Is Woke Losing?

There is much evidence to suggest that modern democracy, and with it modern political consciousness more broadly, is inclined to endless self-radicalization. Wokeness is only the latest manifestation of what Eric Voegelin called “modernity without restraint.” As the French scholar Jean-François Brunstein has written in a fine book on the subject, Wokeness is a secular religion born in the universities, one that sees the Western democracies as “systematically” sexist, racist, and colonialist and therefore as illicit and beyond redemption. As a result, the Woke show no tolerance toward those who resist its identification of any and all inequalities with “discrimination” and who oppose its efforts to remake human nature according to the requirements of gender theory.  As Braunstein aptly puts it, Wokeness inevitably culminates in a dictatorship of a crudely defined “social justice.”

Tocqueville already saw this dynamic in the 1830s when writing about America in the context of an unfolding “democratic revolution” with no clear end in sight. Tocqueville understood that left to themselves, the democratic and egalitarian impulses tended not to respect any limits but were of the nature to run roughshod over natural talents and the “diverse faculties” (as they were called in Federalist #10) inherent in human nature.

The Sisyphean Art of Liberty

The great French statesman and political thinker nonetheless hoped that these profound tendencies of democracy could be held in check, if imperfectly and at the price of eternal vigilance, by a unique art,  an “art of liberty.” In his day, this art had many resources that it could enlist:  existing local self-government and the American “genius” in forming voluntary associations, widespread religious faith, healthy common sense, respect for the rule of law, and even pockets of human greatness, albeit in forms that respected the truth that all human beings are equal in the ideas of the Creator. Like other conservative-minded liberals then and now, Tocqueville wanted to keep together moderate modernity and older forms of salutary wisdom, what he called “the spirit of liberty” and “the spirit of religion.” This remains the great task of true friends of liberty and human dignity in the late modern world.

As long as democracy abides, however, the task that this “art” undertakes is Sisyphean and, therefore, will never achieve complete or definitive victory over debased forms of democracy or the temptations of “modernity without restraint.” But thanks to this art (and to Tocqueville’s guiding diagnosis), democracy’s tendency toward self-radicalization need not achieve its logical terminus:  the degradation and enervation of the human soul and what Tocqueville called “tutelary despotism.” Tocqueville’s analysis provides enduring insights for understanding the ideological deformations that continue to haunt the democratic project, including the latest ideological manifestation of Wokeness.   More generally, his diagnosis and prescription allow us to hope without illusions and to keep despair (and its accompanying debilitating passivity) at bay. This is wise counsel, indeed.

Modernity’s Totalitarian Face

There are other lessons that we should recall.  In the twentieth century, the partisans of revolutionary socialism claimed that Communism—no matter how cruel and tyrannical - was more “democratic” than democracy, more “modern” than moderate modernity because it was more consistently egalitarian, humanitarian, and atheistic. It is important to recognize that there is an essential truth to this claim. With Communism, radical modernity’s emancipated and autonomous Man came to the fore in a way that was most revealing: here was a human being devoid of loyalty to tradition, denying the sovereignty of a good and gracious God, as well as lacking in respect for common sense and the natural order of things. The most elementary liberties were destroyed in the process, and lying became a way of life. Here was a great object-lesson in the self-destructive logic inherent in radical modernity.  

With Communist totalitarianism, humanity came face to face with what Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn called in his 1978 Harvard Address “the calamity of an autonomous, irreligious human consciousness.” Wokeness partakes of that same underlying calamity, the exact replacement of the age-old distinction between Good and Evil by the pernicious and intrinsically totalitarian distinction between Progress and Reaction. This is the hallmark of unrestrained modernity. In this dispensation, some are “guilty” because of who they are (members of suspect classes or races) or because they stand in the way of the “liberationist” designs of those who wish to perfect “modernity without restraint.” The only course of action is to eliminate or subjugate the guilty.

