I have a very similar reading except less conspiratorial.
1.
Wokeness was by no means designed, except insofar as managerial imperatives create a selection process which filters ideas based off whether it suits them. HR aren't going to adopt Fanon regardless of how popular he is among left-wing academics, but will gladly adopt DEI tokenism insofar as it legitimates their otherwise unearned power within the workplace. So too with ESG, etc.
I don't even think they're tied to the central tenets of wokism. i.e. you could get HR to abandon DEI pretty easily so long as you provide them a successor ideology which would allow them to wield even more power and hire even more minions.
2.
What Burnham really got wrong was he assumed there'd be a highly technically-competent managerial elite. In fact the managerial elite are mentally retarded and an overwhelming majority of their ideology is thus dedicated to a principled defence of mental retardation (this covers everything from them trying to remove the SATs to their general notion that mathy work should be done by imported brown-people to keep its status down). The rise of ideology is precisely because they can't legitimate themselves based off technical competence.
The right continue to miss this because they insist on lumping genuinely intelligent professionals with managers into the PMC. So long as you conflate line workers (e.g. software engineers at Google) with staff workers (say HR) you'll fail to identify the genuine power struggle going on.
This distinction also explains why the managers are so dumb, because managers and professionals basically self-select into either path, increasingly on intelligence (no-one I know would ever choose to be a manager because they know it'd mean spending most of your time in meetings with low-IQers).
3. The strength of wokism merely reflects the strength of the parasitic class of managers/administrators. Which is due to stuff like corporate governance failing to address the principal-agent problem (also why the share of income going to managers ever-skyrockets). No-one mentions this. Everyone wants to discuss woke from an ideological angle, not treat it as downstream of economics (which an ex-marxist like Burnham would have done).
Counter theory: The modern managerial class has too much time, too little to do. Most of what used to be done by managers is now done by digital machines (computers, AI) so managers need something to keep themselves busy. Plus, traditional managers don't get much respect from their lackies for their traditional roles so they need to add something to work to make them seem like better people.
Wokism fills both those needs. Reshaping society is an "important" task that fills the emp[y hours of their day and offers many opportunities for virtue signaling. It would be a perfect task forto the modern manager (at this point, imagine your managers humming to themselves the song "I am the very model of a modern Major-General" with appropriately modified lyrics) if they weren't screwing up the world with their new task Sigh!
You made a lot of good points but amazing you can address this issue without highlighting the role of Jews and women. Jews have create the ideology for woke. Woke is simply Weimar 2.0.
Also Woke didn't start in 2016. As you mentioned, Occupy Wall Street was the catalyst.
You mention the type of women but they are crucial to the woke /social justice warrior agenda.
As Orwell pointed out:
It was always the women, and above all the young ones, who were the most bigoted adherents of the Party, the swallowers of slogans, the amateur spies and nosers−out of unorthodoxy.
An excellent article! I would disagree only with the following:
"Managerial elites therefore pivoted to woke ideology as a reactionary move, launching a moral crusade designed to embed their ideological regime as a permanent revolution."
Was this necessarily a conscious process? If an ideology becomes dominant, won't it inevitably become more and more radical over time? Once pushback becomes weak and ineffectual, there is no longer anything to stop "purists" from taking over and persecuting those who are not pure enough. Rinse and repeat.
You argue that Trump's electoral victory in 2016 caused the existing anti-racist consensus to radicalize and become a moral crusade. I would argue that the radicalization had begun earlier, at least during the second term of the Obama administration and probably during the 2000s.
This radicalization was inevitable because few people were left to criticize and critique anti-racism. At best, there were people (usually conservatives) who would criticize anti-racists for being "inconsistent" or "hypocritical." They would condemn liberals for living in white neighborhoods or sending their kids to private schools. Or they would condemn abortion for disproportionately impacting non-white minorities.
Good points. Woke certainly existed before 2016, but more as a vanguard ideology in academia, media, and activist circles. What changed in 2016 is that it became the regime ideology. And this maps to the question of intent. It wasn't a conspiracy, but I argue that key episodes like Trump, Brexit and Corbyn reveal how elites deliberately employed identity frameworks to blunt populist or class revolt and re-channel political energy.
