Written by Sasha Ivanov. This year saw the publication of two very important books, which are bound to shape intellectual discourse and (hopefully) public policy in coming years. Richard Hanania’s The Origins of Woke and Chris Rufo’s America’s Cultural Revolution
Thanks for writing this, very interesting review. The problem I see is that abandoning a Christian moral framework and a liberal political framework means abandoning the United States as a whole. And while it’s certainly possible (and eventually inevitable), I’m not persuaded that this post-America regime is desirable or that it would be better than what we have now. It would mean that we are in a Weimar scenario, with radical movements across the political spectrum vying for the regime. I would prefer to adapt and develop the founding principles to our current challenges. There is still a lot of good in this country and there is still hope for transcending our problems through culture war, changes to the law, and institutional reform.
I hurt a lot of heads with this topic, but I am willing to fight my corner for the rest of my life. What do European nations have that Americans don't? They all have Communist Parties, who are active and win votes. We don't have that here because McCarthyism worked. Bill Ackman called for The List of everyone at Harvard who signed those Jew Hating pieces of paper.
He was two days later than I for calling for a private sector coalition of willing folks in tech and finance to combine video capture, big data analysis and facial recognition software to identify every single asshole who marches "for Palestine" and Hamas. Free speech does not mean freedom from consequences. We need to identify every single person in these marches. We are in the late first inning of WWIII and we need to manage the home front even more aggressively than we did during WWI or WWII. The Biden Administration let 800,000+ military age men into this country from the 20 nations on the Terror Watchlist. The shootings and bombings are coming to a town near you. We need to be ready. Getting a handle on the Useful Idiots and Homegrown Leftist America-Haters is just one step that needs to be taken.
To me that kind of action is unnecessary and harmful. You hire someone based on their experiences and performance levels, not politics. Harvard graduates are notorious for excelling in the real world. As a business owner I wouldn’t care about their political activism if their resume is strong or the interview goes well. Also I could be wrong here but from what I heard, it was about 12 leaders from different student groups that wrote the letter up and posted it and all the other members of these groups simply got opted in to it irrespective of their actual opinions. If I’m in the student group for foreign affairs and all of a sudden I wake up to see that letter... I would be a bit confused especially if I didn’t support the statement itself... then let’s say a few days later I get an offer from a job rescinded. It all seems quite ridiculous to me. Either way a person shouldn’t be canceled over activism akin to this
Good for you, "Blmhcfu," whoever you are. I don't reply to what Slashdot calls "Anonymous Cowards." You want more of a response, tell me your real name.
The challenge to the Christian and Liberal roots of America is that there are loopholes to exploit, and any loophole that can be exploited will be exploited. Human beings are very good at exploiting loopholes.
(Loophole might not even be the best word here as they are inherent goals of the fundamental principles, perhaps real life failure mode of those principles is better, but I wanted to capture the idea that ideological entrepreneurs will always be seeking these things out and won't leave them alone.)
These don't always come out right away. Either because there are pragmatic exceptions made to Christianity and Liberalism to combat such loopholes, or because the physical state of the world provides protection from the consequences of unfettered Christianity/Liberalism.
When Civil Rights caused an explosion of crime and disorder in our cities society responded with "The New Jim Crow". It wasn't consistent with Christian empathy or Liberal crime policy, but America isn't Sweden and blacks aren't Swedes. In other words we made a pragmatic exception to our principles because our principles were failing an empirical test. The cognitive dissonance from this, acting like blacks need extra policing while pretending they don't, gave rise to BLM and the rest of it.
Another example is that in a poorer world with more expensive transportation, one doesn't even need an immigration policy to keep out the third world. They can't even afford the transport cost. And when they get where they are going the first world is still too poor to have a welfare state (and in many cases back then the average citizen let alone immigrant didn't even have the vote). Christian empathy and Liberal immigration sentiment thus are protected from their own flaws by material reality.
