Trends that created the Woke

Because there is no one cause of the Great Awokening (2010 - present)

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Over the past few years, there have been a number of books explaining the emergence of Woke ideology: what many call the “Great Awokening.” Each of the books offers something important to the discussion, but I do not think that they do justice to the complexity of the phenomenon. These books typically focus on one cause, when I believe that the Great Awokening was the outcome of many different trends to gathered over the last 60 years.

These books include:

• The Origins of Woke: Civil Rights Law, Corporate America, and the Triumph of Identity Politics by Richard Hanania, which views Wokeness as the outcome of Civil Rights legislation and the perverse means that the legislation was implemented by the federal bureaucracy

• America's Cultural Revolution: How the Radical Left Conquered by Christopher Rufo, which views Wokeness as an outcome of Leftist ideologies that were born in the late 1960s.

• Cynical Theories: How Activist Scholarship Made Everything about Race, Gender, and Identity—and Why This Harms Everybody, by Helen Pluckrose & James Lindsay, which views Wokeness as the next evolution of academic Post-Modernism (my summary here)

• The Third Awokening by Eric Kaufmann, when views Wokeness as “the making sacred of historically marginalized race, gender and sexual minority groups. Woke people are emotionally attached to minorities and cold toward majorities.”

I don’t pretend that this is an exhaustive list of all books about the Woke, but they are the books on the topic that I have read. First, I want to say that there is very little that I disagree with in any of these books. I would recommend them all to those who are interested in the topic.

It is more an issue of sorting out causality. I think all these books point to important causes of the Great Awokening. As is common in books on ideology, however, they focus too much on the intellectual origins of the ideology and too little on why the Woke world view gained such influence in the 2010s.

Because I am a “historical materialist” I want to explain the material conditions that enabled the Woke world view to rise from obscurity to widespread influence. As I see it, the Great Awokening was the outcome of:

• The non-rational nature of all ideologies

• Shifts in the world view of the American upper class over the last 60 years towards Left-of-Center ideologies. This ideological shift was far from inevitable, but it was probably the single most important factor in the Great Awokening after 2010. Without this shift, Wokeness would have existed, but it would have had minimal impact on American society.

• Key characteristics of virtually all Left-of-Center ideologies:

  • The quest for Equality as the prime moral goal and the impossibility of achieving that goal. This creates what I call the Central Moral Dilemma of the Left.

  • The responsibility of the government to create that state of Equality, or, at the very least, make important strides towards that goal within our lifetime.

  • The belief that the morality of a person should largely be judged by the extent to which that person publicly embraces that quest.

• The constant expansion of government over the last 60+ years to create the conditions for Equality, but without being able to achieve anything near that goal. This expansion did, however, create a steady flow of money and jobs to supporters of Left-of-Center ideologies. This flow of material benefits created reasons for individuals to support the Left (or at least pretend to) even when Left-of-Center policies consistently failed to achieve their stated objectives.

• The deliberate crafting of a radical world view by Critical theorists to manipulate the Center-Left white males who dominate the upper reaches of most of our institutions. These ideologues fully understood the Central Moral Dilemma of the Left and were willing to use it to control and humiliate those who they felt were too timid in confronting inequalities in society. They did so by highlighting the stark contrast between the Center Left egalitarian rhetoric and the highly unequal outcomes in society. Critical theorists forced the Center Left to make a fundamental choice: embrace Equality or suffer Social Humiliation.

• The invention of social media and its algorithms enabled Woke ideas to rapidly propagate through the upper class and American institutions. This created an information cascade that launched one moral panic after another after 2010.

• The willingness of the Center Left to falsify their preferences by pretending to agree with the Woke in order to be seen as a moral person and deserving member of the upper class after 2010. Fear of social shaming was a key factor in this behavior.

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In a previous article, I wrote about the Rebirth of the Totalitarian Left. I suggest that you read that article first. The first article focuses on what is occurring now. This article explains the long-term social trends that made it all happen.