Excellent article. The late Zman often referenced "who whom" as a framework to view politics and recommended supporting Aporia, which is how I found Aporia magazine and became a subscriber. This is the most convincing summation of woke I have come across, thank you
Also interesting that the most vicious attacks were reserved for liberal ideals, to the shock and confusion of people who have not noticed the creeping double standards and anti-majority propaganda until late in the game.
The mild, liberal additions from normies of “All Lives Matter” and “Not All Men” were met with such zealous hatred, as if liberalism itself had been overthrown and Woke was confident that Whites, and men could not even tap into a sufficient supply of believable liberal principles to defend themselves against double standards. Even just affirming equality and due process was too much for the new regime.
That first major rhetorical salvo against liberal principles themselves (the only thing left allowed to function as a historical anchor and heritage in the West) was very telling about how far along Woke thought they were in total domination and disarming of the last defense the majority population even has against dehumanization and permanent subjugation.
I regret The Westering Sun (TWS)'s semantic decision about 'liberal.' The piece speaks of 'Western liberty'. Does TWS have a name for a philosophy of that? What is it? Shouldn't TWS have a name for a philosophy of that? Doesn't TWS see that whatever name gains acceptation—as 'liberal' did from the 1770s—will in the course of time be abused and stolen? TWS throws Western liberty under the bus by not having a name for a philosophy of it.
I don’t reject Western liberty. I reject its abstraction and instrumentalisation by a managerial class that has no attachment to its historical, Christian, or civilizational roots.
If there is no symbolic or historical substance beneath the term, then the name itself is vulnerable to capture: as has already occurred with 'liberalism.' What we need is to restore the symbolic and affective continuity that once made Western liberty meaningful. That continuity isn’t primarily conceptual; it’s civilizational, ancestral, and embodied.
"Predominantly native, often middle or working class, and still retaining residual loyalties to older forms of nationhood, faith and organic order, this group’s economic productivity funds the regime and supports its clients."
...Does it? 9 of 10 of the top per capita contributors to the federal budget are blue states.
You have some interesting points but you need to grapple with the reality that the big cities with lots of immigrants run by the "managerial elites" are the economic engines of the US that support the working class natives, not the other way around.
It’s true that cities and blue states lead in per capita tax receipts and GDP figures. But these metrics are insufficient to capture real economic productivity, which is rooted in value creation through productive labour; and that remains disproportionately concentrated in the traditional population. Without a framework of social cohesion and symbolic legitimacy to sustain civilizational continuity, such productivity cannot endure.
Managerial cities are high-output nodes of global capitalism, but much of their output is extractive or parasitic: driven by rent-seeking, financial leverage, and bureaucratic expansion. They rely on a social infrastructure still supplied by the core population, which they constantly undermine in myriad ways. In this sense, blue-state cities are not economic engines but parasitic hubs, dependent on surpluses they did not generate.
The irony is that the very groups being displaced and demoralized by managerialism are the substrate upon which its functioning depends.
“The irony is that the very groups being displaced and demoralized by managerialism are the substrate upon which its functioning depends.” Some brilliant and deeply analytical points in this essay! Very similar to ideas put forth by NS Lyons as well. I wanted to highlight the above very perspicacious point because it explicitly states what I think is ultimately true of all managerial regimes: their natural parasitism means that inevitably they will kill the host. In short, they are always doomed to fail but in their failure they take down all that is good with them (the USSR was a crude managerial regime not nearly as sophisticated as the global/liberal one running things now). The problem is wealth (the result of Faustian genius) creates wealth and wealth creates complexity. That complexity then needs people to “manage” it. Is there a way to break this Catch-22?
I would argue social cohesion and symbolic legitimacy have been very strong throughout most of human history, with middling results at best considering the generally poor and unchanged standard of living over tens of thousands of years. I would argue we have things like cars and computers and modern medicine because of what i think you are calling the parasitic managerial elites.
On the other end, it seems to me that most immigrants are involved in what I think you would call value production through productive labor - farm and factory work, manual labor, small businesses...
Don't get me wrong, I worry about social cohesion too. I recognize this is maybe the exact opposite of what you're arguing, but, for the US at least, I think we have the tradition and framework to do this without becoming insular and stagnating, as has been the norm for human history: valuing fellow citizens of any culture or ethnicity who value our ideals of democracy, freedom, equal opportunity and small l liberalism as our fellow Americans.
