Was I Wrong about Woke?

Outvoting the elites didn’t change their ideology

I claim that wokism is a rational response to the equality thesis (all groups have the same innate distribution of potential). Therefore, it won’t be stopped without a hereditarian revolution. Christopher Rufo and Richard Hanania argue that wokism followed from a “long march through the institutions” and civil rights law, respectively. They say that it will disappear when we muscle our way back into the institutions and/or change the laws. If Trump just ended wokism by signing some executive orders and changing the leadership at key institutions, that would disprove my model and vindicate Rufo and Hanania.

The right is on a winning streak. However, nothing has yet happened that I didn’t explicitly say was possible. When I presented my theory of wokism in January 2024, I said that “Trump [could be] reelected and issue[] executive orders commanding schools and businesses to treat people as individuals.” But I said that this would not by itself win the support of elites or change the long-term trajectory of our culture.

The false hope that wokism can be beaten without a hereditarian revolution stems from a misunderstanding of what the ideology is. The fact that Laurie Penny’s define woke tweet a couple weeks ago elicited thousands of replies, with virtually no correct answers, indicates that the vast majority of people on the right still don’t understand what is driving the left.

Mainstream anti-woke activists have rallied behind the ideal of “colorblindness,” which Rufo calls “The only hope for a diverse nation.” As I explain below, I do not think Rufo et al. have thought through what would happen under a truly colorblind regime. Racial disparities would be enormous—much greater than they are now. As far as I am aware, no advocate of colorblindness has revealed what he plans to tell people in the post-woke utopia when they notice these disparities and demand an explanation.

This is not the first time in relatively recent history that the left has been on the defensive. In 2004, the left hated George W. Bush almost as much as it now hates Trump. The entire media, academic, and cultural establishment was against Bush. Nevertheless, Bush won reelection—including the popular vote—against his Harris-like, establishment Democratic opponent John Kerry. There was a “vibe shift” then, too. But four years later Obama was elected, and four years after that the Great Awokening began. Everything the right has gained in the past couple months could easily slip through our fingers.

Without a hereditarian revolution, we can mobilize the conservative mob to elect figures like Trump and J. D. Vance, get better laws on the books, and intimidate businesses into giving up explicit DEI programs. We can probably win the fight against the most noxious expressions of gender ideology. Those are all good things. But if we squander yet another opportunity to take on the race taboo, this round of conservative activism will end the same way as all previous efforts for the past 80 years—with capitulation to the left.

After I clarify the logic of wokism, I’ll discuss the prospects of the anti-woke movement in light of the Trump presidency, Rufo’s mistaken claim that hereditarianism has already been tried, problems with the ideal of “colorblindness,” some specific issues with the approach of Rufo, Eric Kaufmann, et al., and evidence that a hereditarian revolution may already be underway.

What Is Woke?

“What is woke?” is the right’s version of “what is a woman?”—a question that often short-circuits the brain and makes the rightist tongue-tied, nervous, and angry. A couple weeks ago, Marxist journalist Laurie Penny challenged anyone who claims to be anti-woke “to define—as specifically as possible—what they think ‘woke’ actually means.” Many conservatives replied that they would answer the question only after Penny defined “woman.” But the fact that gender ideologues struggle to say what a woman is doesn’t excuse conservatives’ inability to define woke. In both cases, a clear, non-deflective answer would expose embarrassing contradictions in the ideology of the mainstream left or right.

There’s no objectively correct way to define “woke,” or any other word. But it is an objective fact that something happened in the world around 2012, and intensified in 2020, which involved the left (and to some extent the right) doubling down on social justice and cancellations. If we agree that “woke” is supposed to refer to that, then there is an objectively correct definition, namely, one that identifies whatever it was that animated the left and caused the phenomena in question.

The failure to define “woke” has real political implications. In the long run, you are unlikely to prevail in the fight against woke if you don’t know what it is. You might even think woke is over and we can pack it in!

Taking the Equality Thesis Seriously

A definition of woke should do three things:

• identify what drove the post-2012 spike in social justice talk and cancel culture

• place the ideology in philosophical and historical context

• be more or less acceptable to wokesters themselves

Put in a negative form, a definition should not:

• confuse manifestations or side effects of wokism for the ideology itself

• conflate wokism with other ideologies or trends that are conceptually or historically separate

• be a straw man that makes it impossible to understand the logic and appeal of wokism or to have productive dialogue with wokesters

Armed with the correct definition, one can understand wokism’s appeal, map its relationship to other ideologies, and craft arguments that could theoretically be persuasive to those in the grip of its logic.

