Morning Wire - The Rise, Impact, and Potenial Decline of Woke Ideology | 12.28.24

Episode Date: December 28, 2024

We explore the origins and societal impact of "woke" ideology and how to dismantle it with Eric Kaufmann, author of The Third Awokening. Get the facts first on Morning Wire. Birch Gold: Text WIRE to 989898 for your free copy of the Ultimate Guide for Gold in the Trump Era. There is no obligation, only information from Birch Gold.Visit GoodRanchers.com and use code WIRE today. Good Ranchers: American meat delivered. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

What is today called woke ideology is a complex and polarizing topic with origins tracing back decades. After expanding during the political correctness of the 80s and 90s, it's culminated in cancel culture and various protest movements that have swept across the U.S. In this episode, we speak to the author of The Third Awakening on how this woke ideology intersects with religion, culture, and education, and how he says the U.S. can reduce its influence. I'm Daily Wire editor-in-chief John Bickley with Georgia Howe. It's December 28th, and this is a special edition of Morning Wire. In today's uncertain economy, more Americans are turning to precious metals to protect their retirement savings. And right now, Birch Gold Group is making it easier than ever to secure your financial future with their special holiday offer. For a limited time, when you open or convert an existing IRA or 401k into a tax-sheltered precious metals IRA with Birch Gold,

you'll receive a free one-ounce American Silver Eagle for every $5,000. purchased. This is their most generous offer of the year, but it will not last long. Don't wait. This offer expires December 18th. Text Wire to 9-8-98-9-8 today. The following is an interview conducted earlier this year. Joining us now to discuss so-called woke ideology and efforts to dismantle it as Eric Kaufman, author of the book The Third Awakening. Eric, thank you so much for joining us. So first, the title of your book is interesting. It's obviously loaded and suggests a pattern going back decades. The third awokening. What does that mean? Right. Well, the book is a critical analysis of the woke phenomenon. And 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. You know, from that flows a fuzzy ideology which says that any inequality of outcome, in desired social, you know, income, social status, etc., 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, 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 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. And then we moved into what I would call the second awokenly. 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 in DEI is something with roots back to that first awakening. 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. 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. A couple of questions prompted by your answer. The Moynihan report, for those who are not familiar with it, can you explain what that found and why it was buried? 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. 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. And so the idea there is the pattern of censorship of ideas or information that counters a narrative must not be disclosed to the public.

Yeah, if you want to express a truth, if you want to freely express that truth, but it offends the sensitivity, of a particular group or people who claim to be spokesman for that group, then you have to shut up or pay the consequences. Now, you've deliberately used a lot of religious language in your descriptions of woke in these movements. Why is that?

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 acknowledgments and taking the knee and jazz hands. And there's a lot of performative public religion. It looks very much like public religion. Ooki's, 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 lord. creates the sacredness around African Americans. And Shelby Steele in his book, White Gills, 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 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 attachment to these groups underpins the system, not any particular ideas. 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. this narrative of the residential schools, mass, graves, the country committing genocide against native peoples. It's not a shred of evidence for that. But it sort of became a talking point. So that's all I'm saying. It's similar to the great awakenings of American Protestantism,

for example. You use the term, quote, left liberals and distinguish that from radicals. What's the difference there and what's their role in promoting or not this wokeism? Well, there have been a number of books by people like Chris Rufo 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. So people like Herbert Rakuza 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, took the oppressor oppressed paradigm out of Marxism and applied it to identity groups, I think has merit.

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. 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, you know, 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%. 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. This alarmist, fascist scare mentality is very predominant amongst those sort of bleeding hard left liberals. Now, the reason all of this matters

is that you argue that the woke movement has eroded freedom, truth, and excellence in our cultures. Could you provide some examples of how this has manifested in society? 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. 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 in the context. 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.

I think there's some people that perceive wokeism as being on the decline now. Others are not so confident that's actually happening. There are major generational differences in terms of views on all of these subjects. What is the trend that you're seeing in terms of the direction that American society is going with these ideas? Well, the bush has been pruned back, but the structures remain largely in place for the next way. For example, and we can see this in debt, 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. 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. 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-McCarthes. 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 immediate voter, the culture is really going to change. And I guess the hope is that there's another swing back with the even, younger generation, but at what point do they actually start influencing culture? That's a question. Now, in terms of wiping out some of the more destructive elements of this, do you feel there's a hope for that? And how would we go about doing that? 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 Rufo, we've got to use government power. And then the libertarian types, you know, like Greg Lukiano for Yashamak, where it's all about persuasion and moral exhortation and lawfare. I think you've 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 schools simply based on their results. They may not have a choice to send kids to a classical school. And in addition, I mean, 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? 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 privileged, or unconscious bias by an adult in the school. 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. In your book, you outline a 12-point plan to roll back progressive extremism. What are some of the high points there? Well, the first thing I would say is, that the political right needs to upgrade the importance of culture, and particularly these culture warped 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. 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. 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, 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 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. For example, indigenous slavery and conquest and genocide, Comanche's 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. 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 hearts 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? Thank you so much for talking with us. Very fascinating topic. Thanks so much. I appreciate it.

That was Eric Kaufman, author of The Third Awakening, and this has been a special edition of Morning Wire. Are you looking for the perfect holiday gift? Skip the grocery store chaos and mystery meat. From premium steaks to wild caught seafood, Good Ranchers delivers 100% American meat right to your door. This holiday season, subscribe to any box and receive an incredible offer. Your choice of free chicken breast, salmon, bacon, or ground beef in every box for a year,

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