The car, computer, and medicine are not products of managerial elites. They are products of Faustian science and traditional capitalism. Managerialism is parasitic on Faustian civilization.
While immigrants are frequently involved in (unskilled) labour they are still typically a net drain in economic terms. That is to say nothing of the social consequences that result from high levels of immigration.
If you look at how many founders and CEOs are immigrants you would rerun your math on this. Elon by himself makes the contribution figures for immigrants look respectable.
Why when natives do low skill labor, they only look like a drain on the economy but are actually the ones funding the regime, but when immigrants do it they really are an economic drain?
I agree there's a difference between rent seeking (which i think is how you're defining the managerial elite) and traditional capitalism and agree the former is bad and the latter good, but both are concentrated in cities, and I see natives and immigrants, conservatives and liberals, religious and atheist people participating in both in about the same proportions.
It's a reference to Spengler, who called the West Faustian civilization. In that sense, it's not a value judgment beyond being an authentic expression of the Western soul.
I'll admit that that tradition has been honored in the breach for most of America's history, but hypocrisy is the tribute vice pays to virtue as they say
“…real economic productivity, which is rooted in value creation through productive labour”
Tbh this sounds like some consulting mumbo jumbo that the managerial class would put out.
You have trillion dollar firms based out of the west coast and you casually label them as rent seeking and value extracting, and “not real economic productivity”.
I very much like the essay and agree with your premise but on the finer details you’re not inspiring confidence.
I think at its height Amazon employed sth like 1 million people. Majority of those people work in distribution centre floors, delivery etc, and a minority at HQ. Those are the type of “real” jobs per your interpretation but you consider Amazon and their peers value extractors. To call this contradictory would be an understatement.
Wokeness is not really that complicated. It is simply radical leftism applied to the issues of the day.
As for its origin, it is the application of the same genetic-cultural substrate of Europeans (universalism, altruism and a good bit of that Christian self-flagellation) to new circumstances of material prosperity and the moral invention of full equality.
How does a good Christian square the newly invented moral imperative of full equality with history of colonialism, slavery and inequality of all kinds? He must self-flagellate.
The ideology of the managerial class is mostly left-liberalism. This left-leaning managerial class yields to a small minority of woke radicals out of fear and conformity.
The corrective to a moral instinct gone haywire is reason, facts and reality. BLM would never have happened had the public been objectively informed. Same for transgenderism, mass immigrationism, multiculturalism etc. Truth disinfects wokeness completely - it just needs to get out and be heard.
This essay argues that politics is not primarily about abstract ideas, but about power. Ideologies must therefore be understood in terms of the social forces they serve and represent. This doesn’t mean reducing them to crude expressions of interest, but it does mean we cannot explain political movements by ideas alone. The relevant question is: why are some beliefs, and not others, empowered, institutionalized, and enforced?
By this light, woke is neither simply radical leftism nor misplaced altruism. It is a regime ideology, developed to consolidate a specific class coalition. It rewards some groups, neutralizes others, and delegitimizes native-majority resistance. That’s why it is institutionalized, enforced, and policed: not because it’s true or coherent, but because it’s useful to those who rule.
It’s not hard to imagine a counterfactual history in which the white elite maintain a white majority. Woke seems to be mainly a factor of white ethnocentrism slowly eroding due to the influx of new elites and/or the WASP elite surrendering/accepting the new proto-woke ideas. Also, ideas do matter—it’s very common for elites to support ideas purely due to idealism (even if it overlaps with their economic interests). Objective truth exists independently of power relations (e.g., capitalism is superior to socialism, etc.).
Yes, it does not explain why the WASP was the only group committed enough to fairness to not defend itself.
Had incoming groups immigrated at slower pace, or been forced to leave behind tribal commitments (through breaking up ethnic enclaves, enforcing English language, requiring ideological tests for citizenship), one could imagine a scenario where liberalism held sway and didn’t yet devolve to minority favoritism and double standards.
Good article. I think your insights on the millennial embrace of managerial-woke ideology, and the potential of what may have happened if they hadn’t, are strong. It is basically, in my eyes, Obama’s main legacy.
