Only the Economic Left Can Beat the Woke

A woke takeover of what, with apologies to President Dwight Eisenhower, can fairly be called the Academic-Cultural-Philanthropic Complex in the United States and throughout the so-called Anglosphere is now all but complete. This should be both surprising and unsurprising: surprising, because the dominant—that is to say establishment—conceptions of the purposes of education, culture, and even language itself have been transformed in such a short period of time; but also unsurprising, because Woke is an extremely powerful, coherent, and for many morally attractive, not to say morally imperative, worldview, especially to the young, which is something most of its critics can’t seem to bring themselves to fully acknowledge. And almost wherever you look, from K-12 teachers’ unions, to library associations, to museums, to, perhaps more surprisingly, medicine and other STEM disciplines, Woke’s inherent appeal—above all, its immensely seductive moral urgency—is being institutionalized by a bureaucracy whose reason for being is precisely to consolidate this worldview’s cultural hegemony. In these conditions, what will be surprising is if this new cultural system fails to prevail. Read Full Article »