I guess the question people ask is this. If you believe unprincipled exceptions to Christian and Liberal principles are necessary to make modern society function, can these be sustainably implemented within those frameworks? Or are these principals ultimately totalizing in time? Is the only way to rip up the foundation?
I pose that as a separate question from wether such foundations even could be ripped up or if what replaced them would be any better. Those are good questions to ask once one properly diagnoses Christian and Liberal failure modes.
If you had a naturally law abiding population, like Sweden used to have, you could afford to have a very humane and empathetic justice system without it causing a breakdown in law and order. To not do so would be unchristian.
Imagine for instance the portrayal of the criminal justice system in Shawshank Redemption. That is how liberals think of criminals and the criminal justice system. As far as I can tell it bears little resemblance to actual prison life, where the inmates would be largely black and not be as sympathetic as Morgan Freemen.
Moreover, if all men are (literally) created equal, you should not need two different systems for two different population subgroups. And a lot of Christian energy during Civil Rights went into the proposition that such physical equality was "literally true" and it ought to be written into law that it is "literally true" and that results deviating from that truth were evidence of foul play. After all, if it wasn't "literally true" then a lot of behaviors people didn't like before Civil Rights are just rational rather than evil.
You can try to reconcile Christianity with genetic realism via the suggestions in The Bell Curve, but nobody wants to hear them and they would run into a collision course with Civil Rights. Politically/Culturally I just don't think Murray-ism has legs, even Murray seems to understand this. He soldiers on despite the futility though.
You are making fair criticisms of liberal thoughts on the justice system, but I’m not seeing how any of that bears on Christian assumptions about criminal law. “Christian” =/= post 1950s America.
All me one more comment on the broader point. The author dislikes both Christianity and Classical Liberalism. I’m mostly just a fan of the latter. Anyone who wants to criticize the legacy of the Enlightenment has to deal with the consequences of Industrial Revolution, and the fact that life has gotten so much better since that time. My experience is that most people who criticize the Enlightenment basically ignore this or have some weird value system in which glory to God is more important than becoming wealthy and free. For an atheist it is particularly strange.
To want to do away with classical liberalism due to wokeness is like complaining about winning a million dollars in the lottery because you have to pay taxes on it. I’ll take wokeness if it’s required to have our decline in infant mortality rate, the elimination of communicable disease, etc
There seems little reason to me that wokeness is required to have nerds and tinkerers make assembly lines better. If anything it seems to make it harder for those people to due their magic. When we were inventing antibiotics and indoor plumbing we had Jim Crow and colonialism. The last time we had crime under control blacks were basically disenfranchised.
Classical Liberalism is doing away with itself, mostly via the open border immigration you love so much.
The key point is that there is no "one weird trick" that will solve for the political equilibrium. Getting someone to pass an executive order, while an important step in a larger program, does nothing if it's going against the tide of the political equilibrium.
Civil Rights came about because black votes (and cultural power, and violence) were relatively cheap. The cultural innovation was convincing white people not to ethnic bloc vote in response via making them feel guilty as shit about it. In the Nixon era you could dog whistle around that guilt, but the left slowly brought multiple responses to that.
Your insights are a great practical guide to what someone who has won the political question should do to actualize their victory, but it won't produce the victory in and of itself. Sadly, your immigration views assure such victory is impossible.
I think you describe the opposing viewpoint correctly. It is a God-first approach to life.
I think you will have trouble finding consensus with them because they view your viewpoint (becoming wealthy and free is better than being obedient to God) as self-worship, which, in religion, is akin to worshiping Satan. Satan’s big sin was self-worship, or an unwillingness to submit to God.
This review ignores the strongest pieces of evidence I present, which is the direct temporal sequence of events. Something pops up in the bureaucracy and then it later becomes part of culture. We see that over and over again. And yes he’s right it’s about how people other than legislators have interpreted the law, but I mostly point to judges and the president, not the average low level bureaucrat. He argues that my list of conservative victories tend to be in a libertarian direction, which is true, in which case rolling back civil rights law would fit right in to that.
