The Cultural Contradictions of the Anti-Woke
Trumpworld could be hastening the next Great Awokening
Since 2010, there has been significant unrest in U.S. society and culture tied to social justice, identity, expertise and much more. The public discussion about these changes has been mostly focused on vibes and anecdotes. It’s been myopic, with stakeholders trying to explain things happening right now almost purely in terms of other things that are also happening today – with a strong presumption that we’re navigating uncharted waters, etc.
One of the primary goals of We Have Never Been Woke was to discipline these conversations. The book shows that we can measure changes in U.S. society and culture at scale. By observing shifts in a more systematic, comprehensive and (literally and metaphorically) measured way, we can better see which institutions, communities and stakeholders underwent changes, and when the changes began. Looking at these empirical indicators also allows us to see that, in fact, the period of rapid change in norms, discourse and activism within the symbolic professions was not unprecedented. It was a case of something. By comparing and contrasting these cases, we can figure out what seems to drive these Awokenings, even as we rule out popular but misleading causal narratives. We can simultaneously get a sense of why these Awokenings end, and what their legacies tend to be.
We can gain deeper understanding of anti-woke movements too.
As We Have Never Been Woke emphasizes, opponents of “wokeness” often share the same basic dispositions as the people they criticize. They engage in politics in much the same way and are driven by the same mix of motives. While they may define themselves against “wokeness,” in practice they have a symbiotic relationship with it. They rely on Awokenings to advance their own position and further their social goals and, as a consequence, attempt to continue public contestation around “wokeness” even after the Awokening has itself run out of steam.
This is the moment we find ourselves in now. Mainstream symbolic capitalists and aligned institutions have been moderating rapidly in recent years.1 However, this course correction arrived too little, too late. Backlash followed each of the previous Great Awokenings. In this case, likewise, backlash had already set in when the moderating trend became clear. The specific form and character of the contemporary anti-Wokening has been significantly shaped by the activism and research of two symbolic capitalists: Richard Hanania and Christopher Rufo.
Their recent bestselling books provide a good window into some of the fundamental symmetries between the woke and antiwoke, and why the anti-Wokenings often prove to be just as contradictory and self-defeating as the movements they arise in reaction to.
Christopher Rufo, America’s Cultural Revolution
Until 2018, Christopher Rufo was a documentary filmmaker who worked for PBS and other mainstream outlets. In his work and public engagements, he defended cities against popular right-aligned narratives depicting them as hellscpaes, even as he worked to address and document urban struggles. Politically, he was a never-Trump libertarian who ran for Seattle’s city council on a platform of addressing homelessness, blight and public disorder. However, he dropped out shortly into his campaign after he and his family were purportedly bullied, harassed and threatened by left-aligned activists. This experience seemed to have had a radicalizing effect on him.
Rather than continuing to focus on issues like addiction, poverty or homelessness, he became monomaniacally focused on understanding and defeating “wokeness.” His 2023 book, America’s Cultural Revolution is both a reflection of what he learned over the preceding five years and a call to action.
The story he tells is as follows: after the 1960s social movements failed in the popular sphere, the erstwhile revolutionaries didn’t give up; they adopted new tactics. Entrenching themselves in academia, they began indoctrinating and radicalizing students who, in turn, carried out a “long march through the institutions” -- subverting everything from non-profits, to the media, to K-12 education, to corporate HR departments and government bureaucracies in the service of their anti-capitalist, anti-American, and anti-Christian radical agenda. Today, Rufo argues, the activists are so well-entrenched and powerful they don’t have to even hide what they’re up to: they overtly wield institutions of cultural production as vectors of activism, and they coerce, punish, threaten and exclude anyone who doesn’t fall in line. Restoring these institutions to their proper purpose will require a counter-revolution from the center and right.
I should say at the top: there is much to like about the book. It is clear that Rufo has done a lot of serious reading and thinking. The book summarizes sometimes dense work by activists and practitioners in a concise, compelling and accessible manner. There is much folks could quibble with in many of those accounts but, on balance, he accurately characterizes his featured thinkers’ lives and arguments. In these and other respects, the book stands head and shoulders above most other right-aligned and anti-woke “explainers” of left-aligned thinkers and activists. That said, the book does have its critics.
As Matt McManus and Nathan Robinson noted, America’s Cultural Revolution does a decent job of explaining what many left-aligned thinkers argued, but it doesn’t really go into much detail about how they arrived at the conclusions they did, how their reasoning went wrong in Rufo’s estimation, or what, specifically, is inaccurate about empirical claims each theorist made. That is, the book doesn’t really argue against the featured scholars and activists, it just presents their views -- apparently relying on the audience’s preexisting commitments to fill in the blanks about why these ideas are bad and must be resisted.
Likewise, as Murtaza Hussein observes, Rufo doesn’t tell a plausible institutional story of how the ideas he highlights were translated into various sectors. He details the arguments of various thinkers, gestures towards ways contemporary rhetoric and policies seem to be broadly aligned with some of the stuff these folks were talking about, and then just assumes that this correlation must entail causation.
