Wokeness at Noon

[Valin]

Law & Liberty

James E. Hartley

Dec. 29 2020

Are you Woke? It was not too long ago that such a question would have been greeted with a puzzled disdain for its grammatical barbarism. It is now the question of the moment, no longer limited to college campuses as part of the initiation rites to higher learning. In certain political circles, it has already become the code word for being taken seriously on policy questions.

As Mark Pulliam notes in “Slouching Toward Totalitarianism,” the rise of wokeness as a powerful political force has been extraordinarily rapid, “almost overnight.” In a few short years it moved from something living in assorted university departments to a thing being promoted by the public library in Pulliam’s small town in Tennessee. There are no less than three best-selling, widely discussed books pushing the agenda: Ta-Nehisi Coates’s Between the World and Me, Robin DiAngelo’s White Fragility, and Ibram X. Kendi’s How to be an Antiracist. Indeed, it is hard to think of any other books on any topic in social policy that have commanded the attention these three books have received in the last few years. How did this happen?

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Here, in a book written in 1941, we have the script of the last four years. As William Voegeli put it in his recent article in the Claremont Review of Books, we now have the “Weak leading the Woke.” The biggest question for the next few months is how much power the weak will transfer to the woke. The Rubashovs among us are the leaders of the Democratic Party, the presidents of the leading universities, the heads of the major media outlets, and the CEOs and upper management of large firms, both in the tech industry and elsewhere. Looking at all those individuals, you find many who used to believe that honor and decency were important. But, in 2016, their own faith that their political and cultural dreams would win, that they were on the right side of history, was shattered. Now, these pillars of society confess their sins in public show trials (“We must do better”) and one by one accede to the demands of the woke, lest they find their careers shot in the back of the head while walking down the halls of power.

Is there hope? Koestler’s book is not an optimistic one. “He who accepts a dictatorship must accept civil war as a means. He [who] recoils from civil war must give up opposition and accept the dictatorship.” Let us hope that Koestler is wrong about that. Hope, however, may not be enough. The challenge of our age is not merely to resist the woke, but for those who recoil from both civil war and dictatorship to find a peaceful, orderly means of resistance.