I think liberals are caught in a double bind. Meaning you want people to forget about race and say it doesn't exist but you then constantly remind them of race by demanding quotas for the "disadvantaged" i.e., race, and are constantly, endlessly obsessed with white supremacy. The latest example being Sydney Sweeney and a brand of clothes.
Liberals have nothing else. They live and die off their Civil Rights street cred. From 70 years ago. Liberals are like old Mike Tyson living off their glory years. When they used to matter. When they had something good to offer. When they stood for openness and free expression. Not silencing and shaming and suppression and institutional punishment (they are the institutions now). Woke is the anti MLK doctrine - they simply GAVE UP on color blindness as the right way to run a pluralistic society. They thought it a better idea to turn on whites and men and Christians as enemies rather than friends. To demand we stand aside and willingly become second class citizens and persona non grata for the sin of - wrong skin and gender. It is the evil fruit of our universities and their long tenured Marx critical theorists who have pumped out tens of thousands into our collective national bloodstream. It is right to pull this weed from the root.
If you changed "liberals" to "woke advocates" or "the illiberal left" I would be in solid agreement. However, many prominent liberals are in the anti-woke camp. "Liberal" does not equate to "woke" just as "anti-woke" isn't the same as "white supremacist." The author of the book under discussion is a liberal - he makes all of the points you mention here.
I think the message is let’s not go nuts over silly and superficial things like expressing outrage at a jeans commercial or a pseudo country store corporate rebrand. We need to be beyond this and I think Williams would probably agree. BTW very good review of this book and I’ll definitely be reading it pretty soon!
Woke is racism. Woke is misandry. Woke is hatred in mirror image form. It is punching up hatred. It doesn’t condemn hate or punching. It is Marx struggle theology covered in righteous robes of accountability. It demonizes entire races and genders as oppressors. It segregates and divides. It never unites. We are told to accept this bedrock dogma of the far Left as so called justice. Positions fully embraced TODAY by AOC, the Squad, Brandon Johnson, Mamdani, and Tim “This Is Who We Are” Walz. The reason Woke is in retreat is that the counter revolution is so fierce. So jarring. NOT because our Left has come to its senses. NOT because the Left is now, magically, converts to universalism. Only because MAGA is laying waste to their engines of production and distribution.
Woke is the cancer that is RIGHTLY getting its radiation. Its money and institutional legitimacy must be attacked until unconditional surrender. It must be, first, destroyed as an active viral enterprise and then delegitimized as the hateful, racist, divisive Marxist lie that it is. And the Left’s leaders who supported it, or still do, are either too foolish to elect into power for believing it a good thing or too hateful to follow. Either way, they are illegitimate.
You immediately undermine your credibility when you glibly characterize Trump's defunding of universities as “ostensibly in response to antisemitism on campus, but also to impose political control and root out “critical race theory” and “gender ideology.”
There is no “ostensibly” about it. Antisemitism on the college campuses, in particular, and on the left, in general, is pervasive and insidious and Trump has made it clear he will not fund universities that tolerate it. Sadly, it has also begun to manifest itself on the far right. Such are the times in which we live.
More to the point, audits of the records of multiple universities reveal that scores of them continue to use race, gender, etc. in its admissions decisions—a clear violation of federal law and the U.S. Constitution. This, along with antisemitism, are the principal reasons for the Administration's defunding of universities.
Now, I firmly believe Trump has erred, perhaps legally but especially from a policy standpoint, in withholding research funding from these schools. Even though they primarily churn out activists and technocrats when, once upon a time, they produced independent-thinking and well-educated adults and future statesmen, their research is essential to the growth, improvement and prosperity of our society.
While withholding funding until campuses demonstrate they have stopped discriminating when make admissions decisions and are maintaining a safe environment for members of the Jewish faith is fully justified, Trump is on weaker ground when he withholds research funding.
Finally, while we may be past “peak woke“ (I prefer “cultural Marxism,” which is a more accurate descriptor), mark my words: it is a cancer that has only gone into remission.
