Eric Kaufmann
Appearances
Morning Wire
The Rise, Impact, and Potenial Decline of Woke Ideology | 12.28.24
You know, from that flows a fuzzy ideology, which says that any inequality of outcome in desired social, you know, income, social status, et cetera, between racial groups, between men and women is an outrage in a way. It's a violation of a sacred value. And the second proposition is anything that harms women.
Morning Wire
The Rise, Impact, and Potenial Decline of Woke Ideology | 12.28.24
whether physically or psychologically, members of these historically marginalized groups is also an outrage. So any speech which offends members of such sacralized groups constitutes a kind of blasphemy, and you therefore are liable to excommunication or being canceled, in other words. So that is basically what woke is. You know, what I argue in the book is that we've had
Morning Wire
The Rise, Impact, and Potenial Decline of Woke Ideology | 12.28.24
three waves of this ideology. It's not just post-2015. Post-2015 is the third of these waves. So the first wave, I trace this back to the late 60s, where you did actually have cancellations occurred. Perhaps the first one was the Moynihan Report of 1965 on the Black Family, which was shelved by the Johnson administration. And we then had affirmative action, of course, in the late 60s.
Morning Wire
The Rise, Impact, and Potenial Decline of Woke Ideology | 12.28.24
And then we move into what I would call the second awokening. And these are waves of mobilization and emotional energy. And so we get speech codes and political correctness in that second wave. Then in the third wave, this is where we are. We have cancel culture, microaggressions. But there's a lot of continuity. Affirmative action and DEI is something with roots back to that first awokening.
Morning Wire
The Rise, Impact, and Potenial Decline of Woke Ideology | 12.28.24
So I kind of stress that. This is very much about continuity and acceleration of an ideology rather than a deviation. There are people around who seem to say, oh, everything was just fine in the 2000s. We didn't have a problem. And then all of a sudden this cancel culture came in because of the smartphone or something.
Morning Wire
The Rise, Impact, and Potenial Decline of Woke Ideology | 12.28.24
I'm accepting that things like smartphone and social media accelerate this, but... I'm arguing the problem lies with an ideology, and that ideology, in my view, is very much rooted in left liberalism and not so much in cultural Marxism.
Morning Wire
The Rise, Impact, and Potenial Decline of Woke Ideology | 12.28.24
Yeah. So Daniel Patrick Moynihan, who was doing a report, he was Democrat at the time, he issued a report for the Johnson administration. And he sort of was raising the alarm about a fatherlessness rate, which had reached 25%, which sounds small by today's standards. But he said this was the harbinger of many problems. He was absolutely right. That rate is now 70%, by the way.
Morning Wire
The Rise, Impact, and Potenial Decline of Woke Ideology | 12.28.24
And the white rate is higher than that. But yeah, So that was seen as unacceptable by certain black politicians and their allies. And so it was shelved as being too controversial.
Morning Wire
The Rise, Impact, and Potenial Decline of Woke Ideology | 12.28.24
Yeah. If you want to express a truth, if you want to freely express that truth, but it offends the sensitivities of a particular group or people who claim to be spokesmen for that group, then you have to shut up or pay the consequences. Right.
Morning Wire
The Rise, Impact, and Potenial Decline of Woke Ideology | 12.28.24
Well, I think there is a certain commonality between woke and religion, especially this distinction between the sacred and the profane, that if you cross a line, you are a heretic that must be cast out of the community. and banished. Also, this idea of rituals, for example, like land acknowledgements and taking the knee and jazz hands. And there's a lot of performative public religion.
Morning Wire
The Rise, Impact, and Potenial Decline of Woke Ideology | 12.28.24
It looks very much like public religion. Woke is, it stems from your emotional attachment to particular groups and particular movements. And this begins with the civil rights movement, which I argue is the Big Bang of our moral order. creates the sacredness around African-Americans.
Morning Wire
The Rise, Impact, and Potenial Decline of Woke Ideology | 12.28.24
And Shelby Steele in his book, White Guilds, is very good on this as an African-American who lived through the civil rights movement, which was, of course, just a liberal movement, but it essentially created a narrative of sin
Morning Wire
The Rise, Impact, and Potenial Decline of Woke Ideology | 12.28.24
and a narrative that essentially the cultural power and the moral authority flowed to African Americans, but it also flowed at the same time away from the right and the traditional American narrative towards the left. So this was a real shift of cultural power and of sacredness to these groups. And so... I argue that this detachment to these groups underpins the system, not any particular ideas.