Graeme Wood rightly stresses that, although Rufo does an effective job painting many of the figures in the book as crackpots and bad people (like Paul Johnson before him), he’s less successful in conveying why their theories have been so influential: What is it that these thinkers saw or said that made them compelling to lots of smart and knowledgeable people? What allowed their work to persist over decades (when most work, even the few pieces that enjoy success at time of publication, are quickly lost to history)? What is it that Rufo, himself, found compelling about their work, which transformed his approach to social activism? You’ll have a hard time discerning answers to these questions through the book itself.2
In my view, one of the reasons some elements of the book may be a littler thinner than optimal is because the text, overall, tries to explain too much.
DEI, for instance, is not downstream of the “cultural revolution’ Rufo describes. Diversity training, etc. doesn’t flow out of “studies” departments, it predates them and has origins largely outside the academy. Sensitivity training goes back to the 1940s. The training started to be widely implemented contemporaneous with the Civil Rights Acts, as a means of shielding institutions from lawsuits – at a time when many of the activists featured in America’s Cultural Revolution were just getting started, and prior to their campaigns to institutionalize within higher ed.
Affirmative action, likewise, predates the activism described in the book and isn’t even a uniquely American phenomenon. In fact, it was piloted in India and other countries before eventually being adapted in the U.S. following executive orders by Kennedy and LBJ – orders that, again, predated the establishment of “studies” departments.
The book lumps all this stuff together as if it’s all derived from the same chain of activity and actors when, in fact, this is not the case.
More to the central point, Rufo is correct that many activists tried to carve out perches in academia after their social movements fizzled out (as my dissertation advisor Fabio Rojas documented in his 2010 book on this topic). He’s correct that many, quite explicitly, hoped to subvert institutions in the service of radical ends. However, those aspirations, it must be said, have been unmitigated failures.
Far from indoctrinating students, professors struggle to get students to read the syllabus or… for that matter… to read anything these days.
The “studies” departments and initiatives that were set up by the aforementioned activists have always functioned largely as intellectual ghettos and, in fact, exert relatively little influence on mainstream scholarship. “Studies” courses and majors suffer chronic enrollment and funding crises.
High-enrollment majors and departments, and fields that win big grants and prestigious awards – such as business, law, medicine and STEM – these are the departments that set the agenda for universities, which are increasingly run as businesses. Incidentally, business schools strongly promote cultural liberalism — albeit not because they’re down with Angela Davis, but because they push a more general libertarian and instrumentalist outlook on everything (a posture that also includes support for privitization, tax cuts, deregulation, globalization, profit maximization, etc.).
Higher ed institutions are hardly sites of radical praxis. They’re some of the most hierarchical and parochial institutions in the country. One of their primary social functions is to reproduce inequalities and legitimize them on “meritocratic” grounds. These dynamics are even more acute at elite schools – which, not incidentally, happen to be the “wokest” of all. Despite the explicit “social justice” orientation of these schools, they are not churning out social workers, public servants, artists, et al. en masse. Most Ivy graduates go into big law, finance and consulting – where they proceed to rake in healthy six and seven figure salaries by reinforcing and exacerbating many of the social problems that the theorists in Rufo’s book decried.
Zach Beauchamp wrote a review of the book for Vox that, to my mind, was not great – and Rufo had a strong response. However, one criticism that I actually agreed with from the review is that, in a deep sense, America’s Cultural Revolution seems to have the casual flow backwards: it’s not the case that institutions have been taken over by radicals, but that radicalism has been conquered by mainstream institutions. The fact that “radical” ideas and rhetoric have been growing more popular in mainstream institutions, even as little changed about the prevailing order -- this suggests that the proliferation of “radical” ideas doesn’t have the impact that many seem to assume. There is much less than meets the eye in these symbolic struggles.
Rufo, at various points, notes that this symbolic gesturing is primarily an elite game that, if anything, only has negative stakes for the genuinely marginalized and disadvantaged in society. However, to my mind, he doesn’t fully square the circle between that recognition and his central argument.
Nonetheless, the book and its author have been hugely influential in leading conservatives try to seize control of institutions of cultural production. Drawing from leftist thought, Rufo has come to view liberalism (of the classical variety) as a luxury that cannot be afforded at present. Somewhat paradoxically, he argues that conservatives should worry less about rules, norms, traditions, decorum, civility or honesty and more with seizing and wielding power. Winning is what matters – dominating institutions and vanquishing your opponents. The Trump Administration has long been fertile soil for this type of approach.
After Rufo withdrew from Seattle’s city council race, he began documenting “woke” ideas in civil service training and public schools. In 2020, he appeared on Tucker Carlson’s Fox News program to discuss this work. This appearance caught the eye of then-president Trump (an avid Fox News viewer), who pledged to purge the ideologies in question from the government bureaucracy. With an ally in the White House, Rufo helped lead GOP initiatives to create and exploit a panic around “CRT” (critical race theory) and promote “patriotic education” in its place.
After Trump was voted out of office in 2020, Rufo began working with presidential hopeful Ron DeSantis on a hostile take over of New College of Florida and the Stop WOKE Act.
