Political Correctness/Totalitarian Humanism

Can Anyone Define “Woke”? As in “Wokeness”?

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By Keith Preston, Dean Phoenix, Eric Pierce, Joe Corbett, and Ryan England, with additional insights, ideas, debate, or counterarguments offered by Adil Sarker, Muhedin Hodzic, Nicky Reid, Aiden P. Gregg, Ze Zakre-Koeur, EG Smith, Kristoffer O’D Donnellan, Christopher Maxwell, Christopher Warren, and Summer Scott.
January 12, 2023
The core ideas associated with the “woke” viewpoint appear to be the following:
1) racism, sexism, homophobia, and other forms of traditional out-group enmity or invidiousness are the ultimate evils;
2) animals and plants possess something approximating the same intrinsic moral worth as humans in a way that essentially constitutes a modern animism or pantheism;
3) a range of economic viewpoints from neoliberalism to social democracy to neo-Marxism to quasi-socialist, utopian socialist, communal or cooperative economics;
4) “health” and “safety” are overriding principles to which other values must be subordinated;
5) reason and science must be subordinated to the principles of “social justice”;
6) traditional civil liberties derived from Enlightenment liberalism, such as due process and freedom of speech, religion, and the press, must be similarly subordinated;
7) technocracy, managerialism, the cult of the expert, and “educationism”;
8) the deification of “progress” in a universalist context;
9) democratism (the deification of the state as a manifestation of some mystical “general will’);
10) the myth of some metaphysical social contract rooted in the theories of Hobbes, Locke, and/or Rousseau;
11) the distribution of social status based on the consumerist ethos;
12) pop psychology (e.g., “the personal is political” or “getting in touch with your inner child”);
13) human perfectibility (e.g., the “human potential” movement and transhumanism);
14) the duty of all institutions to uphold all or most of the values mentioned above;
15) the subordination of civil society and non-state institutions to the state to enforce “social justice” principles;
16) the subordination of local political units to a central authority for the same purpose;
17) the pursuit of global governance to enforce ecological, “social justice,” and “human rights” values.
To be sure, not all individuals who could reasonably be identified as “woke” hold to every one of the principles mentioned above, but a good “rule of thumb” is that most “woke” people, regardless of their specific political affiliation, will typically hold to at least a majority and often a supermajority of these values. Elements of woke also transcend most conventional ideologies, whether neoconservative, neoliberal, reform liberal, social democratic, neo-Marxist, socialist, libertarian, Green, or anarchist. The far right end of “woke” might be represented by someone like the late Trotskyite-turned-neocon Christopher Hitchens, who wanted to bomb Afghanistan “out of the Stone Age,” while Antifa rioters or SJWs shouting down conservative speakers on college campuses may be the far left end.
The actual term “woke” has supposedly existed in black vernacular for something like 100 years.  Recently it mutated into an insult about the excesses of radical/extremist multiculturalism, postmodern relativism, and identity politics. As others have pointed out previously, “wokeness” is yet another fake religion, rehashed Christianity, although one that would be considered heretical by many traditional Christians. “Wokeness” has also mutated into a mask that corrupt corporations and politicians hide behind. A Marxist interpretation of “wokism” would define and confine the term woke to its more specific cultural identity references and the valorization of those identities over all others, especially concerning class identity, since woke is, in fact, a kind of false consciousness ideology of the ruling classes to distract from class consciousness.
“Wokism” is a view of the world that holds a certain idealism about what humans are and sees humans as having identities that are “pliable” and not fixed to the actual physicalities of our actual biological state or the material realities of our existence. While gender dysphoria may be something a person experiences and is a part of their personality structure, transgender ideology itself is essentially a denial that our sex is encoded at a very high genetic level. Because gender ideologists assert that gender identity is malleable and changeable at a whim and try to draw a line between sex and gender. For instance, modern economic leftism sees all of us as oppressed potential rocket scientists and astronauts. Because the post-modern left (it is necessary to distinguish between the “woke” and old-school leftism here as the latter are more grounded) believe in ideas such as post-scarcity.
So, in summary, “wokism” is something the nouveau left propagate, and it’s fundamentally a form of idealism that views everything as being pliable and up for negotiation (and throws out the facts of the matter and the practical consequences to uphold this view). “Wokism” is basically what Thomas Sowell calls the “unconstrained vision,” as illustrated by Trotsky’s quote: “The forms of life will become dynamically dramatic. The average human type will rise to the heights of an Aristotle, a Goethe, or a Marx.” One of the fundamental points leftists (in the vein of the Trotsky quote) try to dispute is IQ distribution but also the distribution of physical prowess and similar attributes. So, all this modern nouveau identity leftism is, is the old-fashioned “tabula rasa” doctrine repackaged into a package emphasizing “physicality” and material nature. The latest rendition of the idea of human perfectibility which came from the Enlightenment through thinkers like Rousseau or Locke’s “tabula rasa” concept.
