The imperative of the moment demands that left-liberals join us in an alliance against the neo-Marxism of wokeness, “cancel culture” and “anti-racism.” The survival of Western civilization, quite literally, depends on it.
The metastasis of the “woke” ideology is the most comprehensive threat facing the American republic. It is appallingly totalitarian, insofar as the woke wield the levers of cancel culture to suppress all dissident speech, root out all wrongthink and achieve by sheer force an intellectual homogeneity. It is outright racist, insofar as intersectionality and identity politics, to say nothing of vogue concepts such as “critical race theory” and “racial equity,” overtly discriminate on the basis of race and thus undermine the preeminent American ethos of equal protection under the law.
As if out of a dystopian novel, though, the woke ideology has nonetheless become the unifying creed of the American ruling class. That ruling class, which extends from public sector bureaucracies to the Fortune 500 to Hollywood to Silicon Valley and sundry others in between, has in recent years universally come to imbibe, promulgate and disseminate the core tenets of wokeness.
What’s more, that universality often takes the more insidious form of cross-institutional collusion: As Matthew Schmitz put it in a Tablet essay last September, “Governmental authorities and corporations now coordinate in enforcing the dictates of the new secular progressive faith.” Thus has the woke ideology completed, a la the Italian Marxist theorist Antonio Gramsci, its long march through the institutions. And let’s not mince words: This is Marxism. As Israeli political theorist Yoram Hazony carefully outlined in a Quillette essay last August, “The new Marxists do not use the technical jargon that was devised by 19th-century Communists,” but “their politics are based on Marx’s framework for critiquing liberalism.”