In the wake of Claudine Gay’s disastrous testimony during the “Ivy League Intifada,” Rufo helped push Harvard’s president out of office by exposing her as a serial plagiarist. This prompted elitist attacks by other Harvard faculty on Rufo’s own credentials – which backfired on them in an embarrassing fashion.
In Trump’s second administration, Rufo has played a key role in organizing and legitimizing the White House’s ongoing war on universities. The scale and ferocity of these efforts have put Rufo at odds with folks who used to be his allies including his former Manhattan Institute colleague Glenn Loury. However, Loury has been purged from the Manhattan Institute, while Rufo remains.
Put simply, regardless of what one thinks of him, Christopher Rufo’s understanding of the Great Awokening and its drivers is of immense practical significance. Similar realities hold for Richard Hanania.
Richard Hanania, The Origins of Woke
Richard Hanania is a controversial author. His work consistently marries striking moments of clarity and insight with off-color jokes, apparent Straussian obfuscation and, regularly, remarks that strike many as outright bigoted towards ethnic, gender and sexual minorities.
All of these tendencies are on full display in his 2023 book.
I should confess, while Hanania is understandably polarizing, I’ve learned a lot by engaging with his work. I cite some of his essays in my own book, and I’m not alone: he has hundreds of citations in Google Scholar, mostly for articles he’s published in peer reviewed and respected scholarly journals. His h-index and academic publication record is commensurate with a typical tenure-line assistant professor of social science. Your mileage may vary with respect to what this says about academia, but what it says about Hanania is that his scholarly outputs and reception are comparable to early-career social science professors. In this, he is importantly different from Christopher Rufo — and this difference is reflected in the text (whether for the better or the worse is, again, a matter of perspective).
One of the most important and, to my mind, correct arguments of the Origins of Woke is that attempts to understand this phenomenon through intellectual genealogies are, in a deep sense, missing where the “action” is.
If we shouldn’t do intellectual genealogy to understand the origins of “wokeness,” what should we do? Hanania argues we should look to the law: the civil rights acts, executive orders on affirmative action and Title IX, “disparate impact” legal standards, and so on. On its face, this is a promising route: as the sociologist Frank Dobbin has shown, much of what we today understand as “DEI” was not derived from activist scholars attempting revolutionary praxis, but, rather, corporate HR departments frantically trying to comply with vague federal standards.
Channeling Hanania, Scott Alexander described the government’s message to institutions as:
We notice your workforce has fewer minorities than the applicant pool.
If this remains true, we’ll sue you for millions of dollars and destroy your company. So by the next time we check, your workforce had better have exactly as many minorities as the applicant pool.
But you’re not allowed to explicitly favor minority applicants over whites. You certainly can’t do anything flagrant, like set a quota of minority employees equal to their level in the applicant pool.
Have fun!
The book is very effective at illustrating the absurd consequences of contradictory demands to, on the one hand, actively and demonstrably close statistical disparities along the lines of race, gender and other dimensions without perceptively preferring or penalizing anyone on the basis of protected identity characteristics.
The book’s arguments also have clear policy implications. For instance, Hanania shows how defunding threats pressured Columbia University into adjusting its hiring and admissions policies with respect to affirmative action and Title IX. Non-coincidentally, we now see efforts to use federal funding to pressure institutions into revising their hiring and admissions policies in the other direction.
The upshot of the book is that people who want to defeat “wokeness” should not waste their time on culture wars over discourse, symbols, beliefs and ideas. They should instead focus intensely on legal and policy goals like revising and/or repealing the civil rights acts, affirmative action, Title IX, DEI roles and programming, and the disparate impact standard.
Since he began formulating this thesis, Hanania has had the ear of many Trumpworld associates, from Vivek Ramaswamy to JD Vance. His arguments have played an important role in shaping the policies and priorities of the second Trump Administration with respect to civil rights law… at least, until recently. However, of late, his arguments have run up against the reality that, in fact, many on the right are not actually opposed to DEI.
As Ira Katznelson illustrated, many policies associated with the New Deal served, essentially, as affirmative action programs for less advantaged whites. They were designed and implemented in ways that largely excluded non-whites and had the effect of reinforcing and exacerbating racial inequalities. These moves enjoyed such wide support among white Americans that FDR won four consecutive presidential elections (and his vice president won another); they became paradigmatic of American domestic policy for decades to come. Partisans across the board supported these social programs… at least, until “others” became more eligible to benefit as well, at which point they became highly controversial.
Today, it’s still the case that people on the right love certain forms of DEI.
For instance, as has been the case for decades now, women tend to graduate from K-12 schools at higher rates, have higher GPAs, post better disciplinary records, apply to college at higher rates, enroll in college at higher rates, and persist in college at higher rates. Consequently, the gender skew of many universities has tilted dramatically towards women. This is a problem because schools are competing to attract the best students, and the high-performing candidates they’re competing for prefer colleges with a solid dating scene. To provide this amenity to their increasingly female student bodies, many schools have issued aggressive affirmative action policies for men. This does not seem to trouble the political right one bit.