To some degree, “wokism” represents a personality type or state of mind as much as an ideology or beliefs. For instance, there are conflicting “woke” perspectives like health nazis vs. fat positives, anti-Islamophobia vs. feminism and LGBTQism, trans vs. TERFs, sex positives vs. SWERFs, open borders vs. neo-Malthusianism, humanitarian hawks vs. Third Worldists, compulsory integration vs. black separatism, urbane cosmopolitan consumerists vs. degrowth eco-ascetics, and the range of political and economic ideologies previously mentioned. There is also the matter of class bias. Some “woke” people consider themselves superior to others because they are more educated or originate from a higher socioeconomic level than the “deplorables” (e.g., “rednecks,” lower-middle-class whites with conservative political leanings, uneducated religious fundamentalists, etc.). Although this conflicts with other “woke” strands, such as those that glorify poverty (“degrowth”) or those who blame everything on rich people (who are usually characterized as “straight white males”). “Woke” is like the church in the sense of having multiple denominations and sometimes conflicting views.
The problematic aspects of “woke” are as much psychological and a matter of personality types as actual beliefs. Of the beliefs, values, and attitudes listed in the above description, some may be generally good, some may be generally bad, and some may be either one depending on the application.  And some predate the rise of “wokism” and have been incorporated into the ideological superstructure of “woke.” It’s more the direction it gets taken in that is the problem. Jonathan Haidt’s explorations of the psychology of different ideologies also provide certain interesting insights into this phenomenon. Another recent psychological study points out the factors that are associated with “left-wing authoritarianism.” As the authors of the study describe their findings:
Authoritarianism has been the subject of scientific inquiry for nearly a century, yet the vast majority of authoritarianism research has focused on right-wing authoritarianism. In the present studies, we investigate the nature, structure, and nomological network of left-wing authoritarianism (LWA), a construct famously known as “the Loch Ness Monster” of political psychology. We iteratively construct a measure and data-driven conceptualization of LWA across six samples (N = 7,258) and conduct quantitative tests of LWA’s relations with more than 60 authoritarianism-related variables. We find that LWA, right-wing authoritarianism, and social dominance orientation reflect a shared constellation of personality traits, cognitive features, beliefs, and motivational values that might be considered the “heart” of authoritarianism. Relative to right-wing authoritarians, left-wing authoritarians were lower in dogmatism and cognitive rigidity, higher in negative emotionality, and expressed stronger support for a political system with substantial centralized state control. Our results also indicate that LWA powerfully predicts behavioral aggression and is strongly correlated with participation in political violence. We conclude that a movement away from exclusively right-wing conceptualizations of authoritarianism may be required to illuminate authoritarianism’s central features, conceptual breadth, and psychological appeal.
Other attributes of “wokism” might include:
Belief in one or more postmodern, postmaterialist, and broadly progressive strains of critical theory that include but are not necessarily limited to feminist theory, queer theory, critical race theory and intersectionality in a manner that, to varying degrees and consciously or unconsciously, is characterized by one or more of the following:
1 – Manichean. Meaning the world is viewed is being divided between pure good and pure evil, with no middle ground. In this case, the struggle is between those with marginalized and oppressed identities (good) and those with privileged identities (evil). There is no neutrality here.
2 – Pseudo-religious. Consciousness of the oppression faced by people with one or more “marginalized” identities is seen as conferring something akin to moral and spiritual grace, while those who question or deny claims to oppression by such people is a kind of moral taint or original sin. In more extreme forms of wokeness, all people who bear a privileged identity are automatically tainted, regardless of their beliefs.
3 – Faith based. Questioning the theory is indicative of holding on to latent racism, sexism, homophobia, or privilege. Wokeness either openly or implicitly rejects empiricism and reason alike as white male constructs, and demands that woke people “prove” their claims in an objective manner are indistinguishable from harboring bigoted values and “punching down.” Claims made by adherents to the anointed schools of liberationist thought are to be believed without question, and one’s willingness to do this is the measure of one’s belief in the inherent goodness and grace-conferring nature of marginalized identities, which is the first crucial step on the road to achieving social justice.
