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We in the West are in the third wave of cultural-left ideological enthusiasm. Each “Awokening” has crested, fallen a little, consolidated, then surged again to reach a higher level. The cumulative result is an elite creed which has produced a crime wave, a worsening education system, chaos at the border, and social division. Fired by a cultural socialism that puts equal results and emotional protection for minorities at the center of their moral universe, today’s young people are twice as intolerant of conservative speech as older generations. These young people will be the median voters and employees of tomorrow, leading and controlling the country. Woke cultural socialism is not the classical liberalism of the American Constitution, but a modern “majorities bad, minorities good” Left-liberalism. It is powered by a set of ‘liberal’ emotional attachments rather than liberal principles. These underpin a moral panic about whites and males combined with a starry-eyed patronizing approach to minorities. Today’s woke extremism is not a repudiation of liberalism, but a perverse extension of it. Our only way out is to use elected, constitutional, government power to break the grip of wokeness in our institutions and schools, steering them toward neutrality and classical liberalism. To do so, the conservative and moderate majority must place culture front and center and spare no effort to win the battle of ideas. Nothing less than the future of our civilization depends on it.
My Summary
Main Ideas, Takeaways & Similarities
Questions
I. What is the problem?
A. How is this problem formulated?
B. Why is this problem important?
C. What is the history of this problem?
D. Which prominent personalities have been interested in this problem?
II. What solutions to the problem are there?
A. What are the conclusions reached?
B. By what argument(s) is the conclusion reached?
C. What facts or assumptions serve as premises?
D. When a prominent personality offers a solution, does he also argue for or against other prominent personalities? Does he raise objections to alternative solutions? Does he consider objections to his own solutions?
III. Evaluation
A. What are the advantages and disadvantages of the alternative formulations to the problem?
B. Has the importance or history of the problem ever been misrepresented?
C. Are the solutions logically related to the premises?
D. Are the facts true? Are the assumptions acceptable? Are the objections answerable?
AI Summary
Highlights
The Third Awokening
Readwise Information
Author:: Eric Kaufmann
Title:: The Third Awokening
Type:: readwise/category/books
Last-Highlighted-Date:: 2025-04-11
Link:: https://readwise.io/bookreview/50471479
Readwise-Source:: readwise/source/kindle
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Linked Notes from Around My Vault
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Yale’s Halloween embarrassment was followed by Bret Weinstein being chased off Evergreen State College’s campus for questioning a one-day “no-white-people-allowed” edict, Black Lives Matter costing thousands of Black lives, and the metoo movement defaming numerous innocent men. The number of professors being disciplined or fired soared, establishment papers like the New York Times indulged in a moral panic over White supremacy, and the entire Canadian establishment fell for the delusion that hundreds of murdered or abused native children lay buried in “mass graves” at residential schools. (Location 61)
Perhaps my newfound willingness to call it out stemmed from a deep-seated reflex to recoil when being forced to genuflect in front of sanctimonious moralizers who use emotional blackmail rather than evidence and logic to make their case. (Location 70)
New collegiate associations like the Free Speech Union and Academic Freedom Alliance sprung up to defend those like myself who were accused of wrongspeak. (Location 88)
After Rufo appeared on Tucker Carlson’s Fox News show calling for anti-Critical Race Theory (CRT) legislation in August 2020, President Trump passed a law banning it in the federal government. Though rescinded by President Biden, the genie was out of the bottle and, as of last count, some forty-four states had introduced anti-CRT legislation, with bills passing in many red states. (Location 109)
I remain deeply skeptical of those who suggest that “woke” is a short-run fad on its way out. (Location 126)
While there is no question that the energy behind cancel culture has peaked, my view is that, far from disappearing, the underlying ideology is likely to maintain or increase its power in the years ahead. Its wings have been clipped, but the core myths and symbols from which it springs remain intact. This seedbed stands ready to nourish another moral panic the next time a White policeman kills an unarmed Black man or a whistleblower exposes a high-profile sexual predator. (Location 140)
Young people, especially young women, are much less tolerant of speech which offends historically disadvantaged race, gender, and sexual identity groups than older generations. This is especially true of Gen Z (zoomers) and millennials educated at the best universities. (Location 143)
A key message of this book is that this fate can only be averted if democratically-elected administrations, aligned with the Constitution, implement sweeping and sustained reforms to the country’s meaning-making institutions—especially public schools and universities. At a deeper level, lasting change is only possible if our moral order ceases to revolve around the sacred totems of historically marginalized race, gender, and sexual identity groups. (Location 148)
I maintain that modern liberals, not radicals, are largely responsible for our cultural malaise. Incremental guilt and compassion, much more than envy or the desire to overthrow the existing order, have led us down this path. (Location 153)
There is no silent liberal majority just waiting to find its courage—many young people and staff in progressive institutions truly believe in the letters D, E, and I are readily swayed by appeals wrapped in the flag of anti-racism and compassion. (Location 156)
A person who demands equal outcomes by race or sex should be treated as every bit as extreme as one who insists that every person enjoy the same wealth, power, and prestige. (Location 161)
defines woke precisely as the “sacralization of historically disadvantaged race, gender and sexual identity groups.” (Location 178)
Left-liberals, not revolutionary radicals, were also responsible for a number of woke innovations. Like water gradually heating to boiling point, their sensibility evolved incrementally from the 1970s through a process of therapeutic “concept creep” in which ever-finer microaggressions came to be declared traumatic. This is how we evolved from “crippled” to “handicapped” to “disabled” to “differently abled.” It also accounts for the ratcheting extremism of a series of Supreme Court decisions between the 1960s and 1980s. (Location 188)
I also show how cancel culture tends to flow from the bottom up rather than the top down, resulting in an “emergent authoritarianism” that largely arises from activists bullying institutions rather than elected officials telling them what to do. Political discrimination falls disproportionately on conservatives. As a result, they self-censor their speech at much higher rates than progressives. (Location 209)
left-liberals today, like radicals, worship the totems of equal outcomes and harm protection for minorities. They accept that this is the North Star toward which morality must orient. (Location 214)
Like pious Muslims trying to argue against Islamic fundamentalists who point to passages in the Quran to authorize their violent global jihad, left-liberals are tied into a common moral framework with the fundamentalists, making it nearly impossible to resist their claims. While Patrick Deneen, Yoram Hazony, and other postliberals believe that the entire philosophy of liberalism is to blame, I believe liberal ideas can be salvaged if today’s left-liberals come to understand, question, and control their “minorities good, majorities threatening” emotional reflex. (Location 216)
cancel culture splits the far left from the center left while what I term “deculturation”—attacks on national and White majority traditions—elicits strong backlash from conservatives and only mild support from progressives. Overall, the culture war unites the right while dividing the left, providing a political opportunity for conservative politicians. (Location 238)
The first politician to successfully link the culture war to immigration, crime, and other high-salience issues is likely to prove a transformative figure. (Location 245)
Conservatives must upgrade the back end of their operation, relying not just on election victories, but also on mobilizing and organizing between elections. (Location 259)
Reform of public schools must be the highest priority. Studies show that school indoctrination really works and is casting tomorrow’s leaders and voters to be champions of DEI. Conservative governments need to purge woke politicization from the classroom, making this an overriding goal. (Location 271)
Government regulation, not market competition, is therefore vital to taming the power of woke. No politician understands this better than Florida’s Ron DeSantis, who is the policy leader in this regard. However, his activism is an awkward fit with many in the conservative political world. It puzzles fiscal conservatives such as George W. Bush, Nikki Haley, or Britain’s Boris Johnson, whose political instincts were forged in the 1980s during the Cold War and stagflation—or by writers formed in this crucible. They are primarily oriented against government power and have been only too willing to submit to cultural left speech policing and affirmative action in order to placate liberals in the media and well-heeled donors. (Location 276)
As a result, conservative politicians have heretofore provided little resistance to equity-diversity (read: discrimination to achieve equal outcomes) or inclusion (read: control over freedom of speech). (Location 281)
Both the public and an important tranche of conservative intellectuals have been ignored by conservative career politicians. This will have to change if we want our institutions to better reflect the mores of the wider society. This new paradigm is fully in accord with liberalism, but is about defending the liberty of citizens from institutions and private threats more than from executive government. It harks back to an older liberal tradition rooted in the works of Thomas Hobbes and John Locke. It recognizes that government is accountable and transparent in a way that institutions are not. (Location 282)
The goals of cultural socialism—achieving equality of outcome and protection from harm for historically disadvantaged identity groups—are worthy aims in moderation but are increasingly crowding out competing human values such as freedom, truth, community, and excellence. (Location 312)
Just as economic liberals resisted and moderated the claims of economic socialism, those of us who are cultural liberals must find a way to push back against cultural socialism. (Location 313)
For instance, by a 2-to-1 margin, Americans and Britons under age twenty-five prioritize protecting minorities from hate speech over defending free speech. (Location 319)
Eight in ten American undergraduate students would ban a speaker who claims Black Lives Matter is a hate group from their campus. (Location 320)
prioritize cultural socialism over our traditional cultural liberalism of freedom of expression, equal treatment, due process, analytic logic, and the scientific method. (Location 323)
From early activist court decisions to affirmative action bureaucracies, speech codes to cancel culture, Critical Race Theory to statue toppling, the cultural socialism we are living through is the outworking and scaling up of the logic of the sacredness of race. (Location 329)
While material self-interest and negative feelings toward communism protected them from economic extremism, no similar emotional or material safeguards existed on cultural issues. (Location 339)
Theoretical justifications—Maoism, Postmodernism, Critical Theory—tried to intellectualize the emotional elephant. (Location 345)
Woke is more mythos than logos: an identity like nationalism or religion more than a philosophy like liberalism. (Location 352)
The pluralist left-liberalism of mid-century intellectuals subsequently overreached, from the mid-1960s, to become woke cultural socialism. (Location 357)
subjectivity of modern—though not classical—liberals is based on the same myths, symbols, and moral intuitions as the radical left. (Location 360)
1961 short story, The Handicapper General, Kurt Vonnegut portrays a futuristic America in the grip of a noneconomic form of socialist totalitarianism: (Location 367)
“The year was 2081, and everybody was finally equal. They weren’t only equal before God and the law. They were equal every which way. Nobody was smarter than anybody else. Nobody was better looking than anybody else. Nobody was stronger or quicker than anybody else. All this equality was due to the 211th, 212th, and 213th Amendments to the Constitution, and to the unceasing vigilance of agents of the United States Handicapper General.”7 (Location 368)
The Handicapper General is a cautionary tale about the excesses of a cultural form of socialism. That is, an ideology which believes in engineering equal outcomes defined on the basis of social and biological characteristics other than economic class. (Location 376)
While Marxian socialism is intellectual where cultural socialism is emotional, is materialist rather than idealist, and contains a concept of majoritarian community (“worker’s state”) that cultural socialism lacks, the defining feature of socialism is its egalitarianism, linked to a worldview which explains inequality as the result of social relations and coercive power rather than talent or hard work. An oppressor-oppressed, power-centric worldview is integral to both economic and cultural socialism. In short, cultural socialism shares much of its DNA with its socialist ancestor. (Location 386)
past discrimination warrants present discrimination. (Location 405)
Attacking national heroes and recasting national narratives as tales of racist shame should be viewed as an attempt to undercut the pride of White majority groups, levelling them down. (Location 412)
In economics, the equity-efficiency trade-off nicely encapsulates the tension between people having an equal share of the pie and the pie growing larger.14 The more equally one divides the pie, the less it grows, so the goal is to optimize between the values of equality and growth. So too for culture: Beyond a certain point, trying to engineer equality of outcome between groups leads to a shrinking of the cultural “pie,” namely reducing the wealth of a culture as measured across the full range of human values, including freedom, excellence, and cultural authenticity. (Location 429)
If equal outcomes and safety are our only values, then everything else—freedom, excellence, beauty, community, identity, and reason—can be sacrificed in the service of the overriding socialist goals. (Location 439)
Similarly, we might not like the fact that some are prettier, more athletic, or more intelligent than we are, but cultural liberals believe it is generally better to let these talents express themselves than to truncate them the way the Handicapper General would. Likewise, it has been scientifically proven that suicide decreases during wartime.15 Yet no one suggests we should immiserize ourselves to cater to the moods of those who are most prone to kill themselves. Some accommodation is warranted if it can improve the mental health of the worst off, but the wider picture of societal wellbeing, or cultural wealth, should guide our thinking. (Location 450)
Three main crunch points that an expanding cultural socialism collides with are excellence, freedom, and community. Using Vonnegut’s example of unequal intelligence, should we adhere to the illusion that everyone is equally smart, and design society accordingly? This is the premise of Lionel Shriver’s new novel, Mania.16 It would mean that everyone gets the same grade on a test in order to avoid making less intelligent people feel bad. (Location 456)
While all but the most zealous cultural socialist would reject the world of the Handicapper General, many are willing to buy into it when the categories are rotated from quick/slow to White/non-White, male/female, or cisgender/transgender. (Location 485)
The problem for cultural socialism is that different cultures, for historical reasons, do not emphasise the same values. Some are more materialistic, others more artistic. Indeed, cultural socialists are often critical of the materialism of Western cultures—which may be an ingredient in the West’s economic success! In addition, the results of cultural socialist policies—a.k.a. affirmative action—have been disastrous. In societies as disparate as Fiji, Zimbabwe, South Africa, or Malaysia, the effects have generally been similar to those of economic socialism: sapping economic growth, encouraging violence and discrimination against disfavoured minorities, and stoking political unrest. (Location 494)
Cancel Culture and “Critical Race Theory” (Location 503)
While cultural socialism damages excellence, defenders of excellence and beauty are not a powerful political group. (Location 505)
Where decontextualized negative portrayals of a country’s history and society are forced on a captive audience—as in schools or with mandatory “diversity statements” in universities—cultural liberal principles of freedom of conscience and equal treatment are violated. In this case, cultural socialism violates both liberalism and national tradition at the same time. (Location 513)
I don’t take an absolutist view of free speech or national tradition, but rather a rule-utilitarian approach which accepts trade-offs. This may mean a statue has to be removed, but the decision will involve consideration of the positives and negatives of an individual, as well as the multiple meanings attached to the statue by different constituencies now and in the future. (Location 516)