Conservatives are not calling for institutions of higher learning (and by proxy, the professions) to be further feminized in the name of "merit." They aren’t describing it as unfair that men can get into most selective universities with lower GPAs, test scores and extracurriculars – and weaker essays – than female peers. Quite the opposite, the Trump Administration has filed complaints against universities for having insufficient numbers of white males on the faculty – while leaning on disparate impact arguments, no less!
Federal (and many state) bureaucracies and contractors also offer significant hiring and promotion advantages to military veterans. Those with a high number of points (based on their military service record and disabilities) can leapfrog over candidates with more direct qualifications and experience and/or higher levels of measured performance. As the chairman of the National Commission on Military, National and Public Service put it, “A veteran who tries to use veterans preference, even if judged as minimally qualified, can float to the top of the qualified list and be hired over better candidates. And that’s probably putting them into a job they aren’t qualified for.”
Studies have found that people hired through this process tend to be, on average, less productive and accomplished than those hired without a points advantage over the course of their careers. Employers have expressed significant frustration with how these policies inhibit their ability to hire the candidates who are the “best” according to the meritocratic standards. Yet, one does not see the political right clamoring to eliminate these preferences. Why not? First, look to who’s benefiting. Second, look to who’s paying the cost: due to the composition of the military force itself, veteran preferences skew the government workforce in favor of men, even as they depress the numbers of homosexuals and immigrants who hold government posts. These are not outcomes the political right is losing sleep over, “merit” be damned.
In a similar vein, one of the key sources of contention in Trump’s war on elite universities is the falling ratio of Jewish students at schools like Columbia and Harvard. Elite schools have a long and shameful history of excluding Jewish people to the benefit of WASP (white, Anglo-Saxon, Protestant) candidates. Today, however, Jewish students are well-represented at elite schools. All said, Jewish Americans comprise 2.2 percent of the U.S. population, and less than 8.5 percent of New York residents. But at Columbia University, 23 percent of the undergraduate population is Jewish. Almost all the “white” American students at Columbia are Jewish (26 percent of the student body identifies as white). Ironically, it’s the formerly-exclusionary WASPs who have seen the sharpest declines in recent decades. They’re now virtually extinct at the school.
The percentage of Jewish students enrolled at Columbia is lower today than in the past, but the key driver of this decline is not antisemitism within admissions committees but, rather, competition from international students.
Compared to other U.S. applicants, Jewish applicants consistently lead the pack. However, growing numbers of top applicants from China, India, Nigeria and other countries are matching or exceeding U.S. Jewish students with respect to test scores, GPAs and other “meritocratic” measures -- and universities have strong financial incentives to prefer these students, all else equal.
This is because, while most domestic applicants to elite schools receive financial aid, international students are typically pay the full sticker price out of pocket (plus room and board) – and often pay a far higher sticker price to boot. Given what a cash cow these students are, it should not be surprising that a plurality of Columbia’s student body are non-resident aliens — the “meritocratic” superelite from around the world:
Notice, however, that GOP is not actively encouraging these universities to relentlessly prioritize meritocratic selection and maximize revenues, even at the expense of Jewish students and other U.S. stakeholders. They are instead pushing elite universities to reduce international student admissions. They’re attempting to ban the most elite schools from enrolling foreign students at all. And they’re doing this, principally, in the name of fighting antisemitism (apparently the White House defines “antisemitism” as ‘too few members of a preferred constitency getting accepted to highly competitive elite schools because of intense meritocratic competition and challenging financial incentives’… this kind of move is not, in my view, particularly healthy for helping others understand or care about the prevlance, distrbution and risks of actual antisemitism).
Finally, even as the White House instructed universities to eliminate ideological or political litmus tests in admissions, hiring, promotion, they simultaneously demanded that universities track the share of faculty and students who self-identify as conservative or Christian, and then adjust their recruitment and retention policies to bring these populations into closer parity with social baselines – even if this entails passing over more qualified “others” – upon penalty of being defunded. This is, in practice, a quotas program for conservatives. Conservatives staunchly oppose such programs when they redound to be benefit of women, non-whites, or non Judeo-Christians. However, they seem to eagerly embrace these programs for people who hail from favored demographic and ideological groups or prized political constituencies.
To his credit, Hanania has been a vocal critic of the growing right-wing DEI movement.3 However, this is a position that puts him increasingly out of synch with GOP leadership. Republicans are actively embracing many of the policies and legal standards that Hanania believes need to be abolished (although they’re doing this to help whites, men, conservatives, and favored religious groups over “others”). For their part, liberals oppose this right-wing version of DEI, but they continue to support using these policies to advance the relative position of gender, sexual and ethnic minorities and, a consequence, will not embrace the policies Hanania is advocating either. In short order, his arguments shifted from being a key component of the anti-woke movement into being a platform without a party.
However, I suspect that the conservative legal movement will continue to wrestle with and draw from his arguments and proposed strategy for the foreseeable future.
Criticism Sandwich
The preceding offered some criticisms of Hanania and Rufo. Shortly, I will highlight how their divergent explanations for “wokeness” each suffer from the same central problem – an issue with immense implications for how their respective campaigns will likely play out (if implemented as they recommend). But before I get into that, I thought it’d be useful to flag some things I actually agree with Hanania and Rufo on — both of whom very kindly sent me review copies of their books but, due to obligations for my own book, I haven’t had a chance to actually write about their texts until now.