There is only one definition of wokism that meets the conditions listed above. As I put it in the “Guide”:

Wokism is what follows from taking the equality thesis seriously, given a background of Christian morality. If all races and sexes have the same innate distributions of psychological traits, disparities in socioeconomic status must be due to environmental factors. In practice, that means differences in outcome favoring whites or men will be attributed to past or present white racism or sexism. This triggers an all-consuming crusade against the hidden forces of discrimination.

To be clear, wokism requires two premises, one empirical (the equality thesis) and one moral (spiritual equality). You need both to generate the ideology.

The empirical premise of wokism was first articulated by John Locke in 1690 when he said that if you or I had been born in South Africa, we would be exactly like Africans and vice versa. His ideas were picked up by the French revolutionaries, then scientists like Alfred Russel Wallace, Alexander von Humboldt, Theodor Waitz, Franz Boas, and Margaret Mead, and became a tenet of leftism and then mainstream conservatism.

Why the equality thesis became the orthodoxy in the absence of any compelling evidence is an interesting question. For what it’s worth, in his 1916 book, The Passing of the Great Race, Madison Grant (a leading American anti-immigration activist and Nordic supremacist) attributed the “widespread and fatuous belief in the power of environment” to “the dogma of the brotherhood of man, derived in turn from the loose thinkers of the French Revolution and their American mimics.” Such wishful thinking was certainly a major factor. Carl Degler points out that, in addition, social scientists had professional incentives to downplay the influence of biology on both individual and group differences in order to increase the perceived importance of social forces. But you don’t need to explain where belief in the equality thesis comes from in order to explain what wokism is.

I say that wokism depends on “Christian morality,” although this requires some qualification.

Christianity teaches that God created individuals—and possibly groups—with different capacities. In the parable of the talents, three sons are given different endowments and judged based on what they do with them, not how much they were given (Matthew 25:14–30). But there is a principle of spiritual equality—or at least potential equality—among all of God’s children. Paul explains: “Glory, honor, and peace to everyone who works what is good, to the Jew first and also to the Greek. For there is no partiality with God” (Romans 2:10–11). “There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is neither male nor female; for you are all one in Christ Jesus” (Galatians 3:28). Christians have often failed to live up to Jesus’s lofty ideals. Nevertheless, Westerners have espoused the doctrine of spiritual equality for almost two thousand years. Most atheists inherited their morality from Christianity, though of course they are unaware of this and believe that the principle of moral equality is based on “reason.”

Wokism doesn’t require Christian morality per se, but rather any morality that calls for equal treatment or the full realization of human potential. Although I reject the moral principle of equal “human worth,” I would be woke if I believed in the equality thesis, since I would like to maximize human performance. But I refer to the moral premise of wokism as “Christian morality” because it was Christianity that first formulated and popularized the idea of spiritual equality, and the secularized version of this principle supplies the moral energy for the left’s crusade against racism. The fact that there are obvious parallels between Christianity and wokism in practice—original sin (white privilege), confession (“I am a racist...”), repentance (“I promise to do the work...”), and so on—indicates that most wokesters are driven specifically by the morality of Christianity.

When you combine the equality thesis with Christian-derived moral sensibilities, the existence of large race (or sex) disparities is intolerable. If all groups are the same, differences must be the result of the environment. It is therefore necessary to fix the environment so that lower-performing groups can reach their potential. If the lower-performing group was previously the victim of actual discrimination—as is the case with people of African descent—it is logical to assume that the environmental cause of the disparities traces directly or indirectly back to past or present racism (or sexism). This leads to an ever-escalating war on racism (and sexism), which, in cases where disparities are due to genetic differences, will never end.

During the civil rights era, the standard leftist position was that legal equality would sooner or later lead to equality of outcome. Obviously, black people cannot reach their potential of they are enslaved or systematically discriminated against. But (the reasoning went) if the boot was lifted from off their neck, disparities would naturally fade away, like when Jews were released from the ghettos.

Legal equality was achieved in the United States with the civil rights legislation of 1964 and 1965. But it quickly became clear that, without further intervention, substantial gaps between blacks and whites would persist. Since activists were unwilling to question the equality thesis, they invented a body of theory (e.g., critical theory, critical race theory) to explain the failure of civil rights laws, and they instituted policies like affirmative action to achieve a degree of equality of outcome that would be impossible under a colorblind system.