The problem is that cultural socialism takes a narrow maximalist approach, sacralizing equal outcomes and harm claims along the lines of race, gender, and sexuality, which renders nuance and trade-offs impossible. (Location 520)
I’m not saying that the problem of race or gender inequality in the economy has been solved, but I’d argue that in the realm of culture (language, narrative, symbol, performance) we have overshot the optimum. (Location 524)
Cultural socialism is fuelling populism and polarization. (Location 533)
The talented and beautiful are not conspiring to spin myths that “socially construct” beauty or intelligence out of nothing. By contrast, the often blank-slate outlook of contemporary cultural socialism leads it toward pseudo-scientific “critical” theories of structural racism and patriarchy which hold that race and sex are actively “constructed” into hierarchies which reproduce themselves unconsciously from one generation to the next, benefitting oppressors at the expense of the oppressed. (Location 543)
influence of psychotherapy and the human potential movement. Robert Putnam reports that in 1950, just 12 percent of survey respondents agreed with the statement, “I am a very important person,” compared to 80 percent in 1990. This was a period of rapid expansion in single living, divorce, personalized mix-and-match religiosity, and other forms of individualism.19 This rise of expressive individualism, sometimes tipping into narcissism, focused people inward, boosting the growth of the psychotherapy industry. While Bohemian intellectuals lauded the benefits of Freudian psychotherapy in the interwar period, the spread of this sensibility from the ’60s onward gave radical ideologies a makeover. What psychologist Nick Haslam terms “concept creep” took hold from the ’60s, resulting in an egalitarian-liberal expansion in the remit of terms such as bullying, trauma, and prejudice.20 Bloated definitions of psychic fragility, self-esteem, and psychic harm came to be layered on top of a substructure of increasingly radical cultural egalitarianism. None of this stemmed from cultural Marxism. (Location 547)
While traditional Marxist economic socialism did have a humanistic component concerned with the wellbeing of workers, this never really extended to psychotherapeutic trauma and emotional safety. (Location 557)
The cultural socialist order is more empathetic and emotional than socialism, and lacks the latter’s scientific pretensions. (Location 566)
If economic socialists are akin to Calvinist biblical literalists, today’s cultural socialists are more like pentecostalists who speak in tongues, feeling rather than thinking their way to holiness. (Location 569)
“Inclusion” means persecution of the uninclusive, “antiracism” means attacking “racists,” an increasingly broad and subjectively-defined target. The flip side of empathy for “oppressed” groups, such as transgender people, is the loss of empathy for those deemed to possess fewer oppression points, such as women. (Location 609)
if cultural socialism spreads to postcolonial contexts where an ethnic majority can be mobilized against successful White or Asian trading minorities (often associated with former colonial regimes), attacks could become a very real possibility. Some would argue this has already occurred, as with the targeting of ethnic Chinese in Southeast Asian countries such as Indonesia or, in a more sporadic way, White farmers in rural South Africa.30 (Location 614)
I cleave to what Isaiah Berlin terms “negative liberalism,” which establishes a framework for coexistence without telling people how best to live their lives. Positive liberalism, by comparison, goes beyond “live and let live” to specify egalitarian or individualist values to which people must hold, often leading to intolerance.32 Many of our problems are caused by slipping from negative liberalism (“use pronouns if you want to”) to positive liberalism (“it is good practice to use pronouns”). (Location 622)
Why Government Intervention is Needed (Location 645)
The threat of emergent authoritarianism (i.e., private censorship) illustrates that we can’t simply think of society in terms of governments and individuals, but rather must picture a world with three layers: government, institutions, and individuals. (Location 646)
interventionist. This outlook holds that in many sectors, outsiders can’t hope to challenge established players. Established institutions control enormous reserves of wealth and prestige which dwarf the resources of those challenging the system. Moreover, it is not right to sacrifice the expressive freedom of current generations toiling in mainstream institutions on the altar of a cultural change in the distant future. (Location 660)
The cultural socialist politicization of institutions means we are entering a period in which power over certain policies must be centralized, away from autonomous institutions and toward elected government. Governments can be scrutinised by the press and voted out of office. Institutions operate behind closed doors and are publicly unaccountable. (Location 674)
Universities, corporations, and government bodies can be reformed or regulated to uphold freedom of speech, due process, and equal treatment. Libertarians prefer to use lawsuits to discipline illiberal organizations, but institutions such as universities can deploy their own hearings and other disciplinary measures to strike fear into dissenters while taking steps to avoid cases coming to trial. (Location 689)
governments must prioritize individual over institutional freedom, defend equal treatment, and draft detailed legislation and precise guidance that leaves no wiggle room for institutions to bend to progressive activists. New bureaucratic offices are probably needed to proactively enforce the law against recalcitrant institutions. Through it all, reformers should hold to a vision in which institutions eventually are persuaded to abandon cultural socialism, thereby regaining bipartisan trust and the right to more autonomy. (Location 696)
As Greg Lukianoff says, “Free speech culture is more important than the First Amendment.”39 All of us are responsible for spreading a culture of toleration. (Location 716)
Freedom of speech must be separated from “equal speech” claims which hold that people with more resources or positional confidence be handicapped, and that this somehow enhances freedom of speech by empowering the less fortunate. (Location 721)
Cultural liberalism should be returned to its paramount position in law, a utilitarian rule which is integral to the good society. In terms of social norms, we need a movement of mass resistance to cultural socialist attempts to redefine language and attack majority culture. Taboos around race, gender, and sexuality should evolve from binary tripwires to graduated norms involving tapered and proportional social penalties—much like the law. False positives such as hoaxes and vexatious accusations must carry greater disincentives than they currently do. (Location 728)
Historical precedent suggests that the route to minority advancement runs through practical steps to improve performance as well as a learned resilience to perceived slights. This can build a greater sense of self-efficacy, confidence, better performance, heightened power, and greater respect, in a self-fulfilling spiral. This is the path trod by previously marginalized groups like the Irish or Indians, and is endorsed by a rising cadre of influential minority writers and by most minorities in surveys. The culture of White majorities and men should be expressed in movies, history texts, music, and advertising without embarrassment or guilt—though not by crowding out or impugning minority voices, as occurred in the past. (Location 735)
Chapter 2 Big Bang: The Rise of the Race Taboo and the New Public Morality (Location 881)
Bohemian expressive individualists in the 1910s injected hostility toward the ethnic majority and tradition—as well as Freudianism—into the mix to produce a new ideology I call “left-modernism.” It represents a kind of extreme liberal-egalitarian humanitarianism. This birthed the ‘minorities good, majority bad’ paradigm, which has since been taken to its logical extreme. (Location 889)
The “left” part of left-modernism is cultural socialism, which was overshadowed prior to the late ’60s by left-modernism’s novelty- and diversity-seeking “modernist” pole, rooted in anti-traditionalist expressive individualism.42 Only from the mid-1960s did moralistic cultural socialism eclipse expressive modernism. Modernism retains some influence, but only insofar as it doesn’t clash with cultural socialism, as with left-modernism’s continued emphasis on diversity, cosmopolitanism, and novelty. When modernist anti-traditionalism collides with cultural socialism’s protective ethos, as on questions of pornography, prostitution, pedophilia, and cultural appropriation, modernism encounters opposition or is forced to give way. (Location 895)
The big change in qualitative terms only occurs after 1965. When White left-modernists embraced the new Black Power ideology, revolutionary cultural socialism was born. What changed in the ’60s, therefore, was the emergence of an Identitarian form of the left as White radicals adopted the rhetoric and worldview of Black radicals. (Location 914)
In effect, from the mid-60s, we see a triple revolution: 1.The radical left shifted from class to identity politics. 2.Private morality narrowed in wider elite society: beliefs about how to be a good person and what to feel guilty about rotated away from religion, patriotism, and sexual propriety to center solely on care/harm and equality—especially as applied to Black Americans and, later, to women and sexual minorities. 3.Public morality narrowed in wider elite society: the beliefs which mark one out to others as a pariah narrowed, abandoning stigmas against being sexually deviant, atheist, or unpatriotic to settle mainly on new norms around not being racist or, later, sexist, homophobic, or unsympathetic to subaltern groups. By contrast, virtue lay in signaling fealty to the antiracist (and later anti-sexist, anti-homophobic, and anti-transphobic) causes. (Location 922)
The Big Bang: The Anti-Racism Taboo is Born (Location 930)
Paul Krugman recalls that one summer, around 1965, large homes on Long Island suddenly repainted their little statues of Black coachmen white in order to not typecast African Americans as subservient. “In our public discourse,” Krugman recalls, “overt racism became utterly taboo. And while it didn’t literally happen overnight, it did happen fast.” (Location 932)
This involved the “concept creep” of racism to encompass benign forms of cultural expression, such as celebrating the Founders or going hiking, which moral innovators recast as racist by association.45 As in other historical periods, utopian ideologies overreached as their logic unfolded, failing to rein in extremists. (Location 941)
The American results in the left chart in Figure 2.1 display a median date of 1959, with 95 percent of responses in the 1954 to 1963 range. This aligns with survey results from the period, such as that asking whether “White people should have the first chance at any kind of job,” a statement which 52 percent of Whites agreed with in 1944, but just 3 percent did by 1972. When asked, “If a Negro with just as much income and education as you had moved into your block, would it make any difference to you?” the share answering “no” rose from 35 percent in 1942 to 67 percent by 1967. Opposition to segregated sections for Black people in “streetcars or buses” rose steadily, from just 44 percent in 1942 to 78 percent in 1963, demonstrating that considerable progress had been made before 1965.46 (Location 954)
The British results in the right chart in Figure 2.1 show a much later average date—1975—for the arrival of the racism stigma, with 95 percent of responses in the 1969 to 1981 range. This comports with evidence that open racism was acceptable among lower- and middle-class people in Britain for longer than in America. (Location 972)
While the rise of an antiracism taboo did not occur in Britain until the 1970s and ’80s, it was already in place in elite circles by the early 1960s. (Location 977)
The cultural revolution of the ’60s and its new race taboo set the moral terrain which underpins routinized forms of cultural socialism such as politically-correct language (i.e., “Latinx”) and diversity training. Radicals seeking to smear conservatives could leverage it as a force multiplier for their views, confident that their audience either shared their care/harm and equality moral foundations (especially as directed toward racial minorities) or feared falling afoul of the new stigmas revolving around these twin moral foundations. (Location 1022)
if care/harm and equal results for identity groups did not form the backcloth of Western morality, woke aficionados would not be able to weaponize extreme versions of it to shame others. (Location 1032)
Those seeking to explain our cultural predicament need to focus more on our banal public morality than on the intellectual lineage of today’s woke fundamentalists. (Location 1033)
While the radical left was also transformed by the race taboo, this would have conferred a great deal less cultural power if public morality remained multi-stranded and cross-cutting (opposing, say, sexual deviance as well as racism, anti-Americanism as well as sexism, atheism as well as homophobia)—as was arguably the case for the median American voter as late as the 2000s or elite voters in the mid-1960s. (Location 1034)
A “cool” evolution in public mores preceded and accompanied the “hot” cultural socialist awakening of the late ’60s, continuing to percolate down the social scale thereafter. This moral revolution is the fulcrum around which the shift from cultural liberalism to cultural socialism must be understood. By 1965, respectable people had come to adopt a new public morality, and this opened the way for illiberal outrage entrepreneurs. (Location 1042)
African-American scholar, Shelby Steele, who remembers what it was like to be Black in the pre-Civil Rights period, offers the single most powerful diagnosis of this caesura in American history. Between the 1950s and 1960s, Steele argues, White people—and America as a whole—lost moral authority: “The lines of moral power, like plates in the earth, had shifted. White guilt became so palpable you could see it on people. At the time what it looked like to my eyes was a remarkable loss of authority. And what whites lost in authority, blacks gained. You cannot feel guilty about anyone without giving away power to them.” For Steele, the Civil Rights Act was also an admission of guilt. Here was White America’s fall from grace, for which it now sought redemption.53 Note that Steele is not describing the radical left but polite society as a whole. (Location 1045)
It is one thing to have a liberal norm against the acceptability of racism to ensure equal treatment; quite another to assume the cultural socialist position of altering the polarity of discursive inequality to invest cultural power in a previously disadvantaged group while insisting that the dominant group approach each interracial interaction in sin. (Location 1052)
Shelby Steele views the events of the 1960s as a delegitimation of both White and American ideational power. The moral authority of the entire American project since 1776 suffered a catastrophic collapse. In order to clear their conscience, Whites sought redemption through social programs and affirmative action. The goal of institutional actions like diversity training or affirmative action, claims Steele, is symbolic and exculpatory. Rather than focusing on measures which might actually improve the lot of Blacks, the measures act as a moral virtue signal to dissociate an organization from the stain of racism while linking it to the legitimating virtue of antiracism. (Location 1063)
Steele believes these guilt-driven policies have damaged the Black family and crippled Black progress by convincing African Americans that Whites control their fate. (Location 1068)
The Unbalancing of the Western Moral Order (Location 1075)
It is thus unclear why highly-educated Americans in northern cities should be so affected by desegregation in the South. Why would the least racist sections of society become the most enamored of White guilt, and acquiesce in the staining of the American brand? The clue lies in the fact that taboos are typically used by communities as signaling devices: people suspend their rational faculties and self-interest to display their fealty to the sacredness embodied in a symbol. In so doing, they reinforce the bonds of the moral community. When people accept a sacred value, anything that stands in its way is demonized as evil.57 (Location 1082)
The removal of anti-Asian exclusions in immigration and desegregation of the military (1946−48), the Brown v. Board of Education desegregation decision (1954), the opening up of refugee channels for Cuban and Hungarian émigrés (1956), and the change in the tone of school history texts by the ’50s (to emphasize immigrant contributions) prefigured the elite revolution to come. (Location 1095)
The progressive identity was not a set of consistent ideas such as liberalism or socialism so much as a patterned set of emotional responses to affective targets. (Location 1105)
positive feeling toward logical principles of liberalism and equality also exists, but there is no apparent tension between the two if the emotional links “feel” right. Thus, it becomes unproblematic to seamlessly move from equal rights to equality of outcome, from free speech to restricting freedom. (Location 1109)
This care/harm and equal outcome-based moral sensibility is akin to what Friedrich Nietzsche derides as the “slave morality” of Christianity and socialism, which he accuses of privileging the concerns of the weak over those of the noble.61 While “slave morality” has, contrary to Nietzsche, contributed an enormous amount to human flourishing, the further we have moved in this direction, the more we face diminishing returns and greater offsetting costs to other values, damaging human flourishing. (Location 1113)
