Wokeness is about making historically marginalized groups sacred. This religion reinforces an ideology I term “cultural socialism,” which holds that the highest aim of society is to equalize outcomes for disadvantaged identity groups and protect them from harm, such as hearing America described as “a land of opportunity.” How did this ethos, which hides under innocuous labels such as “diversity” or “inclusivity,” wind up as the pinnacle of our culture? What can we do about it?
These questions are the focus of two recent books, Christopher Rufo’s best-selling America’s Cultural Revolution and Richard Hanania’s The Origins of Woke, which seems poised to enjoy Rufo-level success. They set out two different accounts of how the radical left conquered the culture. Hanania focuses on affirmative action and cancel culture, emphasizing the evolution of civil rights law from equal treatment to equal results, free speech to speech suppression. Rufo concentrates on Critical Race Theory (CRT), tracing it to Marxism’s cultural turn from class to identity in the late 1960s. The two accounts, evolutionary and revolutionary, institutional and cultural, complement and contest each other.
The two represent a new generation of Millennial intellectuals who made it on the internet, outside the usual system of institutional gatekeepers. Though neither define themselves as national conservatives, the authors find common ground in rejecting the laissez-faire claim that governments should stay out of the cultural fight. Both maintain that the decentralization of authority from democratically elected legislatures to unaccountable managers and educators permitted a cultural revolution to take place under the radar. Rufo calls for a counter-revolution to “lay siege” to ideologically-captured institutions. Hanania sets out a detailed policy manual pointing Republican politicians and lawyers to the precise levers they need to pull to undercut cultural socialism’s power.
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Eric Kaufmann is professor of politics at Birkbeck College, University of London and an adjunct fellow of the Manhattan Institute.
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