The staffer explained that a scientific-technical solution was out of reach: “Given the direction of grant money these days, our top physicists now devote most of their energies to exploring the connection between the cosmos and the idea of racial blackness and to interrogating the use of terms such as ‘black holes’ among mostly white, heterosexist scientists. And our scientists are increasingly — how should I put this delicately? — inadequate, their departments flooded with race-and-gender theorists since the elimination of selective testing.
“And Madam President, you might as well forget about a military solution. Many in the top brass, as you can probably guess, have been busy naming and renaming bases — Guantanamo Bay has been renamed Naval Base Mumia Abu Jamal, though its, er, mission has hardly changed — and redesigning flags and insignia to remove any trace of the stars and stripes. The generals love CRT. As for the specific infiltration units we’d need for this particular job, those guys have been working remotely since the rolling Covid lockdowns became the norm. They haven’t trained for years and are frankly hideously overweight.
“Madam President,” the staffer was winding up, “your best bet is to level with the public and tell the people you’re going along with Extinction Now. We can hope a pre-emptive US surrender will dissuade them from blowing up our reactors, at least. Turn the Russians into the villains here and insist democracy itself is at stake.”
Within hours, more than half of American residential homes and small businesses would lose power. Gas queues would stretch for miles. Shoppers fighting over basic supplies in grocery stores would resort to armed struggle. Riots would break out in red states and blue, though the federal government and media would strictly refer to the latter as “social-justice gatherings”.
Americans, and the West as a whole, would be foolish to underestimate the security risks posed by woke ideology to our societies — even setting aside the important question of its origin: whether it represents the working out of liberal principles or some foreign ideological invasion, from a source extrinsic to liberal order itself (I believe it’s mostly the former).
Wokeness serves two functions for today’s ruling elites. The first is a kind of ideological control directed against Western working classes: wokeness covers over concrete class and economic injustices — massive wealth inequality, health precarity, stagnant wages and so on — with a thick fog of mystification. It creates an impression of furious change and even revolutionary activity. Yet what is in fact taking place is mostly intra-elite competition and redistribution: a disabled trans woman may be on the board, but workers still have to relieve themselves in bottles for lack of sufficient breaks. Wokeness, moreover, is a powerful regulatory mechanism for the HR department, replacing the old factory discipline with a far more invasive psychological apparatus having to do with workers’ use of language and, in essence, their manners.
But there is a second function, and it’s this one that threatens to upset the whole applecart. As Oliver Bateman has astutely argued, woke censorship also serves to insulate elites themselves from reality. The owners of capital and the dull-witted “meritocrats” who service them would prefer not to be exposed to the discontents of workers — but also to other realities that call their rule into question, whether diplomatic or environmental or military. The system must go on. Wokeness creates a filter for uncomfortable facts.
To take a real-world example: US elites spent decades courting China and inviting the Beijing regime into the international economic order, often at the expense of workers in the American heartland. Then it turned out that the Chinese may have been responsible for unleashing a novel virus that cost millions of lives and untold economic damage (much of it borne by the Western poor).
But rather than face this reality and all it implied head-on, elites deployed wokeness as an insulating mechanism. Linking the virus to its origins was xenophobic in the early days of the pandemic (witness the World Health Organisation’s virus-naming agonies), and suggesting the possibility of a lab leak was likewise racist and “unscientific” to boot. Facebook aggressively censored any lab-leak claims, including a column in the New York Post, where I work. Economic interdependence with China is paramount, and wokeness helps block elites’ own view of its downsides.
You can see how easily this principle, taken to its logical conclusion, could usher in the next cataclysm, one far more serious than Covid-19.
Join the discussion
Join like minded readers that support our journalism by becoming a paid subscriber
To join the discussion in the comments, become a paid subscriber.
Join like minded readers that support our journalism, read unlimited articles and enjoy other subscriber-only benefits.
Subscribe