4 – Reductionist and Deterministic. No other factors besides whether or not one has “privileged” or “marginalized” identities matter in the evaluation of human affairs on any level. A white male accused of being racist or sexist is automatically guilty, since they can be nothing else in a society that is completely and utterly defined by nothing other than racism and sexism.
5 – Paranoid and Apocalyptic. People who don’t believe are not to be seen as simply having a different worldview. They are evil, and their only possible motivations are hatred of oppressed and marginalized people. This leads to an uncompromising, crusader-type mentality. You cannot countenance negotiation with the forces of oppression. Only total victory over them is good enough.
6 – Millenarian. This is an old religious term meaning belief in a coming transformation of society that is drastic and utterly total. Perfection is achievable, and nothing less will do. Incremental reform isn’t good enough. Only a total remaking of society from the ground up is acceptable. The inevitable failure of the movement to achieve its impossible goals is attributed to oppressive “istophobias” being even more pervasive than was previously thought. The doctrine can thus never be questioned for its lack of efficacy. The only thing that can be done is to double down.
It is clearly an outgrowth of Abrahamic religion, particularly Protestant pietism rooted in various Lutheran and Calvinist traditions, though secularized. The Radical Reformation was a huge influence also. It’s funny how few people grasp that both right and left in America are like angry, bitter, warring cousins who share a common ancestry. Note that the country’s strongest bastions of wokeness and political correctness exist in either puritan New England or other areas where some kind of strict Protestantism once held sway. Though they secularized, the puritan impulse never really died. It is possible to see much of today’s political and cultural landscape through a religious lens. Our culture has secularized only on a surface, superficial level. Scratch deeper, and we are deeply committed to rediscovering God, however unwilling we may be to admit this. A truly existentialist state, wherein higher meaning and purpose are seen as genuinely superfluous, is a hard place to get to for most people. Almost every strident atheist I know has simply latched themselves onto some other cause or narrative to devote themselves to. For a lot of these folks, it seems fairly similar to a religious conversion.  An example would be white cops and civilians alike washing black protestors’ feet during the 2020 turbulence.
Another factor is that “wokism” is ultimately massively amplified and overrepresented by mass media, i.e., it’s a media phenomenon more than a physical phenomenon. If you look at Google search volume for “Am I transgender?” there is no evidence that people are more interested in this question now than they were ten years ago or even 20 years ago. Yes, there are a few significant spikes, but these spikes only comprise a few dozen searches out of millions and millions of daily search volumes.
Something which can suggest from the graph is that these things propagate in times of severe economic strife. Note, for instance, that the really sustained search volume in the chart only appears after 2008. Extremist ideologies start coming out of the woodwork whenever there is a period of economic crisis or decline. So we must question the sincerity of these movements and look at them as coping methods or ways for people to “legitimately” opt out of mainstream work and commerce perhaps. For instance, in the UK after 2008, there was an explosion of “disabilities.” No… people weren’t really ill. What was happening is that people were “self-diagnosing” with various issues so that they could claim disability benefits and opt out of the official labor pool. The government at the time didn’t necessarily object to this because it helped to suppress actual unemployment statistics.
Academia and mass media’s nearly monolithic embrace of “wokism” is one of the truly fascinating phenomena of our time. It comes down to the fact that totalizing and absolutist ideological systems are actually useful to those seeking to preserve the status quo. Because they must push back not merely against their natural enemies among the reactionaries but also against those who put forward alternative visions of what an egalitarian or libertarian society might look like. Rather like the medieval church or the Soviet Politbureau, The woke crowd knows that once the spigot is opened even just a bit, they are finished.
And that’s what the woke crowd is scared of. Their foundation is built upon perceived intellectual authority vs. their bigoted prejudiced view of the common man as uneducated and ignorant. So, what the woke crowd hates most is public intellectuals and professionals challenging them on their own turf. They saw what happened to the Catholic Church and the Soviet Politbureau, and they learned. You don’t relax, or you lose your hegemony. Mass media, for its part, had much to gain from embracing wokeness. As corporate institutions in a capitalist society, they have an obvious vested interest in suppressing popular frustration with alienation and inequality. But the classic conservative canards were not working with a newly emergent middle class of women and minorities. Wokeness served their needs perfectly.