Wokeness Meets Resistance…and Persists

Today, few in the anti-Woke camp would deny the essentially totalitarian character of Woke ideology and the repressive features and measures to which it has given rise. But with the movement of some major corporations and universities away from rigid DEI policies, together with the revolt of longtime Democratic donors such as the financier Bill Ackman against poisonous anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism at elite universities, and with the building of an anti-Woke coalition around Donald Trump (which includes significant support from minorities and young white men), more than a few commentators have declared Wokeness to have “peaked.” I believe such declarations to be premature and a bit naïve, even if there are reasons to hope that wokeness will continue to meet honest, sustained, and determined opposition. In the Tocquevillian spirit outlined at the opening of this essay, that is perhaps all we can reasonably expect. The battle will and must continue.

What, more specifically, lies behind my call to avoid undue optimism regarding the hope for quickly and permanently putting the threat of Woke despotism behind us? To begin with, what the English conservative philosopher Roger Scruton labeled the “culture of repudiation,” that is, active and unremitting efforts to negate the Western civilizational inheritance, is deeply ingrained in education at every level, and in intellectual life more broadly. It will not be uprooted or replaced in one presidential term or two. In a connected vein, gender ideology and the new racialism in the form of the 1619 Project continue to shape the minds of the young and have massive resources behind them. It took decades for mainstream conservatives and centrists to acknowledge the salience of these “civilizational” issues, with many establishment types accommodating themselves to the cultural revolution in the name of a misplaced “moderation.”   The necessary “education” of such elites will not happen overnight.

Journalism remains a shipwreck, at once shamelessly partisan and ideological. The pretense of “objectivity,” or at least of balance and fairmindedness, is long gone. The mainstream media from the major networks, the cable networks (except Fox News), and prestigious magazines such as The New Yorker and The Atlantic see authoritarianism and worse at work in every effort of decent and reasonable people to protest or resist the progressivist agenda. The members of the Fourth Estate freely play the “fascist” card and succumb without shame to the reductio ad HItlerum, as Leo Strauss already called it in the early 1950s. Once thoughtful intellectuals such as Anne Applebaum and Bill Kristol have become hysterics, crying “1933” every time the mix of conservatives, populists, and advocates of national sovereignty fight back against the elite consensus or make the most minimal of political gains.  New forms of media (think Joe Rogan) have emerged, but legacy media continue to drive and shape a censorious elite consensus.

The entertainment world remains reliably leftist (and laughably self-parodic, with their threats to emigrate with the election of Donald Trump). Few of the “celebrities” in that world have yet to acknowledge the fraudulent character of the Russian Hoax or the mix of rabid partisanship, lawlessness, and contempt for traditional American political norms that underwrote Democratic lawfare. Just a few weeks ago, Taylor Swift, no doubt a political naif and by no means the worst of the worst, paid ritualistic tribute to the indigenous ownership of the land she was playing on in a concert in Toronto. Worse, while she paid tribute to the tenets of “settler colonialism,” the Prime Minister of Canada, Justin Trudeau, whooped it up at the concert as anti-Jewish mobs went on a murderous rampage in Montreal. At the same time, Trudeau announced that Canada would arrest the Prime Minister of Israel per the demented orders of an International Criminal Court informed by deep loathing for those who dare to resist the enemies of Western civilization. Progressive Western self-loathing transcends national boundaries.

Peak Woke?

