Back in the 1980s and 1990s when the US religious right was more influential, I used to be a Richard Dawkins/Christopher Hitchens-like opponent of social conservatives. And I still maintain that a lot of conservatives would gladly maintain a cancel culture of their own when it comes to things they don’t like (flag-burning, porn, weed, “anti-Americanism,” gay literature, satanic rock, gambling, etc). But nowadays, the “religious right” amounts to a subculture of fundamentalist churches and private Christian schools/universities, Islamic mosques, and apocalyptic cults like the JWs or Harold Camping. In my view, the woke/PC/SJW/whatever crowd are the “new social conservatives” only they replace “Faith, Family, and Flag” with “Race, Gender, and F**” and unlike the religious right, they actually have the sympathy of powerful institutions like the media, academia, public sector bureaucracy, professional associations, and increasingly corporate America and even the military. The majority of the “capitalist class” are actually Democrats nowadays, as Bill Bishop and others have documented. The Reaganites and neocons always treated the religious right the same way Trump treats them, i.e. as useful idiots. But “woke” is becoming the ideological superstructure (to use a Marxist concept) of the state and the ruling class.

In trying to trace the cultural and intellectual history of how all that happened, what appears to be the case is that in the postwar era, the rising business class of the Sunbelt launched an insurgency within the power elite in order to challenge the traditional dominance of the “northeastern establishment.” Their intellectual frontmen were guys like Buckley, and they received the support of the intelligence services, essentially becoming the “CIA Right.” Meanwhile, the intelligence services created the Congress on Cultural Freedom as an anti-Soviet faux left-controlled opposition, which included figures ranging from Gloria Steinem to Irving Kristol. Eventually, the “CIA Left” splits into two directions, the “cultural Marxists” of the New Left and the ultra-Zionist, anti-Stalinist-on-Trotskyist-grounds neocons. During the Goldwater-Reagan period, the CIA Right and Sunbelt capital become dominant among the Republicans, eclipsing the Rockefeller Republicans, and cultivating the “neo-Know Nothings” (hardhats, silent majority, segregationists, religious right, etc) as useful idiots to function as their “base.” So the Democrats respond by recruiting the New Left as their “base” while the Rockefeller Democrats/Rockefeller Republicans merge to become the neoliberals with frontmen like Bill Clinton, while the neocons move rightward and join the CIA Right. Meanwhile, the digital revolution happens along with financialization, so “new capital” consisting of tech oligarchs, financial oligarchs, and “bourgeois bohemian” types align themselves with the neoliberals and New Left against remnant Sunbelt elites and “Conservatism, Inc.” Hence, the dominant ideological superstructure becomes what amounts to a synthesis of the New Left and what would have been Rockefeller Republicans a few decades ago.