On a different note, this is the second article I’ve read by the author, and I’m glad to learn he doesn’t like Christian morality and think it’s a source of much of our problems. But the first article was about how much he loves socialism and labor unions, which are based on the idea that society should cater to the lazy and stupid at the expense of the productive. I think he should reconsider his economic views.
“And when Republicans tried to find conservative judges and bureaucrats to appoint, they discovered that there simply weren’t enough of them.”
This part of the book was about the early 1970s. As I show, that problem has been solved. This is why courts do conservative things all the time and could on civil rights law too.
"This review ignores the strongest pieces of evidence I present, which is the direct temporal sequence of events. Something pops up in the bureaucracy and then it later becomes part of culture." does "something" pops up ex nihilo? Looks a lot like religious thinking to me.
Excellent compare/contrast essay with twist that although Rufo much stronger than Hanania, both stand on fundamental ailing assumptions. Thank you for the strong arguments with supporting cases, and clear prose. Also yikes, if classical liberalism and Christian puritan roots the ultimate cause of current decline, since what might replace it could easily be worse. But the old roots themselves cause the decline. It's good to discuss. Calm blue ocean, calm blue ocean.
“The bureaucracy is woke for the same reason that capital is woke: elite-college graduates are literally taught to be woke, from first grade up until they earn their PhDs and JDs. This is due to the systematic capture of education by leftists – a process described in Rufo’s book.”
But why do students just passively accept woke drivel? I think in many cases, these kids are egalitarian by nature.
From my college experience, most of the professors are pretty objective and stay away from politics. However, it really depends on your degree. I was a psychology major and took a lot of classes on evolution/anthropology on the side. We never spoke about politics unless it related to the content (Russian lit, Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy, etc.) and it was never framed as this is what you should believe in... it was more like what did the author think. However, I can also imagine that some majors are just more woke in general and likely experience more ideas like that. But for most classes it’s non-existent. The reason why people talk about it so much are the outliers. Colleges also just attract more liberal people, so teachers are more likely to be as such as well. There has been a stark increase and I think that’s down to additional selection factors as well as cultural shifts. But yeah in general I find it funny that so many people think you are just getting brainwashed with wokeness on campus everyday or that people are protesting all the time. These things are something that you rarely come across. But again I speak as a psychology major not a women’s studies major haha.
Your perspective sounds quite reasonable to me. In addition to the cultural shift (considerably aided by activist writers in Hollywood), there is the fact that activists have marched through various institutions. The universities produce these activists, but I think you are correct that they are self-selected and/or attracted to the more ideological courses on campus. In any event, I think the activists are able to cow the moderates because of their white guilt and/or evolutionary-based egalitarian nature.
These two men are essentially classical liberals. Rufo is a fair bit more based than Hanania, who's contempt for the working class and support for globalism really gets under my skin despite me thoroughly respecting and enjoying 'The Origins of Woke'.
But hey, at the very least we should give both of their approaches a try, and see what happens. They are more politically palatable than completely overturning the American Founding, so despite me fundamentally rejecting those Enlightenment values, if wokeness can be smashed with less effort in exchange for less ideological consistency, I'd be for it.
The question is: will it be enough, or will wokeness still be constantly attacking our civilization? Even if the GOP was committed to the double pronged approach of Rufo and Hanania, the Democrats would still be woke, and it only would take one election victory for the Dems for all of it to be undone and for wokeness to return.
I also think neither gives the LGBT question enough attention, which I've spoken about on my blog.
If you won the political/cultural battle (via Rufo-ism) then the technocratic changes Hanania suggests would be an important part of actualizing that victory. Without the victory an executive order would be meaningless, and without the executive order the victory would dissipate ineffectually.
Well, Sasha, I thought the point was that politics is downstream from culture, but culture (and institutions) is downstream from genetics (more precisely, from the distribution of genes in the population). If one adopts this point of view neither book is very useful. I must have misunderstood what Aporia is all about.
