Dissecting Wokeism

Victor Davis Hanson writes about the disaster that is wokeism.

First, remember that wokeism is a top-down phenomenon. It started in academia with “critical race theory” and “critical legal theory.” These are bastard offshoots of harebrained “critical theory,” which arose from a demoralized and adrift Europe after the cataclysms of two devastating European-spawned world wars.

Second, given its elite origins and spread, it is no surprise that wokeism is a psychological mechanism that exempts the privileged by virtue signaling and performance grievance-mongering in lieu of meaningful real action. Wokeism is neither consistent nor logical. Its self-serving selectivity means Hunter Biden’s serial use of the N-word is not inconsistent with his father’s lectures that the deplorables pose an existential racist threat to the nation.

Third, Wokeism destroys individualism. We cease being persons and instead become categorized peoples. What does it matter that Al Sharpton was a racist demagogue, that Jesse Jackson a skilled shakedown artist of corporate America, that Bayard Rustin, in contrast, a brilliant civil rights strategist, or that Martin Luther King, Jr. was an ecumenical believer in the inherent goodness of a flawed America of his times—once they are all to be reduced to being just black, and therefore just equally victims?

Fourth, race is not unimportant, but it is not the only catalyst of history or arbiter of life in the present.

Fifth, wokeism’s existential enemy is merit. Critical Race Theory claims that meritocratic criteria are rigged or “constructed” in subtle ways to reflect the dominant hegemonies of the white male heterosexual hierarchy. Thus physics has no innate laws across time and space. There are no race-neutral skills or lack of the same in a United Airlines pilot.

Nascent wokeism went viral during the terror of COVID-19, our first global pandemic in a century, the first ever national quarantine, the first ever self-induced recession, the most destructive riots in U.S. history after the death of George Floyd, and the first ever election where well over 60 percent did not vote on election day. And the country went stark-raving mad in response.

As the virus fades, the lockdown becomes porous, pent-up demand fuels an economic recovery, the absence of law enforcement becomes far more deadly than its omnipresence, violent crime spikes and seeps into the suburbs, and the people resist the Left’s unconstitutional hijacking of state protocols of voting, then what happens?

Do we revert to the norms of the civil rights movement where the content of our character alone matters, not the color of our skin?

Or have we sunk so deeply into the woke quicksands, that we cannot thrash our way up to the air, and thus suffocate from the ancient pressures of the bog that have always destroyed civilizations?

Read much more here: https://amgreatness.com/2021/06/13/anatomy-of-the-woke-madness/