An important part of that rebirth, particularly in the United States, is Critical Theory and the Woke. There have been many books and articles written about how these two forces grew from obscurity to becoming an influential force within American institutions. Many of these accounts, however, leave out key factors that played an important role.

In this article, I will list out key trends and events that created the Woke in the 2010s. In order to keep the length of this article manageable, I will merely list them out. I will go into more detail on most of these trends and events in later articles.

TLDR

Due to many different social factors, a large portion of American institutions became almost monolithic Left-of-Center in their politics. The people who uphold Center Left ideology believe that Equality is our prime goal and are morally outraged that it does not exist in the material world. Despite 60 years of enacting government social programs, regulations, taxes, and education, the Center-Left failed to create Equality. By their own claims, America is more unequal than ever.

The Woke are a reaction to that failure. It just needed the correct material conditions to emerge.

The Foundation: Human Psychology

It is impossible to understand the Woke without a solid grasp of the psychological foundations of ideology. I go into much more detail in this article and also in this article, so I will only hit the highlights here:

1. The human brain has two systems:

   1. a non-rational system (which psychologists call “System 1”), and

   2. a rational system (which psychologists call “System 2”)

2. Ideologies originate from the non-rational system, but they are expressed to others via the rational system.

3. Voters choose between ideologies based on their underlying psychological temperament (i.e. they use the non-rational part of their brain).

4. That psychological temperament is largely determined by genetics, but parenting, culture, and life experiences also play a role. This explains why 30-60% of the variance in ideological views can be explained by genes (and here, here, here, here and here as well).

5. But ideology is not exclusively non-rational. A person’s chosen ideology must also be plausible to:

   1. the rational part of their brain

   2. Their culture and social network
      Note here that I say “plausible” instead of “true.” The non-rational part of our brain just needs to persuade the rational part of our brain and other people they associate with not to object too much to any discrepancies between the ideology and observations of material reality.

6. That ideology must also project an image that a person wants to project to others.

7. Cluster B personality disorders are the foundation of almost all radical ideologies.

First a few definitions:

In order to be clear, I want to define my terms.

The Center-Left

For the purposes of this series of articles I will use the term “Center Left” to mean the voters who hold the typical policy views of loyal Democratic voters in the 1970s, 80s and 90s. In particular, I focus this discussion on white, college-educated Democrats in the major metro areas of the Northeast and Pacific coast. These people share the assumption of all ideologies of the Left that:

• We should have Equality in all societies

• It is a moral outrage that we do not

• The government should take immediate action against that inequality.

The Center-Left largely agrees with the Progressive ideal of the early 20th Century that experts within the bureaucracy should use their expertise to solve societal problems. In particular, they want to use the power of the government to gradually move society toward Equality, which is their prime ideal. They believe that the best means to achieve Equality is:

• 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.

The problem is that even according to the Center-Left themselves, Inequality is only getting worse. By 2010, after the messianic hopes for the Obama administration declined and the Republicans won majorities in the US House and most state legislatures, it was obvious to all that the Center-Left’s tactic was failing to achieve Equality.

This was particularly true for a new generation of Left-of-Center Millennials who were the first generation of Americans to be raised by institutions dominated by the Center-Left. It was the conflict between the Egalitarian ideals of the Center-Left and the Inegalitarian outcome of Center-Left government policies that gave birth to the “Great Awokening” after 2010.

The Central Moral Dilemma of the Left

For more than 200 years, almost all Left-of-Center ideologies have had an irresolvable moral dilemma at their heart:

1. What the Left deems to be their prime moral goal (Equality), and:

2. What the Left has actually achieved and what it can possibly achieve in the material world.

Because the prime moral goal of the Left is impossible to achieve, each new generation reinterprets Left-of-Center ideologies to focus on new inequalities and new strategies to overcome those inequalities. Each generation dismisses the failure of previous generations of supporters of Left-of-Center ideologies as inadequate. Each new generation believes that they have discovered the way to finally create Equality and Social Justice.

