Wokeness is about making historically marginalized groups sacred. This religion reinforces an ideology I term “cultural socialism,” which holds that the highest aim of society is to equalize outcomes for disadvantaged identity groups and protect them from harm, such as hearing America described as “a land of opportunity.” How did this ethos, which hides under innocuous labels such as “diversity” or “inclusivity,” wind up as the pinnacle of our culture? What can we do about it?
These questions are the focus of two recent books, Christopher Rufo’s best-selling America’s Cultural Revolution and Richard Hanania’s The Origins of Woke, which seems poised to enjoy Rufo-level success. They set out two different accounts of how the radical left conquered the culture. Hanania focuses on affirmative action and cancel culture, emphasizing the evolution of civil rights law from equal treatment to equal results, free speech to speech suppression. Rufo concentrates on Critical Race Theory (CRT), tracing it to Marxism’s cultural turn from class to identity in the late 1960s. The two accounts, evolutionary and revolutionary, institutional and cultural, complement and contest each other.
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