I have read both books and agree overall with your assessment. Both books make a contribution but Hanania's analysis seems "downstream" of Rufo's to some extent. This is not to dismiss Hanania's notable contribution, particulary regarding how the legal framework has been subverted into Wokism by bureaucrats creating regulation-based rulings exceeding or even subverting the actual law intent.
Neither of them answer an even more fundamental question: Why is the factually ridiculous and socially harmful Woke framework so appealing to so many mid-wits in positions of bureaucratic power? It spreads within institutional settings like a highly infectious disease. That needs to be explained.
Looking at the hourglass-shaped network of causes and effects, the nexus is the continuing gap in outcomes between black and white males. The single biggest, *tractable* cause is Drug Prohibition. Politics or culture? Look at how Drug Prohibition (and Alcohol Prohibition before it) have affected (and, honestly, contributed to) the culture in music, literature, and film.
The link between Puritanism and cancel culture-style authoritarianism is nonsense. Puritanism is long dead - and longest dead among the leftist intellectuals that started cancel culture. There is no direct or causal link. Yes, Christianity is still to some extent in the air we breathe. Tom Holland argues that leftism today is the result of Christian ideas (basically liberalism) that is now cut off from its theological moorings and drifting. That makes some sense, but it doesn’t explain the rising authoritarian streak of modern leftism. I think it’s pretty simple and has nothing to do with Puritanism - the hard Left has rejected liberalism (the open inquiry into truth), replacing it with the idea of political victory of their ideas at all costs. Puritanism as we think of it shares a common thread of ideological extremism (of a very different ideology) but no direct link is discernible or necessary.
Yeah, nah. Conflating Jesus with the plague of wokedom is like blaming parents who teach their kids to share for the madness of Marxism & the nonsense of ‘outcome equity’. Sure, plenty of ignorant Christians play into the hands of the woke due in part to their belief that having a faith means you need to lose your brain. And also in part due to preoccupation with their own salvation (gotta be nice or we won’t get into heaven). You can be Christian, and smart, and scientific, and non-woke all at the same time. In fact I’d argue the requisite concept of real freedom within the biblical account requires Christians to fully denounce wokedom. And the Egyptians thought their plagues were bad..
Very smart analysis. There are a few glaring errors. E.g. the 2007-2008 financial crash was caused by decades of - mostly Leftist - housing finance policy in the US, having zero do with George Bush.
What is needed is an urban warfare, street by street attack on the Marxist ticks who have burrowed themselves into our educational systems and cultural institutions. Bill Ayers and his Leftist ilk modeled themselves on the Jesuits insofar as they understood that changing the minds of children was the way to infect and destroy the system they loathed, even as they were the prime beneficiaries of it. Bill Ayers did not go to jail forever because his rich daddy from Winnetka IL paid for his legal defense.
Culturally, we need to make young idiots understand that if they really want freedom, that is what comes from people "on the right" - never from the budding totalitarians on the Left.
G-d Bless Substack. To give you a sense of how absolute is the Left's intolerance for ANYTHING that challenges their supposed authority: I am a (hard rock, real) mining executive and recovering investment banker. I was thrown off LINKEDIN for criticizing Jew Hatred. Ponder that - LinkedIn's whole business model is making money off the data that comes from professionals voluntarily sharing our professional details and networks. But when it came down to Wokey McWokenFace deciding between having the valuable data of my network relationships versus letting Fakestinian scum spew Jew Hatred, it apparently was not even a choice.
Thanks for writing this, very interesting review. The problem I see is that abandoning a Christian moral framework and a liberal political framework means abandoning the United States as a whole. And while it’s certainly possible (and eventually inevitable), I’m not persuaded that this post-America regime is desirable or that it would be better than what we have now. It would mean that we are in a Weimar scenario, with radical movements across the political spectrum vying for the regime. I would prefer to adapt and develop the founding principles to our current challenges. There is still a lot of good in this country and there is still hope for transcending our problems through culture war, changes to the law, and institutional reform.
