Woke and the Political Order
Foreign Import or Domestic Product?
On the day after Donald Trump was elected in 2016, one of my students at the university in the Bay Area where I taught history for almost thirty years, a very pleasant young black woman, came to me with tears welling up in her eyes, as she said that she had no idea there were so many racists in the United States. I tried to reassure her that very few of the scores of millions who voted for Mr. Trump were indeed, racists. I doubt that she was reassured.
This story is emblematic of the mentality of a substantial majority of the politically active students on campus at that time. They were innocents who believed everything they were told by the mainstream media, by their friends, and by too many of their professors. By the time I retired a few years later, such slogans as “Diversity is our Strength,” were as common on campus as the incantations, “War is Peace,” and “Freedom is Slavery,” were in George Orwell’s novel 1984.
But this was nothing new. For years I had felt the tide of identity politics and political correctness rising until by the time of the George Floyd riots, they had come together as an irresistible tsunami. By then, this combination of racism, transgenderism, climate alarmism, and political intolerance had a new name: woke.
Where did it come from? What was its nature?
One theory popular among radio and television commentators such as Mark Levin, is that woke is a variety of “cultural Marxism” with its origins in the works of Antonio Gramsci and/or “critical theory” developed at the Frankfort School during the 1920s and transmitted to the United States through the work of the Marxist philosopher Herbert Marcuse in the 1960s and 1970s. As one who was a Marxist during the decade that stretched from roughly 1969 to 1978, this simply does not ring true.
Although the woke may share certain goals with Marxists, such as overthrowing capitalism, I don’t believe the two are the same. Marx, and his followers always focused on the hard business of seizing and exercising state power to destroy the bourgeoise, and establish the “dictatorship of the proletariat.” The woke, to the contrary, loathe the proletariat, the working and middle classes, and instead focus on such mental states as sexual and gender identity, guilt, and subconscious racism. In short, their focus is on the psychological interior, and secondarily on the sociological exterior. The woke folk I have met are nihilistic, guilt-ridden, self-loathing, megalomaniacs who think they can change human nature. Marxists are often the latter, but they have never been guilt-ridden, self-loathing, or nihilistic. These are characteristics of religious fanatics.
Had the woke been around in Marx’s day, he would have scorned them as petit bourgeois freaks no more substantial than dust in the streets. Had they been around in revolutionary Russia, Lenin would have tolerated them so long as they were useful. Then, he would have exterminated them with no more regret than he would have felt after swatting a fly.
So, if they are not traditional Marxists what are they? There are several contending opinions. One, advanced by Jay Whig, writing at American Greatness, holds that woke is a religious cult, indeed, a Puritan heresy. Michael Rectenwald, writing in Chronicles, holds that it is a westernized form of Maoism—which makes it nor a Puritan heresy, but a Marxist one. Henry George, also writing in the April 2023 issue of Chronicles, contends that “wokeness,” is a “new moral order for the managerial state,” which originates in the American religious tradition.
A point to keep in mind is that the debate among conservatives about the nature of “woke,” is two-fold. First, is it a foreign import, or a domestic product? Second, is it a political ideology, or a religious cult?
With these two questions in mind, I think we can make more sense of what we are dealing with. First, we need to begin with the recognition that ideology, particularly Marxism, is itself a Judeo-Christian heresy, complete with a battle between good and evil [the proletariat and the bourgeoise], an apocalyptic final battle, [the revolution], and the triumph of the kingdom of heaven [socialism/communism.]. It even has prophets like Marx, Lenin, and Mao and martyrs like Che Guevara, who have sacrificed for the cause. So, it should be no surprise that there are distinct similarities between such Marxist derivations as “critical theory,” or Maoism, and woke. The ideological is the theological.
Second, for a “nation with the soul of a church,” as G.K. Chesterton wrote of the United States, it should come as no surprise to us that a cult such as woke, should spinoff from a fractured protestantism. In fact, no country, with the possible exception of India, has been more prolific than the United States in producing religious movements that become denominations, that themselves produce yet additional spinoffs. It is certainly the history of protestantism in the United States. Nor should it surprise us that American politics have always been suffused with religion and moral crusades.
