What fascinates me about the US election is that all sides claim to represent “real America.” Maybe it’s time we started to accept that this is true.
Donald Trump’s “Make America Great Again” idea claims the legitimacy of what it means to be an American. But, ultimately, it’s a call for a return to the good old days of mid-20th-century cultural life in the US. The problem is that history shows this Golden Age was built by the ancestors of today’s “woke” progressives. In other words, Trump wants yesterday’s leftovers.
What frustrates Trump (and his followers) is not progressivism, but that progress left people like him behind. Trump’s movement wants to control the path of progress, it does not want to reverse any of its gains. All of Trump’s team would have been ‘woke’ back in the 1980s and 1990s. Vivek, Tulsi, RFK Jr and Musk. They are all progressives. None of them are on the ‘right’.
The best way to understand US politics is to think of the Republican and Democratic parties as two rafts floating down the river of American history. The Democrats tend to have a more streamlined boat, while the Republicans can’t figure out why their square tugboat doesn’t slip through the water like a torpedo. In this analogy, ‘woke’ is not a third raft – it is the river itself. Wokeness is the deepest of all traditions that every American agrees with on some level.
Woke can be hard to pin down, but it is more than an ideology. It is a set of psychological and political methods for taking and holding power developed specifically for the American culture. Wokeness doesn’t care about any of the issues it claims to support – race, transgenderism, the environment, crime, feminism, sexual freedom, etc. Each of these is but a means to an end. The end is pure power.
‘Real America’ is wokeism. It always was. Every woke principle (fairness, science, truth, brotherhood) is transparently a cynical power grab to be discarded as soon as the ostensible ‘supporters’ achieve their objective of gaining more power.
For example, wokeness supports race issues because progressives figured out that guilt-tripping people could generate a lot of power. Race was a lever used by the woke to pry open the institutional protections of the state that were installed to prevent unchecked power. Race was a tool to dismantle legal meritocracy and replace it with a patronage system. Wokeness never cared about black people: it only cared that all races were under its control.
Wokeness also does not care about transgender issues. This is another way of wielding political power. Transgender people are a useful subgroup through which Americans can ‘change’ the world and undermine enemy cultures. Neither does wokeness care about feminism or women. Feminism was a tool to disempower religious men and women who held values that were hostile to America’s total power.
We can extend this further. Wokeness doesn't care about sexual freedom or the sexual revolution. The sexual revolution was a tool to dismantle the political power of the Catholic Church and its values. As soon as that was achieved, wokeness went straight back to neo-prudishness and Jesuit-level censorship that characterised early Puritan America.
Wokeness doesn't care about truth, academia or the social sciences. Universities were only the most vulnerable ‘official’ organ of the US state to capture. Woke America will discard academia, just like it discarded women when they ceased to be useful and for the same reasons. Similarly, the woke do not hate straight European males. They see them as the treasure goblins of politics – beating them up makes all the political gold drop out.
Americans do not seek power because they want to promote woke causes. They promote woke causes because they are good tools for seeking power. Wokeness is the power maximiser of the Americans. It is like an uncontrolled chemical reaction that seeks out untapped sources of political power and burns them as fuel. No person or group controls wokeism. It is a gestalt entity. It is not used by people, it uses people. It is America itself.
The American woke tradition was accidentally brought into existence by leaving too much unused exploitable power lying around, like a careless warehouse owner might start a fire by storing too many flammable materials in one place without a sprinkler system. You cannot fight wokeness piecemeal for the same reason a house fire cannot be extinguished by pouring water on the burning couch. The whole inferno must be starved of fuel (unused exploitable power), oxygen (vulnerable sociopolitical systems) or heat (attention via the media).
Despite his words, Donald Trump is not trying to starve the runaway chemical reaction of woke. He was born in that fire. His every breathing step burns with wokeism. Trump sounds like a conservative, but he is proof positive that a conservative is just an American who believes in the woke ideas of 30 years ago. The whole country boils with wokeism.
The problem with chemical reactions is that they tear at the molecular bonds of culture until only atomised individuals remain. There is no victory condition for ‘progress’ for the woke. It will continue forever precisely because it is a tradition, not a destination.
Wokeness cannot have any grand vision for a final, perfect society because that would imply the risk of achieving that goal. Arriving at a destination would immediately sap the energy from the political movements that keep certain people in power. Can’t have that. Much better to pursue abstract ideological values like ‘equity’ and ‘justice’ because those lack any internally limiting principle. You will never achieve ‘justice’. There is always new evil to expiate. Wokeness is the tool for constantly redirecting useful political energy to defeat the next evil ‘thing’.
Most progressives – even academic public intellectual types – have no grand strategic vision at all. If you challenge them by pointing out an obvious logical extension or implication to their latest woke demands, you will immediately encounter Rod Dreher’s Law of Merited Impossibility. They will say, ‘No one is calling for…’ or ‘That’s different because…’ and then, a year or two later, your predicted consequences happen anyway. But they don’t care.
For instance, many of the statues of Robert E Lee have been pulled down over recent years. But why not the statues of Thomas Jefferson as well? Every president has been ‘cancelled’ in some form, so why not go full Taliban and blast Mount Rushmore to smithereens? Honestly, why not? There is no way for the woke to explain why they shouldn’t by reference to their abstract principles. One day, some political up-and-comer will see a way to gain power that allows him to dynamite that mountain into dust. It is inevitable. Everything reduces to atoms.
We are not even close to peak woke. Everyone in America is frustrated at what they think is the too-slow pace of mild measures to move society's stubborn needles. All Americans are disgusted and dismayed that so many offensive things are still allowed to be thought, said and done. Three hundred million Americans really, truly, believe that any opposition to their version of progress by other Americans can only be simple bigotry or oppression.
To be American is to constantly lurch from issue to issue, with each political victory opening a new front of a new battle. In conventional warfare, the territory controlled by an enemy is the natural stopping point upon which a grand strategy can be formulated. But in an American war of democracy, in which the perpetual existence of The Enemy is taken for granted, every gain just leads to yet another attempt to get more gains, “and the night does not end”.
In a way, woke Americans are like entrepreneurs, which makes sense in a capitalist kind of way. They seek the next great political innovation, market disruptor or arbitrage opportunity. They search for political profit without regard for a ‘big picture’ or even the need for a vision of the perfect society. Socially negative externalities from their decentralised pursuit of power are not the concern of the woke political entrepreneur. If you can explain where progress needs to stop, you aren’t an American: you hold some other values in higher regard.
All attempts to convince or persuade Americans to rein in wokeness are futile. There is no way to transcend what is, at root, a fundamental and irreconcilable conflict of values between America and the rest of the world. America is woke today, it will be woke after the 2024 election, and it will continue to be woke until someone, or some force, quenches the chemical reaction of this mutated, garbled idea of progress.
But until and unless that happens, woke will continue for a long while yet.