I hurt a lot of heads with this topic, but I am willing to fight my corner for the rest of my life. What do European nations have that Americans don't? They all have Communist Parties, who are active and win votes. We don't have that here because McCarthyism worked. Bill Ackman called for The List of everyone at Harvard who signed those Jew Hating pieces of paper.
He was two days later than I for calling for a private sector coalition of willing folks in tech and finance to combine video capture, big data analysis and facial recognition software to identify every single asshole who marches "for Palestine" and Hamas. Free speech does not mean freedom from consequences. We need to identify every single person in these marches. We are in the late first inning of WWIII and we need to manage the home front even more aggressively than we did during WWI or WWII. The Biden Administration let 800,000+ military age men into this country from the 20 nations on the Terror Watchlist. The shootings and bombings are coming to a town near you. We need to be ready. Getting a handle on the Useful Idiots and Homegrown Leftist America-Haters is just one step that needs to be taken.
https://open.substack.com/pub/christophermessina/p/davis-polk-and-wardell-is-a-principled?r=erlb4&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web
To me that kind of action is unnecessary and harmful. You hire someone based on their experiences and performance levels, not politics. Harvard graduates are notorious for excelling in the real world. As a business owner I wouldn’t care about their political activism if their resume is strong or the interview goes well. Also I could be wrong here but from what I heard, it was about 12 leaders from different student groups that wrote the letter up and posted it and all the other members of these groups simply got opted in to it irrespective of their actual opinions. If I’m in the student group for foreign affairs and all of a sudden I wake up to see that letter... I would be a bit confused especially if I didn’t support the statement itself... then let’s say a few days later I get an offer from a job rescinded. It all seems quite ridiculous to me. Either way a person shouldn’t be canceled over activism akin to this
Calling for genocide and celebrating barbarity seems like it could inspire a response greater than “it all seems a bit ridiculous to me.”
Good for you, "Blmhcfu," whoever you are. I don't reply to what Slashdot calls "Anonymous Cowards." You want more of a response, tell me your real name.
The challenge to the Christian and Liberal roots of America is that there are loopholes to exploit, and any loophole that can be exploited will be exploited. Human beings are very good at exploiting loopholes.
(Loophole might not even be the best word here as they are inherent goals of the fundamental principles, perhaps real life failure mode of those principles is better, but I wanted to capture the idea that ideological entrepreneurs will always be seeking these things out and won't leave them alone.)
These don't always come out right away. Either because there are pragmatic exceptions made to Christianity and Liberalism to combat such loopholes, or because the physical state of the world provides protection from the consequences of unfettered Christianity/Liberalism.
When Civil Rights caused an explosion of crime and disorder in our cities society responded with "The New Jim Crow". It wasn't consistent with Christian empathy or Liberal crime policy, but America isn't Sweden and blacks aren't Swedes. In other words we made a pragmatic exception to our principles because our principles were failing an empirical test. The cognitive dissonance from this, acting like blacks need extra policing while pretending they don't, gave rise to BLM and the rest of it.
https://newjimcrow.com/
Another example is that in a poorer world with more expensive transportation, one doesn't even need an immigration policy to keep out the third world. They can't even afford the transport cost. And when they get where they are going the first world is still too poor to have a welfare state (and in many cases back then the average citizen let alone immigrant didn't even have the vote). Christian empathy and Liberal immigration sentiment thus are protected from their own flaws by material reality.
I guess the question people ask is this. If you believe unprincipled exceptions to Christian and Liberal principles are necessary to make modern society function, can these be sustainably implemented within those frameworks? Or are these principals ultimately totalizing in time? Is the only way to rip up the foundation?
I pose that as a separate question from wether such foundations even could be ripped up or if what replaced them would be any better. Those are good questions to ask once one properly diagnoses Christian and Liberal failure modes.