To frame this conversation, let’s work from the premise that rolling back illegal and/or demonstrably ineffective and/or demonstrably harmful policies is good, not bad. It’s remains good even if “bad” people also want to get rid of these same illegal, ineffective or harmful policies for reasons “we” don’t personally support.
With this maxim in mind, there is a lot of bloat and waste in the HR and education sectors. Mainstream faculty are deeply concerned both about the immense overhead these bureaucrats are imposing on universities and also the ways administrative creep is undermining faculty governance and autonomy. There is wide consensus, in principle, that paring back many of these administrative roles would be good if carried out in an intelligent way. I share that conviction myself.
Moreover, as I’ve previously illustrated at length, DEI programming generally does a poor job at achieving its explicit goals. Most typically, it’s outright counterproductive with respect to said goals – fostering more conflict, turnover, mistrust, resentment and avoidance across lines of difference.
Likewise, a large body of empirical evidence suggests that promoting and internalizing many of the mindsets popular in progressive spaces may be harmful for adherents’ mental well-being and social flourishing.
Socialists like Adolph Reed have pointed out for a long time that “disparate impact” provides a poor path for understanding social problems or promoting social justice.
As my own book details at length, social justice discourse is often used as a cudgel against symbolic capitalists’ professional and political rivals -- with scant benefit for (or even at the expense of) the genuinely marginalized and disadvantaged in society.
These are real problems. However, it’s also important to avoid “cures” that cause even more harm than the disease. If someone has an infected wound, it typically makes sense to prescribe antibiotics before amputating limbs. More broadly, outside stakeholders should exercise care in making ham-fisted and hasty interventions into fluid and complex systems. These are all points that conservatives used to deeply appreciate while progressives often didn’t. Now, they’re points that basically no one appreciates. They’re certainly lost on both the woke and the antiwoke camps.
Finally, while I believe institutions of higher learning should have wide latitude, I agree with Rufo and Hanania that they should not be outright immune to democratic oversight or control.
As I have detailed previously, the rights symbolic capitalists enjoy are bound up with duties; our privileges come with obligations; our freedoms come with responsibilities. Public higher ed and K-12 institutions are paid for by taxes that are, themselves, authorized by voters (via ballot initiatives or elected representatives). We serve at the pleasure of the public to provide a public service. People who work at these public institutions (like myself) are literally civil servants. As a consequence, it is incumbent on us to respect the expressed will and interests of the constituents who underwrite our paychecks. Those who are disinterested in, or who overtly disdain, the perspectives, priorities, values and goals of said constituents should simply not be civil servants in my opinion. Civil servants don’t have to be slavish about conforming to public opinion, but we should be cognizant of it, meet people where they are, and try to meaningfully address constituents’ priorities and concerns.
Beyond these fundamental commitments, institutions of higher learning should have significant insulation from politics – but that insulation cuts both ways. Institutions and employees can’t portray themselves and their work in terms of activism, social justice, radical praxis, #Resistance, and so on, but cry foul when they, themselves, are made subject to political pressures. We need to pick a lane. If we want to be professional, objective, and so on, then we have ample grounds for pushing for independence and autonomy. If we want to make our work and institutions political, we should not be surprised when politics comes for our institutions and our work.
While I am unabashedly and deeply opposed to many of the counterproductive and illiberal measures being pushed on universities at the hands of the Trump Administration (and I’m disappointed by institutional leaders’ feckless response to legally dubious White House impositions) – there are many elements of our institutions and behaviors that are in need of a course correction. We should not be pulled by the culture wars into defending things that should not be defended. We should instead affirm the value that our institutions do, in fact, add to society (and, while pushing back against efforts to burn the place down, also commit to reforming our institutions to serve their positive functions even more effectively and consistently).
With these concessions granted, let’s move on to the fundamental defects of most prevalent theories of “wokeness” (and associated campaigns to fight it).
Eternal Recurrance
Christopher Rufo’s story of “wokeness” begins in the 1960s. He explicitly models his approach to anti-wokeness on Richard Nixon’s planned response to the social movements of that period. Richard Hanana likewise “starts the clock” in the mid-1960s to early 1970s, with the Civil Rights Acts, affirmative action and Title IX.
It should be flagged that neither Rufo nor Hanania’s accounts can plausibly explain why Awokenings happened when they did. If “wokeness” is just downstream from 1960s civil rights law, why did we have Awokenings at specific times thereafter – in the late 80s and early 90s, and again in the 2010s? Why did these Awokenings start when they did? Why did they fizzle out when they did? An argument tied to civil rights law can’t explain this at all. Nor can any genealogical approach focused on 1960s theorists and activists.
More critically, although most popular explainers of “wokeness” tend to trace it back to the same basic starting point as Rufo and Hanania, as I detail in Chapter 2 my own book, there was actually an Awokening prior to the 1960s.