With collective sources of morality such as religious and national particularism stripped away, it only remained to fetishize the remaining moral “taste buds” of care/harm and equality of outcome, especially as directed toward racial (and later, sexual) minorities. This created an unbalanced public morality, the consequences of which we are currently living through. (Location 1118)
The progressive identity, rooted in emotional rather than logical connections, and yoked to the myth of the avant-garde, marked an important departure for a left which, as Jonathan Rauch notes, had been multivalent in its moral sources. (Location 1126)
The stripped-down individualized public morality that unfolded from the late ’60s meant that no cross-cutting moral commitments existed to check or moderate extremism performed in its name. When one moral intuition, such as equality or harm protection, bumps up against another, such as liberty or patriotism, an individual becomes aware of trade-offs and is more careful to temper the kind of normative extremism that expands the scope of taboos. Once one’s morality becomes unbalanced, there is no check on pushing for maximal normative sanctions on an ever-expanding range of increasingly microscopic transgressions. This is effectively what happened in Western societies, beginning in the mid-1960s. (Location 1136)
The progressive identity pushes its adherents toward empathy-driven actions rather than logically-consistent principles. This emotion-led strategy is empathetic toward some, but creates a new set of (i.e., conservative) enemies to be ruthlessly demonized as obstacles to empathy.65 (Location 1141)
The heady emotions and hopes surrounding the Civil Rights Movement saw President Lyndon Johnson get swept away when addressing students at the historically Black Howard University in 1965. In the speech, Johnson argued that you cannot remove a man’s chains, bring him to the starting line, and expect him to compete. “We seek,” he added, “not just equality as a right and a theory but equality as a fact and equality as a result.” This may have tugged at the heartstrings and captured the hopes of his audience, but it represented the displacement of pre-1965 cultural liberalism in favor of post-1965 cultural socialism. Suddenly, the door was open to restricting liberty and equal treatment in the name of achieving “equality of result.” (Location 1145)
The foregoing shows that the upheavals of the Civil Rights Era did not just reconfigure the intellectual far left toward cultural socialism. Rather, these changes swept through a much larger segment of society in the US and, later, Britain and other Western countries. Public morality as a whole, especially in highly influential professional or well-educated contexts, narrowed to rest only on the equality and care/harm moral foundations, especially as applied to race. Gender and sexuality would later come to be grafted onto this new moral framework. (Location 1162)
The Transformation of the Radical Left (Location 1166)
Elite public morality may have adopted care/harm and equality of outcome for minority groups as its highest principles, but the radical left went further, adding the crucial dimension of anti-White, and later anti-male, demonization. (Location 1167)
An emerging conversation between White leftists and the anti-colonial native left brought Marxist themes of oppression, power, and revolution into contact with the concerns of identity groups. (Location 1175)
This was evident in exchanges between Jean-Paul Sartre, a White French Marxist, and Frantz Fanon, a Black intellectual from the French Caribbean island of Martinique. Sartre had done pioneering work on anti-Semitism just after the war and, in 1948, wrote that minorities in the colonies should use their racial consciousness to organize, in what he dubbed a positive “antiracist racism.”69 Fanon’s Wretched of the Earth in 1961 proved an influential landmark work written during Algeria’s war of liberation from France, in which Fanon took the Algerian side against his own country. (Location 1176)
Fanon counseled indigenous violence in the service of national liberation, a battle cry endorsed by Jean-Paul Sartre (Location 1184)
The strident tones, romantic expressivism, and uncompromising lexicon of Fanon, Malcolm X, and the Black Panthers offered a new source of moral power, excitement, and spiritual depth for White intellectuals primed by their inheritance of humanitarian liberalism, New Deal egalitarianism, and expressive anti-WASP modernism. Art and power, individualism and collectivism, leftism and modernism, fused together. Identity eclipsed class in the pantheon of the Western left as few White radicals failed to be caught up in the Identitarian tumult of the time. (Location 1199)
The rise of the racism taboo and the left-modernist embrace of Black radicalism is the moment in which contemporary cultural socialism was born. (Location 1216)
Black radicalism and Third World socialism, not the Critical Theory of the Frankfurt School or Antonio Gramsci, underlie wokeness. Much is made of the tactical entryism of Gramsci, with his idea of the “war of position,” or of Rudi Dutschke’s 1967 advocacy of the “long march through the institutions.” These ideas suggest an orchestrated cultural leftist action plan to take over elite institutions. In truth, cultural socialism evolved and spread like an emergent mind virus from the bottom up, not as a result of top-down coordination. It charmed liberal leftists like Sontag as much as revolutionaries like Marcuse. (Location 1222)
The Critical Theory of the post-1930s Frankfurt School is a strange candidate for forerunner of wokeness despite sharing a superficial name with contemporary critical theories (known as Critical Social Justice theory). Critical Theorists such as Theodor Adorno, drawing on Antonio Gramsci’s notion of cultural hegemony, mainly concerned themselves with the impact of motion pictures and other culture industries in dulling workers’ appetite for revolution. This was hardly the kind of identity politics we associate with cultural socialism. Only insofar as Adorno and Erich Fromm castigated the European working-class as having an authoritarian personality in the 1940s, can they be seen as harbingers of a new age. (Location 1230)
Of the prominent Frankfurt School Critical Theorists, only Herbert Marcuse is a bridge to the cultural socialism of the New Left. (Location 1238)
In his 1965 essay on repressive tolerance, Marcuse argued that censoring conservatives was justified on the grounds that “regressive movements” must be stopped “before they can become active.” Marcuse alleged that, since conservatives controlled much of society, the left should practice censorship and intolerance in the few spaces—such as some university departments—where the left was dominant. Marcuse’s rationale was a kind of intellectual tit for tat: intolerance as preemptive strike against supposed conservative hegemony; censorship as a way to level the playing field for left-wing and minority voices to prevail.74 Herein lies the origin of the cultural socialist doctrine of “equal speech” in which the definition of free speech is perverted to mean speech power rather than speech rights. (Location 1239)
In proclaiming that “revolution is poetry,” they advanced neither politics nor art. (Location 1284)
This disorder was on clear display in the race riots which began in New York in 1964 and with Los Angeles’ major Watts riot of 1965. These burned even more intensely after Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination in 1968, with violent protests erupting in 110 cities. The legacy of these events was a surge in crime and a deterioration in the quality of urban Black neigborhoods. (Location 1287)
The intersection of Black Power radicalism and anti-Vietnam War student agitation in the late 1960s coincided with a sharp increase in violent crime in American cities. Between the mid-1960s and 1970, rates of violent crime and property crime doubled. The rise of the racism taboo produced a loss of moral authority, be it that of parents, professors, the university, the police, the constitution, or the American national story. As Steele suggests, this collapse was rooted in guilt over the sin of racism, even as it was exacerbated by the country’s ill-conceived war in Vietnam and the Watergate scandal of 1972. The energy of these revolts inspired White cultural socialists, who romanticized these conflicts while bearing none of the costs, working them into their political lore and identity. (Location 1293)
The Advent of Contemporary Cancel Culture (Location 1313)
As a result, the first manifestations of post-Civil Rights cancel culture occur in this period. In 1965, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, a New Deal Democrat working for the Johnson administration, wrote a report for the Department of Labor entitled The Negro Family: The Case for Action. This was vilified by newly-influential Black radicals and, by extension, the New Left and liberal-left, and promptly shelved by President Johnson. Moynihan, using patient analysis and statistics, had shown a substantial rise in out-of-wedlock births in Black families to a quarter of all births. (Location 1319)
E.O. Wilson published Sociobiology: The New Synthesis in 1975. In the book, Wilson argued for an evolutionary biological explanation of human behavior, a general theory which was not about race. (Location 1342)
reputational smear which was powerful because these activist scholars could leverage the new care/harm and equality-centred antiracist public morality. (Location 1347)
The rise of Black and ethnic studies shows how ideology, emotion, and force, rather than academic merit or demand, can shape the content of university teaching. These episodes, along with the much wider phenomenon of student occupations, reveal how the sacredness released by the new race taboo left university administrations with no moral authority to resist protestors’ demands. (Location 1365)
Student activism leveraged a campus environment that leaned more toward care/harm and equality and less toward religion and patriotism than society overall. This allowed activists to institutionalize cultural socialism (a.k.a. “social justice”) as the highest value of the university, replacing academic freedom and the search for truth. (Location 1373)
Two sets of ideas nourished cultural socialism. The first was postmodernism, which influenced new theories of Critical Social Justice (CSJ), beginning with Critical Race Theory in the 1970s and ’80s, but including Third Wave feminism and Queer Theory. The second, arguably more far-reaching, involved society’s growing sensitivity to psychological harm, especially as experienced by historically marginalized identity groups. (Location 1379)
Postmodernism’s core argument is culturally relativist, arguing that words only have meaning in relation to other words, thus meaning is in the eye of the beholder and text, sentences and narratives float free of anything “real” in the world. The Enlightenment and progress are illusions and merely a “grand narrative” which the gnostic postmodernist unmasks. (Location 1386)
While ostensibly playful and relativistic, postmodernism nevertheless continually slipped cultural socialism in through the back door, asserting that power relations underpinned society’s word games. Indeed, this was central to the arguments of gay leftist icon, Michel Foucault, who drew on Antonio Gramsci’s argument that the ruling class used hegemonic cultural stories, identities, and explanations to make the working class accept its fate. (This tradition harks back to Marx’s notion of ethnicity, nation, and religion as forms of “false consciousness” spread by scheming capitalists to divide the working class.) Foucault argued that narratives and their performance reinforced power relations, not just between the state and citizens, but in the private sphere between men and women, or between identity groups—though Foucault was a more sophisticated thinker than the self-styled “critical” theorists who drew inspiration from him. (Location 1391)
Foucault’s obsession with the idea that forms of knowledge concealed power machinations was likewise a staple of postmodernist theorist, Jacques Derrida. (Location 1397)
Derrida maintained that categories, such as “man-woman” or “good-bad” involve value binaries in which there is a dominant and subservient element. This rendered all terms and boundaries suspicious, implying that domination is built into the very act of Western scientific categorization. (Location 1398)
The postmodernist theoretical project thereby smuggled in two linked political projects: the first involving a “horizontal” modernist dismantling of categories and group boundaries, and the second a “vertical” leftist flattening of power hierarchies between categories. (Location 1401)
It is no accident that they influenced more avowedly political writers such as Edward Said, who used their theories to “deconstruct” supposedly dominant White Western or male narratives. (Location 1409)
Gayatri Spivak’s notion of “strategic essentialism” essentially made manifest postmodernism’s latent leftism: race and gender are social constructs, but let’s lean into them as real to fight the White male oppressor. (Location 1410)
Fukuyama ironically notes, those who claim to be speaking truth to power are never interrogated about their power motives. (Location 1417)
After all, if everything is about power, what machinations underlie Foucault’s reasoning? Why can’t we deconstruct the idea of power, the ideology of anti-racism, or postmodernism? Society may be imperfect, but tearing down procedural liberalism because it may not be fully living up to its ideals is a recipe for much worse. (Location 1418)
Critical Race Theory had radical origins in Black Panther claims that the constitution was a smokescreen for slavery. Intellectually, it began life as a moderate critique of where the American constitution failed to apply its standards in a racially impartial manner. However, the 1970s critical legal theory pioneered by Derrick Bell at Harvard soon slipped its leash to attack the entire idea of universal standards and impartiality. Its tools and ideas influenced the writing of scholars such as Kimberlé Crenshaw (on intersectionality) and Richard Delgado who extended it into sociology, education, and other disciplines under the new name Critical Race Theory.93 Queer, radical, feminist, and even fat studies variants of Critical Social Justice (CSJ) soon followed. A conspiratorial mindset rooted in spotting the scheming White male heterosexual power structure behind every neutral liberal principle swiftly pervaded these fields. (Location 1421)
David Roediger argued that Whites gain a “psychic wage” from their whiteness as well as a structural power advantage.94 Others, such as Isabel Wilkerson, pick up the “psychic wage” trail to claim that dominant beliefs endow Whites or men with a sense of superiority, leading them to commit microaggressions such as talking down to Black people or encroaching on women’s personal space. (Location 1429)
American university graduates from 1990s moral relativism to 2010s moral absolutism. (Location 1439)
turns out that when postmodernism is applied in real life, its intellectual scaffolding of relativism falls away to reveal only naked political moralism. (Location 1441)
Ironically, what postmodernism has produced is precisely the kind of “grand narrative” it claimed to unmask. As James Lindsay and Helen Pluckrose observe, “The belief that society is structured of specific but largely invisible identity-based systems of power and privilege that construct knowledge via ways of talking about things” is now viewed as objectively true.97 (Location 1442)
Critical theories do not fully explain the growth of the Social Justice Warrior phenomenon, which is why a second post-’60s development is important: the rise of the therapeutic ethos. (Location 1448)
In 1966, Philip Rieff’s Triumph of the Therapeutic pointed to the fusion of Freudianism and Marxism as a potent force influencing therapy and society to advocate for the release of psychic energies from bourgeois and religious restraints. (Location 1449)
Therapy’s “feel good” modernist ethos did not initially center around fragility and trauma, but took a sympathetic view of complaints of psychological distress, furnishing the building blocks for an ethos of fragility. (Location 1456)
psychology of Abraham Maslow and Carl Rogers in the 1950s and ’60s, with its attitude of affirming people’s feelings and viewing psychological unease sympathetically. (Location 1458)
The crossover of psychiatry and radicalism also produced the first unlearning racism therapy sessions—the distant ancestor of Robin DiAngelo’s struggle sessions—led by Herbert Marcuse’s third wife, Ricky Sherover-Marcuse, in 1970s California. She emphasized “emancipatory consciousness” and the traumatic emotion of confessing one’s racism. (Location 1474)
The final step in the march of sensitivity to minorities was the medicalization of everyday life and concept creep. Definitions of psychiatric terms such as prejudice, bullying, trauma, and harassment expanded to include milder phenomena which would not previously have been considered problems. (Location 1477)
treadmill notion of social ills—in which small problems become big problems as the big ones are solved—is a general rule which should operate cross-culturally and cross-politically in a way that doesn’t easily fit the data. (Location 1481)
I am likewise only partially convinced by Haidt and Lukianoff’s argument in The Coddling of the American Mind that “helicopter” parenting and social media exposure explain the fragility of the 2010s generation.101 If anything, straight White Zoomer males have had to develop a thicker skin than their predecessors. Moreover, in China or Japan, the same predictors don’t seem to have produced the woke cultural revolution that has afflicted the West. (Location 1483)
major elevation of care/harm moral reasoning has taken place, evident in content analyses of English-language books from the 1980s onward. In this period, we find a rapid expansion in the use of terms such as hurt and harm, as well as those which elevate a morality of care (i.e., compassion, protect). (Location 1488)
term “sexual harassment,” which originally referred to something physical, came to encompass verbal and online insults to the point where over 80 percent of women qualify as having experienced harassment. (Location 1500)