"Considering the vast racial disparities that still exist in the United States—in everything from household wealth to incarceration rates to levels of educational attainment..."
I have always held that, were we to embrace the last topic in this sentence, so much of the previous two would mostly disappear.
Very interesting article. I wonder if the book talked about the strong incentives on the left to play identity politics ? Ever since the Kennedys backed civil rights, American blacks became loyal democratic voters. Over the decades, the democrats seemed to believe that identity groups, gays, blacks, latinos, and now transgender people would give them voters. Since elections are won by 2% these identity groups matter. The republicans did this on abortion and now on " anti-woke", rile people up, don't look for sensible compromises, use the issues to get 1%t 2% of voters that can push you over the finish line. Democracy suffers.
Any movement toward the ideal of a colorblind society must reckon with the ancient and enduring power of the territorial instinct. In the animal world, this has always been a survival mechanism - among other advantages enabling the weaker to defeat or at least drive off the stronger as long as the weaker is on home ground. We humans give the concept lip service in such phrases as ‘the home court advantage’, but in reality have taken it to an intellectual and emotional level that never existed in the non-human animal world, and thus among us it has become more disadvantage than advantage. This is most evident in our own stubborn determination to divide ourselves into all sorts of groups, often depending on wholly non-existent/imaginary criteria to do so. Racism based on skin color is one of the oldest forms of this problem. But the power of territoriality also lies behind all the national, religious, social, and political differences with which we’ve saddled ourselves.
We often like to think of ourselves as Locke's 'tabula rasa', thinking, as Rogers and Hammerstein put it so well in their musical South Pacific - 'You have to be carefully taught’ to discriminate/dislike/hate/distrust those whom you have decided are unlike you, but in fact we are already genetically programmed to do so.
That is not to say that we cannot overcome our ‘programming'. But it is essential to understand just how powerful the ‘inclination’ to do so is within us.
I graduated from college in 1971 (should have done so in 1967 but a stint in the US Army intervened), well before the ‘woke’ revolution hit, so I tended to ignore all the brouhaha over what I tended to see as a ginned-up criticism from the right. I was certainly at least mildly in favor of affirmative action since I was fully aware of the history and the reality of racial discrimination, having watched, sometimes in real time, the extraordinary social upheaval and violence of the Civil Rights Era. Any one of a later birth can catch at least a glimpse of what I saw by watching the extraordinary PBS documentary Eyes on the Prize. Watching it can give those not there to see it firsthand, where the BLM movement after the death of George Floyd and others got some of its power.
So it was only later than I began to understand just how suppressive things got in the woke world.
In a sense, then the summer of 2020 is just a place on the continuum of American history. One can trace it directly back to our Original Sin - the creation of a nation based on principles of freedom and individual rights that also maintained slavery. One can still hear Samual Johnson’s reaction to the Declaration of Independence. "We hear the loudest yelps for liberty among the drivers of Negoes".
We are still paying for that Sin. The 700,000 lives we lost between 1861 and 1865 being only a partial price.
Being sublimated to raw skin color groups = how prisons are run. Not enlightened societies. When booked into prison, you’re given an orange jump suit and a menu of three racial gangs. These are your new friends in the yard. This is, now, who you lift weights with and play basketball with and eat with in the dining hall. Prisons aren’t places where you organize gangs around poets or philosophers or scientists or lawyers or economists or writers or actors. It is a barbarian dungeon at the bottom of our primate brainstem where only easy-to-spot color markers distinguish Us from Them in the savage mission to just stay alive.
This is the world Woke takes us. A prison yard in our own society.
That’s an exceptional exaggeration. Woke, while it clearly went overboard, was originally intended to equalize opportunities in a society in which opportunity had been severely limited to particular groups, and not all based on skin color - but also on religious, social, financial, and ethnic distinctions. And it is easy forget that fact even while significant parts of the anti-woke forces would return us to that place of limited opportunity initiated decades ago by Nixon’s Southern Strategy and continuing into the presidency of Donald Trump.