I do disagree with you painting “Western liberalism” as oppositional to Western kinship and other aspects of our cultural heritage. You’re falling into a rhetorical trap left-wing enemies have set for us. Liberalism *is* the traditional culture of the West. Our enemies have perverted its meaning to use for their own totalitarian purposes. But individualism and the recognition of human dignity, peaceful dissent, etc ARE our values and are exactly the things that are threatened by mass migration of people from cultures who believe in none of these things. I keep waiting for a Republican politician to recognize this and rhetorically adjust to win persuadable native middle class voters who are true liberals at heart and fail still somehow to recognize that Republicans are now the liberal party and Democrats a totalitarian one.
I take your point, but the traditional culture of the West is Christianity, not liberalism. Liberalism arose within Western Christian civilization, but it cannot replace its metaphysical foundations without leading to dissolution. This is exactly what has happened.
Because Classical civilization and Western civilization are distinct and separate. The Classical contribution to Western civilization is routinely overstated. That overstatement is itself not a neutral fact but part of the West's process of estrangement from its own origins and identity.
"Advocates of multiculturalism presented it as neutral, benevolent and inclusive. Yet from a Machiavellian or realist perspective, it was anything but neutral."
From a Machiavellian pov apparently *nothing* can be neutral, so...
"Its demographic inertia is invoked to justify mass migration, while its defensive political instincts are pathologized as reactionary or extremist. It bears the brunt of taxation, undergoes cultural and demographic displacement, and faces escalating surveillance and censorship."
A lot of this is true, but if this paragraph is basically referring to the white working class I don't see how they can simultaneously be bearing the brunt of taxation?
I have a very similar reading except less conspiratorial.
1.
Wokeness was by no means designed, except insofar as managerial imperatives create a selection process which filters ideas based off whether it suits them. HR aren't going to adopt Fanon regardless of how popular he is among left-wing academics, but will gladly adopt DEI tokenism insofar as it legitimates their otherwise unearned power within the workplace. So too with ESG, etc.
I don't even think they're tied to the central tenets of wokism. i.e. you could get HR to abandon DEI pretty easily so long as you provide them a successor ideology which would allow them to wield even more power and hire even more minions.
2.
What Burnham really got wrong was he assumed there'd be a highly technically-competent managerial elite. In fact the managerial elite are mentally retarded and an overwhelming majority of their ideology is thus dedicated to a principled defence of mental retardation (this covers everything from them trying to remove the SATs to their general notion that mathy work should be done by imported brown-people to keep its status down). The rise of ideology is precisely because they can't legitimate themselves based off technical competence.
The right continue to miss this because they insist on lumping genuinely intelligent professionals with managers into the PMC. So long as you conflate line workers (e.g. software engineers at Google) with staff workers (say HR) you'll fail to identify the genuine power struggle going on.
This distinction also explains why the managers are so dumb, because managers and professionals basically self-select into either path, increasingly on intelligence (no-one I know would ever choose to be a manager because they know it'd mean spending most of your time in meetings with low-IQers).
3. The strength of wokism merely reflects the strength of the parasitic class of managers/administrators. Which is due to stuff like corporate governance failing to address the principal-agent problem (also why the share of income going to managers ever-skyrockets). No-one mentions this. Everyone wants to discuss woke from an ideological angle, not treat it as downstream of economics (which an ex-marxist like Burnham would have done).
Counter theory: The modern managerial class has too much time, too little to do. Most of what used to be done by managers is now done by digital machines (computers, AI) so managers need something to keep themselves busy. Plus, traditional managers don't get much respect from their lackies for their traditional roles so they need to add something to work to make them seem like better people.
Wokism fills both those needs. Reshaping society is an "important" task that fills the emp[y hours of their day and offers many opportunities for virtue signaling. It would be a perfect task forto the modern manager (at this point, imagine your managers humming to themselves the song "I am the very model of a modern Major-General" with appropriately modified lyrics) if they weren't screwing up the world with their new task Sigh!
Elite overproduction. France had this phenomenon as well prior to the first revolution.
You made a lot of good points but amazing you can address this issue without highlighting the role of Jews and women. Jews have create the ideology for woke. Woke is simply Weimar 2.0.
Also Woke didn't start in 2016. As you mentioned, Occupy Wall Street was the catalyst.
You mention the type of women but they are crucial to the woke /social justice warrior agenda.
