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Home – Woke Ideology News – Alive and Kicking: News of Woke’s Death Is Greatly Exaggerated

Alive and Kicking: News of Woke’s Death Is Greatly Exaggerated

RealClearWire—Just a few years ago, wearing a sombrero on Halloween could get you banished from polite society for the social crime of “cultural appropriation.”

Nutrition experts argued that preventing obesity was a form of racialized “fatphobia,” even as scientific names of songbirds were purged in a moral campaign presumably aimed at white supremacy. Meanwhile, a slew of studies, papers, and articles argued that punctuality, excellence, and other forms of professionalism are “the systemic, institutionalized centering of whiteness.”

Today, as universities are dismantling their DEI bureaucracies, corporations are scaling back antiracism training, and academic trigger warnings and diversity pledges have become punch lines rather than cudgels, it is tempting to believe that the excesses of the woke movement have not just peaked but are a thing of the past, a passing fever dream of a peculiar era.

Such thinking, however, underestimates the power and persistence of “wokeness,” which was never a spontaneous outburst of moral righteousness born of COVID-19 lockdowns and rage over George Floyd’s death, but a philosophy and a worldview that were decades in the making. 

The success of candidates backed by the Democratic Socialists of America in recent congressional primaries in New York and mayoral races in Los Angeles and the District of Columbia underscores the enduring appeal of a leftist moral framework that casts American society as a Machiavellian struggle between the oppressors and the oppressed.

Although the DSA’s ascendancy in Democratic Party politics is a relatively new phenomenon, RCI’s analysis of high-profile issues that have defined the movement in recent years—from slavery reparations and polyamory to transgender advocacy and anti-colonialism—reveals that this dogma is still percolating through the culture, with some new outbreak almost every week. These deeper currents indicate that the DSA is not a driver but a reflection of wokeness—a worldview that continues to make advances and succeeds at the ballot box. 

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Major League Baseball’s official condemnation this month of San Francisco Giants players who wore caps with Bible quotes on Pride Night is one example of enforcing ideological conformity that harkens back to the Great Awokening of 2020. A recent newspaper headline, “Minneapolis City Hall dances into Pride Month with a drag show,” is further evidence of woke’s staying power. 

In some ways, the social justice activists and politicians who envisioned diversity, equity, and inclusion as the pillars of American society have moved on to flirting with the moral imperative of micro-looting, lionizing Luigi Mangione for murdering a health care company executive, and celebrating the murder of Charlie Kirk.

However one understands wokeness, it is not a mere hodgepodge of slogans and sporadic Twitter mobs. It is, instead, a cultural paradigm shared by millions of people in the West who espouse the inherent moral supremacy of the underdog and doubt the moral legitimacy of their own societies. These ideas have been homed in volumes of academic scholarship and backed by nonprofit funding over the past half-century, and they are increasingly codified into law and policy (see accompanying sidebar article). 

“People have the idea that it’s a fad. They don’t understand the antecedents and the roots,” said Jason Hill, a philosophy professor at DePaul University who specializes in political philosophy and moral psychology. 

“The moral grammar of the movements we call wokeness comes out of political liberalism,” Hill said. “Liberalism is ultimately a perfectionist and utopian project. It’s a never-ending project.”

Liberalism assumed its modern form in the 1960s, Hill said, when liberals abandoned the ideal of individual rights for group rights, in response to persistent Jim Crow-era discrimination. This shift led to a commitment to “radical egalitarianism,” in which discrimination and injustice are measured not by individual bigotry but by unequal group outcomes, and “the state has a responsibility to rectify those........

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