How the Center-Left paved the way for the Woke
And created a monster that they cannot control.
Ever since the 2024 election, there have been a large number of Center Left thinkers and pundits who claim that the Democratic party and the Left in general should reject Woke policies, terminology and argumentation. In particular, they believe that Woke policies, such as DEI, gender ideology, crime, and unrestrained illegal immigration, only work to the advantage of Republicans during electoral campaigns.
I agree with this claim, but I am skeptical that the Democratic party will change any time soon. As I argued in a previous article, The real 1% who controls American politics, a tiny group of primary voters in uncompetitive Blue states and Blue districts effectively have a veto power over the vast majority of Democratic elected officials. Within the Democratic party primaries in those regions, voters are far more to the Left of the rest of American society on key issues, such as:
Race
Gender
Sexuality
Law enforcement
Immigration
Climate change
Patriotism
And a whole host of other “hot button cultural” issues.
Indeed, the ideological stands on these core issues are much of the reason those people are so committed to political activism. Asking Democratic primary voters to change their views on those issues is like asking a Christian to give up on believing that Jesus is the Son of God.
Now that does not mean that the Democratic party cannot change. I believe that it is going to take far more than one defeat in a Presidential election to get the most activist members of the Democratic party to rethink their core moral values. I guess that it will take something like three straight Presidential elections (as happened in the 1980s) and the loss of control over the US Congress and Supreme Court during that time for that rethink to happen.
The argument also fails to realize the symbiotic relationship between the Center-Left and the Woke in the politics of wealthy Western nations. Without the Center Left, the Woke would be a weak ostracized minority without any influence in society.
This article is part of an extended series of articles on the origins of the Woke. Here is a list of those that I have published so far:
You might also be interested in reading my “From Poverty to Progress” book series:
How the Center Left empowered the Woke
As I argued in previous articles, the United States has experienced a profound change in the worldview of its upper class. Until the 1960s, the American upper class was dominated by WASP Northerners who believed in patriotism, material progress, and Protestant Christianity.
Starting with the coming of age of the Baby Boomers in the late 1960s, that old WASP upper class was replaced by a much broader cross-section of American society based on race, gender, region, and ethnicity. This new upper class largely acquired their place by earning a four-year college degree.
The traditional views of the old WASP upper class were replaced by a Post-Modern Left-of-Center worldview:
Patriotism has been replaced by cosmopolitanism, and often downright anti-patriotism.
A self-confident belief in material progress has been replaced by a post-modern skepticism of or even opposition to progress.
Partisan identification has shifted from Republican to Democratic, particularly in the large metro areas in the Northeast and Pacific coast.
Ideology has shifted from a traditional conservatism to varying degrees of Left-of-Center ideology. The percentage of the professional class who are very Left-of-Center has increased dramatically, particularly since 2010.
Starting in the late 1960s very few successful people outside academia believed in Leftist ideologies. But that changed fairly dramatically in the late 1960s. Suddenly, previously very unacceptable ideological views became acceptable and even desirable within the intelligentsia. With a new generation of Baby Boomers who were born into affluence and largely took that affluence for granted, the uncompromising moral stands of the Left seemed very desirable.
The radical utopianism of the late 1960s fizzled out rapidly in the early 1970s, but the concern for social and cultural issues persisted among college-educated Baby Boomers. As the generation aged and moved up the institutional ladder, they carried their Left-of-Center moral assumptions with them. Gradually, those ideals became influential within white college-educated professionals.
This transition did not happen all at once. It took time for each new generation to go through education, get entry-level professional jobs, and gradually work their way up the corporate ladder.
The Baby Boom generation did not really start reaching the upper ranks of American institutions until the late 1990s and early 2000s. This new upper class gradually worked its way up the career ladder until it dominated the middle and upper ranks of almost all American institutions.
By the 2000s college-educated Baby Boomers with Center-Left sensibilities dominated the middle and upper ranks of the following institutions:
K-12 education
Universities, particularly the humanities and the Education department
Media
Entertainment industry
Democratic party
Bureaucracy of the federal government and most state government bureaucracies.
College-educated Baby Boomers with Center-Left sensibilities leveraged their dominance to shape the agenda for these institutions in ways that promoted their own world view. A key moral stance of this new professional class was a watered-down version of exactly the same stances on the same issues that drive the Woke today. Center-Left professionals of the Baby Boomer generation:
Focused on the moral imperative of Equality.