The Woke are just the latest generation of Left-of-Center ideologies. Wokeness is the moral goal of Equality pushes to its logical (or illogical) extreme. It is Leftism without compromise.

Critical Theorists

The second major group that I focus on in this series are Critical theorists. Critical theorists were heavily influenced by Marxism, but they were not Marxists. Karl Marx wanted to transform Hegelian idealist philosophy into material science. Marx claimed that his theories proved that the inherent contradictions within capitalist economics would inevitably lead to class consciousness among the proletariat, revolution, and finally a pure state of Communism.

Graphic from Tim Urban’s “What’s Our Problem?”

Graphic from Tim Urban’s “What's Our Problem?”

By the 1930s, this claim was obviously wrong. By the late 1960s, even radical Leftists realized it.

Critical theorists originated in the 1930s and dramatically increased their influence within the intelligentsia in the 1960s. Critical theorists were Leftists who had grown disillusioned by the obvious failure of Marxism and Communism to create Equality in the material world. Critical theorists effectively stripped down Marxism to its base assumption while rejecting many of Marx’s key predictions. They:

• Removed the falsifiable predictions that were central to traditional Marxist theory (immiseration of the proletariat, the emergence of class consciousness, and the inevitable revolution to overthrow capitalism).

• Rejected belief in science, logic, and reason that Karl Marx shared with liberal ideologies.

• Shifted the focus from class to race, gender, and sexuality.

• While maintaining the base Marxist assumptions of:

  • Zero-sum competition between groups.

  • All inequalities between groups are due to exploitation and oppression

  • Moral sympathy for those oppressed groups

  • False consciousness of the oppressed

  • A willingness to radically restructure society to end oppression.

Graphic from Tim Urban’s “What is Our Problem?”

Critical theory is not Marxism, but it shares many similar assumptions. While Marx focused on material conditions, the Critical theorists focus on how the powerful created intellectual concepts, such as science, logic, reason, markets, democracy, merit, equality of opportunity, individual rights, individual responsibility, as means of Oppression. Their goal was to deconstruct and undermine the moral legitimacy of these concepts to free the oppressed. This made Critical Theory a far more fundamental critique of modern societies.

Critical Theorists stripped Marxism down to its following core assumptions:

• Human history has been divided by a zero-sum group struggle between the Oppressors and the Oppressed. Class was now only one of the many means of oppression. Race, gender, and sexuality were additional dimensions in the struggle.

• All inequalities and bad behaviors today can be explained by the total victory of the Oppressors over the Oppressed. This victory explains why Equality does not exist despite being a moral imperative.

• Every intellectual construct in society, including progress, science, logic, reason, family, merit, religion, democracy, markets, and individual rights, does not come from material reality. They are instead the socially-constructed tools of oppression cynically created by the Oppressor group to blind us to our oppression.

• It is the moral obligation of all people to take a stand against the Oppressors and in favor of the Oppressed. Since all members of the Oppressor group benefit from their oppression of others, they bear that moral obligation regardless of their individual views and actions.

• We all must take a stand against the Oppressors by subjecting all members of the Oppressor class to relentless criticism and shaming until their moral legitimacy collapses. Only then will the Oppression end and Equality emerge. Exactly how is will happen is left very unclear.

While I cannot prove it, I believe Critical theorists have strong tendencies to anti-social personality disorders, but who also possess very high levels of intelligence and verbal abilities. Critical Theorists use words to manipulate others to achieve their desired anti-social ends indirectly so they can escape responsibility for the damage they cause. They camouflage these anti-social instincts with a wrapper of moral virtue. This makes their ideology very seductive for:

• people who want to harm others and

• for people who sincerely want to help others.

This is a very potent combination. Critical Theorists are the “intellectual puppet masters.” The Woke and the Center-Left are the “puppets.”