As Orwell pointed out:
It was always the women, and above all the young ones, who were the most bigoted adherents of the Party, the swallowers of slogans, the amateur spies and nosers−out of unorthodoxy.
An excellent article! I would disagree only with the following:
"Managerial elites therefore pivoted to woke ideology as a reactionary move, launching a moral crusade designed to embed their ideological regime as a permanent revolution."
Was this necessarily a conscious process? If an ideology becomes dominant, won't it inevitably become more and more radical over time? Once pushback becomes weak and ineffectual, there is no longer anything to stop "purists" from taking over and persecuting those who are not pure enough. Rinse and repeat.
You argue that Trump's electoral victory in 2016 caused the existing anti-racist consensus to radicalize and become a moral crusade. I would argue that the radicalization had begun earlier, at least during the second term of the Obama administration and probably during the 2000s.
This radicalization was inevitable because few people were left to criticize and critique anti-racism. At best, there were people (usually conservatives) who would criticize anti-racists for being "inconsistent" or "hypocritical." They would condemn liberals for living in white neighborhoods or sending their kids to private schools. Or they would condemn abortion for disproportionately impacting non-white minorities.
"If an ideology becomes dominant, won't it inevitably become more and more radical over time?"
The Soviet ideology actually became less radical over time
After the rise of Stalin to power. I'm not sure we've reached that point yet.
Good points. Woke certainly existed before 2016, but more as a vanguard ideology in academia, media, and activist circles. What changed in 2016 is that it became the regime ideology. And this maps to the question of intent. It wasn't a conspiracy, but I argue that key episodes like Trump, Brexit and Corbyn reveal how elites deliberately employed identity frameworks to blunt populist or class revolt and re-channel political energy.
Let's suppose that Hillary Clinton had won in 2016. Would the Woke Revolution have been kinder and gentler?
Here, in Canada, the Wokeists didn't try to play Mr. Nice Guy. And our national leader was Justin Trudeau.
It would probably have been less convulsive. Let's think of what happened as a strategic acceleration of an emergent pattern.
Thankyou, this piece provides much clarity.
Excellent article. The late Zman often referenced "who whom" as a framework to view politics and recommended supporting Aporia, which is how I found Aporia magazine and became a subscriber. This is the most convincing summation of woke I have come across, thank you
This was excellent.
Also interesting that the most vicious attacks were reserved for liberal ideals, to the shock and confusion of people who have not noticed the creeping double standards and anti-majority propaganda until late in the game.
The mild, liberal additions from normies of “All Lives Matter” and “Not All Men” were met with such zealous hatred, as if liberalism itself had been overthrown and Woke was confident that Whites, and men could not even tap into a sufficient supply of believable liberal principles to defend themselves against double standards. Even just affirming equality and due process was too much for the new regime.
That first major rhetorical salvo against liberal principles themselves (the only thing left allowed to function as a historical anchor and heritage in the West) was very telling about how far along Woke thought they were in total domination and disarming of the last defense the majority population even has against dehumanization and permanent subjugation.
That, Sir, was an excellent article. A great many things were put into a coherent framework. As a consequence I have much to think about.
I regret The Westering Sun (TWS)'s semantic decision about 'liberal.' The piece speaks of 'Western liberty'. Does TWS have a name for a philosophy of that? What is it? Shouldn't TWS have a name for a philosophy of that? Doesn't TWS see that whatever name gains acceptation—as 'liberal' did from the 1770s—will in the course of time be abused and stolen? TWS throws Western liberty under the bus by not having a name for a philosophy of it.
I don’t reject Western liberty. I reject its abstraction and instrumentalisation by a managerial class that has no attachment to its historical, Christian, or civilizational roots.
If there is no symbolic or historical substance beneath the term, then the name itself is vulnerable to capture: as has already occurred with 'liberalism.' What we need is to restore the symbolic and affective continuity that once made Western liberty meaningful. That continuity isn’t primarily conceptual; it’s civilizational, ancestral, and embodied.
"Predominantly native, often middle or working class, and still retaining residual loyalties to older forms of nationhood, faith and organic order, this group’s economic productivity funds the regime and supports its clients."
