The Rise, Impact, and Potenial Decline of Woke Ideology | 12.28.24

Summary

Morning Wire Podcast Summary Episode: The Rise, Impact, and Potential Decline of Woke Ideology | 12.28.24 Release Date: December 28, 2024

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Hosts:

• John Bickley, Editor-in-Chief, The Daily Wire
• Georgia Howe, Co-host

Guest:

• Eric Kaufman, Author of The Third Awokening

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Introduction to Woke Ideology: Definition and Origins

The episode delves into the multifaceted concept of woke ideology, exploring its historical roots and current manifestations. John Bickley opens the discussion by tracing the origins of wokeism back to the political correctness movements of the 1980s and 1990s, highlighting its evolution into what is now recognized as cancel culture and various protest movements sweeping across the United States.

The Three Waves of Woke Ideology

Eric Kaufman introduces his framework of the Three Awokenings, providing a structured analysis of the ideology's progression:

• First Awokening (Late 1960s): Initiated with pivotal events like the Moynihan Report of 1965, which examined the African American family structure but was controversially shelved by the Johnson administration. This wave also saw the inception of affirmative action.

  "[...] affirmative action, of course, in the late 60s. And then we move into what I would call the second awokening." (01:38)

• Second Awokening (1980s-1990s): Characterized by the rise of political correctness and speech codes, marking a consolidation of woke ideology at a higher societal level.

• Third Awokening (Post-2015): The current phase, featuring cancel culture and microaggressions, with strong continuity from previous waves rather than being a mere digital acceleration.

  "Post2015 is the third of these waves. So the first wave, I trace this back to the late 60s..." (01:38)

The Moynihan Report and Patterns of Censorship

Kaufman discusses the Moynihan Report, which highlighted a 25% fatherlessness rate among African Americans—a figure that has since soared to 70%. He critiques the political maneuvering that led to the report's suppression, emphasizing a pattern where ideas opposing the dominant woke narrative are censored to protect group sensitivities.

"If you want to express that truth, but it offends the sensitivities of a particular group... then you have to shut up or pay the consequences." (04:55)

Wokeism and Religion: Parallels in Sacredness and Exclusion

Drawing parallels between woke ideology and religious fervor, Kaufman argues that wokeism functions similarly to a public religion, with its own set of sacred values and rituals. This comparison underscores the exclusionary practices inherent in cancel culture and the enforcement of ideological purity.

"Woke is... it looks very much like public religion." (05:16)

Left Liberals vs. Cultural Marxism: Defining the Spectrum

Kaufman distinguishes between left liberals and cultural Marxists, contending that much of what is labeled as wokeism originates from left liberalism rather than traditional cultural Marxism. He explains that while concepts like critical race theory have Marxist roots, many woke practices—such as political correctness and affirmative action—arose independently within left liberal frameworks.

"A lot of what we consider woke actually does not begin with cultural Marxism." (07:18)

The Erosion of Freedom, Truth, and Excellence

The discussion highlights how woke ideology undermines societal pillars by promoting subjective truths over objective realities. Kaufman cites examples like the contested definitions of gender and the prioritization of diversity metrics over merit in academic and professional settings.

"The definition of male and female, you know, that offends trans people to say there are only two sexes. So that's an example of where it erodes truth." (09:15)

Current Trends and Generational Impact

Kaufman analyzes current trends, asserting that despite some visible pushbacks, wokeism remains entrenched and is potentially growing stronger due to generational shifts. He points out that younger demographics exhibit higher levels of adherence to woke principles, contrasting it with historical movements where younger generations often resisted prevailing ideologies.

"The young population that are really a lot more woke than older... when those 20 somethings become the media voter, the culture's really going to change." (10:17)

Strategies for Rolling Back Progressive Extremism: The 12-Point Plan

Kaufman outlines a 12-point plan aimed at dismantling progressive extremism, emphasizing the following key strategies:

1. Cultural Emphasis: Elevate the importance of cultural issues within the political right, similar to how the NRA or pro-life organizations function.

   "The political right needs to upgrade the importance of culture and particularly these culture war issues." (13:34)

2. Educational Reform: Advocate for curriculum changes to present a more balanced historical narrative, countering the one-sided portrayal prevalent in current educational systems.

   "You should not be allowed to teach that the US was a slave power... contextualization is so vital." (13:34)

3. Accountability Mechanisms: Develop infrastructure to hold politicians accountable for their stances on affirmative action, critical race theory, and similar issues, mirroring existing models that address other policy areas.