The Great Awokening occurred when we reached a tipping point around 2012. Four years of Obama had failed to usher in a post-racial era. Everyone realized that another generation of affirmative action, Black History Months, and Kwanza wasn’t going to bring about equality. Brainwashed late millennials and zoomers—people who truly believed the Noble Lie that black, white, Jewish, and Asian people are all born on average exactly the same—arrived on college campuses and demanded an end to the unfairness.

The Great Awokening was catalyzed by developments in technology and changing institutional demographics. Social media made it easier to wind people up and organize cancellations. The feminization of our institutions, which was reaching a new high point, led to a greater emphasis on harm and empathy, and therefore more institutional support for the woke project. However, the conditions that facilitated the intensification of wokism should not be confused with the Great Awokening itself, which was a reaction to persistent group disparities.

The fact that many blue-haired, nose-ringed SJWs might be unable to clearly state the logic of wokism does not mean that my definition is wrong. Many Christians could not give a clear definition of Christianity, or communists of communism. People latch on to ideologies—or to superficial expressions of ideologies—for many reasons, and often without a deep understanding of their logical foundations. Not every action performed by a representative of an ideology will necessarily be consistent with the movements’ stated goals. But ideologies are generally developed and sustained by people who do understand their logic. Wokism is driven by more or less intelligent, morally sensitive people who believe in the equality thesis and are horrified at the persistence of racial disparities.

“Woke Is Everything Bad”

Conservatives often define “woke” as a laundry list of left-coded stuff that they don’t like: gender theory, socialism, drinking soymilk, affirmative consent, etc. But these things are all philosophically and historically distinct from the project of following the equality thesis to its logical conclusion. Suppose we outlawed transgenderism and neopronouns, made Rand Paul the Secretary of the Treasury, disbanded PETA, and kicked the HR department out of our bedrooms, but kept the obsession with white supremacy and racial bean counting. Everyone would recognize that wokism was still with us. On the other hand, if we became race realists, wokism would be over even if some race realists kept their pronouns in their email signatures.

The biggest mistake is conflating wokism with gender theory. Again, you can define the word “woke” however you like. But the project of taking the equality thesis seriously, on the one hand, and saying gender is a social construct, on the other, are separate phenomena. It’s possible to be a race communist and a TERF (there are many real-life examples), or to be a they/them race realist. The equality thesis comes out of a tradition of liberalism and blank slatism going back centuries. Gender ideology comes out of the gay rights movement, and it didn’t go mainstream until approximately ten years ago. These are different ideologies, which should be described with different words.

There is a real possibility that conservatives could win the war on the most extreme expressions of gender ideology. Outside of some far-left university departments, “gender affirming” mutilation of minors, biological men clobbering women in the boxing ring, and men in wigs abusing women in female prisons are not very popular. However, as I said in January 2024, “Wokism could survive a backlash against gender theory.” These are different fights.

Three Ways to be non-Woke

Since wokism is what happens when you take the equality thesis seriously given “commonsense” moral assumptions, there are logically three ways to not be woke:

First, reject the equality thesis.

Second, reject Christian morality, or any other morality that calls for equal treatment or the full realization of human potential.

Third, fail to realize that wokism follow from the equality thesis and commonsense morality due to stupidity and/or moral insensitivity.

As I’ve argued, the mainstream left and right both accept the empirical and moral premises that generate wokism. Smart people are more likely to see that wokism follows, so the elites lean left. The MAGA coalition is made up largely of conservatives who fail to understand that they ought to be woke, given their beliefs, which is why they struggle to craft a message that is compelling to most cognitive elites.

Hanania, Rufo, and Kaufmann have explicitly rejected my model of wokism. However, neither they nor anyone else has ever explained why DEI ideology doesn’t follow from the equality thesis and widely accepted moral principles. If all groups have exactly the same innate potential, how can we possibly not see it as a moral emergency to fix the environmental conditions that lead to massive disparities? Without hereditarianism, it is impossible to win an argument against a smart wokester who demands justice. Nonelites will continue to overwhelmingly lean woke, and they will thwart our attempts to retake the culture and institutions.