As Haslam et. al., citing Sunstein, explain: “If an opposed belief or expression can be labelled a form of ‘violence’ or ‘hate,’ even if it does not rise to the level of legal definitions of those concepts, it may provoke the intensely moralised reaction normally recruited against other forms of violence or hate.” (Location 1502)
In other words, expansion entrepreneurs seek to spread the moral power of care/harm terminology to less serious phenomena in order to place a wider sphere of behavior beyond the pale of what’s acceptable.103 (Location 1504)
In so doing, activists try to paint adjacent ideas with a radioactive brush to induce compliance and fear in others, and make them shun or punish transgressors. The resulting creep of care/harm-based taboos, which are used to form binary good versus bad judgments, collapses the distinction between serious, minor, and trivial offenses. (Location 1506)
norm expansion—with its attendant chilling effects—reduces the degree of liberty, reason, truth, beauty, or cohesion while making a negligible impact on the level of harm minorities experience. This doesn’t mean norm expansion is never warranted, only that there is no countervailing guardrail to optimize expansion and prevent a norm from exacting too great a price in competing values. (Location 1513)
The late 1980s and early 1990s witnessed the second Great Awokening of cultural socialism as Baby Boomers entered the professoriate in large numbers. (Location 1517)
In 1987, a group of cultural socialist Stanford students protested the university’s Western civilization requirement with the chant, “Hey, hey, ho, ho, Western culture’s gotta go.” (Location 1527)
So began the battle to replace the “Dead White Male” Western curriculum with multiculturalism and global studies. (Location 1530)
Accusations of racism and sexism were used as battering rams in an assault on the foundations of Western education. This was bemoaned by cultural liberals like Allan Bloom, whose landmark Closing of the American Mind in 1987, assailed the vacuousness and narcissism of many students and the doctrinaire philistinism of cultural socialist ideologues. Other backlash works by cultural liberals followed, such as Arthur Schlesinger Jr.’s The Disuniting of America in 1991, Robert Hughes’s Culture of Complaint in 1993, and Nathan Glazer’s We Are All Multiculturalists Now in 1997. Though Glazer, Bell, Adorno, and others had criticized the student movements of the late ’60s for their illiberalism and anti-intellectualism, the late 1980s bore witness to the first full-scale “culture war” between cultural socialist and cultural liberal intellectuals. (Location 1533)
increasingly urgent that we remind ourselves of the failures of the humanitarian-anarchist tradition that underpins left-modernism. Left-modernist extremism falls into two categories: internal damage to a movement and its members, and external costs to society. Early utopian socialist experiments such as Robert Owen’s New Harmony commune fell apart because they failed to understand that humans have a natural desire to raise, provide for, and favor their own children. People are less likely to work hard if the fruits of their labor are shared equally among all residents in the settlement. The fall of communism has impressed the second of these lessons upon us, but the first has not been learned: the nuclear family has few intellectual defenders and both Black Lives Matter and radical feminism seek to dismantle it. (Location 1567)
As Richard Ellis shows in his analysis of radical egalitarianism since the early 1800s, the rejection of power structures creates a vacuum which produces infighting, collapse, or the rise of authoritarian leaders who accuse critics of undermining the egalitarian community.110 More recently, the same process has rendered progressive foundations and movements ungovernable as accusations of racism, bullying and sexism are tossed at movement leaders.111 This doesn’t mean that anarchists have contributed nothing to human progress. Their willingness to experiment, and to break free of convention, marked the beginning of a process which has resulted in the legitimizing of interracial relationships. (Location 1578)
The Liberal Progressives of the early 1900s failed to appreciate the impact of immigration on the cultural security of the Anglo-Protestant majority and cohesion of the country, but they were correct to defend Catholic and Jewish immigrants’ right to transmit their culture and value their heritage rather than being forced to assimilate quickly. (Location 1584)
The Bohemian Young Intellectuals of 1910s New York inaugurated the appreciation of jazz, immigrant diversity, and modern art in America. Yet they overreached by attacking the WASP ethnic majority and failing to appreciate the value of its traditions. (Location 1587)
The influential left-liberal New York Intellectuals of the 1930s and ’40s were right to warn of the authoritarian tendencies in fascism and communism and to champion the virtues of being open to foreign traditions. They stepped across the line, however, when they unfairly swept liberal nationalists like the artists of the American Scene into the fascist category and derided the Anglo-Protestant collective memories and folkways of the rural and provincial majority. (Location 1590)
The 1960s New Left rightly protested against the Vietnam War and is associated with the highly innovative “hippie” culture which introduced a wealth of new music, forms of dress, and other cultural accoutrements. The ’60s sexual revolution legitimized sex before marriage as well as divorce, arguably improving human welfare, even as attacks on the traditional family and motherhood represent an overreach. Declines in racism, sexism, and homophobia took place after the ’60s, though the antiracist improvements arguably stemmed from the pre-1965 liberal rather than radical phase of the movement. (Location 1593)
many of the New Left’s political innovations had negative consequences. Crime and the blighting of urban neighbourhoods took off while fatherlessness rose precipitously in the Black community, producing baleful effects on Black progress. Affirmative action has resulted in discrimination against Whites and Asians, violating foundational negative liberal principles and breeding resentment while arguably mismatching minorities to universities and jobs. (Location 1598)
Since the 1970s, cultural socialism has arguably contributed even less to the human flourishing. While there have been advances—such as gay marriage, police and prison reform, greater appreciation of minority artistic talent. and more attention to serious forms of workplace harassment following the metoo movement—these have been significantly outweighed by overreach. Examples of an excessive twisting of the progressive dial include the plethora of false campus rape charges which have been dismissed in the courts but have ruined lives and reputations along the way, and the rise of a toxic post-BLM systemic racism discourse. The latter has resulted in a sharp increase in lost Black lives, setbacks to Black communities, failures to maintain standards of education that might help Black talented pupils succeed, and a large-scale desecration of national and ethnic majority symbols that has stoked populism and polarization. In Canada and Australia, a romanticized “noble savage” approach to indigenous communities has prevented much-needed scrutiny of band governance and housing policies which entrench a cycle of poverty. A culture of low expectations and dependency has prevented a shift toward a culture of self-reliance. (Location 1611)
growing climate of illiberalism, fear, and unreason is arguably stifling high culture and the academy. Downstream effects of speech restrictions that preclude rational solutions include a rising homelessness problem, higher crime rates, poorer education outcomes, and lax border enforcement. (Location 1619)
Part of the problem for Western societies is that we lack a powerful set of stories to bring the excesses of cultural socialism to life. Nazism, colonialism, or Jim Crow live in the hearts and minds of people, especially the young, in a way that the excesses of Soviet communism or Maoism do not. (Location 1623)
Left-modernism’s failures are difficult to spot because no anarchist-humanitarian states have heretofore existed. We can only judge them by examining the fragmentation of social movements like the New Left or communes such as Brook Farm which illustrate the kind of dynamics that can occur in utopian micro-societies. (Location 1629)
Few since Hobbes understand how bloody life is in a true anarchy, or how orthodoxy, paralysis, and division characterize social experiments that lack social boundaries and power structures. (Location 1631)
Humor and logic, however, cut little ice with the next generation, who demanded moral seriousness. Though classical liberals such as Arthur Schlesinger Jr. or Francis Fukuyama excoriated the politically-correct agenda in the pages of mainstream periodicals like The New Republic or The Atlantic Monthly, cultural socialism continued to win the battle for the hearts of the young and idealistic. (Location 1896)
Cultural liberals and conservatives won debate after debate against identity politics but, at the emotional level, provided few stories to compete with canonical progressive narratives such as slavery, Jim Crow, or Nazism. (Location 1899)
The steady leftist advance in the social sciences and humanities departments of universities from the mid-’60s reached a tipping point in the late ’80s when sufficient numbers of graduates were in position to churn out like-minded young epigones, creating a self-propelled cascade. (Location 1909)
This gave the movement two sources of growth: cohort change, as progressive generations formed a larger share of the electorate and older generations died off; and cultural institutionalization through the capture of society’s organs of socialization. (Location 1920)
cultural socialists deployed both carrots and sticks, (Location 1925)
First, it conceals its iron fist of compelled speech, unreason, and attacks on White, national, male, and female identity within an attractive velvet glove of “diversity, equity, and inclusion.” This allows it to camouflage its illiberalism as liberalism, attracting support. (Location 1928)
Second, it immobilizes opponents with a toxin of cancel culture that renders critics radioactive, serving as a warning to others. In later chapters, we shall see that cultural socialism’s velvet glove is more important than its radioactivity in explaining its success. That is, more people are attracted by the movement’s “majority bad, minorities good” emotional pull than are cowed into silence by its threat to shame and punish. The two mechanisms are, however, connected. Public morality is based on the threat of being shamed by the judgment of an external audience while private morality is driven by an internal guilt which arises from the judgment of our internal audience—the superego or “generalized other”—whose approval is necessary for a positive sense of self.119 (Location 1930)
holy trinity of taboos: racism, sexism, and homophobia. (Location 1938)
shows that the rate at which Americans typed the term “racism” into Google in 2020 varies greatly by state. (Location 1945)
Following the trail of woke taboos over time reveals three “Great Awokenings.” The first erupted in the late 1960s. “Racism” garnered attention from 1964, reaching a peak in 1972, while “sexism” took off later, in 1969, only peaking in 1977. The second wave began around 1987, with both terms now in sync. This was the era in which I came of age, when political correctness entered the lexicon and Allan Bloom’s The Closing of the American Mind—which I recall devouring in a few sittings at the time—inveighed against the emerging trends. Though the progressive energy of the second awakening tapered off in the mid-to-late 1990s, a third wave began around 2013, peaking in 2020. (Location 1957)
left:right split amongst the faculty increased from around 1.5 to 1 in the mid-1960s to 2:1 in 1989 to 6:1 by 2010. (Location 1984)
In American social sciences and humanities (SSH) departments today, for instance, 36 percent of centrist academics and 70 percent of conservatives say their departments are hostile climates for their political beliefs, compared to 4 percent of leftists. (Location 2001)
In the US, the left:right ratio among journalists shifted from less than 1.5 to 1 in 1971 to 4 to 1 by 2013. (Location 2007)
Youth and Social Media: Cultural Socialism Spreads Off Campus (Location 2012)
cultural socialism began in academia and in the radical progressive media, spreading more recently to young people. (Location 2028)
University is the ground zero for wokeness, but this has less to do with its effect on students than with ideas emerging from radical SSH faculty which influence high culture, celebrity culture, public education, and youth culture. Indeed, researchers find only inconclusive evidence for the direct impact of university on students’ political beliefs.127 In my own survey of 1,500 British eighteen- to twenty-year-olds, I find that those attending university are no more likely to support PC than their peers who intend to attend but have not yet done so. On the other hand, both current and prospective students are significantly more PC than those who don’t intend to go to university. (Location 2033)
Across the population as a whole, I find that age, social media use, and university have independent effects on support for PC. Being young is twice as important as having a degree. Active Twitter and Instagram (or, to a lesser degree, Facebook) use is almost as important as age and more important than going to university. One way of interpreting these results is to view being young, on social media, and in tune with campus values as indicators of proximity to the wellsprings of modern woke culture. (Location 2051)
The rise of cultural socialism is a long march through the field of narrative and emotion rather than a patiently-argued victory in the court of evidence and argument. (Location 2061)
Cultural Socialism Spreads Off Campus (Location 2063)
Yascha Mounk adds that Tumblr incubated a narcissistic, virtue-signaling youth variant of critical theory by 2015. (Location 2074)
Greg Lukianoff and Rikki Schlott also note that social media’s “like” and “retweet” buttons allowed a critical mass of people to engage in real-time pile-ons, empowering cancel culture. (Location 2078)
For Ezra Klein, the new polarization represents a return to the opinionated partisan journalism which held sway before the classified advertising-led business model emerged in the twentieth century to usher in a nonpartisan ethos. (Location 2100)
deliberate work of institutional actors motivated by cultural socialist intuitions. These were usually not radicals, as Chris Rufo or Francis Fukuyama suggest, but rather left-liberals wedded to powerful progressive narratives and imagoes. Institutional creep thereby stems from the same evolutionary cultural forces that produced concept creep in psychotherapy and a constantly-shifting vocabulary for referring to disadvantaged groups—from (Location 2137)
The scale of racial quota activity did not stem from LBJ’s 1965 executive order, which only mentioned the need for government contractors to take “affirmative action” to ensure that nobody is discriminated against on the basis of race or other characteristics. But the activist Department of Labor interpreted the executive order to mean “goals and timetables,” transforming its intent from an initial cultural liberalism of equal opportunity to a de facto cultural socialism based on quotas. Time and time again, activist bureaucrats and judges stretched the meaning of the law, crossing the boundary from liberalism to cultural socialism. (Location 2175)
With time, writers such as Caldwell and Hanania argue that proactive enforcement by federal government agencies like the EEOC resulted in a dramatic rise in the share of major firms adopting affirmative action, from 20 percent in 1970 to 50 percent by 1980. Legal compliance and human resources departments sprang to life in companies, universities, and other organizations. Once in post, the new administrators sought to justify their existence and expand their budgets by conducting investigations, writing codes of conduct, or establishing mandatory diversity training. From these beginnings, the diversity industry and woke capital was born. (Location 2248)
The diversity training sector began in the late 1960s, and was in full swing by the 1970s. While the rhetoric of “diversity” did not burst forth until after the publication of a seminal 1987 US Department of Labor report called Workforce 2000, it already emphasized a narrative of historic victims and victimizers, generating resentment. As a pro-training academic paper acknowledged, “Because the [1970s and 80s] training focused primarily on treating historically underrepresented minorities and women fairly and equitably in White male-dominated environments and on avoidance of lawsuits, nonmembers of these groups [i.e. White males] resented their exclusion and felt that preferential treatment was being afforded to the targeted group.” (Location 2262)
By the late 1990s, the term “inclusion” was being increasingly used by the diversity training industry. (Location 2273)
By the 2000s, the main pillars of the DEI trifecta were recognizable, though the more aggressive and radical “White privilege,” “systemic racism,” and other Critical-Race-Theory-derived buzzwords only appear to have entered the corporate lexicon in the 2010s. (Location 2280)
Once again, the incremental evolution of the liberal-left, with emotive narratives obscuring logical contradictions, was the driver—not revolutionary radicalism. DEI is a deepening and extension of pre-existing practice, not a radical break. The fact that left-liberals converged with cultural Marxists does not mean that radicals converted professionals to the cause of system overthrow. The reason the liberal left could converge with socialism on cultural grounds is that its only deeply-held limits on the left are on economics. (Location 2285)
