Wokism Is Just Beginning

Millennials, zoomers, and elites remain firmly on the side of DEI and cancel culture

In the year 1101, I could have produced a number of graphs showing that Christianity had peaked in 1096–1099. My first graph would plot the number of killings perpetrated in the name of Christianity, which fell precipitously in 1100. Production of swords with cruciform hilts also dropped off, and the percentage of Europeans aged 18–60 who agreed with the statement “It is important to wage Holy War for Christianity” had gone down slightly from its historic high in 1095. Just look at the data, I would have said, before being burned at the stake.

The problem with my data-driven argument that Christianity peaked at the end of the 11th century is that it was missing the bigger context. The Crusade, which, unbeknownst to me, would later be known as the First Crusade, was fought from 1096–1099. It ended not because Christianity was on the wane, but because the Christian extremists had achieved victory and there wasn’t much left to do.

The argument that wokism peaked in the early 2020s is similarly flawed. Obviously, the emotional intensity of 2020–2023 could not be permanently sustained. But instead of burning down police stations, social justice warriors are in our boardrooms, universities, and government bureaucracies putting their ideology into practice. Millennials, zoomers, and elites remain firmly on the side of DEI and cancel culture. Regardless of who wins the 2024 presidential election, wokesters are on a path to achieve absolute power in the next ten to thirty years.

Our institutions are largely controlled by boomers and gen Xers who lean toward classical liberalism. This is the demographic that stands in the way of the total wokification of America and other Western countries. But, to repeat Solomon’s observation, “one generation goes, and another generation comes.” In this case, generational turnover will mean the end of free speech, free thought, free association, due process, and everything else that millennials and (especially) zoomers think is less important than diversity, equity, and inclusion.

Once we understand what wokism is—namely, the inevitable consequence of taking the equality thesis seriously—it will be obvious why conservatives and classical liberals have lost the battle of ideas. The argument that we are “passed peak woke,” which recently got a boost from articles in the Economist and the New York Times, misinterprets the consolidation of the woke victory as a decline in the ideology’s power (like Crusaders buying fewer swords in the year 1100). The theory that the market punishes wokism (“go woke, go broke”) is not supported by evidence. The rise of millennials and zoomers will usher in a woke dystopia. There is only one way to escape this fate: attack wokism at its root, namely, belief in the equality thesis.

The Logic of Wokism

As I have explained before, the logic of wokism is simple: Races and the sexes have the same innate distribution of potential, ergo all group disparities must be the result of environmental forces. Given the persistence of massive disparities, there is a moral emergency to fix the environment and achieve equal outcomes. As long as environmental interventions fail to produce equality, we must intensify our efforts until we achieve success. Everything associated with “wokism”—witch hunts, cancel culture, Critical Race Theory, and so on—stems from this reasoning.

The empirical premise that generates wokism—the equality thesis—has been the orthodoxy among establishment intellectuals since the 1960s, if not earlier. Noah Carl argues that this is a problem for my account, since “all the evidence suggests wokeness is a phenomenon that emerged very rapidly between 2010 and 2015.” Why, he asks, was there a delay between acceptance of the equality thesis among elites and the Great Awokening? But there is a simple, two-part answer to this question.

First, it took a few generations for people to absorb the orthodoxy. Race denial began as a relatively transparent Noble Lie that most people probably went along with because it seemed like the nice thing to do. (Even the anthropologist Franz Boas, who promoted environmentalism in the early to mid-twentieth century, acknowledged that there are innate differences in the “mental make-up of the negro race and other races,” and that “it would be erroneous to assume...their activities should run in the same line.”) Each subsequent generation of children was subjected to increasingly intensive brainwashing until the Noble Lie was genuinely believed.

Second, the Great Awokening couldn’t start until after we had tried everything else. Believers in racial sameness originally thought that the civil rights legislation of the 1960s would lead to equality. When that didn’t work, they tried affirmative action, welfare, welfare reform, Head Start, No Child Left Behind, and countless other programs that also failed to equalize outcomes. We finally reached a tipping point around 2012. Obama had failed to live up to liberals’ messianic expectations. It was clear that another generation of affirmative action wouldn’t make a big difference. True believing late millennials arrived on college campuses and demanded an immediate end to the environmental conditions that produce inequality. This inevitably took the form of a hysterical search for hidden “racism.” The process may have been catalyzed by social media and the feminization of the institutions—two forces that Carl has highlighted. But, ultimately, wokism flows from a simple piece of reasoning rooted in the equality thesis, which was endorsed by President Lyndon Johnson in 1965 when he said: “We seek not just equality as a right and a theory but equality as a fact and equality as a result.”