The Woke

The Woke are those people who accept the moral challenge of the Critical theorists, even though they do not fully understand all the assumptions listed above. They implement the idea of Critical Theory in the material world, even though few of them actually understand what Critical theory is.

The Woke are those people who use the terminology of Critical theory, and subject anyone who disagrees with Critical theory to relentless criticism and shaming. It is important to note that few of the Woke actually understand the intricacies of Critical Theory. Many of them just like the uncompromising stand against Equality and the need for immediate action. They just form “the muscle” of the ideology in the material world.

The Woke disproportionately suffer from Cluster B personality disorders and see Critical theory as a way to relieve their suffering. Critical theory was deliberately designed to appeal to these personality types, because those with personality disorders are the most vulnerable to symbolic manipulation.

Blaming members of the Oppressor class is much better than admitting that their suffering is due to their own psychology and not what is going on outside in the material world. Unfortunately, Critical Theory has the opposite result of “spiking” their mental disorders (i.e. making their suffering even worse). So like moths to a flame, the Woke are drawn to what harms them and repelled by others who try to help them deal with their personality disorders.

Trends that created the Woke

All the above explain the existence of radical ideologies and Left-of-Center ideologies (which overlap) but they do not explain why they were able to become so influential in the United States and the rest of the Anglo world after 2010.

To explain that we must examine cultural, political, and economic trends that have occurred over the last 60 years.

Pre-history

• The sustained economic growth in the United States from 1947-1965 created the first generation that can take prosperity for granted: the Baby Boom generation.

In hard times, humans need to focus on survival, and they must use the rational side of their brain to do so. Greater material prosperity makes it easier for individuals to indulge in their non-rational impulses without endangering their survival. This is particularly true for those with underlying mental disorders.

The late 1960s

I believe that the late 1960s experienced a fundamental cultural change that we are still dealing with. It is not an exaggeration to call the period a Cultural Revolution. One might even call it the “First Great Awokening.”

1. In 1965 the Democratic party implemented the Great Society, a raft of means-tested programs designed to eliminate poverty and racial inequality. These programs make up the bedrock of social programs for the poor and near-poor for the next 60 years. Despite great anticipation, those social programs did little to create greater equality, except for retirees.

2. Because Americans born after 1945 could take their prosperity for granted, a sizable portion of college-educated Baby Boomers adopted Leftist ideologies that preach that America is the cause of:

   1. Inequality

   2. Injustice

   3. Oppression for women and blacks

   4. War

   5. Imperialism

   6. Environmental Destruction.

3. Baby Boom Leftists revolted against mainstream American values and institutions but failed to achieve many concrete results in the short-term. By the early 1970s, their leftist views went dormant. The Idealism of the late 1960s evaporates into the Cynicism of the 1970s.

The primary difference between the First Great Awokening of the late 1960s and the Second Great Awokening of the present is that the first instance was largely contained to youths. With the exception of college campuses, the First Great Awokening had little impact on American institutions. That is why it burned out so quickly and had so little short-term impact.

But once those college-educated supporters of Left-of-Center ideologies begin to enter the workforce, they slowly changed the political views of the lower-ranks of those institutions. By 2010 those people had worked their way up to middle and upper rungs of those institutions.

Trends from 1970 to 2008

After the Cultural Revolution of the late 1960s, the United States appeared to return to normal, but some powerful trends caused massive changes over the coming decades:

1. From the late 1960s to the present, we see massive growth in the size and scope of the federal government. A sizeable portion of these programs were implemented to overcome specific inequalities within society, including:

   1. Spending, particularly social programs implemented in the Great Society

   2. Regulations

   3. Taxes

   4. Mandates on state governments

2. American institutions begin to require four-year college degrees in hiring for professional job occupations to increase the competence of their middle and upper-level leadership. By the end of the 1980s, a four-year college degree was required by most higher-level job positions.

3. Those with a four-year college degree acquired a disproportionate share of the gains of economic growth during this period.

4. Religious observance among Americans with a four-year college degree declines substantially. Because humans need moral meaning in their lives, Left-of-Center ideologies filled the previous role of religion.