Morning Wire
The Rise, Impact, and Potenial Decline of Woke Ideology | 12.28.24
So because of that, you get these unpredictable waves that can emerge of enthusiasm or moral panics that can emerge. We saw that with the racial reckoning in 2020 in Canada. We had this narrative of the residential schools, mass graves, the country committing genocide against Native peoples. There's not a shred of evidence for that, but it sort of became a talking point. So that's all I'm saying.
Morning Wire
The Rise, Impact, and Potenial Decline of Woke Ideology | 12.28.24
It's similar to the great awakenings of American Protestantism, for example.
Morning Wire
The Rise, Impact, and Potenial Decline of Woke Ideology | 12.28.24
Well, there've been a number of books by people like Chris Ruffo and James Lindsay and Francis Fukuyama and Yashima that talk about the role of essentially post-Marxism. So the white working class didn't bring the revolution.
Morning Wire
The Rise, Impact, and Potenial Decline of Woke Ideology | 12.28.24
So people like Herbert Marcuse and Angela Davis looked to other groups, so African-Americans, the third world masses as the source of their hopes for radical social transformation and the overthrow of capitalism. Now that argument that we moved who took the oppressor-oppressed paradigm out of Marxism and applied it to identity groups, I think has merit.
Morning Wire
The Rise, Impact, and Potenial Decline of Woke Ideology | 12.28.24
But what I would say is that a lot of what we consider woke actually does not begin with cultural Marxism. Now, it's true that critical race theory and radical gender ideology These ideas like systemic racism and patriarchy do owe their origin to cultural Marxist ideas.
Morning Wire
The Rise, Impact, and Potenial Decline of Woke Ideology | 12.28.24
But speech codes, for example, diversity training, affirmative action, none of that, political correctness, none of that comes from this Marxist tradition. Also, the way in which The radical elements have been so easily accepted. You know, Eldridge Cleaver and Angela Davis getting jobs at prestigious U.S. universities. The people of Seattle voting to defund the police by 51%.
Morning Wire
The Rise, Impact, and Potenial Decline of Woke Ideology | 12.28.24
They're not all Marxists, right? But they are left liberals who feel guilty. And they have an alarmist conception of the right that somehow if we even let up for our vigilance for a second, they'll have women back in the home. They'll have Jim Crow segregation. They'll have gays back in the closet.
Morning Wire
The Rise, Impact, and Potenial Decline of Woke Ideology | 12.28.24
This alarmist fascist scare mentality is very predominant amongst those sort of bleeding heart left liberals.
Morning Wire
The Rise, Impact, and Potenial Decline of Woke Ideology | 12.28.24
Yeah, I mean, I think certainly in terms of truth, I talked about where research finds things that are inconvenient. You know, for example, the definition of male and female, you know, that offends trans people to say there are only two sexes. So that's an example of where it erodes truth.
Morning Wire
The Rise, Impact, and Potenial Decline of Woke Ideology | 12.28.24
Now, of course, in terms of merit, awarding places at top universities, awarding grants on the basis of, say, skin color or... Sex, rather than on the basis of your score on a test or how well you've done, that's an example of where merit is eroded.
Morning Wire
The Rise, Impact, and Potenial Decline of Woke Ideology | 12.28.24
In the culture, the fact that a white person cannot write a story about a black person without being accused of some kind of cultural appropriation, that impoverishes the culture.
Morning Wire
The Rise, Impact, and Potenial Decline of Woke Ideology | 12.28.24
Well, the bush has been pruned back, but it remains, the structures remain largely in place for the next wave. For example, and we can see this in data, if we take use of the word racism or sexism in American English language books, there was a spurt in the late 60s, a consolidation at a lower level. It peaked, came down a little bit, but then consolidated.
Morning Wire
The Rise, Impact, and Potenial Decline of Woke Ideology | 12.28.24
second spurt in the late 80s, early 90s. Again, a consolidation at a higher level and then a third spurt in the 2010s. That's sort of how I would expect to see this go. So DEI, yes, there is a certain cutting back of DEI in tech firms and a certain amount of it less in universities, but a lot of that infrastructure remains there.
Morning Wire
The Rise, Impact, and Potenial Decline of Woke Ideology | 12.28.24
And the reason I'm more pessimistic than others is that if you look at the structure of public opinion, It's the young population that are really a lot more woke than old. And that's very different than, for example, when McCarthyism ended in 1953, you could see that the young people were actually more anti-McCarthy's.
Morning Wire
The Rise, Impact, and Potenial Decline of Woke Ideology | 12.28.24
And so the direction of generational turnover was away from Red Scare, for example, whereas the direction of generational turnover now... is in the direction of what I'd call fascist scare and towards woke. And I'm just worried that when those 20-somethings become the media voter, the culture is really going to change.