Accordingly, while woke has been cross fertilized by cultural Marxism, Maoism, and even post-modernism, it is most likely that its tap root lies deep in American religious history. As Henry George writes, it seems “plausible that the fervor with which the woke express themselves is rooted in American religion and culture, reaching back to the turn of the 20thcentury. Blaming . . . . some malign foreign philosophical influence is arguably both inaccurate and simplistic.” We need not go abroad in search of alien ideologies. Americans have been producing moral crusaders since the First Great Awakening before the republic was even founded. But none had greater impact on modern American culture and politics than the Second Great Awakening of the early nineteenth century.
The Second Great Awakening, in addition to producing a flood of new protestant denominations such as the Mormons, the Seventh Day Adventists, and Jehovah’s Witnesses, spawned numerous crusades for moral, political, and social improvement, ranging from pacifism to temperance, but none was so powerful as abolitionism which was an uncompromising moral crusade against slavery epitomized by the following stanza from verse four of Julia Ward Howe’s Battle Hymn of the Republic: “ As He died to make men holy, Let us die to make men free.”
This reminds me of Jane Addams, a young woman who came of age in the aftermath of the Civil War. The daughter of an abolitionist friend of Abraham Lincoln, she imbibed all the crusading zeal of the battle against slavery, but by the time she was old enough to leave her father’s house, slavery had been abolished. Consequently, she was at a loss as to what to do with her life—until she went to London and saw a food riot. From that point forward she threw herself into all sorts of moral reform crusades. She was an archetypal progressive of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, active in social work, women’s suffrage, and the world peace movement. She dedicated her life to moral reform until she passed away in 1935 at the height of the New Deal, another political reform movement.
The New Deal crusade died with the approach of the Second World War, although it did result in the establishment of the United Nations as a successor to the League of Nations, an organization that tried to reform international affairs in accordance with Woodrow Wilson’s vision of a “parliament of man” that would establish perpetual peace, another holy crusade that energized progressives.
Arguably, the next great crusade that American reformers participated in was the crusade against Jim Crow in the South. The crusade drew heavily for inspiration upon protestant churches, both black and white. The eldest of the boomers were not quite old enough to participate in the civil rights struggle, the great moral crusade of the time, so, like Jane Addams before her, many of them sought to find meaning in life in another such crusade. During the late sixties and early seventies, many found it by taking the struggle for political equality to the next step—a crusade against “subconscious racism,” the last vestiges of prejudice.
Accordingly, many young college students devoted a good deal of time to examining their own souls for any hint of racism. When they found it, as they always did, they struggled to extirpate it—and what’s more, they demanded that others do the same. Never content, they began to examine American institutions for any vestige of racism and demanded that it be abolished. They were driven by a sense of guilt, just as antebellum abolitionists like William Lloyd Garrison were. Just as the abolitionists felt morally tainted by any association with slavery, many young boomers felt tainted by what came to be called “systemic racism,” and accordingly felt called upon to root it out it at any cost. This I think is the origin of the guilty conscience so many white Americans feel to this day about race.
When Americans think about politics, they think in moral terms. Many, especially the young, have no other frame of reference. Accordingly, our politics tend to be suffused with moral judgements derived from a sort of generalized protestantism. Within this worldview, sin is central. It most certainly was to the Puritans. Despite the general erosion of faith among Americans during the twentieth century, deeply rooted, yet free floating feelings of about sin, guilt, and atonement survive. Within such a narrative there are always victims and sinners. In the United States, as Brandon Van Dyke put in a YouTube video in 2022, “race is at the very center of our moral order, but the categories of sex and sexual orientation . . . . round out a kind of holy trinity of victimology. In this holy trinity, race sits on the throne, with sex and sexual orientation to its left and right.”
Within this context, sensitive young Americans, ignorant about their own history as well as the lamentable history of the rest of the world, easily fall victim to moralistic stories of American evil told by opportunistic demagogues trying to advance their own selfish interests or causes. Thus, they readily join yet another moral crusade to purify the social order. Whatever else woke, and especially the transgender movement may be, it is clearly a post-modern mental disorder with the characteristics of social contagion.
Though the woke crusades are capable of mobilizing hundreds of thousands, perhaps even millions of activists, the globalist oligarchs who are driving the current revolutionary effort to seize power in the west, regard them much as Lenin regarded the “useful idiots” of the left in his day. Mobilize them now. Eliminate them later. Those of us who are trying to preserve American and western civilization should not be distracted. As Edward Ring reminds us, there are other hills to die upon.