...Does it? 9 of 10 of the top per capita contributors to the federal budget are blue states.
https://www.visualcapitalist.com/cp/mapped-u-s-federal-tax-revenue-per-person-by-state/
You have some interesting points but you need to grapple with the reality that the big cities with lots of immigrants run by the "managerial elites" are the economic engines of the US that support the working class natives, not the other way around.
It’s true that cities and blue states lead in per capita tax receipts and GDP figures. But these metrics are insufficient to capture real economic productivity, which is rooted in value creation through productive labour; and that remains disproportionately concentrated in the traditional population. Without a framework of social cohesion and symbolic legitimacy to sustain civilizational continuity, such productivity cannot endure.
Managerial cities are high-output nodes of global capitalism, but much of their output is extractive or parasitic: driven by rent-seeking, financial leverage, and bureaucratic expansion. They rely on a social infrastructure still supplied by the core population, which they constantly undermine in myriad ways. In this sense, blue-state cities are not economic engines but parasitic hubs, dependent on surpluses they did not generate.
The irony is that the very groups being displaced and demoralized by managerialism are the substrate upon which its functioning depends.
“The irony is that the very groups being displaced and demoralized by managerialism are the substrate upon which its functioning depends.” Some brilliant and deeply analytical points in this essay! Very similar to ideas put forth by NS Lyons as well. I wanted to highlight the above very perspicacious point because it explicitly states what I think is ultimately true of all managerial regimes: their natural parasitism means that inevitably they will kill the host. In short, they are always doomed to fail but in their failure they take down all that is good with them (the USSR was a crude managerial regime not nearly as sophisticated as the global/liberal one running things now). The problem is wealth (the result of Faustian genius) creates wealth and wealth creates complexity. That complexity then needs people to “manage” it. Is there a way to break this Catch-22?
I would argue social cohesion and symbolic legitimacy have been very strong throughout most of human history, with middling results at best considering the generally poor and unchanged standard of living over tens of thousands of years. I would argue we have things like cars and computers and modern medicine because of what i think you are calling the parasitic managerial elites.
On the other end, it seems to me that most immigrants are involved in what I think you would call value production through productive labor - farm and factory work, manual labor, small businesses...
Don't get me wrong, I worry about social cohesion too. I recognize this is maybe the exact opposite of what you're arguing, but, for the US at least, I think we have the tradition and framework to do this without becoming insular and stagnating, as has been the norm for human history: valuing fellow citizens of any culture or ethnicity who value our ideals of democracy, freedom, equal opportunity and small l liberalism as our fellow Americans.
The car, computer, and medicine are not products of managerial elites. They are products of Faustian science and traditional capitalism. Managerialism is parasitic on Faustian civilization.
While immigrants are frequently involved in (unskilled) labour they are still typically a net drain in economic terms. That is to say nothing of the social consequences that result from high levels of immigration.
If you look at how many founders and CEOs are immigrants you would rerun your math on this. Elon by himself makes the contribution figures for immigrants look respectable.
Why when natives do low skill labor, they only look like a drain on the economy but are actually the ones funding the regime, but when immigrants do it they really are an economic drain?
I agree there's a difference between rent seeking (which i think is how you're defining the managerial elite) and traditional capitalism and agree the former is bad and the latter good, but both are concentrated in cities, and I see natives and immigrants, conservatives and liberals, religious and atheist people participating in both in about the same proportions.
"The car, computer, and medicine are not products of managerial elites."
I very much agree.
"They are products of Faustian science and traditional capitalism."
I very much disagree with your use of the adjective 'Faustian' to describe the technology of modern life. That seems like Luddism.
It's a reference to Spengler, who called the West Faustian civilization. In that sense, it's not a value judgment beyond being an authentic expression of the Western soul.
Got it.
I'll admit that that tradition has been honored in the breach for most of America's history, but hypocrisy is the tribute vice pays to virtue as they say
“…real economic productivity, which is rooted in value creation through productive labour”
Tbh this sounds like some consulting mumbo jumbo that the managerial class would put out.
You have trillion dollar firms based out of the west coast and you casually label them as rent seeking and value extracting, and “not real economic productivity”.
I very much like the essay and agree with your premise but on the finer details you’re not inspiring confidence.