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10 replies »

  1. I largely agree – I wrote a similar, much shorter attempt at defining wokeness on Medium recently. Your first point is in essence the same as mine. I disagree that Lockian social contract theory is woke – since Locke clearly defends the individual’s right to reject the state if it threatens one’s person or property. But Rousseau is a fair point. It is millenarian and religious in nature. I think that it’s influence gets magnified mainly due to its control of key institutions – along the like of C Wright Mills’ the Power Elite – such as mass media, social media, and universities. The organs of mass communication, in general.

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  3. If I had to identify the core building blocks of Woke it would be Anglo-Protestant pietism in the cultural realm, digital capitalism in the economic and technological realm, the professional-managerial class in the institutional realm, and “liberal imperialism” in the geopolitical realm, with woke being a modern version of the “white man’s burden” only instead of allegedly rescuing the colored man from savagery the enlightened white liberal is now rescuing the colored man from racism. Still, the social function of both is the same. These four components are the essence of the woke ocean.
    The core trajectory begins with the rise of the merchant class against traditional elites under Cromwell, which evolves into New England Puritanism and Puritan heresies like transcendentalism and Unitarianism, followed by Abolitionist zeal, progressive Christianity, the social gospel, and then secular progressivism fused with the public administration state (with the latter concept being imported from Bismarckian Germany) within the context of the industrial revolution. I suppose if I wanted, I could trace it back to German Lutheran pietism and Calvinism, or to Roman Christianity, Platonic dualism, Zoroastrianism eschatology and apocalypticism, early salvation cults like Osiris worship, and other philosophies and religions that contain millenarian elements. The point is that woke exhibits features fouud in many philosophies and religions, such as an unconstrained vision (Sowell). Otherworldly utopian ideologies have existed throughout the entire history of human thought.

    I argue against many conservatives’ tendency to identify Woke with the Left. Certainly, many leftist rivers run into the woke ocean. The rivers include Enlightenment rationalism, scientism, French Jacobinism, Marxism, Trotskyism, Fabianism, Social Democracy, critical theory, the culture of critique, Gramscianism, postmodernism, Western Maoism, gender theory, privilege theory, etc. But these are only secondary or tertiary issues. I’ve also heard some traditional Communists and Social Democrats identify woke with fascism because of the influence of Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Schmitt on elements of the woke theory and because interwar fascists were fascinated by Malthusianism, techno-futurism, youth, physical strength and masculinity, homosexuality, drugs, mysticism, romantic medievalism, paganism, etc. All of these things may be influences drawn from the left and right, but none of them are the central thrust of Woke. We also need to consider the role of the intelligence services in developing the New Left and New Right as a controlled opposition through the Congress on Cultural Freedom, neocons, Social Democrats USA, and Buckleyites.

