of the brave?
To be clear (since this is the Motte), the cultural shortcoming that let wokeness wedge its foot in the door is not intellectual, but moral in nature. Tyranny does not gain ground with logic, and logic is not the weapon that beats it back. The vast majority of Americans already know that wokeness is wrong. What people need to stand up against wokeness is not a higher IQ, or a seminar on rationality, but the courage to say out loud, in public, what they already know to be right. If men do not stand up and speak the truth when it is uncomfortable, it will become expensive. If men do not stand up and speak the truth when it is expensive, it will become dangerous. If men then do not stand up and speak the truth when it is dangerous, only God can help us. If we are not willing to speak the truth and we do not believe in God, we will certainly believe in Hell -- because it is on its way.
I think the root of the woke mind virus (and a lot of other mind virii that are in the mix as well) is that we’re essentially an immunocompromised society. There’s no lines in the sand that can’t be crossed. The evils always exist, but we’re the polite people who refuse, on the grounds of “being nice” to say anything about them. The urge to cancel people has always existed, we just don’t stand up to them anymore. There were probably always perverts who want access to children. Now we’ve lost the ability to say “we don’t do that here”. There was always a push to try to get sinecures for our own ethnic, religious, or sexuality tribes, but again, there wasn’t any sense that the rest of us wouldn’t push back. And radical Islam has been pushing through the same gap. They want to impose on us, we more or less don’t want to be rude by saying “no, you cannot do that.” They want to impose their view of the world on us, or to be allowed access to children. They want every child to be taught about Islam, but pushing back is rude. And I think until the West regrows it’s spine and decides that it’s ideas are pretty good and it has every right, not only to teach its own religion, culture, and legal theory in its own country, but the right to insist that people who choose to live here abide those beliefs and systems. No, you may not rape 12 year olds. No, you don’t get to throw people out of work for offending you. No, men don’t get to go into women’s private spaces, especially changing areas. No, you don’t get to trans kids in schools.
And until that part is fixed, until there’s enough spine in the west to be willing to impose its will in its own territories, and do so no matter how many ways the carriers of mind viruses try to brand us as crime thinkers, I don’t see it stopping. I think the west made a mistake in removing Christianity from government entirely. Yes it can be annoying, but if my options are “we’ll arrest you for protecting your children from rape, while teaching them to salute th3 gay flag” or “were all Presbyterians now, and if someone wants to hold office they have to be a confessional Christian,” im signing up on the second one. At least they can tell people to stop stealing, raping, and say no to teaching kids to switch genders while hiding it from parents. At least there’s no reason to think that such a society would go woke out of politeness.
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I'm rather sure that Trump's victory last year is by far not the first setback of wokeness in the US, and arguably not the biggest either. I recall reading the argument from Walt Bismarck and maybe other rightist bloggers as well that the period between Nixon's reelection and the LA riots of 1992 can be interpreted as two decades of racial detente, for example.
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I think the question is, what will be the synthesis to the thesis/anti-thesis you have pointed at. People will eventually realize they can speak up but someone needs to do the work to fill in what comes next.
I don't think we will go forward to the world that the woke want. Neither do I think we're going back to the 80s. The only way forward is through.
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