5. Professional-class white voters increasingly support the Democratic party and bring into the party new concerns about social issues. These voters were far more moderate than the Sixties Radicals, but they focused on similar issues:

   1. Uplifting the poor and racial minorities

   2. Liberating women and gays

   3. Peace (or at least opposition to American participation in war)

   4. Environmentalism

   5. Expanding immigration

6. As the leadership of the Democratic party, campaign donors, and activists became dominated by college-educated whites, the party shifts away from their previous New Deal commitment to:

   1. social insurance programs

   2. promoting economic growth

   3. promoting national defense

   4. opposition to totalitarians abroad

7. In reaction, working-class voters shift away from the Democratic party. Some become independent, but many become Republicans. This only increases the influence of the remaining college-educated whites within the Democratic party.

8. College-educated citizens increasingly migrate towards affluent suburbs in a few major metro areas in the:

   1. Northeast

   2. Pacific coast

   3. Plus college towns scattered across America

9. A small group of former Sixties Radicals in academia gradually craft a new ideology called Critical Theory.
   At first, the ideology had very limited support even within academia. But supporters of Critical Theory gradually hone their arguments to convince the Center-Left of the need to be more aggressive in confronting existing inequalities. Because the Center-Left, who dominate academia, also deems equality to be their prime moral goal, supporters of Critical Theory grow in influence, particularly within the humanities and education departments.

10. The gradual implementation of affirmative action policies in government bureaucracies, government contractors, and universities. Ironically, this was an outgrowth of the attempt of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 to eliminate racial discrimination, but the Left-of-Center activists within the EEOC and judiciary transformed it into its opposite: intentional discrimination. This created a moral and legal legitimacy for what would become Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI).

11. The Internet creates new business models that threaten the flow of revenues to many American institutions.

Enter the Millennials

Just as the Baby Boom generation played a key role in the First Great Awokening, so did the Millennial generation (born 1981-1996) play a key role in the Second Great Awokening. While the Baby Boomers were the first generation born into material prosperity, the Millennials were the first generation born into a world dominated by 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 of them, the Left-of-Center worldview was just common sense.

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 a clear injustice… an injustice that many were willing to fight against.

The Pivot

Because of all the trends listed above, by 2008 the United States was fundamentally different from what it was in the mid-1960s:

• It is far richer

• Those with a four-year college degree earned a far higher percentage of the total national income and wealth

• The importance of acquiring a four-year college degree has increased dramatically. Those who have at least a four-year college degree dominate the middle and upper-rungs of virtually all American institutions

• The representation of those who uphold Left-of-Center ideologies became far higher among those with four-year college degrees than it had been before.

• Left-of-center professionals are geographically concentrated in the affluent suburbs in a few major metro areas on the Northeast and Pacific coasts.

• Left-of-center professionals are also occupationally concentrated in certain professions:

  • Government bureaucrats

  • Teaching (K-12 and universities)

  • Media

  • Entertainment

  • Digital technology

  • Non-profits

• Because of these geographical and occupational concentrations, Left-of-center professionals:

  • rarely came into contact with people who had fundamentally different ideological views

  • and those few whom they did come into contact with were of lower social status, lower income, and lower intelligence than themselves

  • gradually evolved a culture that contrasts sharply with the rest of America.

• Just as the Baby Boom generation was the first generation to take material prosperity for granted, the Millennial generation is the first generation raised in a society dominated by Baby Boomers. Particularly those Millennials who were born into Left-of-Center professional-class families were exposed almost exclusively to the world-view of Left-of-Center Baby Boomers.

Events from 2009 to Present

The Obama presidency represents a major break in ideological trends, but not for obvious reasons.

1. After 8 years of being excluded from power and the Iraq war, the Center-Left was desperate for change. They latched onto Barack Obama with almost messianic fervor. Unrealistic expectations of what he could do quickly collapsed in 2010 when his administration could not produce the hoped-for results.
   This discredited Center-Left ideology, particularly in the minds of Leftist Millennials. These Leftist Millennials were particularly concerned with the income, wealth and power of the Top 1%.