    It goes back much further than the postwar New Left’s focus shift from the proletariat to the socially marginalized. I see the prototype for modern leftist revolutions as being not America, France, Haiti, or 1848 but the Cromwell revolution. As the Marxists will point out, the Cromwell revolution was a bourgeois-merchant class revolution against England’s traditional royal, aristocratic, and clerical elites. But the religious and cultural foundation of the Cromwell revolution was a Protestant Puritan and Jewish merchant class alliance, which is why Cromwell lifted religious restrictions on the practice of Judaism after coming to power. The merchant class revolution fed into the development of English liberalism, represented by figures like John Locke. But while Locke is heralded as a proponent of “religious toleration,” he actually wasn’t. He favored religious toleration for all Protestant and Jewish sects but not Catholics and non-believers. In other words, he favored toleration for the religions of the merchant class but not the traditional elite or, presumably, those further to his left.

    The dual roles of English Puritanism and English liberalism in the colonization of North America and the founding of the United States are particularly important because it was the exportation of the English merchant class culture to the New World. The Puritan colonists often regarded North America as the “new Canaan,” and this later fed into the development of ideas like “American exceptionalism” and America as a “redeemer nation.” As the influence of the Enlightenment eclipsed Calvinism, the former Calvinist sects began to liberalize and/or create heretical offshoots that included all of these same influences like Transcendentalism, Unitarianism, Social Gospel, Progressive Christianity, etc. It was within this cultural milieu that militant Abolitionism developed. For instance, the “Battle Hymn of the Republic” is essentially a Protestant war song, like something out of the Thirty Years War. Only by that time, Protestantism has evolved from Lutheran and Calvinism orthodoxy to these forms of neo-Protestantism. Out of the cultural and intellectual milieu of the Civil War, this “racial redemption” narrative that feeds into the development of modern “wokeism” first emerges. I would agree that the waves of Jewish immigration that occurred in the decades following the Civil War resulted in prophetic Judaism finding a pre-existing cultural milieu in Anglo-Protestant pietism where it could thrive. Judaism had been going through the same liberalization process during the same time as the liberalization of Protestantism.

    Then in the 20th century, we can see the growth of the influence of Jewish liberalism within the context of Anglo-Protestant liberalism, the same way the Jewish merchant class became ascendent parallel to the Anglo-merchant class 300 years earlier. Obviously, there is an overlap between Jewish and Protestant liberals on the race issue. For instance, Jews were involved in founding the NAACP in the 1910s. One reason many Jews were attracted to Communism was the idea that the “workers have no country,” meaning class identity superseded national identity. Many on the Right point out the role of the (largely Jewish) Frankfurt School as a prototype or forebears of Woke, but the Frankfurt School could only thrive in the context of a pre-existing Anglo-Protestantism with an orientation toward secularized redemption narratives, and a pre-existing public administration state for which such ideas could become an ideological superstructure. This is how MLK became a modern secular version of the Jewish Yom Kippur or the Christian martyred savior. This cultural, religious, intellectual, and psychological model is replicated and applied to the “least shall be the first” general ethos of woke pietism.

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  4. Another factor that has to be considered involves the relationship between Woke and the traditional American civil religion identified by Robert Bellah. For much of US history, the American civil religion was the ideological superstructure of the ruling class. This civil religion is an outgrowth of neo-Abrahamic “promised land” and “redeemer nation” narratives. However, the array of cultural, generational, demographic, technological, economic, and political changes since the postwar era have required a gradual reformulation of the American civil religion into the Woke religion. In fact, I think this is the essence of what the “culture war” is all about, whether the traditional American civil religion or the new Woke religion will be the de facto state religion.