4. Public Persuasion and Legislation: Implement a dual approach combining moral exhortation with legal measures to counteract woke ideology effectively.

   "You've got to do both [government power and persuasion]." (11:55)

Kaufman stresses the urgency of these measures to prevent the further entrenchment of wokeism in American society.

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Conclusion

The episode provides a comprehensive examination of woke ideology, tracing its historical development, current impact, and potential future trajectory. Through Eric Kaufman's insights, listeners gain a nuanced understanding of the forces shaping contemporary cultural and political landscapes, along with actionable strategies to address perceived challenges posed by wokeism.

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Note: Advertisements, introductory remarks, and non-content segments have been excluded to focus on the substantive discussions of the episode.

Transcript

[John Bickley]

What is today called woke ideology is a complex and polarizing topic with origins tracing back decades. After expanding during the political correctness of the 80s and 90s, it's culminated in Cancel Culture and various protest movements that have swept across the U.S. in this.

[Georgia Howe]

Episode, we speak to the author of the Third Awokening on how this woke ideology intersects with religion, culture and education, and how he says the US can reduce its influence. I'm Daily Wire Editor Chief John Bickley with Georgia Howe. It's December 28th, and this is a special edition of Morning Wire.

[John Bickley]

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[Georgia Howe]

The following is an interview conducted earlier this year. Joining us now to discuss so called woke ideology and efforts to dismantle it is Eric Kaufman, author of the book the Third Awokening. Eric, thank you so much for joining us. So first, the title of your book is interesting. It's obviously loaded and suggests a pattern going back decades, decades. The Third Awokening. What does that mean?

[Eric Kaufman]

Right. Well, the book is a critical analysis of the woke phenomenon. And I should say I have an analytical definition of woke. You know, I know it is used as a political epithet, but the definition of woke I use is the making sacred of historically marginalized race, gender and sexual identity groups. That's the one sentence definition of woke. You know, from that flows a fuzzy ideology which says that any inequality of outcome in desired social, you know, income, social status, et cetera, between racial groups, between men and women, is an outrage. In a way, it's a violation of a sacred value. And the second proposition is anything that harms, whether physically or psychologically, members of these historically marginalized groups is also an outrage. So any speech which offends members of such sacralized groups constitutes a kind of blasphemy and you therefore are liable to excommunication or being canceled. In other words. So that is basically what woke is. You know, what I argue in the book is that we've had three waves of this ideology. It's not just post2015. Post2015 is the third of these waves. So the first wave, I trace this back to the late 60s, where you did actually have cancellations occurring. Perhaps. The first one was the Moynihan report of 1965 on the black family, which was shelved by the Johnson administration. And we then had affirmative action, of course, in the late 60s. And then we move into what I would call the second awokening. And these are waves of mobilization and emotional energy. And so we get speech codes and political correctness in that second wave. Then in the third wave, this is where we are. We have cancel culture microaggressions. But there's a lot of continuity. Affirmative action and DEI is something with roots back to that first awokening. So I kind of stressed that this is very much about continuity and acceleration of an ideology rather than a deviation. There are people around who seem to say, oh, everything was just fine in the 2000s, we didn't have a problem. And then all of a sudden, this cancel culture came in because of the smartphone or something. I'm accepting that things like the smartphone and social media accelerate this, but I'm arguing the problem lies with an ideology. And that ideology, in my view, is very much rooted in left liberalism and not so much in cultural Marxism.

[Georgia Howe]

Couple of questions prompted by your answer. The Moynihan Report, for those who are not familiar with it, can you explain what that found and why it was buried?

[Eric Kaufman]

Yeah, so. So Daniel Patrick Moynihan, who was doing a report, he was Democrat at the time, he issued a report for the Johnson administration, and he sort of was raising the alarm about a fatherlessness rate which had reached 25%, which sounds small by today's standards. But he said this was the harbinger of many problems. He was absolutely right. That rate is now 70%, by the way, and the white rate is higher than that. But, yeah, so that was seen as unacceptable by certain black politicians and their allies, and so it was shelved as being too controversial.

[Georgia Howe]

And so the idea there is the pattern of censorship of ideas or information that counters a narrative must not be disclosed to the public. Public.