I would like to see some argument made for why the post-1960s American crackdown on crime is in contradiction to Christianity.
If you had a naturally law abiding population, like Sweden used to have, you could afford to have a very humane and empathetic justice system without it causing a breakdown in law and order. To not do so would be unchristian.
Imagine for instance the portrayal of the criminal justice system in Shawshank Redemption. That is how liberals think of criminals and the criminal justice system. As far as I can tell it bears little resemblance to actual prison life, where the inmates would be largely black and not be as sympathetic as Morgan Freemen.
Moreover, if all men are (literally) created equal, you should not need two different systems for two different population subgroups. And a lot of Christian energy during Civil Rights went into the proposition that such physical equality was "literally true" and it ought to be written into law that it is "literally true" and that results deviating from that truth were evidence of foul play. After all, if it wasn't "literally true" then a lot of behaviors people didn't like before Civil Rights are just rational rather than evil.
You can try to reconcile Christianity with genetic realism via the suggestions in The Bell Curve, but nobody wants to hear them and they would run into a collision course with Civil Rights. Politically/Culturally I just don't think Murray-ism has legs, even Murray seems to understand this. He soldiers on despite the futility though.
You are making fair criticisms of liberal thoughts on the justice system, but I’m not seeing how any of that bears on Christian assumptions about criminal law. “Christian” =/= post 1950s America.
All me one more comment on the broader point. The author dislikes both Christianity and Classical Liberalism. I’m mostly just a fan of the latter. Anyone who wants to criticize the legacy of the Enlightenment has to deal with the consequences of Industrial Revolution, and the fact that life has gotten so much better since that time. My experience is that most people who criticize the Enlightenment basically ignore this or have some weird value system in which glory to God is more important than becoming wealthy and free. For an atheist it is particularly strange.
To want to do away with classical liberalism due to wokeness is like complaining about winning a million dollars in the lottery because you have to pay taxes on it. I’ll take wokeness if it’s required to have our decline in infant mortality rate, the elimination of communicable disease, etc
There seems little reason to me that wokeness is required to have nerds and tinkerers make assembly lines better. If anything it seems to make it harder for those people to due their magic. When we were inventing antibiotics and indoor plumbing we had Jim Crow and colonialism. The last time we had crime under control blacks were basically disenfranchised.
Classical Liberalism is doing away with itself, mostly via the open border immigration you love so much.
The key point is that there is no "one weird trick" that will solve for the political equilibrium. Getting someone to pass an executive order, while an important step in a larger program, does nothing if it's going against the tide of the political equilibrium.
Civil Rights came about because black votes (and cultural power, and violence) were relatively cheap. The cultural innovation was convincing white people not to ethnic bloc vote in response via making them feel guilty as shit about it. In the Nixon era you could dog whistle around that guilt, but the left slowly brought multiple responses to that.
Your insights are a great practical guide to what someone who has won the political question should do to actualize their victory, but it won't produce the victory in and of itself. Sadly, your immigration views assure such victory is impossible.
Yup.
https://open.substack.com/pub/christophermessina/p/harvard-proves-the-need-to-purge?r=erlb4&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web
I think you describe the opposing viewpoint correctly. It is a God-first approach to life.
I think you will have trouble finding consensus with them because they view your viewpoint (becoming wealthy and free is better than being obedient to God) as self-worship, which, in religion, is akin to worshiping Satan. Satan’s big sin was self-worship, or an unwillingness to submit to God.
This review ignores the strongest pieces of evidence I present, which is the direct temporal sequence of events. Something pops up in the bureaucracy and then it later becomes part of culture. We see that over and over again. And yes he’s right it’s about how people other than legislators have interpreted the law, but I mostly point to judges and the president, not the average low level bureaucrat. He argues that my list of conservative victories tend to be in a libertarian direction, which is true, in which case rolling back civil rights law would fit right in to that.