It is true that, in a sense, wokeness peaked in the summer of 2020. As Christopher Caldwell pointed out in the Claremont Review of Books not long after that hellish summer, the entire nation was then living on social media, a form of communication dominated by ideological conformism and willful, ignorant, and deeply illiberal young people (a situation that could not survive the pandemic lockdowns). White progressives succumbed to racial panic, seeing murderous white policemen everywhere. It became fashionable to call for “defunding the police,” with the poor and the vulnerable inevitably paying the price for this ideological contagion in “the state of nature” that emerged in many of our major cities. It became de rigueur to praise the Maoists and nihilists of the Black Lives Matter movement, who themselves are racists of the first order. Establishment Republicans were largely silent, and the Democratic party openly identified with a movement that attacked America as a permanently “structurally racist” country. Nineteen-year-olds on our college campuses, bereft of any real learning or insight, claimed the authority to silence or humiliate anyone who dared to challenge the regnant ideological nostrums. A very imperfect President Trump nonetheless dared to defend the essential nobility of the American cause in a memorable speech at Mount Rushmore on July 3, 2020. However, Senator Mitt Romney, the quintessence of the Republican “moderate,” marched with BLM sympathizers, and Never Trumpers at the Bulwark remained silent while our cities burned and our country came under systematic assault.

On these scores, things are objectively better now—no doubt about it. Many Republicans have found their courage. Anti-woke liberals and even leftists—the folks at the Free Press and the demi-traditionalist, demi-Marxist Compact, for example, vigorously denounce it. What the Czech Catholic dissident Václav Benda called “the parallel polis” has taken shape in the form of myriad independent, classical, charter schools and in new “Civic Thought” programs and institutes at major universities in a full range of red and purple states. These programs are not explicitly conservative in the narrow political sense, but they are models of intellectual and civic excellence that explicitly reject the culture of repudiation and all its works.  One can only hope they flourish.

In a connected vein, many minorities and some young people, mainly males tired of being blamed for all the evils of society, are beginning to break free from Woke conformism. Twitter (now relabeled “X”) has been liberated from the Woke censorship regime by Elon Musk. And on it, one regularly reads personal testimonies of liberals or progressives being red-pilled and liberated from the Leftist Matrix.  Still, as I said above, gender theory, the new racialism, and “settler colonial” ideology remain ubiquitous at every level of education, and young women in particular remain deeply committed to them, as the social scientist Erik Kaufmann recently pointed out in the Times of London.

The End of the Beginning and Our Larger Task

The Leftist “hegemony” was battered by the 2024 election results and the declaration of independence from Wokeness that its results entailed. But its proponents have not been converted to moderation and will live to fight another day. The “Deep State” is biding its time. Conservatives have won elections before (think of Reagan and Thatcher in the 1980s), and the revolution proceeded apace, growing ever more militant and unreasonable. At best, this is the “end of the beginning” of a struggle, to cite Winston Churchill, and should not be mistaken for “the beginning of the end.” How then, should we proceed? Beyond particular goals, one needs to keep one’s eye on the Bigger Picture and work to reanimate the principles undergirding ordered liberty.

The conservative task is always to meld together spiritedness regarding the things that must be defended and preserved and attentiveness to the higher needs of the soul. The anti-revolutionary party properly rejects “visionary expectations” for politics, as Leo Strauss once put it, but also “unmanly contempt” for the practical tasks that lie before us. That is the path of honor, self-respect, and piety before our Western and American inheritances.

The return of common sense is most welcome. As Eric Voegelin argued in his 1965 essay “What is Political Reality?” included in his book, Anamnesis: On the Theory of History and Politics, the rich reserves of common sense gave the English-speaking peoples “remarkable power(s)” of resistance to the inhuman ideologies that ravaged continental Europe from the French Revolution afterwards, and especially in the twentieth century. But, Voegelin added, those admirable efforts inspired by common sense were increasingly accompanied by “remarkable sterility” on the philosophical plane. Only the restoration of “right reason,” “noetic reason,” as the classics called it, a reason that speaks confidently about the ends and purposes of human freedom, can give us the strength and confidence to take on ideological mendacity with sustained strength of soul.

Daniel J. Mahoney is Professor Emeritus at Assumption University and Senior Fellow at the Claremont Institute. His latest book, The Persistence of the Ideological Lie: The Totalitarian Lie, will be released by Encounter Books on April 15, 2025.