There is a lively debate between those, such as Hanania and Caldwell, who argue that the path from Civil Rights leads directly to the cultural socialist dispensation, and others, such as Charles Fain Lehman, who counter that even when legislative, bureaucratic, and executive guidance was scaled back, organizations continued to pursue affirmative action.161 For Shelby Steele, as noted in Chapter 2, policies like affirmative action of DEI are a form of virtue signaling, a way for fallen institutions that admitted moral culpability after the Civil Rights Movement to regain moral authority. In other words, these policies are more about cultural bona fides than legal compliance and do little to substantively advance the cause of minorities. (Location 2303)
Corporate compliance officers donate to Democrats over Republicans by a 3 to 1 margin. (Location 2318)
Speech Codes and Hostile Environment (Location 2382)
Affirmative action, disparate impact, and diversity training violate key precepts of cultural liberalism, but speech codes strike even deeper at the heart of a free society. (Location 2383)
The shift from a moderate egalitarianism and norms of reasonable speech restraint to using administrative power to engineer equal outcomes and enforce political correctness occurred because the progressive identity, not liberal principles, were in the driver’s seat. (Location 2388)
carried out in a moderate, circumscribed, and politically impartial manner, “hostile environment,” like diversity training or affirmative action, can be a force for good. The problem, as always, involves unchecked progressive activism. This is evident in the proliferation of university “speech codes” which began to be implemented in earnest on American campuses in the late 1980s. These punish students who “demean,” “insult,” or “offend,” even when such speech is permitted under the First Amendment. Despite the Supreme Court ruling in the 1992 R.A.V. v. St. Paul case limiting the scope of speech restrictions to fighting words, as well as lower court rulings that repeatedly find college speech codes to violate the First Amendment due to their breadth, vagueness, and viewpoint discrimination, speech codes remain pervasive. (Location 2401)
A similar story can be told for universities’ zealous enforcement of the Obama administration’s Title IX regulations around sexual assault, which abrogates the rights of the accused to cross-examine plaintiffs and jettisons the “innocent until proven guilty” standard. This led to numerous wrongfully accused defendants whose lives have been damaged. (Location 2413)
The rise of cultural socialism threatens two sets of values. The first are those of cultural liberalism, or the Enlightenment: free speech, equal treatment, due process, excellence, and objective truth. The second concerns cultural conservatism, or tradition: White majority ethnicity, national history and identity, classical virtues, male culture, female identity, heterosexuality, and traditional words and sayings. (Location 2657)
An outstanding instance of progressive illiberalism is the case of mild-mannered gender critical feminist, Kathleen Stock, formerly of Sussex University, who was hounded out of her job by a trans activist mob, or the equally agreeable Google programmer, James Damore, fired for questioning the firm’s narrative of why women are underrepresented among computer programmers. (Location 2663)
Cancel culture stems from two processes illustrated in Figure 4.1. The first is institutional punishment, which I term “hard authoritarianism.” This involves a vertical process of top-down censorship and punishment, extending to firing those who violate the sacred values of wokeness. (Location 2697)
The second prong, which is more consequential, is political discrimination. This entails a horizontal dynamic of peer pressure on individuals not to deviate from orthodoxy, and uses social punishments such as reputational shaming or shunning to chill speech and compel self-censorship. Rather than being fired, this threat involves not being hired, promoted, or published, as well as being socially ostracized. (Location 2701)
Such forms of activity, which John Stuart Mill called the “despotism of custom,” violate what Greg Lukianoff terms the free speech culture, a societal ethos of toleration which underpins genuine freedom of expression in society. (Location 2712)
The Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE) maintains a database of speakers whose invitation has been withdrawn at the behest of activists. (Location 2727)
The number of cancellation incidents recorded by FIRE and other databases is relatively small, a fraction of a percent of the total number of staff and students. But this only scratches the surface of hard authoritarianism on campus. Universities often punish academics short of firing them, or threaten them with disciplinary action, all of which passes under the radar. The only way to measure the reach of this punishment apparatus is through anonymous surveys of random academics. One of the first attempts is a study for the UCU, the main union for academics in Britain. This surveyed 2,300 British and 4,100 European academics in 2017 about their experiences of being punished for speech.190 The authors asked, “Have you ever been subjected to informal or formal disciplinary action, or the threat of disciplinary action (up to, and including, dismissal) because of [the following].” Response categories included views expressed in teaching, research, in discussions elsewhere in the university, in public fora, and off campus. Just over 1 in 10 of this overwhelmingly left-leaning sample said they had been disciplined, or threatened with discipline, for expressing their views. I found a similar rate in surveys I conducted of American, Canadian, and British academics during 2020.191 (Location 2756)
23 percent of the UCU sample reporting bullying and 27 percent saying they were psychologically pressured for their views. (Location 2771)
This tells us that many academics are conflicted, with their cultural socialist values inclining them to cancel in the name of equality and harm protection but with their liberal values acting to cross-pressure them. (Location 2837)
Are Academics More Tolerant than the Public? (Location 2843)
Academics Are Both More Woke and More Liberal (Location 2894)
The idea that academics might hold both cultural socialist and cultural liberal values more strongly than the average member of the public accords with how Philip Tetlock thinks about people’s rank-orderings of values. Individuals may rank two values highly, but prioritize one over the other when the two conflict. Thus, even if someone values free speech and minority protection relatively highly, one will be sacrificed when people are forced to make trade-offs. (Location 2895)
True Belief or Spiral of Silence: What Motivates Cancel Culture? (Location 2956)
Ideology or Preference Falsification? (Location 2962)
A key question for organizations is whether employees truly believe in the corporate ideology or whether most oppose it and are concealing their actual views. According to Timur Kuran, people often engage in “preference falsification” of their true beliefs, whether living under a fascist or communist dictatorship, or when working in an organization where cultural socialist norms have moral force.208 Cass Sunstein terms this emperor’s-new-clothes scenario “pluralistic ignorance,” claiming that it pervades organizations on matters as nonideological as criticizing the boss or the company.209 Is there a silent majority that is afraid to say what most people believe, with no one willing to make the first move and stick their head above the parapet? (Location 2963)
Within the quiet half of opponents, 73 to 81 percent agreed that “not being seen as racist” was a motivation in not raising their hands while just 6 to 9 percent of them disagreed. Being viewed as not being a team player or as a Republican or Tory were considered less important motivations for self-censoring. The study shows that in white-collar settings, preference falsification accounts for just a quarter of support for DEI measures (that is, half of the half who oppose DEI). The bigger part of the explanation is that half of employees are truly convinced by the “velvet glove” progressive appeal of the equity pitch, falling in behind a vocal minority of strong believers—much as Robert P. George reported with respect to Princeton academics. (Location 2978)
The second, and arguably more important mechanism, is the horizontal peer-to-peer pressure of political prejudice and discrimination. This soft authoritarianism doesn’t lead a dissenter to be fired, but can mean they aren’t hired, promoted, or published. They are not censored, but instead self-censor to avoid being discriminated against. Along the way, political prejudice encourages others to ostracize them or, at the very least, to not befriend, date, or marry them. (Location 3193)
Philosopher Spencer Case convincingly argues that anti-conservative prejudice functions in exactly the same way as racial or religious prejudice. It makes people view others through a distorted lens, seeing only their surface characteristics while wilfully misinterpreting their arguments and refusing to use logic and evidence to evaluate their claims. (Location 3197)
African Americans tend to rate all aspects of identity higher than Whites, so it is important to examine how their views differ from those of Whites. Among Black leftists, what we find is the reverse pattern from that of Whites: those who don’t think White Republicans are racist value their ideology more as a source of identity than Black leftists who think white Republicans are racist. This arguably stems from the fact that White leftist sentiment is ideologically-driven whereas Black leftist sentiment stems more from communal identity, with Democratic sympathy tied to Black identity. More ideologically-motivated Blacks may move away from a communal orientation, becoming less likely to perceive White Republicans as racist. The emphasis on racially-inflected ideology as a source of identity among White progressives contrasts greatly with White leftists’ weak national, religious, and ethnic/racial identities—all important differences from Black progressives, who tend to value these traditional identities more highly than White progressives. (Location 3359)
Many students self-censor, albeit somewhat less than their professors. When asked if they felt they could not express opinions on campus, 22 percent of nearly 45,000 students at 208 mainly elite universities polled by FIRE in 2022 said this happened “fairly” or “very” often (the corresponding rate among their professors is 33 percent). Among conservatives, the number was 41 percent, three times as high as the 13 percent recorded for their left-leaning counterparts. Thus, over four in ten conservative students and nearly six in ten conservative academics self-censor. When we consider that only one in five students and one in ten academics are conservative, this socially-induced censoring of political minorities produces a dramatic loss of viewpoint diversity on campus.255 (Location 3635)
To wit, conservative students self-censor more in left-wing environments than left-wing students do in right-leaning ones. (Location 3643)
Across the entire survey, 74 percent of conservative students self-censor compared to 45 percent of left-wing students. (Location 3651)
Why do conservatives self-censor more on leftist campuses than the left does on conservative campuses? The greater intolerance of the left, which we encountered in the previous chapter, is one likely reason. Another is cultural socialist hegemony within the wider elite culture and its institutions, typically cloaked in the velvet glove of “equity, diversity, and inclusion.” (Location 3657)
The encroachment of hard and soft authoritarianism as a consequence of the spread of cultural socialist ideology is creating a chillier climate for expressive freedom. In the US and Britain, the vast majority of people, between 70 and 80 percent, agree that “political correctness has gone too far.” Fifty-four percent of Britons and 64 percent of Americans say that “the political climate prevents me from saying things I believe because people might find them offensive.” Forty to forty-five percent of Britons and Americans feel less free to express their views on immigration and transgender issues than five years ago while 26 percent of Britons and 37 percent of Americans worry about being fired or reputationally shamed. (Location 3788)
A related pattern shows up among schoolchildren. In a set of surveys of over 1,500 eighteen- to twenty-year-olds each, I asked British and American young people to think back to their school days and tell me how worried they were about being shamed, punished, or expelled from school for voicing their opinions on controversial subjects. The eighteen-year-olds were still in school at the time of the surveys, while the nineteen- and twenty year-olds were asked to reflect on their school experience. (Location 3822)
“Every record has been destroyed or falsified, every book rewritten, every picture has been repainted, every statue and street building has been renamed, every date has been altered. And the process is continuing day by day and minute by minute. History has stopped. Nothing exists except an endless present in which the Party is always right.” —George Orwell, 1984 (Location 4061)
Cultural socialism’s deculturating imperative is especially damaging to cultural conservatives: people attached to traditional categories and narratives, notably those of nationhood, ethnicity, gender, language, or religion. For instance, the trashing of Christopher Columbus is experienced as an ethnic insult by some Italian-Americans and a national insult by many Americans. Including biological males with penises in the category of “female” strikes some women as erasing the boundaries that define their female identity. Trying to scrub masculine and feminine nouns from Spanish or eliminate words like “Master of the College” from the lexicon in the name of hypersensitivity is viewed, by those attached to their language, as vandalism.284 (Location 4070)
Political philosopher, Michael Walzer, writes that there can be no communities without boundaries. (Location 4078)
Cultural liberals are uneasy about the unequal treatment of people based on race which stems from the application of the philosophy of White blood guilt embedded in Critical Race Theory. In addition, they are concerned about the violation of the truth-based order that distortions of the historical record, such as the New York Times’ “ The 1619 Project”—which erroneously claims that slavery was the main motive behind the American Revolution—produce.286 These are features of a totalitarian order that liberal giants like Hannah Arendt and George Orwell warned us about. (Location 4086)
As Ryszard Legutko notes, the cultural left is no more interested in the actual culture of minority groups than the communists were in the folkways and traditions of the working-class. Their goal is to turn social groups into political parties.288 “People of color,” like the proletariat, is a political category, with the objects of devotion expected to act accordingly by elevating oppositional politics over tradition and beauty. John McWhorter adds that those such as Kwame Anthony Appiah (one could add Frances Fukuyama or Amy Chua) who think the woke moment is about “identity politics” and a neo-Herderian tribalism that separates group from group in horizontal space, miss the fact that it is actually about vertical power divisions between oppressor and oppressed, or “who is hurting who.”289 Only in this manner can we understand progressive women deferring to trans women when it comes to accessing female spaces, or White gays and lesbians reacting sheepishly when Black members accuse them of racism, acquiescing in the dividing of their movement. (Location 4110)
On the right, this can take the form of George Soros, the World Economic Forum, and their plans to impose a globalist “great reset.” On the left, it revolves around phantoms such as “White supremacy” and the specter of a return to 1950s misogyny and homophobia, all symbolized by figures such as Donald Trump. While such concerns are not wholly without foundation, they are greatly exaggerated in order to activate fears, mobilize support, and manufacture consent. Cultural socialism tends to center the violent excesses of the right, specifically the Holocaust, slavery, and the period of Jim Crow segregation. In Britain, colonial atrocities are sometimes added to the mix while in Canada and Australasia, the expulsion of natives from lands earmarked for settlement gets top billing. (Location 4127)
Nevertheless, for progressives, the crimes of the left, from Stalin to Mao to Pol Pot, disappear from view. The sins of non-European imperialisms, slave trades, and genocides are airbrushed away. This curation of history permits cultural socialist catastrophists to foreground their favored White supremacist bogeyman. Like Oceania hyping up the threat from Goldstein, we are told it’s always a minute to midnight. Those who back reductions in immigration or a repeal of critical “antiracist” initiatives are cast as crypto-Nazis bent on segregation and genocide. No wonder one of the biggest misperceptions that progressive voters have about conservatives concerns their views on race. (Location 4139)
The Canadian left’s cultural triumph reveals two important things. First, as with Steele’s account of White guilt in America, the rise of minority sacredness doesn’t just concern a shift of moral authority from White to non-white, but entails a transfer of legitimacy from right to left. The left, by identifying itself with sacralized minorities, appropriates their cultural power to wield it against conservatives. This helps us understand the comments of a White MP from Trudeau’s Liberal Party who expressed her fervent hope that the mass graves agitation would prove Canada’s George Floyd moment.310 Far from damaging their identity, acknowledgments of national and ethnic guilt make White progressives feel virtuous, superior, and good about themselves.311 Moreover, their investment in political ideology as a core identity, alongside weak attachments to race, religion, or national tradition, mean that sacrificing traditional ascriptive identities on the altar of ideological community is an irresistible no-brainer. Canadian cultural socialists were desperate for their Floyd experience, keen to capitalize on the febrile mood south of the border to vent their identity and cement their moral hegemony. (Location 4308)