On a different note, this is the second article I’ve read by the author, and I’m glad to learn he doesn’t like Christian morality and think it’s a source of much of our problems. But the first article was about how much he loves socialism and labor unions, which are based on the idea that society should cater to the lazy and stupid at the expense of the productive. I think he should reconsider his economic views.
“And when Republicans tried to find conservative judges and bureaucrats to appoint, they discovered that there simply weren’t enough of them.”
This part of the book was about the early 1970s. As I show, that problem has been solved. This is why courts do conservative things all the time and could on civil rights law too.
"This review ignores the strongest pieces of evidence I present, which is the direct temporal sequence of events. Something pops up in the bureaucracy and then it later becomes part of culture." does "something" pops up ex nihilo? Looks a lot like religious thinking to me.
Which is why we need to slash the Federal Leviathan back to its pre-WWII size.
So what is your alternative to Christian morality?
Jewish morality, which is the same except a whole lot more objective and less forgiving of transgressors.
Excellent compare/contrast essay with twist that although Rufo much stronger than Hanania, both stand on fundamental ailing assumptions. Thank you for the strong arguments with supporting cases, and clear prose. Also yikes, if classical liberalism and Christian puritan roots the ultimate cause of current decline, since what might replace it could easily be worse. But the old roots themselves cause the decline. It's good to discuss. Calm blue ocean, calm blue ocean.
“The bureaucracy is woke for the same reason that capital is woke: elite-college graduates are literally taught to be woke, from first grade up until they earn their PhDs and JDs. This is due to the systematic capture of education by leftists – a process described in Rufo’s book.”
But why do students just passively accept woke drivel? I think in many cases, these kids are egalitarian by nature.
From my college experience, most of the professors are pretty objective and stay away from politics. However, it really depends on your degree. I was a psychology major and took a lot of classes on evolution/anthropology on the side. We never spoke about politics unless it related to the content (Russian lit, Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy, etc.) and it was never framed as this is what you should believe in... it was more like what did the author think. However, I can also imagine that some majors are just more woke in general and likely experience more ideas like that. But for most classes it’s non-existent. The reason why people talk about it so much are the outliers. Colleges also just attract more liberal people, so teachers are more likely to be as such as well. There has been a stark increase and I think that’s down to additional selection factors as well as cultural shifts. But yeah in general I find it funny that so many people think you are just getting brainwashed with wokeness on campus everyday or that people are protesting all the time. These things are something that you rarely come across. But again I speak as a psychology major not a women’s studies major haha.
Your perspective sounds quite reasonable to me. In addition to the cultural shift (considerably aided by activist writers in Hollywood), there is the fact that activists have marched through various institutions. The universities produce these activists, but I think you are correct that they are self-selected and/or attracted to the more ideological courses on campus. In any event, I think the activists are able to cow the moderates because of their white guilt and/or evolutionary-based egalitarian nature.
Good article, I agreed with every word.
These two men are essentially classical liberals. Rufo is a fair bit more based than Hanania, who's contempt for the working class and support for globalism really gets under my skin despite me thoroughly respecting and enjoying 'The Origins of Woke'.
But hey, at the very least we should give both of their approaches a try, and see what happens. They are more politically palatable than completely overturning the American Founding, so despite me fundamentally rejecting those Enlightenment values, if wokeness can be smashed with less effort in exchange for less ideological consistency, I'd be for it.
The question is: will it be enough, or will wokeness still be constantly attacking our civilization? Even if the GOP was committed to the double pronged approach of Rufo and Hanania, the Democrats would still be woke, and it only would take one election victory for the Dems for all of it to be undone and for wokeness to return.
I also think neither gives the LGBT question enough attention, which I've spoken about on my blog.
If you won the political/cultural battle (via Rufo-ism) then the technocratic changes Hanania suggests would be an important part of actualizing that victory. Without the victory an executive order would be meaningless, and without the executive order the victory would dissipate ineffectually.
