American conservatives currently riding the Streetcar Named American Democracy could well imagine they’re seeing the hated Streetcar Named Woke rumbling off in the opposite direction, likely to disappear out of sight. The rest of us Australians, Brits, and Canadians are still sitting gridlocked on Woke Avenue. But I have a warning for those MAGA Americans who think they are done with ‘all that Woke crap’. To them I say, not so fast!
It is true that by the time November 2024 rolled around, the number of Americans sick of the Woke Empire’s version of progress had finally reached critical mass resulting in the Trumpist shift of their democratic tectonic plates. And so far so good, one might say. But there are currently two kinds of anti-Woke false dawns swirling round in right-wing media.
The first is the Woke is So Over! meme. Somehow the tens of millions of laptop culture warriors, including those sitting at all levels of the West’s civil service and bureaucracies, never got the message. Tell it to the ‘creatives’ in the multi-billion dollar TV advertising industry, I say.
The second (more serious) kind is a right-wing political narrative where everything gets blamed on a so-called ‘Woke elite’. This is a malign elite who (so we are told) have been ‘in control’ of it all. A kind of Wokievellian Illuminati. In this telling of our 21st Century hyper-progressive dystopia, Woke reality has simply been foisted on a great mass of grounded and well-adjusted citizenry. Yes, they have put up with it, but entirely unwillingly. Hence the proposed answer to the problem is for this ‘Woke elite’ to be vanquished by new swashbuckling Trump-type administrations in order to Make Everything Great Again. There’s one big failure in this narrative. By implication, the US Democratic Party ought, for example, to have attracted around 5 per cent of the popular vote last November, not the near-50 per cent it actually got …..one hell of a lot of people to label an ‘elite’
The more dispiriting truth is that if there is such a thing as a ‘Woke elite’, it is a very big group of people. One which perhaps comprises a majority of all those Westerners who have been through tertiary education. That’s one hell of a lot of people to label an elite. The new-right online ecosystem is nevertheless awash with Woke elite theorising – as Googling ‘Woke’ plus ‘elite’ or phrases such as ‘techno-managerial elite’ will show. Some of it is from well-known writers that I generally respect so am reluctant to point fingers.
One could excuse the narrative if it were just coming from politicians. Politicians might not want to alienate potential voters with home truths about Woke-ish opinions they’d now rather pretend they never had. But when it comes from journalists and think-tankers it seems like the naive embrace of a big bad wolf fairy tale. The darker reality is that aspects of the hyper-progressive mentality have, over recent decades, been embraced by tens (perhaps hundreds) of millions – albeit in greatly varying dilutions.
So I’ll start with the parts of the ‘elite in control’ narrative that are basically true and then move on to parts that are more blinkered or disingenuous:
It is true that the quality of our supposedly democratic political discourse has been hugely skewed since the mid-20th Century by a hegemonic progressive intellectual ‘elite’. Our great political folly was failing to foresee the consequences of allowing universities to become colonised by an intelligentsia intent on unpicking the threads that held Western Civilisation together. Viewed from outer space, our 21st Century universities do probably look like monasteries of groupthink controlled by a malign Social Justice religious priesthood.
It is equally true that a university-educated managerial class – groomed to pitch-perfect self-righteousness – has ‘long-marched’ its way down all the corridors of power, legal, administrative, non-governmental, fourth estate etc. And each one of these institutions has become a platform for the ex-cathedra promulgation of progressive ‘values’.
Turning now to the parts that the narrative typically shies away from:
aspects of the hyper-progressive mentality have been embraced by tens (perhaps hundreds) of millions – albeit in varying dilutions.
This is a retreat to a moral/philosophical redoubt in which an alien ‘other’ is juxtaposed with a reassuringly ‘great mass’ of sane citizens. But maybe the darker truth is that the Progressive competitive-victimhood mentality is a highly addictive one … a kind of mass psychosis that ensnares tens of millions – rich and poor, young and old. The most salient feature of our 21st Century digital age is that everyone has lost control of it.
This is why an anti-Woke, political course-correction is likely to prove much more intractable than any political regime, however radical, could entirely accomplish. The obstacles are many and largely out of the control of any elite, Woke or otherwise.
I will pick up on three more of them:
The Internet: In days of yore, information about the big wide world was a scarce resource. Then with the advent of radio and television, people began to pick up a bag of off-the-shelf ‘knowledge’ and ‘opinions’ – a process that the internet has turbocharged.
It is the intrinsic nature of mass media that politico-obsessives and permanent malcontents get a disproportionately large ‘voice’ in shaping the nexus of received information/disinformation. And so, in our media-soaked times, even semi-apolitical citizens pick up – barely even noticing it – fashionable ‘opinions’ about all sorts of stuff that they are not even particularly interested in. Of course, there’s global warming. Of course there’s racism, sexism, homophobia. Everybody knows that!
A Tertiary Education Complex: It’s all very well for conservative intellectuals to nail the Marxist Herbert Marcuse-type academics for their poisoning of the Western philosophical well. But what made them so successful in Wokefying our Western culture? That’s the bit that needs to be addressed. Fashionable opinion formation is an especially powerful phenomenon at a young, impressionable age when opinions are first encountered as ‘cool’ fashion accessories that seem to win favour with one’s peers in the overheated college campus coop. Then in adult life – as with hair and clothing styles – beliefs acquired when young tend to stick in later adult life.
In the wrong intellectual ‘soil’, tertiary education can have paradoxical consequences. Upward striving parents dream of their kids going to university so as to get a ‘proper education’. How ironic if the skills their kids actually learn are a pseudo-intellectual sophistry in the defence of inherent absurdities and a deactivation of whatever native common sense they came in with… Could it be that the massive late 20th Century expansion of tertiary education (that seemed in the 1980s to be progress-on-a-stick) might have actually spread more ignorance than enlightenment?
The entry into the Western collective psyche of a supposed deficit of self-love … one that needed correcting via maximal self-esteem:
A ‘Culture of Narcissism’? Older readers may have grown up with the remnants of a Christian moral sense that everyone (including oneself) is an imperfect being. In the following decades, that moral/philosophical centre ‘progressively’ unravelled. Key to this was the entry into the Western collective psyche of a supposed deficit of self-love … one that needed correcting via maximal self-esteem. In the post-60s decades, self-esteem’s supposed importance to healthy personal development became axiomatic right across the spectrum from Left to Right. But it had a downside. Once you are encouraged to view yourself as axiomatically personally blameless, the next step is to look for someone (or something) else to blame for your discontents. Re-cast your wonderful self as a ‘victim’….. of something or other.
To put all this in a nutshell: Wokeness is not Marxism in extremis, it is Liberal Individualism in extremis. It could well be that the current Trumpist revolution is necessary medicine and who knows what course-correction it might achieve on the good ship Western Liberalism. Trusting in the democratically expressed wisdom of the electorate is, after all, the philosophical keystone on which Liberalism is founded. Even if in darker moments one might wonder whether – in the withering words of H L Menchen: ‘Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard.’
Other pieces by Graham can be found on his Substack: https://grahamcunningham.substack.com/