About the Book
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.
We in the West are in the third wave of cultural-left ideological enthusiasm. 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. 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. These underpin a moral panic about whites and males combined with a starry-eyed patronizing approach to minorities.
Today’s woke extremism is not a repudiation of liberalism, but a perverse extension of it. Our 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, 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
Eric Kaufmann is Professor of Politics at University of Buckingham. He is the author of Whiteshift: Immigration, Populism and the Future of White Majorities (Penguin, October 2018). He has also written Changing Places: mapping the white British response to ethnic change (Demos 2014), Shall the Religious Inherit the Earth: demography and politics in the twenty-first century (Profile 2010), The Rise and Fall of Anglo-America: the decline of dominant ethnicity in the United States (Harvard 2004) and two other books. He may be found on X (formerly known as Twitter) at @epkaufm and on the web at www.sneps.net.