The Long Haul of Woke

I came across this essay by N.S. Lyons and it took me a minute to realize that it was a reprint from three years ago on his Substack. Yet after all that time and all that has happened (and is happening) it remains as timely as ever.

Why?

As Lyons writes in his editor’s note to the reprint:

Today, with the second Trump administration in power, we have seen a sledgehammer taken to those DEI programs, as well as other manifestations of wokeness such as transgender mania. Again, many observers are pronouncing the demise of the revolution. It is always dangerous to declare victory prematurely, while the enemy can yet strike back.

 

Much, it is true, has changed; but much remains the same. The original essay lists twenty different reasons to be skeptical of the sudden demise of wokeness. Of those, several, including the observation that woke racial bookkeeping was effectively required by law (#15), that it maintained control of all the levers of power within government (#19), and that government was intent on leveraging the ideology to expand its bureaucratic power (#20), have perhaps now been largely overturned. But others, such as the observation that wokeness functions as a pseudo-religion that fills a spiritual and communal void in our culture, or that the “overproduction” of college-educated elites makes our society particularly susceptible to radicalization, seem as relevant as ever.

I argue that the metaphor that Lyons is looking for comes from physics, that is momentum. It provides the proper frame of reference to describe what we are fighting against and what powers it.

“Woke” or “DEI” or “CRT” are merely instances of a larger phenomenon — the collapse of the liberal West — that has been going on for more than 150 years, picking up speed during the past ten. The triple hammer blows of the 19th Century – Darwin, Marx, Nietzsche – left the cultural and social foundations of the West fatally weakened for the events of the 20th Century and especially the rise of postmodernism.

A friend of mine says I’m too short-sighted, and that I need to look back to the 1789 French Revolution, the impact of which Zhou Enlai famously stated “Was too early to say.”

Two of the problems on the Right as it deals with political and social problems caused by the Left are that 1) It doesn’t understand power and 2) It thinks in terms of years and not generations. Generally that’s not a bad thing, but it does leave you at the mercy of those who do take that longer view.

It is the generational issue and its relation to power that is a major theme of Lyons’s work. Back in the early days of my grad school career, I studied the issue of party identification. The professor, a guy who basically founded that area of political science, emphasized that party ID formed part of a person’s psychological make-up. It developed early in life, and that initial choice proved to be both the dominant indicator of how one voted, and was “sticky” in that it hardly changed throughout a person’s life.

The classic example of this was the “Reagan Democrats” in the 1980s: voters, usually blue-collar, who identified as Democrats but voted for Reagan. What is not appreciated is that those same voters continued to vote Democrat in congressional races and returned to the Democratic party in later elections. The vote for Reagan was not a conversion to the Republicans as much as it was a reaction to the Democrats of the day.

In short, you may have been a Democrat all of your life, until you couldn’t take it any more and stepped away, but calling yourself a Republican is just a step too far. The rejection of one form doesn’t mean the acceptance of its opposite. Changes in party ID happen not so much from partisan conversion but from demographic change due to the entrance of new voters into the system.

Lyons’s point is that the same sort of psychological identification has been going on now with younger generations in terms of their ideology, which is a post-modern mélange of identity, Marxism and other anti-Western thought. Not only is there a “positive” effect in that this ideological indoctrination provides a tether for those individuals’ psychological identity, but it also provides a “negative” effect in that the development of other values – say, traditional civic attachments – has no place to take root and, therefore, never takes place.

Just as with party ID, a person who moves away from his identity of “Woke” or post-modern probably won’t become the grand marshal for his town’s Independence Day parade.

This is not to be pessimistic, and in fact Lyons marks the substantial progress that has occurred over the past three years. However, it is only good and proper to be realistic about the task that lies ahead. It took more than 50 years here to get into this mess and it will take just as long, and plenty of new ideas and effort, to get us out of it.

Perhaps it is the end of the beginning.

I will touch on some ways of accomplishing that in a later post.