Assumed that any differences in outcome between groups (particularly based on race and gender) as evidence of discrimination or lack of Equality of Opportunity
The duty of government to overcome disparate outcomes between groups, particularly those based on race and gender.
Created affirmative action programs in universities and public jobs that gradually evolved into more aggressive DEI policies for all institutions.
Used the moral frame of commitment to Equality against conservatives and Republicans in political debate.
Refused to acknowledge genetics and biology in general as a major cause for existing inequalities, and deemed anyone as “racist” or “sexist” for even raising the topic.
To be clear, not all Baby Boomer professionals believed the above, but the beliefs in all the above were far more common than in any previous generation of Americans. As the college-educated Baby Boomers came to dominate the leadership of the Democratic party, they changed the party away from a “bread-and-butter” party focused on the working class and unions to a political alliance between white college-educated professionals and Blacks (and later Hispanics).
Then, the Millennial generation became the first generation to grow up in an educational, media, and entertainment environment dominated by the sensibilities of Center-Left baby boomers. Particularly those Millennials raised by college-educated parents grew up in a world where Left-of-Center ideologies were widespread if not dominant. Because Left-of-Center college-educated Baby Boomers dominated so many educational and cultural institutions and were residentially segregated from the rest of America, many of them only heard the Left-of-Center worldview.
For many Millennials raised in college-educated families and neighborhoods, the Left-of-Center worldview was just common sense. It was only within the coming of age of the Millennial generation that what we now call “Wokeness” emerged onto the scene.
By the early 2000s, college-educated Millennials began to enter the workforce. Because of their preferences, they tended to choose jobs that were already dominated by Left-of-center professionals: education, media, entertainment, digital technology, and non-profits.
But as they learned more about the realities of American society, they came to see the stark contrast between the egalitarian rhetoric of college-educated professionals and the inequalities that permeated society. For them, this was clear injustice… an injustice that many were willing to fight against.
How the Center Left argued against conservatives
The worldview of these white college-educated Baby Boomers was dominated by the intellectual and electoral competition between the Center-Left and Conservatives. For college-educated Center-Leftists, it was a competition between the moral, intelligent, and caring of those who were not. This moral frame was central to how they viewed the entire world.
Center-leftists of the Baby Boom and following generations typically believe that anyone who disagreed with them was one (or more) of the following:
Uninformed, which is why they put so much stress on education
Unintelligent
Corrupt (i.e. they received money or material goods from some unknown Conservative individual or group)
Immoral, because they did not accept the goal of Equality or did not feel moral outrage that society had not yet achieved Equality.
It was very hard for anyone on the Center-left to admit that an informed, intelligent, and moral person would have a serious disagreement with them because the goal of Equality was so self-evidently moral.
This was an extremely successful rhetorical strategy. Conservative Republicans had a very hard time dealing with the accusations that they did not care about the poor or Blacks, that they were corrupted by their support from corporations and the rich.
Most conservative Republicans reacted by not contesting many of the policy accomplishments of the Democratic party, particularly those regarding race and gender. And conservative Republicans avoided any real attempt to cut back on social spending and regulations. They focused instead on cutting taxes.
So in the long run, conservative Republicans caved into virtually everything the Center Left implemented (while complaining the whole time). The Reagan, HW Bush, GW Bush, and Trump administrations did very little to roll back Democratic policies despite holding the Presidency for 24 years.
The Center-Left and Blacks
Ever since the Civil Rights movement of the late 1950s and early 1960s, white Center-Leftists had a very odd relationship with Black Americans. White Center-Leftists saw slavery and Jim Crow segregation as the “original sins” of American society. Remember that back in the 1960s, there were very few Americans of Hispanic or Asian descent and the different levels of income, wealth, status, power, and education between Blacks and Whites were stark.
Particularly for young Baby Boomers, the Civil Rights movement was the great moral cause of their time (along with the Vietnam war). Because of social segregation, Blacks and Whites outside of the South did not come into contact with each other often, so for most White Center-Leftists, Blacks were a symbol - a symbol of Oppression and Shame. Because Blacks were a symbol, all dysfunctional behavior - broken families, violence, drugs, avoidance of work, and low skills - were blamed on their history of oppression.