As Douglas Murray writes in The War on the West, “Racism is not the sole lens through which our societies can be understood, and yet it is increasingly the only lens used.”323 (Location 4398)
In his magisterial War on the West, Douglas Murray makes the case that Western self-loathing stems, in large measure, from the decline of religion. This has created a spiritual vacuum which McWhorter’s “religion of antiracism” and other variants of wokeness have filled.327 I am less convinced. (Location 4461)
the content and structure of Christianity could even facilitate the suspension of disbelief, boosting woke. Christian doctrine such as “blessed are the meek,” resistance to slavery, or the valorization of poverty has its counterparts in socialism—a resemblance not lost on critics like Friedrich Nietzsche. For Pascal Bruckner, White guilt plucks at the same strings of original sin and redemption that can be found in New Testament-focused Christianity.330 (Location 4477)
A similar pattern can be seen for national pride. Britain and the United States, in contrast to Germany or Australia, have experienced a notable decline in national pride in the 2000s. (Location 4497)
Religiosity is a partial barrier to wokeness in Britain but not in the US. It also does not appear to prevent people from seeking meaning in politics. Pew asked Americans in 2017 about their sources of meaning and fulfilment. As Figure 7.7 illustrates, the biggest difference among White Americans is between left and right, with around 30 percent of both religious and secular “liberals” reporting they find a great deal of meaning in social and political causes. By contrast, only 6 percent of conservatives without religion and 12 percent of conservatives who are religious find meaning in politics. (Location 4507)
Young Whites are less religious than the old, but the spiritual “void” is filled mainly by the meaning they attach to career, pets, and hobbies. Controlling for age, education, race, sex, and the meaning people find in family and religion doesn’t alter the fact that the left cares more about politics than the right, and thus punches far above its weight in donations, on Twitter, in institutions, and in protesting. As Richard Hanania writes, politics is more of a cardinal value for leftists, allowing them to dominate many institutions. (Location 4512)
Stepping back from these results, what jumps out is that the direct impact of religion on woke attitudes is modest. Christianity is generally only a bulwark against cultural socialism insofar as it inclines individuals to be conservative. A leftist who attends church regularly is not less woke than a leftist who doesn’t. As Douglas Murray acknowledges, many churches have shifted with the cultural tides. While this is most evident among the more liberal Anglicans and Episcopalians, it should not be forgotten that Pope Francis participated fully in the ritualistic head bowing that took place in the midst of Canada’s “mass graves” hysteria.332 (Location 4520)
The idea that a loss of religion has produced a spiritual vacuum which the religion of antiracism is filling receives little backing from these results. If religion roared back, this would reduce wokeness somewhat, but only because it would produce more conservatives, who would then track toward patriotism and anti-wokeism. The return of a strong secular nationalism (think Eastern Europe or East Asia) would have a bigger effect. (Location 4526)
If the woke wave were, like Covid, concentrated among senior citizens, the implications would first be felt in the voting booth rather than the universities. However, this mind virus has scored its greatest victory among the young, who are the future of Western society, and within the highly educated, who are its leaders. As the Millennials and Gen-Z enter corporations, law firms, newsrooms, and government, they are bringing their cultural socialist values with them. Instead of assimilating to the liberal outlook of the adult world, they are compelling those adults to bend the knee to their woke worldview.336 While corporate leaders at Netflix or the tech firms may have pushed back slightly, it is only a matter of time before the new generation takes over. The shock troops of this movement are concealing the thought- and speech-control aspects of their creed under benign labels like “inclusion” or “antiracism.” At the same time, they weaponize taboos to cancel those who resist, deploying this twin-track “radioactive velvet glove” strategy to stunning effect. (Location 4753)
Age or Cohort: Will the Young Outgrow Their Intolerance? (Location 4836)
It was once a truism in American public opinion research that those with university education, young people, and “liberals” (i.e., those on the left) were more tolerant of every form of speech. Moreover, toleration, based on six core items from the University of Chicago’s long-running General Social Survey (GSS), showed steady increases since the survey was first fielded in 1972. But then, something strange happened. As California political scientists Dennis Chong, Morris Levy, and Jack Citrin remark, “Each cohort born after the Baby Boom generation has become less tolerant than its predecessors of offensive speech about race, religion, and gender – bringing an end to the long-term growth of tolerance of all forms of unpopular expression.”344 Whereas age and education were once indicators of tolerance, they now predict intolerance. The young and highly-educated, the authors argue, are more likely to be socialized into the new norms of cultural egalitarianism. (Location 4837)
It’s true that those who don’t plan to ever go to university are less leftist and supportive of political correctness. (Location 4910)
School is arguably the more important driver of change. In the US, 93 percent of eighteen- to twenty-year-olds polled said they were taught or had heard about at least one critical race or gender concept, such as “White privilege” or the idea of many genders, in school. In Britain, the comparable figure was nearly as high, at 73 percent, with eighteen-year-olds more exposed than twenty-year-olds, indicating a rising penetration level. In nearly seven in ten instances, in both countries, these ideas were taught as truth rather than contested. There is no question that indoctrination in these pseudoscientific concepts is pervasive in schools in North America and Britain. (Location 4917)
The psychological argument for the rise of cancel culture and spread of critical race and gender concepts among young people is that they are a more emotionally fragile generation. Jonathan Haidt, Greg Lukianoff, and Jean Twenge attribute rising mental illness to a combination of protective parenting and social media—though they are agnostic about whether the new emotional fragility is in turn responsible for the Great Awokening.356 (Location 4947)
On this view, our culture has shifted from one which encouraged resilience and stoicism, but sometimes promoted emotional hysteria about socialists and minority groups toward one that generally encourages victimhood and fragility, with emotional hysteria directed instead toward conservatives and historically dominant groups. The latter modality is most developed among those open to new values: far leftists and the young. (Location 4954)
First, indicators of poor mental health among young people soared. The proportion of female teens reporting symptoms of major depression jumped from 13 percent in 2012 to 29 percent in 2022. For boys, the share increased from 5 to 12 percent. Rates of anxiety increased even more. (Location 4964)
Why Sexuality, Ideology, and Mental Health Are Connected (Location 5046)
Parenting is Unlikely to Explain Wokeism (Location 5064)
Helicopter parenting and social media do not, in my view, shed much light on the rise of cultural socialist extremism. In my survey of American eighteen- to twenty-year-olds, I asked respondents how they got around their neighborhood when they were a child aged seven to thirteen. Response categories ranged on a five-point scale from “I always had to be transported by an adult” to “I was always allowed to go out on my own.” Neither this nor whether they said they were raised strictly or permissively correlated with mental health. Whether children were given the right to roam also was not associated with sexual orientation, or with support for White guilt and other woke positions. (Location 5065)
This is not principally a story about the share of women going to university rising from 40 to 60 percent over these decades. Data from the Higher Education Research Institute (HERI), which has conducted a representative sample of around 100,000 first-year university students every year since 1970, shows that women were somewhat more conservative than men in 1970 (though they have always been less supportive of free speech). By the early 2000s, women had become slightly more progressive, and by 2016, women were sixteen points to the left. (Location 5118)
Age, gender, and gender-age gaps on culture war issues help explain unusual voting patterns emerging in Anglosphere countries such as Britain and America. In a viral piece for the Financial Times, John Burn-Murdoch shows that the well-established pattern of people shifting right as they age has broken down among Millennials in Britain and the US. Thirtysomething Millennials seem to be just as left-wing as they were when they were eighteen. Morten Støstad adds that this pattern is also true of Australia and New Zealand but does not hold in western Europe. A reasonable conclusion is that the rise of cultural socialism among youth, especially women, is the major reason for Anglo exceptionalism. (Location 5154)
Chapter 9 The Politics of the Culture War (Location 5353)
We are in the midst of the third major wave of cultural conflict of the post-1960s period. The three are connected, but also substantially independent of each other. The first cultural contest concerns the rise of liberal social mores around sex before marriage, divorce, sexual content in the media, homosexuality, and the decline of religion. The benefits of this liberalization included greater freedom to experiment and leave damaging relationships, as well as greater equality for homosexuals, divorcées, and nontraditional families. Negatives associated with this change revolve around the breakdown of the family, the loss of what Robert Putnam calls “bonding” social capital, and the rise of mental illness. (Location 5392)
The second cultural shift involved an increase in immigration levels and a shift away from assimilation and commonality toward multiculturalism and the celebration of difference. The benefits of this change included greater cultural richness—at least initially—and a more comfortable environment for minorities. Its downsides include the loss of social cohesion and trust (Putnam’s “bridging” social capital) due to greater ethnic diversity, and increased polarization between the proponents and opponents of cultural diversification. (Location 5397)
The third cultural fault line is what we currently term the “culture war.” This pertains to the clash between cultural socialism and cultural wealth. Cultural socialists favor using administrative, discursive, and state power to engineer equal results between, and prevent emotional harm to, historically disadvantaged identity groups. Cultural liberals and many conservatives converge over the need to protect freedom of speech and conscience, due process, equal treatment, and objective truth from the dictates of critical race and gender theory; and from an associated cancel culture designed to censor those who say things that might be deemed even microscopically “harmful.” Cultural conservatives go further, seeking to defend the nation, Whites, and men from unequal or defamatory treatment, and to protect traditional definitions of words such as woman or mother, or the historic names of buildings and streets. (Location 5402)
Culture War III, which is the subject of this book, has two battlefronts: a) cancel culture and b) critical race or gender theory. As cultural socialism advanced, a backlash developed, and both woke and anti-woke forces now riff off the other, as we demonstrated in Figure 3.6. (Location 5443)
While I date the first culture war to the sexual revolution of the 1960s, cresting with the religious right in the ’80s and ’90s, the second culture war from the late ’80s, rising in the 2010s and 2020s, and the third from the mid-2010s, it is vital to appreciate that all three originated in the mid-’60s. Affirmative action, gender quotas, sensitivity training, and political correctness are third culture war phenomena that begin as early as the late ’60s, soon after the “big bang” that is the race taboo. (Location 5447)
Battles Over the History Curriculum in the Anglosphere (Location 5490)
What distinguishes the politics of the culture war today from its Culture War III precursors in the ’80s and ’90s is the higher centrality of questions around speech boundaries and the past. Never in the postwar period have secular questions around cancel culture, Critical Race Theory, or gender ideology played such an important role in national and state election campaigns. (Location 5586)
The results reveal two major patterns. First, around 70 percent of the US public oppose the cultural socialist position justifying speech restrictions and punishment. Second, the “very liberal” (i.e., far left) segment of opinion, representing 13 percent of the sample (the lowest of five lines in each series), stands out as the only group that supports cancel culture. Even among this far left segment, 40 to 50 percent oppose censorship and punishment for speech on most questions. Indeed, it is really only among the small “Progressive Activist” 8 percent of highly online, mainly White, highly-educated, and relatively young far-leftists that cancel culture wins majority support.411 (Location 5594)
The fact the public leans 2:1 against cancel culture and gender theory and Critical Race Theory in both Britain and America means these are potential wedge issues that right-wing parties can use to peel votes away from the left. (Location 5612)
The Rising Salience of the Culture War (Location 5642)
Progressive overreach on cultural issues has progressed to such an extent that it can no longer be ignored by a growing swath of the electorate. Recall as well that these ideas remained relatively cloistered inside academia until the mid-2010s. Their escape off campus, fueled by the rise of social media and the new click-driven journalism, is a major reason why these issues are entering the political arena. (Location 5643)
The Culture War Cleavage in Western Politics (Location 5876)
Cultural socialism’s malign impact on the material world flows through two broad pathways. First, a self-fulfilling prophecy in which the ideology of systemic racism (or transphobia) leads to actions which harm the marginalized groups that radical progressives claim to want to help. This widens group disparities and sharpens a group’s perceptions of harm, reinforcing the narrative. Adverse policy impacts are suppressed or blamed on ideological bogeymen such as White supremacy to feed the cycle anew. (Location 6145)
Second, recursive radicalization: cultural socialism suppresses debate in mainstream institutions using taboos such as racism, creating a vacuum which populist right entrepreneurs fill. Woke words and deeds, embodied in captured institutions, fan White, male, or cis-female reactance, feeding populism still further. Populism, in turn, prompts a woke moral backlash, which fuels a subsequent populist response, and so on, in a cycle of mutual radicalization that tears the social fabric and prevents a society from reaching its economic, social, and foreign policy goals. (Location 6148)
Something similar can be said for indigenous people in Western societies such as Canada and Australia. Versions of virtue signaling, or what Shelby Steele terms “dissociation” from racism, abound in this area. From Land Acknowledgments and paeans to “indigenous knowledge” to Australia’s “National Sorry Day” and the inclusion of Maori words in academic papers in New Zealand, elite progressives fall over themselves to outdo each other in collective self-flagellation. While moral panics like the Canadian “mass graves” hysteria give White progressives meaning, flying the national flag at half-mast does nothing to address the actual problems indigenous people face. (Location 6255)
This is pathological, doing the precise opposite of what Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT) asks us to avoid, namely what Lukianoff and Haidt term the three “great untruths:” “1. What doesn’t kill you makes you weaker. 2.Always trust your feelings. 3.Life is a battle between good people and evil people.”467 (Location 6284)
Psychologists emphasize the importance of believing that you can control your mind and body. Yet, on a core “locus of control” question, I found that Black Americans who read a passage from CRT firebrand Ta-Nehisi Coates emphasizing how society and the police prey on Blacks measurably depressed respondents’ sense of self-belief. That is, when prompted, “When I make plans, I am almost certain that I can make them work,” 83 percent of Blacks who read other passages of text (or no text) said they could realize their life plans while just 68 percent of those who read the Coates vignette said they felt they in control of their lives (see Figure 10.1). This is a finding that I have replicated, suggesting that even a small dose of CRT’s radical pessimism is enough to disempower minorities. Multiply that by the millions of victim-centered stories, memes, and videos circulating online and you have a recipe for collective disempowerment. (Location 6293)
The full impact of the Great Awokening on minorities has yet to be tabulated. In 1994, not long after the Rodney King riots, 56 percent of American Blacks said that discrimination was the main reason why “many Blacks don’t get ahead.” This then fell steadily to the point that in 2012, 54 percent of Blacks said Blacks were mostly responsible, with just 30 percent saying discrimination was. In this period, the rate of eighteen- to nineteen-year-old Black male incarceration plunged 72 percent, though there were a number of other factors also at work.469 After the upheavals of 2020, this sense of agency evaporated. As of 2021, a staggering 68 percent of Blacks said “discrimination” was the main reason for Black underperformance, with a mere 25 percent claiming that Blacks were mainly responsible for their condition.470 Only time will tell if this media-fueled narrative further damages Black progress. This of course will be used as evidence for systemic racism, furnishing evidence for wokeism’s self-fulfilling prophecy. (Location 6302)