I think at its height Amazon employed sth like 1 million people. Majority of those people work in distribution centre floors, delivery etc, and a minority at HQ. Those are the type of “real” jobs per your interpretation but you consider Amazon and their peers value extractors. To call this contradictory would be an understatement.
Wokeness is not really that complicated. It is simply radical leftism applied to the issues of the day.
As for its origin, it is the application of the same genetic-cultural substrate of Europeans (universalism, altruism and a good bit of that Christian self-flagellation) to new circumstances of material prosperity and the moral invention of full equality.
How does a good Christian square the newly invented moral imperative of full equality with history of colonialism, slavery and inequality of all kinds? He must self-flagellate.
The ideology of the managerial class is mostly left-liberalism. This left-leaning managerial class yields to a small minority of woke radicals out of fear and conformity.
The corrective to a moral instinct gone haywire is reason, facts and reality. BLM would never have happened had the public been objectively informed. Same for transgenderism, mass immigrationism, multiculturalism etc. Truth disinfects wokeness completely - it just needs to get out and be heard.
This essay argues that politics is not primarily about abstract ideas, but about power. Ideologies must therefore be understood in terms of the social forces they serve and represent. This doesn’t mean reducing them to crude expressions of interest, but it does mean we cannot explain political movements by ideas alone. The relevant question is: why are some beliefs, and not others, empowered, institutionalized, and enforced?
By this light, woke is neither simply radical leftism nor misplaced altruism. It is a regime ideology, developed to consolidate a specific class coalition. It rewards some groups, neutralizes others, and delegitimizes native-majority resistance. That’s why it is institutionalized, enforced, and policed: not because it’s true or coherent, but because it’s useful to those who rule.
It’s not hard to imagine a counterfactual history in which the white elite maintain a white majority. Woke seems to be mainly a factor of white ethnocentrism slowly eroding due to the influx of new elites and/or the WASP elite surrendering/accepting the new proto-woke ideas. Also, ideas do matter—it’s very common for elites to support ideas purely due to idealism (even if it overlaps with their economic interests). Objective truth exists independently of power relations (e.g., capitalism is superior to socialism, etc.).
Yes, it does not explain why the WASP was the only group committed enough to fairness to not defend itself.
Had incoming groups immigrated at slower pace, or been forced to leave behind tribal commitments (through breaking up ethnic enclaves, enforcing English language, requiring ideological tests for citizenship), one could imagine a scenario where liberalism held sway and didn’t yet devolve to minority favoritism and double standards.
Good article. I think your insights on the millennial embrace of managerial-woke ideology, and the potential of what may have happened if they hadn’t, are strong. It is basically, in my eyes, Obama’s main legacy.
I do disagree with you painting “Western liberalism” as oppositional to Western kinship and other aspects of our cultural heritage. You’re falling into a rhetorical trap left-wing enemies have set for us. Liberalism *is* the traditional culture of the West. Our enemies have perverted its meaning to use for their own totalitarian purposes. But individualism and the recognition of human dignity, peaceful dissent, etc ARE our values and are exactly the things that are threatened by mass migration of people from cultures who believe in none of these things. I keep waiting for a Republican politician to recognize this and rhetorically adjust to win persuadable native middle class voters who are true liberals at heart and fail still somehow to recognize that Republicans are now the liberal party and Democrats a totalitarian one.
I take your point, but the traditional culture of the West is Christianity, not liberalism. Liberalism arose within Western Christian civilization, but it cannot replace its metaphysical foundations without leading to dissolution. This is exactly what has happened.
Why begin at Jesus and not Socrates?
Because Classical civilization and Western civilization are distinct and separate. The Classical contribution to Western civilization is routinely overstated. That overstatement is itself not a neutral fact but part of the West's process of estrangement from its own origins and identity.
"Advocates of multiculturalism presented it as neutral, benevolent and inclusive. Yet from a Machiavellian or realist perspective, it was anything but neutral."
From a Machiavellian pov apparently *nothing* can be neutral, so...
Woke is a tool for societal disruption.
"Its demographic inertia is invoked to justify mass migration, while its defensive political instincts are pathologized as reactionary or extremist. It bears the brunt of taxation, undergoes cultural and demographic displacement, and faces escalating surveillance and censorship."
A lot of this is true, but if this paragraph is basically referring to the white working class I don't see how they can simultaneously be bearing the brunt of taxation?