The Third Awokening: A 12-Point Plan for Rolling Back Progressive Extremism

May 2024

NEW YORK, NY – Woke is not a fad but a cultural revolution—a movement that can only be stopped by a drastic intervention in our institutions and culture, argues Eric Kaufmann in his new book, The Third Awokening: A 12-Point Plan for Rolling Back Progressive Extremism.

Those in the West are in the third wave of cultural-left ideological enthusiasm, Kaufmann asserts. Each “Awokening” has crested, fallen a little, consolidated, then surged again to reach a higher level. The cumulative result is an elite creed which has produced a crime wave, a worsening education system, chaos at the border, and social division. In the book he explains that fired by a cultural socialism that puts equal results and emotional protection for minorities at the center of their moral universe, today’s young people are twice as intolerant of conservative speech as older generations. These young people will be the median voters and employees of tomorrow, leading and controlling the country. Woke cultural socialism is not the classical liberalism of the American Constitution, but a modern “majorities bad, minorities good” Left-liberalism. It is powered by a set of ‘liberal’ emotional attachments rather than liberal principles.

Kaufmann makes the case that today’s woke extremism is not a repudiation of liberalism, but a perverse extension of it and the only way out is to use elected, constitutional, government power to break the grip of wokeness in our institutions and schools, steering them toward neutrality and classical liberalism. To do so, Kaufmann suggests, the conservative and moderate majority must place culture front and center and spare no effort to win the battle of ideas. Nothing less than the future of our civilization depends on it.

About the Author

Dr. Eric Kaufmann is Professor of Politics at the University of Buckingham and adjunct fellow at the Manhattan Institute. A native of Vancouver, British Columbia, he was born in Hong Kong and spent eight early years in Tokyo. His previous books include Whiteshift and Shall the Religious Inherit the Earth?