Equal opportunity was and is not a goal of the committed woke. Equal results are what has been absurdly demanded. That's why the "E" in DEI stands for equity and not equality. Woke is the "Politics of Procrustes" as explained in Anthony Flew's book of the same name written in 1981. No one can say we weren't warned.
Equal opportunity has been the goal ever since the 13th, 14th, 15th, and 19th Amendments to the Constitution were enacted. The fact that in the attempt to meet that goal, some went overboard does not detract from the nature of the effort.
You would damn ‘woke’ apparently without any consideration of the efforts of others ever since our founding, often those in power, to maintain inequality. An effort, BTW that the current administration is pursuing with unConstitutional abandon.
James - You seem to agree with the Diangelo and Kendi premise. That we are irredeemably racist at our DNA. Our institutions and norms and practices are rooted in racism and continue to be. That white supremacy isn’t just a private bias held by a dwindling few - but a pervasive attitude calcified by formal and informal action at the highest levels. And woke is the waking up to this systemic injustice. We are racist because the Woke say so. And to disagree is to deny this lived experience (making it unfalsifiable). Like “believe all women” (for no woman in history has ever lied to increase her esteem), we, The Oppressors, must “believe all woke”. Don’t quote data showing the police shooting of unarmed black men averages 20 a year while those same black men commit half of America’s murders. Data doesn’t count. You must believe all woke. And shut up. And hand over your privilege because we say so. For no other reason. And shame be on you to disagree. So, hire us to retrain you and make sure you only select our chosen few for anything,
That seems to be the position + message of the Woke mob. And what you must agree to as an evangelist for the holy cause.
Not racism, but something wider, deeper, and far more ancient as I described in my original post. Seeing this requires an understanding of our history both as a species and as one of the offshoots of that far more ancient animal world of which we are still a part, whether we choose to understand that or not.
I never said we could not overcome that ancient genetic heritage, only that we needed to understand its depth and power.
In the end, we need to understand and to amplify what we share as human beings, and not all the various ways in which we’ve managed to separate ourselves one from another - most of which are entirely imaginary.
This whole ‘woke’ business is simply one brief step in a continuum of millennia.
This is a nice defense of liberalism. I agree totally with your first paragraph.
Because wokeness evolved out of liberalism, it has even less excuse for it's excesses, not more. The woke should know better, yet the woke are profoundly illiberal.
Woke is identitarian essentialism. Racial and gender. It is binary. It has only winners and losers. Entire groups are to be favored or disfavored based strictly on immutable traits nobody can control. On the singular pretext of historical oppression vs current reality. On trumped up, or outright false, charges of institutional racism and historical foundations. It is a discriminatory social religion sold on emotion and fiction. None of this is wildly overblown. It is the precise nature of this vile snake in our national bed.
This opinion piece should be required reading for all Democrats considering running for election or re-election in 2026. I would also ask them to read Summer of Our Discontent, but considering the quality of candidates in both major parties, some may not be capable of reading a whole book!
Why we are in deepening trouble: the Far Left (where Marx struggle theology emerges) has fully embraced this. They smuggled it into our schools, media and corporations through Democrat moderate leaders who were too meek to resist (or be branded as MAGA collaborators and be shamed out of their high paying careers).
That same Far Left wing = the fighter wing. These are the folks who show up to tell Trump to stick it up his ass. To yell fuck you! to MAGA.
That wing = attractive to Democrats. Who are getting collectively steamrolled by Trump. They’ll rise in influence in the coming years. Especially when (not if) AI begins driving 10%+ unemployment in cities - which will face blight and despair - by 2028 election. More socialist mayors and city councils. More far Left true blue believers - not less. More calls for racial and gender reckoning - not less
I think liberals are caught in a double bind. Meaning you want people to forget about race and say it doesn't exist but you then constantly remind them of race by demanding quotas for the "disadvantaged" i.e., race, and are constantly, endlessly obsessed with white supremacy. The latest example being Sydney Sweeney and a brand of clothes.