The evidence for a progressive sin of omission—orthodoxy obscuring root causes and generating damaging policy outcomes for marginalized groups—is considerable. Here is a partial list of cultural socialism’s self-fulfilling prophecies: •Suggesting that the idea that Black Americans are disadvantaged by their dearth of two-parent families is a “myth,” despite the fact that differences in family structure explain a third of the racial income gap.482 Woke taboos around race and gender limit the ambit of pro-family policy, helping to perpetuate race gaps. •Focusing resources, foundations, and political activity on progress for women while ignoring the educational and economic underperformance of men has knock-on effects on family formation and stability. The failure of men constricts the pool of attractive mates for women and may increase domestic violence and the appeal of misogyny. Male suicide hits loved ones most. And male underperformance affects racial outcomes because Black men do especially poorly compared to Black women, hampering the socialization of young Black males.483 •Allowing underperforming schools and universities serving minority students to deflect accountability for poor results by foregrounding Critical Race Theory. Meanwhile teacher-training colleges appear more interested in politicized pedagogy than instructing teachers in practical classroom techniques.484 This allows substandard teachers and schools to deflect scrutiny, perpetuating racial attainment gaps. •Using systemic racism to excuse greater vaccine hesitancy among minority communities while amplifying narratives such as the Tuskegee syphilis tragedy which feed minority mistrust in medical authorities.485 This leads to higher mortality among minorities compared to Whites, another gap used to prop up the narrative of systemic racism, thereby completing the circle, in self-fulfilling fashion. •Longstanding rape shelters being forced to close unless they alter women-only admission policies. This forces vulnerable women to lose the support they desperately require.486 •Feminists, out of racial sensitivity, ignore cultures of rape among some indigenous Australians, preventing justice for vulnerable women.487 Once again, the results are the opposite of what cultural socialists purport to want. •White progressives blame African corruption and economic development on the legacy of colonialism, suggesting that only Whites have agency. This excuses the nepotism and graft of African leaders like Robert Mugabe or Jacob Zuma, perpetuating African underdevelopment. As Remi Adekoya ruefully observes, “[White progressives display] an incredibly paternalistic and patronising attitude to Africans, painting them as helpless children who, even when they steal from their people, probably do it because the white man has told them to. All this only serves to downplay the role of corrupt African leaders in impoverishing their people: how thrilled these rulers must be as those useful idiots… (Location 6404)
Western cultural socialists also shield China from criticism, as when American progressives decry antagonism toward China for repressing the Uyghurs, reflexively tag the Covid lab-leak theory as anti-Asian hate, or when Trudeau tries to deflect criticism of Chinese interference in Canadian elections by smearing this as racist. (Location 6562)
Russia, meanwhile, has learned from the likes of the American left and Trudeau that accusing opponents of being Nazis—in this case the Ukrainians—is a reputable strategy. (Location 6566)
A final foreign policy factor is the impact of falling military recruitment, especially among White men, many of whom stem from conservative small-town backgrounds. This shortfall echoes trends in the police, and is evident in both the United States and Britain. If major western militaries are perceived as unpatriotic or pushing DEI rather than unity, this could impair their ability to maintain troop levels, altering the balance of global power. (Location 6574)
The first point to note is that this struggle must involve a broad alliance of conservatives, classical liberals, and even traditional socialists. This will ensure the largest possible winning coalition for the push to restore normalcy. The aim is not to jettison cultural egalitarianism, but rather to turn the dial back to an optimal point at which costs to competing values such as reason, liberty, cohesion, and excellence are reduced. Valuable rules, such as free speech, equal treatment, due process, and an objective truth-based legal and scientific order must be reaffirmed and only abridged in extremis. (Location 6821)
The challenge to liberalism is not the one faced by American Framers like James Madison or citizens of authoritarian countries. Instead, it is more similar to the threats identified by Thomas Hobbes and, to some extent, John Locke, who lived during a more anarchic age than Madison. Whereas Madison feared the tyranny of government against its citizens, Hobbes worried about private violence in an age rent by vicious religious war and ideological division. John Locke agreed with Hobbes that governments and citizens enter into a social contract to secure protection for freedoms. Among the natural rights governments help defend are those of life and property, even as Locke also worried about governments’ threats to those rights. As Steven Pinker notes, violence in anarchic contexts like tribal competition or a failed state is orders of magnitude higher than in places with strong governments, even if repressive.511 Eighteenth-century liberals such as Madison were concerned to delimit a sphere of individual rights against the King. By contrast, the Hobbesian conception of liberalism enjoins politicians to use government to protect civil liberty. Both the Hobbesian and Madisonian traditions are important and require appropriate balancing. (Location 6826)
This can be hard to grasp for many classical liberals, weaned on Madisonian liberalism and the threat from authoritarian regimes. The easiest way to think about the problem is to imagine society consisting of three levels: state, intermediate institutions, and individual citizens. The state can oppress the citizenry, in which case robust courts and constitutions offer protection. Intermediate institutions act as a check on state power. This is the way classical liberals such as the American Framers thought about liberalism. (Location 6835)
However, it can also be the case that intermediate institutions or private individuals can become corrupt, threatening citizens. In this case, the state (normally the police) must intervene to protect individual rights. (Location 6839)
John Stuart Mill recognized the danger that nongovernmental social pressure plays in stifling freedom, defending free speech against it in the most robust terms as key to both human flourishing and the pursuit of truth.512 (Location 6843)
While governments may sometimes infringe on civil liberty, they are open to scrutiny from the media and electorate in a way institutions are not. Thus, I worry less about the overreach of elected governments than of unelected administrative elites. The strong libertarian backlash to lockdowns in popular media and protests in North America, indicative of a fear of government, contrasts sharply with the often-tepid response to violations of expressive freedom in institutions. In my view, the latter is a far more cut-and-dried case of illiberalism than the former, where many deaths were occurring and politicians had to make quick decisions in an atmosphere of high uncertainty and risk. This reveals that liberal impulses are much more finely honed against government than against institutions. (Location 6885)
Devolving power to public bodies allows democracy to be subverted by bureaucrats, teachers, or other public employees whose political commitments are increasingly opposed to the will of the democratic majority. (Location 6890)
Why Government Intervention Is Imperative (Location 6927)
The more bricks-and-mortar we get, however, the more difficult it is to devise market solutions. Interlocking systems of regulators, accreditors, insurers, advertisers, clients, and the HR, compliance, and communications departments of corporations limit the ability of large firms to stand against the woke consensus. Tech firms such as Google, Twitter (now X), and Meta/Facebook have reached a size where competition is next to impossible, locking in monopoly advantages. Finally, elite universities, museums, and schools benefit from similar first-mover legacy effects as well as locational advantages. These limit the potential for market-based solutions and parallel institutions. This is not to say there is no role for new entrants in these spheres, only that they are not going to effect system-level change. (Location 6937)
When it comes to education, in the debate between libertarians like David French who wish to rely only on persuasion and markets, and interventionists such as Chris Rufo who prefer democratically elected government action, I incline toward the latter. This does not mean I endorse a purely combative strategy of tit-for-tat measures or applying maximal power wherever practicable. Instead, power must be exercised judiciously, consistent with a set of Hobbesian-Millian liberal principles premised on maximizing individual liberty, due process, freedom of conscience, and equal treatment. The aim should be to achieve political impartiality in public institutions and respect for citizen’s rights while respecting the will of the democratic majority. (Location 6943)
The final point in favor of government-led reform is that organizations and law can shape culture, as with smoking and seatbelt bans.525 Cultural socialists have gained control of our education system, as well as much of popular culture, high culture, and other meaning-making centers of society. Enormous resources from foundation endowments, corporate profits, and government tax revenue are being channeled into socializing new generations, remaking society through cohort change. I’m not suggesting that most of what we see on television or in schools, universities, and museums is ideology. Rather, what is being replaced is a thin but vital layer of patriotic-cum-classical liberal symbolism, narrative, ethos, and values. It’s as if the national flags displayed throughout Britain gradually morphed from the Union Jack into the Chinese flag. Nothing substantive would have changed—players would still kick a ball in front of fans, we would still fret about the cost of living and the weather—but something extremely important will have been lost. (Location 6954)
Free Speech: Laws should defend maximal freedom of expression, including protecting individuals from being fired or experiencing a detriment for stating their views. Achieving this may require new legislation, precedent-setting court cases, and guidance issued by government and agencies. Equality law will need to be amended to specify that free speech takes precedence over considerations of “hostile environment” and the duty to foster good relations between groups until a high and well-specified threshold is reached. Note that freedom of speech at work (as distinct from outside work) is only strongly protected in certain professions, notably for university professors, but should be defended elsewhere wherever possible. In other professions, it may be that speech outside of work can be cause for punishment if clearly intended to cause harm to one’s employer, such as recommending a competitor’s product (but excluding whistleblowing, which must be protected). (Location 6967)
Political Neutrality: Issue guidance and proactively enforce political neutrality in the administrative layers of all public bodies (i.e., K−12 schools, universities, government agencies, and public media like the BBC or CBC). Use elected government to regulate and audit elite institutions, including private common carriers like tech firms (notably Big Tech algorithms) for political discrimination. All public institutions which bear on culture and society must be recognized as potentially political and treated as such, albeit with an eye to steering them toward political neutrality. A useful metric might be partisan differences in public opinion survey data, or a measure’s unpopularity. Any issue where there is a partisan divide of twenty points or more, i.e., over teaching “White privilege,” or is supported by less than 40 percent of the population, should be avoided. Government shouldn’t intervene in private sector and civil society bodies, but private sector firms which act as common carriers—as with monopolistic or oligopolistic tech firms—can be regulated to abide by laws pertaining to the equal treatment of viewpoints. Finally, political campaigns should be kept out of internal spaces, with buildings compelled to only fly common insignia such as the national flag. A good example of best practice is a Norwich, Ontario (Canada) bylaw preventing the flying of politically-coded emblems, such as the pride flag, on municipal property.526 (Location 6974)
“Equivalent Action:” Make political beliefs a protected characteristic, preventing political discrimination. This is already in European and British law following the Grainger (2010), Redfearn v. Serco (2012), and Forstater (2021) cases. It is also present in eleven US states, notably California, New York, and Washington, DC.527 Furthermore, ensure that any equity, diversity, and inclusion measures on race and gender are matched by “equivalent action” on political beliefs, with the option for the institution to roll back race/gender DEI to achieve equivalence with political beliefs. This means taking political discrimination as seriously as race or gender discrimination. If there is race/gender monitoring or quotas, the same must hold for vote and ideology. If a public organization is reluctant to apply monitoring or quotas to voting and ideology, it must remove them for race and gender. Fines and terminations should be used if a public organization repeatedly refuses to comply. This is an attempt to chill an organization’s leadership but is justified on the grounds that this lifts chilling effects on dissenting individuals inside the organization. While some counsel scrapping equality laws altogether, this is a mistake as this is politically unattainable. Monitoring equality is legitimate if the aim is to lift the weak or… (Location 6985)
“People are the Policy:” Open public bodies up to political appointments, as with the US Supreme Court. Conservative governments should prioritize getting committed individuals into key roles in agencies and public organizations in order to ensure that policy is actively carried out despite the resistance of ideologically-opposed employees. Where necessary, captured public bodies such as the major US civil rights agencies may need to be scrapped and others created anew—though this should be a last resort given the importance of institutional knowledge and workers’ right to retain their jobs if… (Location 6999)
A Federalist Society for the Bureaucracy: Peopling organizations requires nurturing and mining talent. Most academics, students, and intellectuals lean left, hence conservatives were long outgunned in judicial appointments until the conservative legal movement mobilized.529 The Federalist Society is adept at recruiting dissenting students who believe in constitutional originalism. They help to vet candidates for clerkships and court appointments to the point that a law student from an elite university who leans right is as much as fourteen times more likely to clerk than the vast majority of their classmates who lean left. In this manner, FedSoc nurtures a small but important seam of conservative and classical liberal students and connects them to wider professional networks inside the system. We need a similar approach to nurturing a cadre of public servants who can represent the views of the majority in other elite institutions. Along with like-minded intellectuals and politicians, they can form what political scientists call a policy network to achieve change. An important pioneer in this regard is the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025, which is coordinating around 100 conservative organizations to generate a list of 50,000 individuals which an incoming Trump administration can appoint to government positions.530 The… (Location 7005)
NRA for the Culture War: As a supporter of gun control, I’m no fan of the National Rifle Association, but its effectiveness cannot be denied. It punches far above its weight in public opinion. Drawing from its playbook means devising scorecards for politicians on questions of speech and heritage protection based on evaluating their legislative record and public pronouncements. These should be made available to local constituents during leadership selection campaigns and to the press with an eye to engineering the primarying or deselection of candidates who are aligned with cultural socialism. To some extent, this occurred in the British Conservative leadership race when Penny Mordaunt, a relatively cultural socialist candidate and frontrunner, lost when her views on race, sexuality, and gender ideology came to light.531 A set of pledges can also be devised which candidates can be asked to sign up to. Refusal to endorse these could be used as a barometer of non-aligned politicians who support—or are unwilling to resist—the tenets of cultural socialism. As Richard Hanania writes, what this will do is make it “as unthinkable for a red state to support race or sex preferences… (Location 7019)
