https://quadrant.org.au/magazine/2023/01/the-woke-revolution-is-far-from-over/
Just over a year ago, I wrote a lengthy article detailing all the reasons why no one should assume the far-left “Woke” ideological revolution was over, even if conservatives here in the United States were to ride what seemed a “red wave” of popular political dissatisfaction to a sweeping victory in November’s mid-term elections. Well, those elections are now over, and it turns out there wasn’t even any wave to speak of. It’s worth thinking seriously about what that result signals about where this increasingly global ideological revolution is headed.
We are now more than two years downstream from the fiery Year Zero of the Revolution, 2020, when, amid the most widespread and destructive riots in the nation’s history, nearly every public and private institution in American life (and then beyond, across nearly the whole of the broader Western world) simultaneously pledged allegiance to the same transformational illiberal ideology that had inspired the violence. The results were immediate, shocking in scope, and lasting in consequence: the primacy of racial consciousness and grievance was forcefully reintroduced into society in the name of racial “diversity” and “equity”; police departments were defunded and criminal behavior effectively decriminalized in the name of “social justice,” resulting in a deadly ongoing crime wave; elite medical and educational institutions, along with the American government, began not only to mainstream extremist concepts like the mutilating surgical “affirmation” of children’s alleged transgender identity (among other innovations) in the name of “inclusion,” but to actively seek to criminalize any opposition to these and other practices; in a coordinated effort with the state, the world’s largest technology and media giants imposed a great wave of censorship in an effort to entrench and defend the ideological hegemony of the Revolution and its values; mobbed by zealots, dissenters to the new ideological regime were summarily ousted from their positions and livelihoods; families and friendships were torn apart as the window of acceptable opinion shifted with lightning speed… This is only to scratch the surface of the traumatic upheaval that was thrust onto American society.
But now we know that all of this barely moved the needle in America’s tribal politics. There was either no coherent backlash to the Woke revolution at the ballot box, or its adherents proved just as numerous and motivated as its opponents. Those few tentative suggestions about how progressive policies and messaging might have gone too far, which had begun to sporadically appear as anxiety proliferated on the left ahead of the elections, will now all be swiftly forgotten. With no costs imposed for their behavior, and so no incentive to change course, the revolutionaries’ already self-confident zeal will only redouble.
Which, make no mistake, means that the Woke are now winning decisively. The reason for this is straightforward: of the key institutional high ground – from educational institutions to the media and Hollywood and the publishing houses, to the tech giants (with the recent singular exception of Elon Musk’s Twitter), to the law schools and the legal associations, to the healthcare system and medical schools, to the powerful foundations, big banks, corporate consulting giants, and stock exchanges, to even the churches, not to mention the federal government – essentially all of it is already Woke. This means that a 50-50 stalemate in the arena of democratic politics is no stalemate at all, but the continuation of a totally lopsided war of civilizational attrition.