Liberals have nothing else. They live and die off their Civil Rights street cred. From 70 years ago. Liberals are like old Mike Tyson living off their glory years. When they used to matter. When they had something good to offer. When they stood for openness and free expression. Not silencing and shaming and suppression and institutional punishment (they are the institutions now). Woke is the anti MLK doctrine - they simply GAVE UP on color blindness as the right way to run a pluralistic society. They thought it a better idea to turn on whites and men and Christians as enemies rather than friends. To demand we stand aside and willingly become second class citizens and persona non grata for the sin of - wrong skin and gender. It is the evil fruit of our universities and their long tenured Marx critical theorists who have pumped out tens of thousands into our collective national bloodstream. It is right to pull this weed from the root.
If you changed "liberals" to "woke advocates" or "the illiberal left" I would be in solid agreement. However, many prominent liberals are in the anti-woke camp. "Liberal" does not equate to "woke" just as "anti-woke" isn't the same as "white supremacist." The author of the book under discussion is a liberal - he makes all of the points you mention here.
Well said. Fully agree.
I am a Democrat. Or, an Independent who “identifies” as a Democrat 😎
I think the message is let’s not go nuts over silly and superficial things like expressing outrage at a jeans commercial or a pseudo country store corporate rebrand. We need to be beyond this and I think Williams would probably agree. BTW very good review of this book and I’ll definitely be reading it pretty soon!
Woke is racism. Woke is misandry. Woke is hatred in mirror image form. It is punching up hatred. It doesn’t condemn hate or punching. It is Marx struggle theology covered in righteous robes of accountability. It demonizes entire races and genders as oppressors. It segregates and divides. It never unites. We are told to accept this bedrock dogma of the far Left as so called justice. Positions fully embraced TODAY by AOC, the Squad, Brandon Johnson, Mamdani, and Tim “This Is Who We Are” Walz. The reason Woke is in retreat is that the counter revolution is so fierce. So jarring. NOT because our Left has come to its senses. NOT because the Left is now, magically, converts to universalism. Only because MAGA is laying waste to their engines of production and distribution.
Woke is the cancer that is RIGHTLY getting its radiation. Its money and institutional legitimacy must be attacked until unconditional surrender. It must be, first, destroyed as an active viral enterprise and then delegitimized as the hateful, racist, divisive Marxist lie that it is. And the Left’s leaders who supported it, or still do, are either too foolish to elect into power for believing it a good thing or too hateful to follow. Either way, they are illegitimate.
I have never been woke 😁
You immediately undermine your credibility when you glibly characterize Trump's defunding of universities as “ostensibly in response to antisemitism on campus, but also to impose political control and root out “critical race theory” and “gender ideology.”
There is no “ostensibly” about it. Antisemitism on the college campuses, in particular, and on the left, in general, is pervasive and insidious and Trump has made it clear he will not fund universities that tolerate it. Sadly, it has also begun to manifest itself on the far right. Such are the times in which we live.
More to the point, audits of the records of multiple universities reveal that scores of them continue to use race, gender, etc. in its admissions decisions—a clear violation of federal law and the U.S. Constitution. This, along with antisemitism, are the principal reasons for the Administration's defunding of universities.
Now, I firmly believe Trump has erred, perhaps legally but especially from a policy standpoint, in withholding research funding from these schools. Even though they primarily churn out activists and technocrats when, once upon a time, they produced independent-thinking and well-educated adults and future statesmen, their research is essential to the growth, improvement and prosperity of our society.
While withholding funding until campuses demonstrate they have stopped discriminating when make admissions decisions and are maintaining a safe environment for members of the Jewish faith is fully justified, Trump is on weaker ground when he withholds research funding.
Finally, while we may be past “peak woke“ (I prefer “cultural Marxism,” which is a more accurate descriptor), mark my words: it is a cancer that has only gone into remission.
"Considering the vast racial disparities that still exist in the United States—in everything from household wealth to incarceration rates to levels of educational attainment..."
I have always held that, were we to embrace the last topic in this sentence, so much of the previous two would mostly disappear.