    In the same way, Protestants and Catholics were fighting over which religion would be the state religion in the Thirty Years’ War. “Conservatives” (broadly defined to include everyone from evangelicals to Jews like Dennis Prager to “moderates” like Michael Schellenberger to 2010-era liberals) prefer some rendition of the traditional American civil religion. In contrast, “liberals” prefer the new Woke religion. But the real function of both religions has been to convey legitimacy to the ruling class, state, power elite, and institutional infrastructure of any given era.

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  5. I should probably add that my reasons for opposing Woke are polar opposite from those of many conservative or right-wing opponents of Woke. I oppose wokesters not because they are unpatriotic or un-American but because the woke ideology is being used to convey legitimacy on the state and on ruling class institutions generally. I oppose teaching woke ideology in schools for the same reason I oppose compulsory flag veneration or school prayer. I oppose firing employees for being un-woke for the same reason I would oppose firing employees for being gay. I oppose hate speech laws for the same reason I oppose laws against publishing pornography. I oppose compulsory affirmation of woke ideology for the same reason I would oppose McCarthy-era loyalty oaths. I oppose wokescolds for the same reason I oppose groups from previous generations like the Moral Majority, PMRC, or disciples of Bill “Bookie of Virtue” Bennett. I oppose woke laws for the same reason I oppose the “victimless crime” laws criticized by libertarians. For example, many wokesters want to ban or hyper regulate smoking or junk food the same way many social conservatives want to ban marijuana or gambling. I oppose gun control laws for the same reason I oppose drug prohibition. I oppose excessive environmental laws for the same reasons I would oppose religious law or laws against miscegenation or sodomy. In fact, various factions of wokesters and various factions of social conservatives often overlap on a range of issues, e.g. sex trafficking hysteria, anti-alcohol or anti-smoking or anti-gambling crusading in some instances, bans on porn and prostitution, support for drug prohibition instances, support for various forms of religious persecution, many other examples. In other words, I oppose wokesters not because they are “un-conservative” but because they are conservatives.

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  7. Did Anglo-Protestant pietism create the cultural foundation for Cultural Marxism/culture of critique/woke, or did the latter simply coopt Anglo-Protestantism? As I said, it is a symbiotic relationship with roots, going back to at least the Cromwell era and the Protestant-Jewish merchant class alliance. One reason why I tend to think the “JQ” as well as the wider “cultural Marxism” paradigm is overemphasized on the right is because modern woke ideology seems to greatly resemble abolitionist fanaticism that emerged in the pre-Civil War era. I would have been an “abolitionist” if I had lived back then (I’m with Lysander Spooner on that one). Still, abolitionism also assumed an evangelical level of religious fanaticism. John Brown is a good example. He also struck me more as a cult leader like Jim Jones than a serious social reformer. Jews were only .5 percent of the US population at that time. While there were Jews involved in abolition, was abolitionism a Jewish project in and of itself? The Marxists, including Marx and Engels personally, were pro-Union in the Civil War, but can the Union cause be laid at the feet of Marxism? These are among the reasons why I think many of the rivers that lead into the woke ocean are later add-ons rather than the main event, with the actual cultural foundation of these later currents being Anglo-Protestantism.