Morning Wire
The Rise, Impact, and Potenial Decline of Woke Ideology | 12.28.24
you know, we've got to do whatever works and we've got to do a both-and strategy. Because right now, there's kind of a split between the people who say, like Chris Ruffo, we've got to use government power, and then the libertarian types, you know, like Greg Lucchiano for Yashamach, where it's all about persuasion and moral exhortation and lawfare.
Morning Wire
The Rise, Impact, and Potenial Decline of Woke Ideology | 12.28.24
I think you got to do both, but I don't think just the libertarian approach is going to work. And we can look at a number of examples of that. One is schooling. School choice is not going to solve this problem because most people are going to choose school simply based on their results. They may not have a choice to send kids to a classical school.
Morning Wire
The Rise, Impact, and Potenial Decline of Woke Ideology | 12.28.24
And in addition, I mean, the surveys that I've looked at show there's almost no difference in the degree of exposure to critical race and gender ideology between public and private school and even, to a large extent, homeschool kids. And so only those with very committed parents where there is a choice of clearly non-woke instruction, are we going to get a change?
Morning Wire
The Rise, Impact, and Potenial Decline of Woke Ideology | 12.28.24
Meanwhile, the vast bulk of kids are just going to be going through this indoctrination mill. I did a survey with Zach Goldberg at the Manhattan Institute. We found 90% of American 18 to 20-year-olds that we surveyed, we got 1,500, 90% had been exposed to at least one critical race theory concept, that is systemic racism, white privilege, or unconscious bias by an adult in the school.
Morning Wire
The Rise, Impact, and Potenial Decline of Woke Ideology | 12.28.24
So this is saturation level, and there has to be Some way of addressing that, I think Ron DeSantis is showing the kinds of things that need to be done to make the school into a politically neutral space once again.
Morning Wire
The Rise, Impact, and Potenial Decline of Woke Ideology | 12.28.24
Well, the first thing I would say is that the political right needs to upgrade the importance of culture and particularly these culture war issues around critical race and gender ideology and free speech protection and political neutrality in schools, government bodies, for example, in the teaching of history. But you look at the Republican Party, they have largely been asleep at the switch.
Morning Wire
The Rise, Impact, and Potenial Decline of Woke Ideology | 12.28.24
Only very recently are they starting to move, particularly at the state level. You know, you have a very strong infrastructure in the U.S. on the right to hold politicians to account between elections on certain issues, guns, abortion, for example, taxes. We don't have anything like that to hold politicians to account on how they're doing on, for example, affirmative action.
Morning Wire
The Rise, Impact, and Potenial Decline of Woke Ideology | 12.28.24
which has only been banned in four red states compared to 13 red states banning abortion, even though affirmative action is opposed by about a two-thirds majority of the American public. So I argue that NRA or pro-life organizations are a model for the kinds of culture war organizations that need to spring up
Morning Wire
The Rise, Impact, and Potenial Decline of Woke Ideology | 12.28.24
in order to make Republican politicians accountable for their performance on these issues. And that doesn't yet exist. The other thing I'd like to see is certainly a lot of school reforms, particularly on the curriculum side. You should not be allowed to teach that the U.S. was a slave power and engaged in stealing land without teaching about non-white slavery.
Morning Wire
The Rise, Impact, and Potenial Decline of Woke Ideology | 12.28.24
For example, indigenous slavery and conquest and genocide. Comanches nearly wiped out the Apaches. On the West Coast, the British actually ended indigenous slavery. You know, we have numerous empires, the Aztecs, the Ottomans that were engaging in all of these things. So this contextualization is so vital.
Morning Wire
The Rise, Impact, and Potenial Decline of Woke Ideology | 12.28.24
71% of Americans under 25 believe that the native peoples lived in peace and harmony before the arrival of the Europeans, which is the exact opposite of the truth. In fact, the Europeans were actually a lot more peaceable, you know, in terms of your likelihood of being violently killed. And so they're getting a very one-sided sort of moralized view of history. This is where the heart's
Morning Wire
The Rise, Impact, and Potenial Decline of Woke Ideology | 12.28.24
are formed and the emotions are shaped. And I think that has to be the starting point. And so that's where I place a lot of the emphasis in the 12-point plan. How do you gear up the right to focus a lot more heavily on culture?
Morning Wire
The Rise, Impact, and Potenial Decline of Woke Ideology | 12.28.24
Well, the book is a critical analysis of the woke phenomenon. I should say I have an analytical definition of woke. You know, I know it is used as a political epithet, but the definition of woke I use is the making sacred of historically marginalized race, gender and sexual identity groups. That's the one sentence definition of woke. Hmm.