2. The media, which had previously viewed itself as a watchdog guarding against the powerful, could not bring itself to criticize Barack Obama, a charismatic black-skinned proponent of Center-Left ideology. Unlike every previous president, the media never left the “honeymoon” phase, and they started acting more as a Public Relations department for the Obama administration and the Democratic party. After eight years, this new mode of coverage was thoroughly entrenched as the new norm.

3. The invention of social media enabled a more immediate connection between people and strengthened the insular bubble of users. Because high-education and high-income people tend to be the first adopters of new technology, Left-of-Center professionals become a majority of early users. They also dominate the digital companies that administer the algorithms and content moderation of that social media.

4. As the internet and social media threatened the business model of traditional American institutions, many organizations learned that pandering to the ideological views of the Left-of-Center professional class was a viable business model. To implement this business model, all the content is shaped by how it makes Left-of-Center professionals feel: happy, shocked, angry, or vengeful. Highly visual and negative events are the most effective at provoking an intense reaction.

5. To forward this new business model:

   1. mainstream new media:

      1. increased positive coverage of Leftist movements and Left-of-Center politicians

      2. adopted Post-Modernist Leftist terminology, particularly regarding race, gender, and climate

      3. decreased the number of conservative opinion pieces.

   2. social media algorithms deliberately:

      1. amplified Left-of-Center content

      2. dampened or outright censored Right-of-Center content.

   3. to not lose access to their audience, many previously conservative media voices and politicians shifted to the Left, particularly regarding race, gender, and climate.

6. The proliferation of smartphones with internet access, social media access with likes and reposts, and video cameras enabled upsetting personal events to be propagated across the nation within minutes. It was the perfect means to provoke a sudden non-rational response from people.

7. The traditional news media runs massive amounts of coverage on events tailor-made to outrage Left-of-Center professionals long before all the facts of the case become known. Each event is inserted into a narrative that is both pleasing and provocative to those with Left-of-Center views.
   

   

8. In this curated media and social media environment, one Leftist social movement dominated by young Millenials after another sprung up to fight against injustice and inequalities. Unlike in previous eras, those social movements faced little criticism from American institutions:

   1. Climate Change movement throughout the entire period

   2. Occupy movement in 2011-12

   3. Democratic Socialists in roughly 2016-21

   4. MeToo movement in roughly 2015-18

   5. Black Lives Matter movement from 2013 to present

   6. Transgender rights movement from 2013 to present

   7. The Anti-Trump Resistance movement from 2015 to the present.

9. All of the above trends gave media and social media an enormous incentive to focus on these movements and present them in a positive manner to their Center-Left audience. Because this Center-Left audience believed fervently in Equality, it was impossible for them not to have a positive view of these Leftist movements.

10. All of the above caused white college-educated professionals with Center-Left views to shift radically to the Left. This caused the institutions that they dominated to shift with them. Previously, non-political American institutions stampeded to show that they were against climate change, systemic racism, police brutality, sexual harassment, transphobes, and above all, Donald Trump.

11. All of the above put individuals with diagnosed Cluster B personality disorders or tendencies toward them under enormous psychological pressure. This is particularly true of young Millennials with far less life experience than older generations. Young Left-of-Center Millennials proved particularly vulnerable to Critical Theory. They were primed to become Woke.

12. Young women, who have significantly higher rates of Neuroticism and Agreeableness (desire to comply) are particularly vulnerable to Critical Theory. Because of society’s predisposition to protect women and the Left-of-Center ideologies’ prime moral goal of Equality that they were taught their entire lives, they were incredibly isolated from the real world. Then those same women were the targets of social media algorithms that saturated them with the message.