Well, Sasha, I thought the point was that politics is downstream from culture, but culture (and institutions) is downstream from genetics (more precisely, from the distribution of genes in the population). If one adopts this point of view neither book is very useful. I must have misunderstood what Aporia is all about.
Sasha should stick to Behavioral Genetics and leave culture, history, and politics to people who actually know what they are talking about.
I have read both books and agree overall with your assessment. Both books make a contribution but Hanania's analysis seems "downstream" of Rufo's to some extent. This is not to dismiss Hanania's notable contribution, particulary regarding how the legal framework has been subverted into Wokism by bureaucrats creating regulation-based rulings exceeding or even subverting the actual law intent.
Neither of them answer an even more fundamental question: Why is the factually ridiculous and socially harmful Woke framework so appealing to so many mid-wits in positions of bureaucratic power? It spreads within institutional settings like a highly infectious disease. That needs to be explained.
Looking at the hourglass-shaped network of causes and effects, the nexus is the continuing gap in outcomes between black and white males. The single biggest, *tractable* cause is Drug Prohibition. Politics or culture? Look at how Drug Prohibition (and Alcohol Prohibition before it) have affected (and, honestly, contributed to) the culture in music, literature, and film.
The link between Puritanism and cancel culture-style authoritarianism is nonsense. Puritanism is long dead - and longest dead among the leftist intellectuals that started cancel culture. There is no direct or causal link. Yes, Christianity is still to some extent in the air we breathe. Tom Holland argues that leftism today is the result of Christian ideas (basically liberalism) that is now cut off from its theological moorings and drifting. That makes some sense, but it doesn’t explain the rising authoritarian streak of modern leftism. I think it’s pretty simple and has nothing to do with Puritanism - the hard Left has rejected liberalism (the open inquiry into truth), replacing it with the idea of political victory of their ideas at all costs. Puritanism as we think of it shares a common thread of ideological extremism (of a very different ideology) but no direct link is discernible or necessary.
Yeah, nah. Conflating Jesus with the plague of wokedom is like blaming parents who teach their kids to share for the madness of Marxism & the nonsense of ‘outcome equity’. Sure, plenty of ignorant Christians play into the hands of the woke due in part to their belief that having a faith means you need to lose your brain. And also in part due to preoccupation with their own salvation (gotta be nice or we won’t get into heaven). You can be Christian, and smart, and scientific, and non-woke all at the same time. In fact I’d argue the requisite concept of real freedom within the biblical account requires Christians to fully denounce wokedom. And the Egyptians thought their plagues were bad..
Who is BAP?
Very smart analysis. There are a few glaring errors. E.g. the 2007-2008 financial crash was caused by decades of - mostly Leftist - housing finance policy in the US, having zero do with George Bush.
What is needed is an urban warfare, street by street attack on the Marxist ticks who have burrowed themselves into our educational systems and cultural institutions. Bill Ayers and his Leftist ilk modeled themselves on the Jesuits insofar as they understood that changing the minds of children was the way to infect and destroy the system they loathed, even as they were the prime beneficiaries of it. Bill Ayers did not go to jail forever because his rich daddy from Winnetka IL paid for his legal defense.
Culturally, we need to make young idiots understand that if they really want freedom, that is what comes from people "on the right" - never from the budding totalitarians on the Left.
G-d Bless Substack. To give you a sense of how absolute is the Left's intolerance for ANYTHING that challenges their supposed authority: I am a (hard rock, real) mining executive and recovering investment banker. I was thrown off LINKEDIN for criticizing Jew Hatred. Ponder that - LinkedIn's whole business model is making money off the data that comes from professionals voluntarily sharing our professional details and networks. But when it came down to Wokey McWokenFace deciding between having the valuable data of my network relationships versus letting Fakestinian scum spew Jew Hatred, it apparently was not even a choice.
We're in this for the long haul. If you care to have a ponder about a third way / complementary proposal, I'd love anyone's thoughts: https://open.substack.com/pub/christophermessina/p/harvard-proves-the-need-to-purge?r=erlb4&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web