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  8. The roots of “woke” are sometimes attributed to the displacement of Social Darwinian anthropology by the Boasian paradigm. However, Franz Boas is actually considered “politically incorrect” today because he held that race is a genuine biological category, while the contemporary norm in the social sciences is that race is a social construct with no biological foundation. Although his cultural relativism continues to influence post-colonial studies to some degree, or at least provides something of a foundation built on by others. Boas can also obviously be seen as a transitional figure who rejected the previously dominant “Social Darwinian” or eugenicist views of race (for example, the views of Ernst Haeckel), which today is typically labeled “scientific racism,” and opened the door for the purely sociological view of race that is currently dominant in the social sciences. Darwinian sociobiology continues to impact certain fields like evolutionary psychology (ironically, Kevin’ MacDonald’s field has influenced his views significantly). But the Boasian anthropologists still had to find an audience and patronage for their work to become an established paradigm, which Boas found as a professor at Columbia University, with the patronage of WASP elites. The same thing happened with the Frankfurt School. They were driven out of Germany but found a home in the US with similar patronage. I think this trajectory strengthens my argument that Jewish intellectual culture was merely the seeds planted in the pre-existing fertile soil of Anglo-Protestant religious culture and its cultural derivatives. Btw, while I think “Woke” and its predecessors were an outgrowth of Anglo-Protestant Puritan pietism, I also suspect National Socialism was an outgrowth of German Lutheran pietism, which evolved in a different direction. And it’s not a coincidence that Luther, Marx, and Uncle Alfie were all Germans. All three represented different facets of German culture fused with Abrahamic religion.

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  9. Norman Finkelstein has an interesting discussion of “woke” beginning around 39 minutes into this interview: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LWI4JYnSPKw&t=1s

    What Finkelstein is describing can be traced at least in part to Fred Dutton in the early 70s:
    https://www.amazon.com/Changing-Sources-Power-American-Politics/dp/007018402X

    Colin Liddell has more of a “bottom up” analysis of the origins of “woke”:
    https://neokrat.blogspot.com/2023/04/wokeism-is-expression-of-popular-will.html

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  10. Chris Hedges critique of “woke imperialism” is helpful as well:
    https://scheerpost.com/2023/02/05/chris-hedges-woke-imperialism/

    Also, John McWhorter on “woke racism”: https://news.columbia.edu/news/john-mcwhorter-talks-about-his-new-book-woke-racism

    Vivek Ramaswamy on “woke capitalism”: https://www.chicagobooth.edu/review/capitalisnt-is-woke-capitalism-threat-democracy

    Joel Kokin’s concept of the “new clerisy” is also interesting: https://joelkotkin.com/the-new-class-conflict/

    The use of “climatism” as a weapon against the working class, petite bourgeoisie,, and small capital: https://www.cbsnews.com/losangeles/news/pasadena-to-ban-gas-powered-leaf-blowers-ahead-of-state-ban/

    Michael Lind’s analysis of the conflict between the woke “Big Rich” and conservative “Lesser Rich” is another model: https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/americas-asymmetric-civil-war

    Thomas Piketty’s “Brahmin Left/Merchant Right” dichotomy is another model.
    https://academic.oup.com/qje/article/137/1/1/6383014

    Caleb Maupin’s analysis of divisions within the ruling class builds on these concepts a bit from a Marxist perspective: https://www.amazon.com/Where-America-Going-Marxism-Revolution/dp/B0BW31GMDH

    Bill Bishop’s idea of the “inverted New Deal” is another interesting framework: https://www.100daysinappalachia.com/2020/12/the-inverted-new-deal-elites-vote-democratic-working-class-republican/

    This essay discusses the idea of universities as “woke mission fields” https://newdiscourses.com/2020/12/university-woke-mission-field-dissident-womens-studies-phd-speaks-out/

    Another example includes a proposal to create a federalized “public health” police state: https://thehill.com/opinion/criminal-justice/507847-what-current-police-reform-efforts-lack-a-call-to-federalize/

    This parallels renewed calls for conscription: https://www.military.com/daily-news/opinions/2023/07/29/we-need-limited-military-draft.html along with compulsory national service: https://www.brookings.edu/articles/united-we-serve-the-debate-over-national-service/
    https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/02/opinion/compulsory-national-service-america.html

    This attack on Michel Bauwens is an illustration: https://c4ss.org/content/54521

    Attacks on free speech in Europe (article by Vaclav Havel’s daughter): https://public.substack.com/p/my-country-is-returning-to-totalitarianism?utm_source=post-email-title&publication_id=279400&post_id=142926190&utm_campaign=email-post-title&isFreemail=true&r=5ooh1&triedRedirect=true&utm_medium=email

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