The first waves of feminism, antiracism and gay rights movements occurred in the 1920s through the early 30s. As I illiustrate in my review of Orwell’s Road to Wigan Pier, an emphasis on symbolic forms of social justice (disconnected from the will and interests of the people we claim to “support” and “represent”), asymmetrical multiculturalism, intersectionality – all of this is more than a century old.
This is not a quibble, it’s a major issue.
If “woke” dispositions, practices, ideas and activism predate the 1960s, then the thinkers discussed in Rufo’s book cannot plausibly be the cause of “wokeness.” Civil rights legislation of the 60s cannot plausibly be the culprit either.
This should matter to the political right because, if stakeholders have an incorrect understanding of the source of the “problem,” their proposed solutions are unlikely to work out as intended. There’s a good chance they could backfire instead.
My own book argues that “wokeness” is and always has been tightly connected to the symbolic professions. It is a product of the historically contingent fact that the high compensation, autonomy and prestige these professions enjoy has, from the outset, been intimately bound up with claims towards altruism, serving the common good, and uplifting the “least among us.”
From the beginning of the symbolic professions, our bids for power, status, and opportunity have been tied to claims about social justice. Our place among the elite is, paradoxically, premised on egalitarianism. So long as this remains our core form of legitimation, “wokeness” will always be part of our professions. The professions themselves are indispensible to the workings of contemporary capitalism. So, unless and until there is a radical transformation of the global institutional and financial order, we’re not going anywhere… and neither are our internecine struggles over “social justice.”
However, the intensity of those struggles waxes and wanes. When times grow particularly tough for symbolic capitalists – and contests over power, opportunities and resources grows particularly fierce – our claims and activism around “social justice” intensify in turn. We see “Great Awokenings.”
Accelerating the Next Awokening
We Have Never Been Woke details two core predictors of Great Awokenings: acute elite overproduction (within the symbolic professions) and popular immiseration (in society more broadly). When there is a confluence of these factors, Awokenings are possible. If my model is correct, many of the MAGA-aligned anti-woke campaigns could be hastening and exacerbating the next Great Awokening rather than preventing or forestalling it.
For instance, the Trump 2.0 Administration has slashed federal jobs. It has pulled federal funding of many programs and institutions, leading to hiring freezes, pay cuts and layoffs at a number of universities — and layoffs at the state and local levels of government too. Simultaneously, the White House is making massive investments in AI, which is already gutting entry level white collar positions. The job market for recent college graduates is as bleak as its been in 10 years. However, two factors are likely suppressing an Awokening from breaking out right now:
First, many emerging symbolic capitalists have lowered life expectations than previous cohorts, precisely due to coming of age during a bleak economic period, and entering the job market under Trump’s austerity spree. Overproduction, in the sense relevant for this my argument, occurs when growing numbers of elite aspirants are unable to realize lives they have long taken for granted. Insofar as the next cohort of symbolic capitalists is passing through their formative years and entering adulthood with low expectations, they’re more likely to be positively surprised instead of disappointed by whatever successes they’re able to nail down. Many are expecting precarity and underemployment rather than a six-figure job, a spouse, a house, social prestige, etc. — and so if they experience precarity and undereployment, it will be less of a shock, and it won’t be something they feel empowered and compelled to “do something” about.
Second, the economy is still not terrible for normie workers and, so long as the fortunes of elites and regular people continue to operate countercyclically, any frustrated elites who do want to raise a ruckus will have less leverage over the system than they otherwise might.
That said, if there was a major economic crisis or recession that cast aspiring elites into an even weaker position than they were prepared to accept while adversely affecting a broad range of normie workers too – perhaps triggered by the Whtie House’s ongoing trade war – then the stage could be more fully set for another Awokening to emerge.
Up to now, each of the Awokenings have been separated by 15 years or more. The anti-woke efforts by Trump and his allies could help usher in a major exception to the general pattern. This is just one of many respects in which Trumpworld’s culture war efforts seem self-defeating.4
Awokenings Don’t Last Forever. But Neither do Anti-Wokenings.
As I detail in We Have Never Been Woke, Awokenings usually give rise to Anti-Wokenings – movements spearheaded by right-aligned and reactionary symbolic capitalists who obtain power, status, opportunities and resources by moving in the direction opposite their mainstream peers.
Those who strike the anti-woke position tend to occupy similar institutional positions as the folks who champion wokeness. The antiwokes also think about politics in much the same way as the people they criticize.
For instance, anti-wokes often say things like, “Ibram X. Kendi’s approach to antiracism sucks. I support the MLK approach to racial justice.” To which one could reasonably reply, “Cool, cool. So, are you organizing or participating in any MLK-style broad-based social movements to address poverty, oppose war, or rectify historical and ongoing racial injustices?” To which the answer is always “No.” Instead, they are sitting in their armchairs criticizing wokeness and using that as a stand-in for practical political action to solve concrete social problems. They aren’t doing anything different from the “woke” people they condemn.