With the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Voting Rights Act of 1965, an enormous number of new social programs in the Great Society, and the Fair Housing Act of 1968, it seemed as if Liberation from Oppression had finally been achieved. The only thing remaining was to implement the Center-Left policies in education, health care, pensions, housing, food stamps, and other social programs. Then affirmative action and bussing were added to the mix. Any person who doubted the morality and effectiveness of these programs were deemed uninformed, unintelligent, corrupt, or immoral.
While Black Americans clearly did improve in their education, income, wealth, and education, the gap between Whites and Blacks stubbornly persists. For a while, Ronald Reagan and the Republicans could be blamed for the lack of Equality, but the problem of racial inequality still remained. And so did gender inequality, and income inequality, and wealth inequality, etc.
The inability to create Equality
This rhetorical style had a Kryptonite that was largely unnoticed for 50 years. Taking the moral high-ground against conservative Republicans was useless against those who took an even higher moral standpoint.
In building up intellectual and moral defenses against conservatives, the Center-Left lowered its intellectual and moral defenses against the Woke. By placing themselves on a higher moral ground than conservatives, the Center-Left thought that they had won the political argument. The problem is that they forgot that the goal is not to win elections or to implement public policies to move toward greater Equality. The goal was to achieve the results of implementing Equality.
The Center-Left truly believed that they could gradually greater Equality over time via:
Increased spending on social programs, such as education, medical care, pensions, and poverty relief.
Regulations to constrain the selfish behavior of corporations
Taxes on the wealthy
Expansion of government-protected rights
Educating people, particularly young people, as to the injustices and inequalities in society and the necessity of fighting against them.
In terms of inputs (i.e. resources deployed), these Center-Left policies has been a spectacular success. Since World War II, there has been a spectacular increase in the percentage of GDP that has been devoted to government social spending. In addition to the increased spending in the graphic below is the sizable increase in regulations and government spending on education.
In terms of the Results in creating Equality, however, this massive deployment of societal resources has been an unmitigated failure. By their own testament, inequality in America is worse than ever.
The Central Moral Dilemma
I believe that Wokeness is an outgrowth of the Central Moral Dilemma of all Left-of-Center ideologies. The Central Moral Dilemma of Left-of-Center ideologies is an irresolvable moral conflict between:
What the Left deems to be their prime moral goal (Equality), and:
What the Left has actually achieved and what it can possibly achieve in the material world.
As long as the Left makes the goal of Equality a moral imperative, there will always be people who take that goal very seriously. Wokeness is the goal of Equality as a moral imperative taken to its logical extreme. Wokeness is Center-Left politics without compromise. Virtually all other Left-of-Center ideologies accept the goal of Equality as a moral imperative, but no other competing Left-of-Center ideology is willing to expand the concept to every dimension of human inequality.
Wokeness is the final destination of the Left
Wokeness, therefore, is the final destination of the Left because Wokeness is the moral assumptions of the Left taken to its irreducible minimum. And attempts by the Center-Left to purge Wokeness from political parties will only undermine their own moral credibility. The Center-Left has no real arguments against the Woke because they fundamentally share the same goal. This is why they are forced to rely on the “It will only create a backlash from the Right” argument.
Wokeness will always tear down other ideologies of the Left to its level. The Center-Left have no intellectual defense against Wokeness because both worldviews start with the same assumption. All that the Center-Left can do is claim that the Woke or unrealistic or liable to provoke a backlash from the Right.
The Woke is doing to the Center-Left what the Center-Left has always done with the Right: claim the moral high ground by claiming to believe in Equality more than their opponent. The Woke are just less willing to compromise on that goal than the Center-Left.
The combination of:
Preaching the goal of Equality, particularly equality of race and gender.
Changing institutional policies (particularly education, media, and entertainment) to preach the goal of Equality, and
An inability to actually create Equality in the material world
Guarantees that a new generation of followers of Left-of-Center ideologies will revolt against their elders and shame them for willingness to accept Inequality. The new generation will invariably claim that previous generations of Left-of-Center supporters just did not try enough or did not care enough.
In response the older generation of Left-of-Center supporters cannot disagree with the new generation because they share the same goals. So they cave in to demands that they know are irrational and doomed to fail. The only alternative is the embrace the exact same arguments used by conservatives against them in preceding ideological battles. That is an unbearable option because it would invalidate the center-left’s entire worldview.