Hereditarianism Has Never Been Tried

A few days ago in a conversation with Eric Kaufmann, Rufo responded to my proposed hereditarian revolution saying:

[W]ithout even taking a position on the correctness of [Cofnas’s] analysis, my retort to that is, “but that position has been elaborated, you know, for decades.” There’s been somebody with some prominence making some variation of that argument. It’s the Charles Murray argument, The Bell Curve in that political correctness phase of the 1990s....[W]hen The Bell Curve came out, I remember it being this huge scandal....[It] had more publicity than probably any book since The Closing of the American Mind a decade prior. Yet it was radically insufficient....I’m just very hesitant about this idea that if we only had another paper, we could finally break through with the truth. I think that Cofnas in particular, presenting himself as someone who is willing to step into the breach with the truth is actually somewhat naïve. It’s like, well, okay, you present your paper, good luck. It strikes me as maybe the wrong focus for the work, but in fact, a better focus of the work would be to say how practically can these institutions change. That’s a question that it seems to me that very few people are asking and even fewer have answered. (46:55–49:28)

To be clear, my plan is not just to have another paper! As I said in the “Guide”:

Cultural change doesn’t happen automatically in response to an individual stating a radical idea, even if it’s a true idea backed up with lots of evidence. You can’t just publish a book or a tweet and say, “there was no revolution, I guess we have to give up.” For an idea to spread, millions of people have to argue it out over Thanksgiving dinner tables, water coolers, and dorm room hookahs. Prominent figures have to take a stand in favor of the idea, and show that they are willing to pay a price for their conviction.

Rufo himself argues that wokism triumphed after a “long march through the institutions.” The long march didn’t consist in Marcuse publishing a book and then a few scattered individuals expressing agreement with him. There was a large network and organizational apparatus doggedly advancing woke ideology. The right has never tried anything like that with hereditarianism. In fact, the mainstream right does the opposite: it cancels anyone who violates the left’s race taboos. For example, Jason Richwine—then a rising star in the conservative movement—was fired from the Heritage Foundation in 2013 when it was discovered that he mentioned some politically incorrect facts about race in his dissertation at Harvard University. Harvard was literally more open to evidence-based discussion of race than a leading conservative think tank!

The conservative establishment has decided that Charles Murray (and only Charles Murray) gets a pass to talk about some uncomfortable facts connected to race. However, to this day Murray has never made an unequivocal statement that differences between groups are rooted in genes. When he appeared on the Colbert Report in 2012, Cobert said: “People interpreted what you were saying [in The Bell Curve] as saying that there were racial and genetic components to black people scoring lower on intelligence tests.” Murray replied: “No, no, the book did not say that.” I’m not criticizing Murray. But Rufo can’t point to this as evidence that my strategy has been tested and didn’t work.

The vast majority of smart, educated people in the West have simply never been exposed to the evidence for hereditarianism, at least in a way that they can take it seriously. A real information campaign backed by establishment conservative institutions would have a very different result than what has been tried before.

The “practical” question of “how...institutions change” is important, and, as I have said, Rufoism is a necessary part of the solution to wokism. But cultural change isn’t driven solely by the raw exercise of power. A non-woke regime will have to gain the ideological support of a critical mass of intelligent, thoughtful people—far more than it has now. Regarding the dearth of elites on the right, Rufo himself has lamented how difficult it is to find competent and mentally stable individuals with right-wing bona fides to fill one or two positions at the Manhattan Institute. Rufo is now helping to orchestrate an attempted takeover of American universities. How does he expect to find tens of thousands of serious scholars on the right to be professors?

Kaufmann replied to Rufo saying that woke “was never really about outcomes....It was never really about necessarily bringing blacks up to the level of whites. It was really much more about moralistic virtue signaling, and it was an ideological belief” (49:34–50:21). But virtue signaling is a universal feature of all human morality, not an explanation for why morality takes a specific form. Christians virtue signal about how charitable they are. Online rightists virtue signal by trying to outdo each other in being anti-Semitic. The question is why leftists decided to virtue signal specifically by being race communists. Is it really plausible to think that the left would have the same obsession with race and racism if the black–white gaps had closed in the years following the Civil Rights Act of 1964? Everything wokesters do and say is exactly what they would do and say if they were taking the equality thesis seriously. Why not assume that it’s because that’s what they’re doing, and they would stop if the equality thesis were refuted?

The Problem with Colorblindness

Both Rufo and Kaufmann advocate “colorblindness.” Rufo says that “The only hope for a diverse nation is a regime of colorblind equality....[R]eformers should outlaw affirmative action and racial preferences of any kind.” What would such a regime actually look like? The chart below shows the percentage of Americans of different races within various IQ bands. Although blacks make up 14.4% of the American population, they are only 0.76% of Americans with IQs of at least 135, and 0.55% of those with IQs of at least 140—the level from which the most high-profile cognitive elites are likely to be drawn.

