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

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 US.

In this 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. Once. I'm Daily Wire Editor-in-Chief John Bickley with Georgia How. It's December 28th, and this is a special edition of Morning Wire.

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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 The title of your book is interesting. It's obviously loaded and suggests a pattern going back decades, The Third Awokening. What does that mean?

Well, the book is a critical analysis of the woke phenomenon. I should say I have an analytical definition of woke. I know it is used as a political apathet, 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. From that flows a fuzzy ideology which says that any inequality of outcome in desired social 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. 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 blasphemy, and you, therefore, are liable to excommunication or being canceled, in other words. That is basically what woke is. What I argue in the book is that we've had three waves of this ideology. It's not just post-2015. Post-2015 is the third of these waves. The first wave, I trace this back to the late '60s, where you did actually have cancelation occurred. Perhaps the first one was the Moynihan report of 1965 on the Black family, which was shelved by the Johnson administration.

We then had affirmative action, of course, in the late '60s. Then we move into what I would call the second awokening. These are waves of mobilization and emotional energy. 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 stress 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.

A 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 Yeah.

So Daniel Patrick Moynihan, who was doing a report. He was a Democrat at the time. He issued a report for the Johnson administration, and he was raising the alarm about a fatherlessness rate, which had reached 25%, which It 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.

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

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 a spokesman for that group, then you have to shut up or pay the consequences.

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

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. There's a lot of performative public religion. It looks very much like public religion. Wokey, it stems from your emotional attachment to particular groups and particular movements. This begins with the civil rights movement, which I argue is the big bang of our moral order, creates the sacredness around African-Americans. Shelby Steele in his book, White Gills, 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 It's not a shred of evidence for that, but it became a talking point. So that's all I'm saying. It's similar to the great awakened of American Protestantism, for example.

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

Well, there have been a number of books by people like Chris Ruffo and James Lindsay and Francis Fukuyama and Yashima that talk about the role of essentially post-markxism. So The white working class didn't bring the revolution. So people like Herbert Marcusey 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, we 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 comes from this Marxist tradition. Also, the way in which the radical elements have been so easily accepted, Eldrich Cleaver and Angela is getting jobs at prestigious US universities. The people of Seattle voting to defund the police by 51%. They're not all Marxists, but they are left liberals who feel guilty, and they have an enormous this conception of the right that somehow, if we even let up 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 alarm us fascist scare mentality is very predominant amongst those bleeding-hard left liberals.

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?

Yeah. I think certainly in terms of truth, I talked about where research finds things that are inconvenient. For example, the definition of male and female. That offends trans people to say there are only two sexes. 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 sex, 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 cultural appropriation, that impoverishes the culture.

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?

Well, the Bush has been pruned back, but 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 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 communities, but a lot of that infrastructure remains there. 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 old. That's very different than for example, when McCarthyism ended in 1953, you could see that the young people were actually more anti-McArthur's. 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 median voter, the culture is really going to change.

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 a 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?

We've got to do whatever works, and we've got to do a both-and strategy. Because right now, there's a split between the people who say, like Chris Ruffo, we've got to use government power, and then the libertarian types, like Greg Lucciano for Yashamak, where it's all about persuasion and moral exhortation and law fair. I think you got to do both, but I don't think just the libertarian approach is going to work. 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. In addition, the surveys that I 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. 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 Zack Goldberg at the Manhattan Institute.

We found 90% of American 18 to 20-year-olds that we surveyed, we got 1,500. 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.

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

Well, the first thing I would say is that the political right needs to upgrade the importance of culture, and particularly these culture warred 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. But 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 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. We have numerous empires, the Aztecs, the Ottomans that were engaging in all of these things. So this contextualization is so vital. Seventy-one % 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 in terms of your likelihood of being violently killed. They're getting a very one-sided moralized view of history. This is where the hearts are formed and the emotions are shaped. I think that has to be the starting 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?

Thank you so much for talking with us. Very fascinating topic. Thanks so much. I appreciate it. That was Eric I'm Jeffman, author of The Third Awokening, and this has been a special edition of Morning Wired.

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