The Unconstrained Vision Lives

The appeal of Wokeism and Socialism

Theodore Dalrymple writes,

[Andrew] Doyle provides a succinct characterization of woke ideology. It is, he says, “An ideology underpinned by the postmodernist notion that our understanding of reality is produced in the context of linguistic and cultural frameworks, that knowledge is a construct of power wielded oppressively through language, and therefore censorship and other authoritarian measures are necessary to reshape society.”

This reshaping is, of course, to be carried out in the name of social justice, but entails the wielding of great, unopposed, and even totalitarian power by those who consider themselves enlightened—namely, the woke.

There is no central committee, or Lenin, of wokeism. It spreads not by overall design, but like an epidemic disease. Universities are foci of infection, and just as epidemics spare certain parts of the population, relatively speaking, so wokeism is like the measles of the educated. It is precisely because there are now so many of them that it affects every level from subeditor to government minister.

Doyle sees Wokeism as dead, killed by the Trump Administration. Dalrymple disagrees.

I suspect also that we have raised a generation of educated people who believe that any difference in outcomes between identifiable groups of people can only be accounted for by prejudice and illicit discrimination. If they believe this, they will remain susceptible to the siren song of wokeism for years to come. Thus, any dismantling of the bureaucratic apparatus inspired by absurd doctrines might prove only temporary.

Coleman Hughes writes,

it’s not that young people are suddenly getting into socialism, it’s that older people were turned off to it for specific, contingent reasons. And now it is just returning to its default level of popularity…

socialism promises to take from the rich and give to the poor. Which is to say, it promises not only “free stuff,” but also a more equal society. Critics of socialism often highlight the first half without realizing the importance of the second. The human instinct for fairness is deep-seated and evolutionarily ancient. Parents notice how naturally it comes to their children to complain that their sibling got more than they did. It doesn’t need to be taught.

He says that old folks like me have stronger memories of the collapse of the Soviet Union, as well as what Cuba and Venezuela were like before they became socialist. Young people do not have that experience.

Dalrymple and Hughes are probably correct that the goal of perfect equality is always going to have appeal. And people will always point to Scandinavia. Not the actual Scandinavia, which has plenty of inequality, free enterprise, and imperfections, but an imaginary Scandinavia that is everything pure and communal.

Thomas Sowell wrote of the “unconstrained vision.” That is a vision that sees human society as perfectible. The problem is that when those with that vision obtain power, they get frustrated when perfection does not ensue, and they become increasingly authoritarian in their methods. The results only get worse.

Milton Friedman and other twentieth-century economists were very articulate about the connection between capitalism and freedom. They pointed out that the attempt to engineer a perfectly equal society leads to dictatorship. Inequality remains, with the rulers on top of the heap.

To me, it seems that an extreme form of the unconstrained vision is at the root of wokeism and socialism. I see this vision as a horror.

There is plenty of room for disagreement among those of us who accept the constrained vision. It is not just conservatives who accept it. There are people on the left who accept the constrained vision.

But the left’s loudest and youngest voices do not accept the constrained vision. I agree with Dalrymple and Hughes in their pessimism about getting the unconstrained vision out of the political bloodstream. I wish it were otherwise.