Estimated racial composition of the population of Americans at different IQ levels, assuming mean 85 for African Americans, 90 for Hispanics, 100 for whites, and 105 for Asians with a standard deviation of 15 for all groups. From Russell Warne, In the Know: Debunking 35 Myths about Human Intelligence, Table 34.2.

Rufo et al. have never said what they plan to tell people after they get their colorblind meritocracy and elite positions become totally dominated by whites and Asians. Do they think people who believe in the equality thesis will not notice what happened, or just accept it without asking questions? In fact, they are setting the stage for a second Great Awokening. The only thing that would stop the cycle of wokism—and allow society to come to some agreement about how to deal with disparities in innate ability—is knowledge of hereditarianism among the elites.

Weakness of the Right

The American right has no coherent message or ideology besides being against the left. It has no good answer to the major issue of our time, which is the question of lingering race disparities. We have almost no effective institutions. We control literally zero serious PhD-granting universities. Even universities in solid red states remain in the hands of our opponents. Among graduate students and assistant professors at elite institutions, our representation is very close to zero percent. The right has been shut out of editing Wikipedia—the most influential source of (alleged) information in our society. Conservative culture revolves largely around figures who are some combination of grifter, crackpot, criminal, conspiracy theorist, anti-Semite, or racist-in-a-bad-way. We produce virtually no art, music, or literature. Right-wing discourse is dominated by people doing “physiognomy checks” on each other, calling Democrats pedophiles, and telling people not to get vaccinated and that they can cure their cancer with ivermectin. None of this was changed by the election of Donald Trump.

As I discussed in “Wokism Is Just Beginning,” surveys show that young people are decisively on the side of DEI and cancel culture. As millennials and zoomers start taking over universities, the judiciary, and government bureaucracies, the institutions are going to increasingly reflect their preferences. Even if Trump, Rufo, et al. had the power to appoint whomever they want as professors and government bureaucrats (which they don’t), they wouldn’t have enough competent, ideologically aligned people to staff even a fraction of these positions. As Rufo himself said to explain his recent hiring decisions at the Manhattan Institute, “the idea that there are ‘thousands of rw bros’ and undiscovered geniuses who would thrive in an institutional environment is simply not the case.”

In “Wokism Is Just Beginning” I cited a survey showing that Kamala “stay woke” Harris was beating Trump among voters under 30 by 2:1. Exit polling, however, indicates that Harris won the youth vote by only 11 points, lost by a point among men under 30, and tied with Trump among whites under 30. Eric Kaufmann suggests that surveys are less likely to reach young people not enrolled in college, so the exit polls are probably more accurate. However, this just means that the elite remains overwhelmingly on the side of woke. According to the exit poll, voters with advanced degrees favored Harris by 21 points.

A Hereditarian Counter-elite

Among young (most millennial, virtually all zoomer) intellectuals on the right, race realism isn’t controversial. There is widespread recognition of the fact that the race taboo is the linchpin of the leftist sociopolitical order. While generational turnover as a whole will lead to an entrenchment of wokism, within the small world of conservative institutions, it may lead to more public discussion of the most important topic.

The only elites who currently side with the right in significant numbers are the tech bros. It is an open secret that this community is aware of race differences. Elon Musk frequently promotes HBD (human-biodiversity) X accounts. To the extent that the right has won the support of elites—people who were instrumental in Trump’s victory and in setting his agenda—it may be due to the diffusion of information about hereditarianism. Far from being something that has been tested and failed, hereditarianism has proved itself to be the most potent means of de-wokifying elites.

I’m not saying that someone like Rufo should necessarily start publicly talking about race differences. People have different roles in the movement. But I would urge him and other activists to accept that race realism is going to be an integral part of a successful strategy.

Rufo says that “Conservatives...should begin educating and organizing a counter-elite of their own.” But he has no viable plan for doing this. As of now, we don’t have enough raw human capital to educate and organize an intellectual force capable of resisting the left. Rufo says that the principles of his proposed “counter-revolution” are “family, faith, work, community, country,” and “The task for the counter-revolutionary is not simply to halt the movement of his adversaries but to resurrect the system of values, symbols, myths, and principles that constituted the essence of the old regime.” This message isn’t going to win the elites, most of whom don’t care about conservative “symbols” and “myths,” and who want to press on to something new, not restore the values of Leave It to Beaver. The only idea powerful enough to draw talented people away from the left, and prompt them to create a system suited to our new reality, is hereditarianism.