Very interesting article. I wonder if the book talked about the strong incentives on the left to play identity politics ? Ever since the Kennedys backed civil rights, American blacks became loyal democratic voters. Over the decades, the democrats seemed to believe that identity groups, gays, blacks, latinos, and now transgender people would give them voters. Since elections are won by 2% these identity groups matter. The republicans did this on abortion and now on " anti-woke", rile people up, don't look for sensible compromises, use the issues to get 1%t 2% of voters that can push you over the finish line. Democracy suffers.
Exactly. That is precisely their incentive
Reading the book now. It's really well written and brings complicated ideas together in understandable patterns. I recommend it.
Any movement toward the ideal of a colorblind society must reckon with the ancient and enduring power of the territorial instinct. In the animal world, this has always been a survival mechanism - among other advantages enabling the weaker to defeat or at least drive off the stronger as long as the weaker is on home ground. We humans give the concept lip service in such phrases as ‘the home court advantage’, but in reality have taken it to an intellectual and emotional level that never existed in the non-human animal world, and thus among us it has become more disadvantage than advantage. This is most evident in our own stubborn determination to divide ourselves into all sorts of groups, often depending on wholly non-existent/imaginary criteria to do so. Racism based on skin color is one of the oldest forms of this problem. But the power of territoriality also lies behind all the national, religious, social, and political differences with which we’ve saddled ourselves.
We often like to think of ourselves as Locke's 'tabula rasa', thinking, as Rogers and Hammerstein put it so well in their musical South Pacific - 'You have to be carefully taught’ to discriminate/dislike/hate/distrust those whom you have decided are unlike you, but in fact we are already genetically programmed to do so.
That is not to say that we cannot overcome our ‘programming'. But it is essential to understand just how powerful the ‘inclination’ to do so is within us.
I graduated from college in 1971 (should have done so in 1967 but a stint in the US Army intervened), well before the ‘woke’ revolution hit, so I tended to ignore all the brouhaha over what I tended to see as a ginned-up criticism from the right. I was certainly at least mildly in favor of affirmative action since I was fully aware of the history and the reality of racial discrimination, having watched, sometimes in real time, the extraordinary social upheaval and violence of the Civil Rights Era. Any one of a later birth can catch at least a glimpse of what I saw by watching the extraordinary PBS documentary Eyes on the Prize. Watching it can give those not there to see it firsthand, where the BLM movement after the death of George Floyd and others got some of its power.
So it was only later than I began to understand just how suppressive things got in the woke world.
In a sense, then the summer of 2020 is just a place on the continuum of American history. One can trace it directly back to our Original Sin - the creation of a nation based on principles of freedom and individual rights that also maintained slavery. One can still hear Samual Johnson’s reaction to the Declaration of Independence. "We hear the loudest yelps for liberty among the drivers of Negoes".
We are still paying for that Sin. The 700,000 lives we lost between 1861 and 1865 being only a partial price.
Being sublimated to raw skin color groups = how prisons are run. Not enlightened societies. When booked into prison, you’re given an orange jump suit and a menu of three racial gangs. These are your new friends in the yard. This is, now, who you lift weights with and play basketball with and eat with in the dining hall. Prisons aren’t places where you organize gangs around poets or philosophers or scientists or lawyers or economists or writers or actors. It is a barbarian dungeon at the bottom of our primate brainstem where only easy-to-spot color markers distinguish Us from Them in the savage mission to just stay alive.
This is the world Woke takes us. A prison yard in our own society.
That’s an exceptional exaggeration. Woke, while it clearly went overboard, was originally intended to equalize opportunities in a society in which opportunity had been severely limited to particular groups, and not all based on skin color - but also on religious, social, financial, and ethnic distinctions. And it is easy forget that fact even while significant parts of the anti-woke forces would return us to that place of limited opportunity initiated decades ago by Nixon’s Southern Strategy and continuing into the presidency of Donald Trump.
Equal opportunity was and is not a goal of the committed woke. Equal results are what has been absurdly demanded. That's why the "E" in DEI stands for equity and not equality. Woke is the "Politics of Procrustes" as explained in Anthony Flew's book of the same name written in 1981. No one can say we weren't warned.