A Christian Coalition for Secular Culture: The religious right and its mass movement organizations such as the Christian Coalition, March for Life, or Focus on the Family have been extremely effective in knitting together a large church-based grassroots network that can be mobilized to pressure school boards, lobby politicians at all levels, and get out the vote. I’m not a fan of their views, but there is no question this movement has an outsized impact on the abortion question despite the fact most Americans do not support a strict pro-life stance. The cultural left is far more politically-organized and conscious than the center or right. A grassroots movement is vital for raising consciousness, coordinating political activity, and sharing best practice at local, state, or provincial and national levels. Moms for Liberty, with its 150,000 volunteers, is a sterling example on the critical race and… (Location 7031)
An Austrian School for Culture: The Austrian School of Economics was a key component in economic liberal resistance to socialism. A number of its key figures, such as Ludwig von Mises and Friedrich Hayek, laid the groundwork for the neoclassical revolution in economics and policy. Straussians formed another important current in the postwar economic right’s intellectual armory. Ideally, cultural liberal and conservative ideas would be nourished in networks based in universities. With today’s progressive monoculture on campus, especially in the soft social sciences and humanities, think tanks such as the conservative-leaning Manhattan… (Location 7040)
Heterodox or right-leaning universities such as Hillsdale College and the University of Austin in the US, or the University of Buckingham in Britain can help nurture a new generation of countercultural thought leaders and bureaucratic appointees. Dissenting research centers such as the Hoover Institution at Stanford, SCETL at Arizona State, or the Adams Institute near Harvard can expose students at mainstream or elite universities to new ideas while recruiting talent. Long-form publications such as American Affairs, UnHerd, City Journal, and Quillette can incubate and develop ideas. Political training schools such as Civic Future in Britain, founded by former Conservative Party Director of Policy Munira Mirza, can help tutor aspiring politicians in political… (Location 7046)
Contextualization of Past and Present: Government must actively shape the curriculum in the public schools that most children attend, making this a top priority. Schools should be required to teach the excesses of utopian movements such as communism alongside those of right-wing movements like fascism, since there is no appreciable difference in genocide risk between the two.533 Wild Swans, 1984, or The Gulag Archipelago should be required reading. In terms of history and culture, acts of conquest, violence, slavery or discrimination by the nation or its dominant ethnic group must be contextualized by discussion of pre-colonial, pre-settlement, and non-European imperialism,… (Location 7053)
“Retain and Explain:” Following British policy spearheaded by Conservative culture minister Oliver Dowden, this prevents activists from tearing down statues and ensures that local government cannot remove a historic statue or monument without clearance from the Communities Secretary in the national government.537 Ideally, this should be extended to the renaming of streets and buildings as these are also of historic importance. Government should also issue and enforce guidance, on political impartiality grounds, preventing the use of politically-coded new terms in government such as “chestfeeding” for breastfeeding, “Latinx” for Latino, or “pregnant person” in place of mother. (Location 7070)
Vivid Political Communications: Cultural socialists can lose arguments but still win on the emotional plane if they dominate the “fast-thinking” mode that most people usually operate in. In a saturated information environment, they can disguise their illiberal policies using euphemistic velvet gloves, counting on people’s short attention spans and the positive glow of the progressive brand to conceal an authoritarian iron fist. Effective public communications should use vivid images and slogans to cut through deceptive labels. Pictures of tattooed male rapists destined for women’s prisons like Scotland’s Isla Bryson/Adam Graham, or Billboard Chris’s substitution of “chemical castration of children” in place of “gender-affirming care” are examples. When Canadians in a survey were shown a picture of Kayla Lemieux, a transgender teacher with oversized prosthetic breasts, they reacted far more negatively to this being permitted by the school’s dress code than when this was simply described. The flip side of empathy for some is often antipathy to others. Affirmative action targets should be described as “anti-White, anti-Asian, and anti-male discrimination.” Critical Race Theory and gender theory-inspired “equity and inclusion” policies which single out White and male identity for denigration are, in fact, practicing “anti-White racism,” “anti-male sexism,” or “anti-conservative indoctrination.” Simple messages which convey these realities are required to get through to busy people who tend to grant progressives the benefit of the doubt. The unmasking technique should, however, be situated within a positive message of equal treatment in pursuit of unity. (Location 7077)
From Taboos to Jurisprudence: This may ultimately prove the most important step we can take to restore sanity to society. It means reconstructing the all-or-nothing big bang race taboo of 1965 to make it more rational and proportional to harms caused prior to sensitization. This means using proportionality, precedent, principle, and the possibility of redemption to move from Black-White taboos to graduated social penalties. It means assuming a reasonable degree of resilience on the part of minority citizens. It requires decentering race, gender, and sexuality. As I have previously argued, we need a moral jurisprudence, perhaps in the form of a bipartisan online task force, to respond in real time to… (Location 7089)
As Democratic pollster David Shor suggested in 2021, the Democratic Party has become “trapped in an echo chamber of Twitter activists and woke staff members,” turning off working-class voters of all races.539 Ben Cobley describes something similar happening to Labour in Britain, whose 2017 rule book mentions women or gender 206 times, race 97 times, and class twice. Almost all references to representation focused on gender and race. (Location 7115)
Florida’s Ron DeSantis has been a leading innovator in tackling cultural socialism in the public sector. He has pursued a set of higher education policies, beginning with the Stop WOKE Act and continuing with HB 999, that do some good things, such as abolishing DEI bureaucracies, diversity training, and racial preferences.554 However, other aspects overstep the mark into illiberalism. I largely concur with FIRE’s assessment that banning the teaching of entire subjects, such as Critical Race Theory, runs counter to academic freedom. Weakening tenure undercuts the job security that dissenters, typically conservative or gender-critical, require to defy convention. It stipulates the content of general education requirements, mandating that these focus on American history and Western civilization from a more positive point of view. This violates the right of academics to craft their own curricula. (Location 7245)
This is where Florida’s legislation hits the target. It sets aside funds for the establishment of non-leftist social science and humanities centers. Using public money to fund these islands of nonconformity at each university is, in my estimation, the best way to reintroduce viewpoint diversity into the faculty. This, of course, gives rise to the charge of “affirmative action for conservatives,” which is fair comment. An alternative possibility would be to implement the equivalent action policy I favor, in which all action on race and gender diversity must be matched by equivalent action in hiring conservatives to achieve equal representation. This is likely to have a bigger impact on political diversity in numerical terms. Still, both approaches are vital because only in the centers can the weight of progressive peer pressure lift sufficiently to allow more open discussion of ideas. In complex systems, “both/and” is a better strategy than “either/or.” (Location 7263)
DeSantis’s HB 999 gives university presidents and trustees more control over hiring. Here, there are risks as well as opportunities. (Location 7285)
Ninety percent of American pupils attend public school, as do 93 percent of their British counterparts. Public school education is the most important lever for changing the way future generations of voters think, thus classical liberals and conservatives must make this their top priority. (Location 7298)
Here Ron DeSantis is undoubtedly world-leading. He has banned the teaching of CRT-related concepts and restricted discussion of gender identity in public schools. He has worked to elect anti-CSJ school-board candidates and rejected the College Board’s CRT-influenced AP African American Studies course. He has stood against the progressive Common Core and action civics national curriculum.558 His policy stamina is defying a pattern of capitulation that has been established over the past forty years under Reagan, the Bushes, and even Donald Trump; under John Major and David Cameron in Britain, and John Howard and Scott Morrison in Australia. Progressive educators now simply expect to get their way even if they have to endure a few performative complaints. This systemic failure reflects a lack of conservative policy follow-through, short political memories, and a misplaced trust in professional educators. (Location 7301)
DeSantis’s lead has been followed by many others at state and local levels. As of writing, in March 2023, forty-nine states have proposed or enacted anti-CRT legislation. There has been a sharp rise in new anti-CRT laws at both the local and state level, even in blue states like New Mexico and California.559 These are important steps toward a less politicized and more balanced classroom. Ideally, teachers would fairly teach both pro- and anti-CRT perspectives, but this is currently unrealistic due to the influence of critical pedagogy among teachers interested in such topics. Should this change and trust return, more leeway can be granted to teachers. (Location 7308)
This recalls my third point, echoed by Vivek Ramaswamy, that political beliefs should become a protected characteristic like religious belief.560 Political discrimination thereby becomes actionable in the large organizations which enforce adherence to DEI, i.e., cultural socialism. Corporations are free to implement DEI policies. However, government is within its rights to refuse to transact with firms who force their employees to take and pass CRT-based DEI training. (Location 7319)
Liberal Universalism Is Not Realistic (Location 7719)
Cultural liberals who argue that we should dispatch identity talk so that people focus only on the individual and a nation defined on the basis of universalist ideals have a point, but the reality of human psychology is that people also possess group identities that matter to them. Cultural socialism is actually not about celebrating such particularity. Rather than cherish actually existing identities, it sets out a universalistic religion based on the currency of victimhood which orders identities along a pole from oppressor to oppressed and demands that those lower on the totem pole bow to those higher up. Minorities must emphasize grievance-based caricatures of their groups. (Location 7720)
Better to pursue what I elsewhere term “multivocalism:” different ways of being American or British or Indian that allow each person to identify with the symbols on the national menu that are most meaningful to them. Different ethnic and ideological groups’ symbolic attachments will overlap but many ethnic majority citizens, some minorities and conservatives will place more weight on landscape, history, and ethnic majority narratives while certain minorities and progressives may identify more with multicultural diversity. That’s fine as all are identifying with the nation.574 Ethnic groups can maintain and express their identity, but space will have to be created for ethnic majorities too as their claims need to be weighed in order for a fairer system to emerge. Groups should express what Jonathan Haidt terms a “common humanity” (rather than “common enemy”) version of group identity, always aiming for a bit less than their maximal demands in order to make the system work.575 (Location 7729)
Transitioning from a victimhood culture to a resilience culture will help historically marginalized groups catch up. It will also reduce cultural socialism’s impact on liberal freedoms (“cancel culture”) and majority identities (“deculturation”). This can begin to draw the sting from the culture wars, helping to reduce polarization and inaugurate a new era of consensus, progress, and cultural efflorescence. (Location 7766)
Winston Churchill or Thomas Jefferson may have said or done things that were typical of their day and offend modern sensibilities. However, such figures must be assessed based on the cards they held, including their cultural assumptions. Indeed, our descendants, once they improve synthetic meat, may look back at most of us in disgust for our complicity in the mass-killing of farm animals, dismissing all of our achievements. Any yardstick which neglects context soon degenerates into ahistorical moralism. (Location 7773)
A better way forward is, ironically, to take a leaf from the postmodernist notebook. Roland Barthes’s notion of the “death of the author” argues that the meaning of a statue, artwork, or text is in the eye of the beholder. The meaning ascribed to a work by its author does not define its essence. This overstates the case, but in considering our heritage, we should grasp its wisdom. Namely that successive generations attach new meanings to old symbols, even the Confederate flag. Many pay little attention to the historical markers and symbols in their environment, or don’t understand what they represent. Only after activists infect people’s minds with their cultural virus do people “awoke” to their grievance-driven project. (Location 7778)
To engage in offense archaeology, sensitizing people only to the injustice embodied in a work, is to strip our species of its links to spiritual or genetic ancestors, constricting our horizons into a one-dimensional grievance narrative. Rebalancing should foreground the positive even as we recognize past generations’ moral failings. When it comes to honoring specific individuals, a calculation which weighs good and bad deeds should guide us: no one should celebrate Hitler just because he built the Autobahn. This said, retaining Nazi memorabilia or even a Hitler statue in museums can be justified on antiquarian grounds. We must be able to learn from the distasteful parts of our past. As Orwell reminded us, vandalizing or erasing the past in order to uphold a politically pure present is a feature of totalitarian societies. (Location 7784)
Authenticity is another important feature in the culture that is being traduced. Restaurants are permitted to discriminate in the hiring of staff if this is germane to creating an authentic experience for the customer (i.e., French waiters at a French restaurant, Chinese cooks at a Chinese restaurant). (Location 7818)
Ethnic majorities in the West should be able to unselfconsciously express their culture as this adds to the world’s distinctiveness. Racial quotas such as those imposed by the Oscars represent the triumph of cultural socialism over cultural wealth and should be jettisoned.582 Casting by gender and sexuality should likewise balance the need to challenge stereotypes with the imperative to authentically portray gender-typical desires and behavior. In a similar vein, progressive moral themes in modern productions, such as discrimination and injustice, should ideally be better balanced with traditional ones such as loyalty, excellence, or bravery. (Location 7830)
National and religious conservatives tend to argue that negative liberalism, with its focus on individual rights, has paved the way for the woke revolution, and that we require a state imbued with the religious and traditional values of the community to rebuild.584 I rather contend that we must defend liberal procedures, including civil rights, but should use the state to enforce political neutrality or political balance in public institutions. This means that schools can either not mention history and civics at all, or teach them in such a way that balances conservative and progressive perspectives. The bureaucracy can either scrap anything that is politically contentious, or go for balance: talk about Black history and gay pride, but only if it this is kept in proportion to these groups’ share of the population and balanced by celebrations of the ethnic majority (or majority-inflected traditions like, in America, Pioneer Days or St. Patrick’s Day) or conventional family life. (Location 7843)
At the core of my political theory is a cultural version of the equity-efficiency trade-off outlined in Table 1. Cultural socialism, like economic socialism, saps growth. It does so by suppressing or destroying social categories, rules, practices, and distinctions that generate cultural wealth. This is true of capitalism, sports teams, and companies; families, nations, and the gender binary; as well as more micro-level practices such as punctuality, incarceration, and standardized testing. These yield goods for society, but also create winners and losers, and exclude those who reject the values of a given structure. The good society is one that takes exclusion and inequality seriously, adopting reforms that increase the good. Those who do not fit the norm should be tolerated and assisted. Disparate outcomes should be addressed through moderate redistribution, if possible, with attempts focusing on strengthening the weak rather than weakening the strong. (Location 7856)
The optimal balancing of equity and efficiency concerns should respect the rights of the marginal but cannot denigrate the identities and values of the mainstream. It must take care to optimize across all members of society, accommodating but not centering the weird, the outsiders, and the downtrodden. Paradoxically, by increasing cultural wealth, this will produce the collective goods that subaltern groups also enjoy. (Location 7870)