Indeed, as journalist James Ball recently noted in an interview with me, many “class” oriented anti-woke people who spend all of their efforts simply criticizing “woke” people for being out of touch with the working man, and highlighting various culture war crap as distractions from “real” problems of ordinary people… but they never, themselves, actually get around to addressing those “real” problems either. They don’t spend their efforts pushing for higher pay and better benefits, improved working conditions, increased job security, a stronger social safety net, more healthy communities, or anything of the sort. It’s “woke is bad” all day, every day… but, somehow, in the name of class.
This tendency, incidentally, is one of the reasons anti-wokenings burn out.
Ordinary people get exhausted by the culture wars and elect right-leaning people in the hopes of turning the page. But rather than focusing on practical problems, these newly-empowered right-aligned folks assume that the reason they won is because voters like their position on the culture wars, and that voters want still more culture wars -- just going the other direction. This is motivated reasoning: they’re super excited at this prospect, because they take symbols, rhetoric, etc. just as seriously as the “woke.”5
We saw this dynamic in action when Trump got into office and promptly set out to rename military bases, monuments, geographical landmarks and holidays while spending tens of millions of dollars to eliminate “woke” monuments and throw miliary parades… even while the administration is, in it’s own self-description, furiously trying to cut extraneous spending.
This is not as contradictory as it may appear once we recognize that to Trump, these moves are not wasteful expenditures of time or effort – they’re super important – because the anti-woke, like the woke, seem to believe there is a lot at stake in these symbolic actions (Trump is, himself, a symbolic capitalist).
In previous anti-wokenings, the public eventually grew frustrated with the fact that they got still more culture wars by voting out the “woke” party. This disconent provided an opportunity for the out-party to make a partial comeback (if and when they got their own house in order a bit) – eventually ushering the anti-wokes out of power too.
Critically, although anti-woke politicians often neglect bread and butter matters in ways that frustrate normie voters, they also tend to radically overshoot the mark on the few practical issues they focus on (usually, policy areas that touch on the culture wars in some way). As I’ve detailed elsewhere drawing from the work of James Stimson and others, voters who want a directional shift in one direction on a policy issue often get far more than they bargained for when they vote the opposition into power -- because the newly empowered party often misreads their "mandate" and takes much more radical action that voters actually want.
In the case of immigration, for instance, voters clearly seemed to reject the Biden Administration’s approach. Many wanted a slowing of immigration to more typical (or even, below-average) levels, more consistent enforcement of existing laws, better border controls, a streamlining of our byzantine immigration system and stiffer penalties for immigrants who engage in criminal activities and/or are not gainfully employed.
However, if what they actually get from Trump is aggressive and invasive investigations into American citizens (in an attempt to identify non-citizens), deportations of longstanding, productive, and otherwise law-abiding undocumented workers, deportations of legal permanent residents, family separations, large numbers of people dumped in camps at the border or sent to gulags in foreign countries without due process, raids on churches, courthouses, and schools and so on -- they'll likely sour on the GOP… and because of the very issue that helped usher them back into power. Indeed, although immigration remains Trump’s strongest area, his net approval ratings on this issue have fallen by more than half in recent months.
The trend has stabilized for now but could easily drop lower if and when the casualties of Trump’s draconian immigration and deportation policies become a major topic of public conversation again.
All to say, while “wokeness” is deeply alienating to large numbers of Americans, before long, the anti-wokes end up seeming little better than the people they define themselves against – largely because of the broad symmetries between the woke and the anti-woke.
Not only is there a symmetry, there’s also a symbiosis. The anti-woke rely on Awokenings in order to make themselves relevant, and many of the actions currently being undertaken in the name of preventing the next Great Awokening may help hasten it instead.
The moderation trend is demonstrably not a product of Trump’s 2016 or 2024 victories (nor Trump’s 2020 defeat) – both the acceleration and moderation trends were orthogonal to the U.S. presidential cycles. Antiwoke actors may try to take credit for the symbolic professions moderating, but they are not, in fact, responsible.
The general sense conveyed in the text is that these thinkers are popular because crazy loves crazy, and academia is just stuffed with crazies. But as Graeme Wood notes, even if this were true in an uncomplicated way, it’s not necessarily bad to have some cranks on the faculty. It can even be healthy for a university’s pedagogical mission.
For my part, pace Hanania (and, ironically, most on the left), I’m don’t oppose most of these goals in principle.
I support military preferences (especially for combat veterans) because, in my view, citizens and institutions have social duties that extend beyond maximum efficiency. We should support those who risk their lives on our behalf – with money, yes, but also with jobs. Getting paid to be unemployed or underemployed is not a good existence. Veterans want, need, and deserve post-service careers that provide dignity and purpose. When they don’t have access to those opportunities, this is not just a moral disgrace, it often generates tangible threats to the social order (which is why these preferences were put in place to begin with).
Here, it deserves to be noted that veterans have been one of the primary groups harmed by Trump’s cuts to the federal workforce. Due to the aforementioned hiring preferences, they are massively overrepresented in the civil service and, as a consequence, have been disproportionately suffering because of the cuts.
I’ve also argued at length that colleges and universities would benefit from more ideological diversity in the student body and professoriate. The devil is in the details of how we get there. Demonstrably, many of the anti-DEI policies championed by conservatives are counterproductive to this goal because, in reality, the challenges of promoting more demographic and ideological diversity in the academy are deeply intertwined. Pursuing one at the expense of the other is a losing strategy, no matter which side of the coin you’re most concerned with.