Left-of-center ideologies have created an irresolvable dilemma of their own making. The only way out is to have the Honesty and the Moral Courage to admit that:
Equality is impossible to achieve and
All attempts to create Equality hurt society more than it helps.
So the Woke is not a bunch of radicals with completely different viewpoints from Center-Left college-educated professionals, they are its creation. They are Frankenstein’s monster. And Center Left cannot kill the monster without renouncing their own worldview.
The choice confronting the Center-Left
The Center-Left throughout the wealthy Western world has a choice forced on them by the Central Moral Dilemma of Left-of-Center ideologies. They have one of three options:
Acknowledging the failure and rethinking their basic principles and methods (my preferred option)
I believe that fully embracing the concept of material progress and the need to reshape policies around promoting long-term widely-shared economic growth is the only viable alternative. I hope that at some point, the Center Left comes to see that.Embracing censorship, legal/social harassment of the opposition, or defacto ostracization of major parties on the Right as anti-democratic or racist.
This is increasingly the choice made by the Center-Left in the Western world. The result has been a wave of social media censorship and instances of harassment and banning of opposition candidates.
If successful, this path leads to Totalitarianism (or perhaps what one might call a form of “soft” Totalitarianism). I am not claiming that the Center-Left wants that outcome. Only that it is the necessary outcome of this choice if political opposition from the Right is overcome.Rejecting material reality and embracing the constant flamboyant display of “good intentions” in public without caring about results.
This is increasingly the choice made by the Woke, Greens, and other Leftists. If successful, this choice leads to either a Totalitarian regime or a meltdown of society where the worst psychological instincts of humanity are amplified and the best instincts are vilified.
I am here to tell you that choices #2 and #3 will inevitably fail because they do not embrace learning from results. The attempts to implement choices #2 and #3 will hurt, and likely kill, many people because that failure will generate intense political opposition.
Without a peaceful means of overthrowing elites, many will choose violent opposition. Even if political opposition to “Soft” Totalitarianism is overcome, future regimes will confront the same problems as Communist regimes.
So why did it take so long?
If the Woke is the inevitable outcome of Center-Left dominance of our institutions, why did they take so long to emerge? Why did they only emerge after 2010?
I must admit that I do not feel that I have the entire answer to this question, but I think that it had to do with cultural norms and generation transition. The Baby Boom generation was born into a society that was very patriotic, and religious, believed in traditional gender roles, and believed strongly in material progress. While many Baby Boomers revolted against their elders, most of them still held on enough to traditional ways not “go full woke” in their adulthood. Most of them still accepted the intellectuals boundaries of science, logic, reason, Christianity, market-based economics, democratic governance, and traditional customs. Those that did not were in the distinct minority.
But the worldview of Left-of-Center Baby Boomers gradually eroded those traditional values like an acid. It was left to a later generation, the Millenials, to fully reject all limitations on the goal of Equality and be willing to violate social customs to shame anyone who disagreed with them.
I believe that it took:
A new generation raised in a world where traditional American values were clearly in decline.
A much higher percentage of that generation accepting the Left-of-Center worldview.
A significantly lower percentage of conservatives within the middle and upper ranks of American institutions to act as a counter-balance
The invention of social media and mobile devices that enabled rebellious youths and intellectuals to organize for action in real-time without ever having to meet face-to-face.
All the above came together around the year 2010. That is when Frankenstein’s monster revolted against Dr. Frankenstein. No matter how much Dr. Frankenstein hopes his creation will go away, it will not do so.
As long as the college-educated professional class is dominated by Left-of-Center ideologies, a new generation of activists will rise up in rebellion against the inequalities that surround them.
This article is part of an extended series of articles on the origins of the Woke. Here is a list of those that I have published so far:
You might also be interested in reading my “From Poverty to Progress” book series:
The end of the Cold War enabled the idea that inequality is the only threat facing the western world. When there was a military threat, the reality of that wasn’t as hospitable to utopian dreams. The juxtaposition of the USSR vs the US highlighted the lack of freedom that may come out of heavy handed guidance towards equality. Once that was gone, the ground was ripe for woke ideology to develop.
Edit needed: “While many Baby Boomers revolted against their elders, most of them still held on enough to traditional ways not “go full woke” in their adulthood.”