    

The Fuel

• The materials for the bonfire were assembled:

  • The Covid pandemic, which killed so many seniors, forced the Baby Boom generation to suddenly and simultaneously confront their own mortality. The generation that celebrated Youth now might die within a few weeks.

  • Anti-Trump hysteria that had gradually ramped up over the previous 4 years

  • Social isolation and boredom from the Covid lockdowns, and

  • the coming 2020 Presidential election, and the strong incentive of his opponents to make everything look bad so the Democrats would win the election

The Catalyst

• The death of George Floyd. Without all the other factors mentioned previously, however, Floyd’s death would have gone unnoticed.

  

Ignition

All the forces that had been developing over the last 60 years, along with the psychologies of the human brain triggered one of the greatest moral panics in American history.

I am not going to go into great detail here, as you all experienced it. I think that it will be looked at as one of the most important events of the 21st Century.

All at once, the vast majority of American institutions that had been built on merit, hard work, and accomplishment for centuries rushed to embrace the world view of Cluster B personality disorders. The reason it looked like madness was because that was exactly what it was. It was a 21st-Century witch hunt fueled by ideology, mental disorder, media coverage, social media algorithms, and (most of all) fear.

As with all witch hunts, the most ruthless and demented took advantage of the situation to manipulate the white male Left-of-Center professionals who dominated American institutions to embrace ideas that just a few years ago they would have found laughable. Anyone who accused another person of racism, misogyny, or fascism gained an immediate social advantage.

To protect themselves from being accused themselves, friends and family went along with it and, in many cases, cheered it on. Everyone lived in fear of what other people thought because they knew that the slightest slip of the tongue would lead to social suicide, career suicide, and institutional suicide.

In such a situation, sociopaths and narcissists come out on top because they care only about themselves, and they will do what needs to be done to survive even if it means destroying others. And for the worst of them, destroying others was a nice bonus. They could easily manipulate and trigger histrionic and borderline people, particularly naive young women.

This witch hunt was very useful in the short run for Joe Biden and the Democratic party as it propelled them into power in DC. To reward Democratic voters, Biden implemented even more intense DEI policies than had been previously implemented, passed new Green energy policies, and opened up the borders.

As with all previous witch hunts, the emotional intensity could not be maintained forever. Once the immediate threat from Covid passed, and people began to go back to their normal lives, regret set in.

Now, the irrational seemed irrational again. As information about old events trickled in and social media censorship relaxed, all the Left-of-Center narratives of 2015-22 began to crack. No one apologized (because that would be unsightly), but almost everyone knew that our institutions had gone much, much too far.

Now, the Cluster B persons were isolated, but the policies implemented due to fear of their destructive behavior still exist. And in the 2024 elections, a majority of Americans voted to roll them back. It is too early to see if President Trump will be successful in doing so.

So are the Woke dead?

No, the Woke have just gone into temporary retreat. As long as the American upper class is dominated by Left-of-Center ideologies, the nation will be vulnerable to moral panics that grow out of the Central Moral Dilemma of the Left. As long as they preach the goal of Equality via our institutions, there will always be a new generation of uncompromising Leftists willing to shame the older generation for not creating Equality and living in hypocrisy.

So the cycle will continue until our upper class is willing to confront reality.

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More of my articles on Ideology:

1. Understanding ideology:

   1. Where do ideologies come from?

   2. Why neither the Left nor the Right have solutions

2. Understanding Totalitarian ideologies:

   1. Radical ideologies feast on mental disorders

   2. The rise of Totalitarian Ideologies in the 20th Century

   3. The dangers of Soft Totalitarianism

   4. Were Hitler and the National Socialists actually Socialist?

3. Why Left-of-Center ideologies are the main threat to continuing material progress:

   1. The Central Moral Dilemma of the Left

   2. The Left's definition of "progress" is not progress at all

   3. Why the Left undermines Progress

   4. The Left has hit a historic dead-end

4. How ideologies undermine mental health and human flourishing:

   1. Why are people still unhappy in a world of progress?

   2. Is material progress driving us crazy?