The Woke Virus and its Hosts

Eric Kaufmann's explanation for the power of Woke Ideology

Eric Kaufmann’s recent book, The Third Great Awokening, has some provocative and important things to say concerning Wokeism, or what Kaufmann calls cultural socialism.

• Cultural socialism appeals to people by stimulating an emotional reflex to root for the underdog, cheering for some groups and booing others.

• Cultural socialism is not going away, because it is very entrenched among young people.

• Only by exercising political control over education can opponents of cultural socialism keep it from taking over.

But the book is unreadable. In a podcast with Richard Hanania, Hanania says right away that he only read parts of the book. My own experience is that after the first two chapters I resorted to skimming. There is too much repetition, too many metaphors, too many recycled anecdotes of cancel culture.

I recommend hanging Kaufmann’s editors.

An Emotional Reflex

Kaufmann invokes Jonathan Haidt’s moral foundations framework in arguing that cultural socialism takes the equality and care/harm considerations to extreme. Kaufmann

defines woke precisely as the “sacralization of historically disadvantaged race, gender and sexual identity groups.” This powers a woke variant of cultural socialist ideology, namely the belief in equal outcomes and emotional harm protection for totemic identity groups—think of the first as “Diversity-Equity” and the second as “Inclusion.” p. 15

But because so many people, particularly on the left, are sensitive to equality and care/harm, they find it hard to be against cultural socialism. Cultural socialism taps into what Kaufmann calls a “minorities good, majorities threatening” emotional reflex. While very few people take cultural socialism to authoritarian extremes (repressing dissent), the extremists ride a wave of sympathy from the moderate left.

The emotional reflex began to develop in the mid-1960s.

morality narrowed in wider elite society: beliefs about how to be a good person and what to feel guilty about rotated away from religion, patriotism, and sexual propriety to center solely on care/harm and equality—especially as applied to Black Americans and, later, to women and sexual minorities. p. 60

Think of all of the situations in which you were expected to agree with a speaker who spoke favorably about women relative to men, blacks relative to whites, or queers relative to straights. Collectively, we have been training our emotional reflexes to have these reactions. No decent person is supposed to be against Black Lives Matter, #MeToo, the Pride flag, or Free Palestine.

For example, over ten years ago, I attended my third daughter’s graduation from Brandeis University, which was in the vanguard of Woke institutions. I had a traumatic experience.

The graduation speaker mentioned that she had recently read that by 2050 the United States population would be over 50 percent minorities. Although she did not intend this as an applause line, the speaker was interrupted by wild cheers. The graduates whooped and hollered, while I sat, puzzled and appalled by their behavior, because I do not believe in cheering for one identity group against another. In hindsight, I was witnessing the “minorities good, majorities threatening” emotional reflex in action.

Kaufmann convinced me that the emotional reflex is a plausible explanation for the triumph of cultural socialism. Very few people are going to become dedicated students of Critical Race Theory, Queer Theory, or “de-colonization.” But when these ideas get boiled down to “minorities good, majorities threatening,” they have broad appeal.

The Kids are All Woke

Kaufmann is a devotee of surveys of political and cultural values. He believes that the recent backlash against cultural socialism will be short-lived.

The young are consistently more woke than the old, especially in elite circles, which is a major reason for my longer-term pessimism about the claim that woke is in remission...Young women are especially likely to be cultural socialists. p. 17

In a chapter called “Youthquake,” he writes,

As the Millennials and Gen-Z enter corporations, law firms, newsrooms, and government, they are bringing their cultural socialist values with them. Instead of assimilating to the liberal outlook of the adult world, they are compelling those adults to bend the knee to their woke worldview. p. 282

Among the many survey findings he cites to support his pessimistic take on younger generations, there is

An American national student survey in 2021 found that three in four students agreed that a professor who says something students find offensive should be reported to the university. p. 282

The 2022 FIRE student survey found that 85 percent of 45,000 students agreed at least somewhat that a speaker who says BLM is a hate group, or that trans people have a mental disorder, should not be permitted to speak on campus, with even 43 to 45 percent of conservative students concurring. p. 283

Government intervention in education

At present, many teachers in both public and private schools are advocates for cultural socialism. In the podcast, Kaufmann argues for government intervention to prevent teachers from using the classroom to preach cultural socialism. He would impose a more conservative-friendly curriculum in K-12 schools. Hanania pushes back.

The libertarian approach is to encourage more school choice, in the belief that the best values will win out. Instead, Kaufmann says that conservatives must be willing to deploy the interventionist tool.

The only major institution that clearly lies outside the sway of cultural socialism is elected government. Thus, government takes on greater importance p. 48

In 2019, Kaufmann conducted an interesting experiment with British students. Before asking students to ask whether we should prioritize freedom of speech or the feelings of people who would be made uncomfortable by certain expressions, Kaufmann

asked a third to read a passage in favor of academic freedom, a third to read about the importance of protecting minority groups from harmful speech, and a third to read nothing. … students who read the free speech paragraph shifted some fifteen points toward the free speech position. It turns out that even a short paragraph can swing opinion among a third of students. Reading about harmful speech, however, had a much bigger impact on young women than young men, shifting women fourteen points toward emotional safety compared to a mere two points among men. p. 293

This suggests that young people can be influenced by how they are taught.

In conclusion, I believe that Kaufmann has important things to say. I am sorry that his book does not say them more concisely.

substacks referenced above: @

How the Race Taboo Swallowed Our Political Culture | Eric Kaufmann & Richard Hanania