How Did Woke Conquer the West? By James Reed

How did, first what was called "political correctness," now "woke," conquer the West, becoming a ruling ideology? According to one view, woke is the product of the long march by neo-Marxist through the institutions, beginning with the universities. Where direct physical revolution failed to produce the communist revolution in the West, the idea was to gain control of societies' nerve centres and produce radical change from the top, the revolution from the top, rather than from the bottom.

But according to Kaufmann, this view is wrong; rather wokeness, seen as the "sacralisation of historically disadvantaged race, gender and sexual identity groups," arises from the Left-liberal emotional compassion to towards the under-dog. Kaufmann says that, "rather than anything to do with more radical Marxism, the underlying political outlook is "cultural socialism", a guilt-ridden, mostly vibe-based project with origins in American progressive culture, originally focused upon achieving equality of outcome for black people rather than mere equality of opportunity, and attempting to protect them from various kinds of emotional harm as well.

In supposed service of these two goals, he argues, there sprang up a variety of increasingly tortuous taboos around discussion of race, enforced by white Left-liberals and moving well beyond the stigmatising of intentionally racist language. Later, as sexual minorities started to be perceived as sufficiently worthy victims and got more political attention, the same goals were extended to them, with accompanying taboos prohibiting open discussion of sexual orientation, 'gender' and matters arising. Only a very narrow set of ideological views on racial and sexual minorities is now permissible in many workplaces, schools and universities, with any deviation viewed as a probable indicator of moral lack. Shorn of their original rational moorings, claims of 'harassment', 'bullying', 'trauma', 'racism' and 'hate speech' fly around far too easily."

I think both positions on the origin of woke are correct and need to be blended together. Thus, it is true that woke got off the ground in the first place because of the universalistic morality that Whites, unlike Blacks and Chinese have, or had. But for such sentiments to become dominant in a society requires some social agents to propagate the ideas, and that was done by the neo-Marxists. Hence Kaufmann is right about the background sentiments to get this destructive, toxic ideology off the ground, but his account needs to be supplemented.

https://dailysceptic.org/2024/06/22/eric-kaufmann-explains-how-woke-conquered-the-world/

"Wokery is a characteristically modern scourge, laying waste all before it in pursuit of a utopian Year Zero where all 'oppression' of minorities is expunged. But where did it come from? Eric Kaufmann, a 'cancelled' Canadian academic and now Professor of Politics at Buckingham University, has written a new book trying to answer that question, and Kathleen Stock has reviewed it for the Times.

Stock begins by setting out the "contrast" account offered by Jordan Peterson, "effectively an adherent to a new version of the 'Reds under the beds' scare that gripped America in the 1950s":

He believes that the repressive state of many so-called progressive institutions owes a significant debt to the ideas of the early 20th-century communist philosopher Antonio Gramsci. Frustrated by the failure of economic Marxism to take root in the West, Left-wingers supposedly decided to take a cue from Gramsci and wage a cultural 'war of position' instead, covertly infiltrating universities and other public organisations to disseminate their radical ideas and undermine traditional social structures. 'Wokeness' is allegedly the result: a garbled melange of postmodernism and neo-Marxist ideas now enjoying a great vogue. The main thrust is that Western categories and values inevitably encode oppressive power relations in favour of dominant white and heterosexual interests, which therefore all must be dismantled in favour of the victimised, colonised and dispossessed.

Yet, "to anyone familiar with the chaos and corporatism of the modern university, this all sounds far too well organised", says Stock.

Kaufmann's rival account rings truer: wokeness, understood as the "sacralisation of historically disadvantaged race, gender and sexual identity groups", derives from a basic emotional impulse of compassion towards the victimised underdog and guilt at past misdeeds. In other words it stems from fairly ordinary Left-liberal motivations.

Instead of a planned coup, it's an "ecstatic leaderless revivalism": the emotional reactions came first, and the intellectual window dressing came later. Although wokeness, interpreted in this way, has particularly flourished in elite institutions in the past 10 years, according to Kaufmann the stage was already set in the 1960s, with roots going back much further, and the trend has been waxing and waning ever since.

Kaufmann says that, rather than anything to do with more radical Marxism, the underlying political outlook is "cultural socialism", a guilt-ridden, mostly vibe-based project with origins in American progressive culture, originally focused upon achieving equality of outcome for black people rather than mere equality of opportunity, and attempting to protect them from various kinds of emotional harm as well.

In supposed service of these two goals, he argues, there sprang up a variety of increasingly tortuous taboos around discussion of race, enforced by white Left-liberals and moving well beyond the stigmatising of intentionally racist language. Later, as sexual minorities started to be perceived as sufficiently worthy victims and got more political attention, the same goals were extended to them, with accompanying taboos prohibiting open discussion of sexual orientation, 'gender' and matters arising. Only a very narrow set of ideological views on racial and sexual minorities is now permissible in many workplaces, schools and universities, with any deviation viewed as a probable indicator of moral lack. Shorn of their original rational moorings, claims of 'harassment', 'bullying', 'trauma', 'racism' and 'hate speech' fly around far too easily.

According to Kaufmann, a Professor of Politics at Buckingham University, the cultural losses due to this unbalanced and repressive political programme have been profound: the neglect of other worthwhile goals such as "freedom, excellence, beauty, community, identity, and reason"; the suppression of information useful for human flourishing; the stigmatisation of people trying in good faith to talk about the negative impacts of unrestricted immigration, the destruction of female-only spaces and other culturally sensitive topics, monstered by the Left as bigots for doing so, and driven into the arms of "populist conservatives" to the triumphalist sneering of their critics. And there have been losses to minorities too. A society that cannot openly discuss issues such as the negative effects of the Black Lives Matter movement on black people, or of militant trans activism upon LGB people, can only bungle responses to these things and make matters worse for all concerned."