[Eric Kaufman]

Yeah. If you want to express a truth, if you want to freely express that truth, but it offends the sensitivities of a particular group or people who claim to be spokesmen for that group, then you have to shut up or pay the consequences.

[Georgia Howe]

Now, you've deliberately used a lot of religious language in your descriptions of woke in these movements. Why is that?

[Eric Kaufman]

Well, I think there is a certain Commonality between woke and religion, especially this distinction between the sacred and the profane, that if you cross a line, you are a heretic that must be cast out of the community and banished. Also this idea of rituals, for example, like land acknowledgments and taking the knee in jazz hands. And there's a lot of performative public religion. It looks very much like public religion. Woke is. It stems from your emotional attachment to particular groups and particular movements. And this begins with the Civil Rights movement, which I argue is the big bang of our moral order, creates the sacredness around African Americans. And Shelby Steele, in his book White Guilds, is very good on this. As an African American who lived through the Civil Rights movement, which was of course just a liberal movement, but it essentially created a narrative of sin and a narrative that essentially the cultural power and the moral authority flowed to African Americans, but it also flowed at the same time away from the right and the traditional American narrative towards the left. So this was a real shift of cultural power and of sacredness to these groups. And so I argue that this detachment to these groups underpins the system, not any particular ideas. So because of that, you get these unpredictable waves that can emerge of enthusiasm or moral panics that can emerge. We saw that with the racial reckoning in 2020 in Canada. We had this narrative of the residential schools, mass graves, the country committing genocide against native peoples. There's not a shred of evidence for that, but it sort of became a talking point. So that's all I'm saying. It's similar to the Great Awakenings of American Protestantism, for example.

[Georgia Howe]

You use the term, quote left liberals and distinguish that from radicals. What's the difference there? And what's their role in promoting or not this Wokeism?

[Eric Kaufman]

Well, there've been a number of books by people like Chris Ruffo and James Lindsay and Francis Fukuyama and Yasha Munk that talk about the role of essentially post Marxism. So the white working class didn't bring the revolution. So people like Herbert Marcuse and Angela Davis looked to other groups. So African Americans, the Third World masses, as the source of their hopes for radical social transformation and the overthrow of capitalism. Now, that argument that we moved took the oppressor, oppressed paradigm out of Marxism and applied it to identity groups, I think has merit. But what I would say is that a lot of what we consider woke actually does not begin with cultural Marxism. Now, it's true that critical race theory and radical gender ideology, these ideas like systemic racism and patriarchy, do owe their origin to cultural Marxist ideas. But speech codes, for example, diversity training, affirmative action, none of that. Political correctness, none of that that comes from this Marxist tradition. Also, the way in which the radical elements have been so easily accepted, you know, Eldridge Cleaver and Angela Davis getting jobs at prestigious US Universities, the people of Seattle voting to defund the police by 51%. They're not all Marxists, right, but they are left liberals who feel guilty. And they have an alarmist conception of the right that somehow if we even let up for our vigilance for a second, they'll have women back in the home, they'll have Jim Crow segregation, they'll have gays back in the closet. This alarmist fascist scare mentality is very predominant amongst those sort of bleeding heart left liberals.

[Georgia Howe]

Now, the reason all of this matters is that you argue that the WOKE movement has eroded freedom, truth and excellence in our cultures. Could you provide some examples of how this has manifested in society?

[Eric Kaufman]

Yeah, I mean, I think certainly in terms of truths, I talked about where research finds things that are inconvenient. You know, for example, the definition of male and female, you know, that offends trans people to say there are only two sexes. So that's an example of where it erodes truth. Now, of course, in terms of merit awarding places at top universities awarding grants on the basis of, say, skin color or sexual, rather than on the basis of your score on a test or how well you've done, that's an example of where merit is eroded in the culture. The fact that a white person cannot write a story about a black person without being accused of some kind of cultural appropriation that impoverishes the culture.

[Georgia Howe]

I think there's some people that perceive wokeism as being on the decline now. Others are not so confident that's actually happening. There are major generational differences in terms of views on all of these subjects. What is the trend that you're seeing in terms of the direction that American society is going with these ideas?