Equal opportunity has been the goal ever since the 13th, 14th, 15th, and 19th Amendments to the Constitution were enacted. The fact that in the attempt to meet that goal, some went overboard does not detract from the nature of the effort.
You would damn ‘woke’ apparently without any consideration of the efforts of others ever since our founding, often those in power, to maintain inequality. An effort, BTW that the current administration is pursuing with unConstitutional abandon.
James - You seem to agree with the Diangelo and Kendi premise. That we are irredeemably racist at our DNA. Our institutions and norms and practices are rooted in racism and continue to be. That white supremacy isn’t just a private bias held by a dwindling few - but a pervasive attitude calcified by formal and informal action at the highest levels. And woke is the waking up to this systemic injustice. We are racist because the Woke say so. And to disagree is to deny this lived experience (making it unfalsifiable). Like “believe all women” (for no woman in history has ever lied to increase her esteem), we, The Oppressors, must “believe all woke”. Don’t quote data showing the police shooting of unarmed black men averages 20 a year while those same black men commit half of America’s murders. Data doesn’t count. You must believe all woke. And shut up. And hand over your privilege because we say so. For no other reason. And shame be on you to disagree. So, hire us to retrain you and make sure you only select our chosen few for anything,
That seems to be the position + message of the Woke mob. And what you must agree to as an evangelist for the holy cause.
Not racism, but something wider, deeper, and far more ancient as I described in my original post. Seeing this requires an understanding of our history both as a species and as one of the offshoots of that far more ancient animal world of which we are still a part, whether we choose to understand that or not.
I never said we could not overcome that ancient genetic heritage, only that we needed to understand its depth and power.
In the end, we need to understand and to amplify what we share as human beings, and not all the various ways in which we’ve managed to separate ourselves one from another - most of which are entirely imaginary.
This whole ‘woke’ business is simply one brief step in a continuum of millennia.
This is a nice defense of liberalism. I agree totally with your first paragraph.
Because wokeness evolved out of liberalism, it has even less excuse for it's excesses, not more. The woke should know better, yet the woke are profoundly illiberal.
Any more illiberal than many of those who oppose it? This is not a one-sided debate.
Exactly
Woke is identitarian essentialism. Racial and gender. It is binary. It has only winners and losers. Entire groups are to be favored or disfavored based strictly on immutable traits nobody can control. On the singular pretext of historical oppression vs current reality. On trumped up, or outright false, charges of institutional racism and historical foundations. It is a discriminatory social religion sold on emotion and fiction. None of this is wildly overblown. It is the precise nature of this vile snake in our national bed.
" It is binary. It has only winners and losers”
That is simplistic almost beyond imagining. .
Why?
Precisely because you make it such a binary situation. It is anything but.
This opinion piece should be required reading for all Democrats considering running for election or re-election in 2026. I would also ask them to read Summer of Our Discontent, but considering the quality of candidates in both major parties, some may not be capable of reading a whole book!
Why we are in deepening trouble: the Far Left (where Marx struggle theology emerges) has fully embraced this. They smuggled it into our schools, media and corporations through Democrat moderate leaders who were too meek to resist (or be branded as MAGA collaborators and be shamed out of their high paying careers).
That same Far Left wing = the fighter wing. These are the folks who show up to tell Trump to stick it up his ass. To yell fuck you! to MAGA.
That wing = attractive to Democrats. Who are getting collectively steamrolled by Trump. They’ll rise in influence in the coming years. Especially when (not if) AI begins driving 10%+ unemployment in cities - which will face blight and despair - by 2028 election. More socialist mayors and city councils. More far Left true blue believers - not less. More calls for racial and gender reckoning - not less
Alternatively, if the Democrats move in the direction that you suggest, the party is doomed to minority status. We are a center right country.
Yes. But we (appear to be) a “burn it down” nation right now. At least our young. We older folk are different.
Litigating wokeness at all, much less referring to it as an "authoritarian ideology" in 2025 is totally absurd.
Wrong.