As it relates to international students, independent of Trump’s pretexts, it may make sense to rebalance admissions. American universities often describe themselves as fundamentally cosmopolitan and international – as global institutions for global citizens – despite the fact that they are heavily subsidized by American taxpayers. This is a somewhat unusual posture for our society to take. Many other countries have the position that publicly funded institutions should support citizens first. In decisions between comparably qualified domestic versus international applicants, the domestic candidate would be strongly preferred. As noted above, the U.S. strikes virtually the opposite position: between a “meritocratically” similar American and foreigner, the international student is far more profitable and, therefore, more likely to gain admission.
Even at flagship public universities, students increasingly have a difficult time attending their local university due to competition with out-of-state and international applicants. At elite private universities, these dynamics are even more pronounced. This is something that may be worthy of adjusting although, critically, in order for universities to remain solvent while relying on fewer international students they’d either need to radically increase tuition, radically cut services, and/or receive significantly more government aid.
Critically, none of these positions contradict one-another or my other stated positions precisely because I don’t fetishize “merit.” As I’ve previously highlighted, in practice, the measures most heavily relied upon to measure “merit” in both academic admissions and hiring largely track antecedent advantages. Even bracketing this issue, just as a matter of fact, basically no one is ever hired purely on the basis of “merit” and, contrary to the narratives of many of Hanania’s fellow travelers, hiring and promotion is more metrics-focused, transparent, standardized, open and competitive than it has ever been. The folks who say “back in the day, before DEI, we used to hire based on merit and now we hire on identity,” seem to have a poor understanding of how hiring and admissions decisions were made prior to the institutional focus on diversity and inclusion.
Some other ways in which anti-woke campaigns often cut against themselves:
Generally, it is a tactical error to financially starve institutions for being too “woke.” Consider K-12 schools: if you want a professionalized workforce that draws in a large range of stakeholders, you need good pay, benefits and working conditions. If the job does not have strong pay, benefits, stability, high status or good working conditions but does require expensive postsecondary education and certifications, the only college degree-holders who will be willing to accept such a position are those who are deeply attracted to the possibility of shaping young minds. By “starving the beast,” GOP stakeholders end up creating jobs that select for ideologues and activists who are willing to get paid peanuts for the opportunity to mould the future. If there is no professional incentive to take on these roles, it’s hard to get staff who are professionally-inclined. If folks wanted to diversify the ideological composition of faculty, they should make these jobs pay better, not worse.
Trumpworld has also done immense harm to the legitimacy of the viewpoint diversity movement over the last six months. Many on the left have long insisted that people on the right have never cared about “free speech,” “viewpoint diversity,” “pluralism” or any of that stuff. The behaviors of MAGA leaders seem like a clean validation of that narrative:
Musk was all about free speech until he took over Twitter, and promptly started censoring and terminating those who criticized him.
Shortly after taking office, Trump vowed to durably end government censorship: “Never again will the immense power of the state be weaponized to persecute political opponents, something I know something about. We will not allow that to happen. It will not happen again. Under my leadership, we will restore fair, equal, and impartial justice under the constitutional rule of law.” He is now using law enforcement agencies to surveille, jail and deport people based on their political views and without due process – while leveraging federal funding to push for ideologically-based purges and quotas.
Many viewpoint diversity advocates and organizations are speaking out against these moves or joining lawsuits to resist them. Others are acquiescent or outright supportive. Those striking these latter postures are causing long-term damage to the movement for intellectual pluralism by rapidly eroding hard earned trust among moderates and progressives – and likely for naught.
Efforts to coerce people into engaging with conservative thought are a dead end. As tons of research on DEI training shows, this kind of mandatory stuff doesn’t just fail, it typically generates reactance and blowback. You can’t actually force people to engage others with charity, humility and openness or to constructively embrace deep differences. As Nietzsche put it, all learning is, ultimately, self-education. Absent pre-existing internal commitments to test one’s ideas and abilities, expand one’s horizons, translate theory into practice, etc. – you can talk at people all day, and it won’t make much of a practical impact.
As I emphasized in a previous essay, “One cannot legislate an institutional culture that encourages viewpoint diversity – let alone an environment where diversity is effectively leveraged to improve research or teaching. This must be willingly and willfully enacted by faculty, students, administrators in their day-to-day interactions. Agents must be convinced (and perhaps incentivized), not compelled, in order to learn and grow from diverse perspectives.”
To the extent that these initiatives have almost no local buy-in and are being thrust onto institutions at gunpoint by an unpopular federal administration, they’re more likely to generate more hostility towards right-aligned views than curiosity, deep engagement or genuine acceptance.
Not only to woke and anti-woke activists share the same basic psychology and dispositions, they also live similar lifestyles, congregate in similar communities, work in similar institutions, and occupy similar roles within those institutions. As a consequence, virtually everything I say about mainstream symbolic capitalists in my book holds just as true of their right-aligned and anti-woke peers.