[Eric Kaufman]

Well, the Bush has been pruned back, but it remains, the structures remain largely in place for the next wave, for example. And we can see this in data if we take use of the word racism or sexism in American English language books. There was a spurt in the late 60s, a consolidation at a lower level. It peaked, came down a little bit, but then consolidated. Second spurt in the late 80s, early 90s, again a consolidation at a higher level, and then a third spurt in the 2010s. That's sort of how I would Expect to see this go so dei. Yes, there is a certain cutting back of DEI in tech firms and a certain amount of it less in universities, but a lot of that infrastructure remains there. And the reason I'm more pessimistic than others is that if you look at the structure of public opinion, it's the young population that are really a lot more woke than older. And that's very different than, for example, when McCarthyism ended in 1953. You could see that the young people were actually more anti McCarthy. And so the direction of generational turnover was away from red scare, for example, whereas the direction of generational turnover now is in the direction of what I'd call fascist scare and towards woke. And I'm just worried that when those 20 somethings become the media voter, the culture's really going to change.

[Georgia Howe]

And I guess the hope is that there's another swing back with the even younger generation. But at what point do they actually start influencing culture? That's the question now in terms of wiping out some of the more destructive elements of this. Do you feel there's a hope for that? And how would we go about doing that?

[Eric Kaufman]

You know, we've got to do whatever works and we've got to do a both and strategy. Because right now there's kind of a split between the people who say, like Chris Rufo, we've got to use government power, and then the libertarian types, you know, like Greg Lukianoff or Yasha Mach, where it's all about persuasion and moral exhortation and lawfare. I think you got to do both. But I don't think just the libertarian approach is going to work. And we can look at a number of examples of that. One is schooling. School choice is not going to solve this problem because most people are going to choose schools simply based on their results. They may not have a choice to send kids to a classical school. And in addition, I mean surveys that I've looked at show there's almost no difference in the degree of exposure to critical race and gender ideology between public and private school and even to a large extent homeschool kids. And so only those with very committed parents where there is a choice of clearly non woke instruction are we going to get a change. Meanwhile, the vast bulk of kids are just going to be going through this indoctrination mill. I did a survey with Zach Goldberg at the Manhattan institute. We found 90% of American 18 to 20 year olds that we surveyed, we got 1500, 90% had been exposed to at least one critical race theory concept that is systemic racism, white privileged or unconscious bias by an adult in the school. So this is saturation level and there has to be some way of addressing that. I think Ron DeSantis is showing the kinds of things that need to be done to make the school into a politically neutral space once again.

[Georgia Howe]

In your book you outline a 12 point plan to roll back progressive extremism. What are some of the high points?

[Eric Kaufman]

There's. Well, the first thing I would say is that the political right needs to upgrade the importance of culture and particularly these culture wart issues around critical race and gender ideology and free speech protection and political neutrality in schools, government bodies. For example, in the teaching of history. You look at the Republican party, they have largely been asleep at the switch. Only very recently are they starting to move, particularly at the state level. You know, you have a very strong infrastructure in the US on the right to hold politicians to account between elections on certain issues. Guns, abortion, for example, taxes, we don't have anything like that to hold politicians to account on how they're doing on, for example, affirmative action, which has only been banned in four red states compared to 13 red states banning abortion, even though affirmative action is opposed by about a two thirds majority of the American public. So I argue that NRA or pro life organizations are a model for the kinds of culture war organizations that need to spring up in order to make Republican politicians accountable for their performance on these issues. And that doesn't yet exist. The other thing I'd like to see is certainly a lot of school reforms, particularly on the curriculum side. You should not be allowed to teach that the US was a slave power and engaged in stealing land without teaching about non white slavery, for example, indigenous slavery and conquest and genocide. Comanches nearly wiped out the Apaches on the west coast. The British actually ended indigenous slavery. You know, we have numerous empires, the Aztecs, the Ottomans that were engaging in all of these things. So this contextualization is so vital. 71% of Americans under 25 believe that the native peoples lived in peace and harmony before the arrival of the Europeans, which is the exact opposite of the truth. In fact, the Europeans were actually a lot more peaceable, you know, in terms of your likelihood of being violently killed. And so they're getting a very one sided sort of moralized view of history. This is where the hearts are formed and the emotions are shaped. And I think that has to be the starting point point. And so that's where I place a lot of the emphasis in the 12 point plan. How do you gear up the right to focus a lot more heavily on culture.

[Georgia Howe]

Thank you so much for talking with us. Very fascinating topic.

[Eric Kaufman]

Thanks so much. I appreciate it.

[Georgia Howe]

That was Eric Kaufman, author of the Third Awokening and this has been a special edition of Morning Wire.

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