Note that my account of wokism says nothing about gender ideology. The Great Awokening was a reaction to the persistence of race and (to a lesser extent) sex differences. It was the culmination of trends that began more than a century ago. Transgenderism more or less came out of left field circa 2015—previously it had been a fringe wing of the gay rights movement. Both ideologies reflect an inability to think biologically, and there’s a statistical correlation between wokery and gender confusion. But they are philosophically and historically separate phenomena.

If gender ideology turns out to be a fad but we retain the obsession with white privilege and racial bean counting, wokism will still be with us. On the other hand, if we all become race realists and accept that many racial disparities are the product of nature for which no one is to blame, wokism in any recognizable form will be over even if some race realists demand to be called “zir.”

In principle, there are three ways to undermine woke logic. First, bring about racial equality. But that obviously isn’t going to happen, because there are limits to how much we can correct for nature’s unfairness. Second, convince people not to care about the fact that environmental conditions cause people from certain races to have profoundly worse outcomes when it comes to average IQ, incarceration rates, wealth, health, and so on. This strategy is hopeless, and it probably wouldn’t even be desirable to abandon our moral commitment to helping people reach their potential. Third, teach people that the equality thesis is wrong, and many disparities are not the fault of white people or anyone else. This last solution is the only one that is realistic.

As long as elites accept the equality thesis, they will inexorably follow the logic of their belief up Mount Woke—sometimes faster, sometimes slower, but always up.

“We Passed Peak Woke”: A Case of Wishful Thinking

Circa 2012, there was a spike in the use of social-justice terms like “mansplaining,” “safe spaces,” “sexist,” “racist,” and “white supremacy” in major media outlets. After the death of George Floyd in May 2020, “mostly peaceful protesters” began a campaign of burning and looting, which they claimed would help end racism. Virtually every mainstream institution in the US from the American Ornithological Society to the American Medical Association ritualistically pledged allegiance to antiracism, using the same mind-numbing incantations about the need “do the work” and “educate ourselves.” There were mass purges of anyone thought to be an obstacle to “social justice.” For example, a Mexican American utility worker was fired because he was pictured cracking his knuckles in such a way that it looked vaguely like he was making an OK hand sign, and the OK hand sign looks like a W attached to an upside down P, which are the first letters of the words “White” and “Power.” Countless other people were summarily fired or ostracized for similar offenses.

Woke justice in 2020: Mexican American utility worker fired for cracking his knuckles so that his hand gesture arguably resembled the OK sign.

One of the first articles on the supposed decline of wokism was Musa al-Gharbi’s “Woke-ism Is Winding Down,” published in February 2023. He cited a graph from Eric Kaufmann showing that the rate of “cancel culture” incidents was declining.

Graph from Eric Kaufmann, cited by Musa al-Gharbi.

Al-Gharbi also touted the fact that companies “are walking back their aggressive symbolic commitments to social justice and quietly defunding the financial pledges they made to various activist groups and causes. Many are also making aggressive cuts to the DEI-related positions that ballooned in recent years.” He noted that Netflix rebuffed attempts to cancel Dave Chappell in late 2021, and Disney toned down some of its LGBTQ propaganda following political backlash and “the box office failures of a number of high-profile movies promoting LGBT relationships.”

Let’s consider these points in turn.

Yes, there were fewer “cancel culture incidents” in 2022 compared to the preceding five years. Al-Gharbi interprets this as evidence that wokism is running out of steam. But a number of alternative explanations may be more plausible.

First, fewer people are being cancelled in part because there’s almost no one left to cancel. Noah Carl and Bo Winegard can’t be fired a second time. Stephen Hsu can’t be forced to resign from his position as vice president for research and graduate studies at Michigan State, because that already happened. In academia, practically every vocal opponent of wokism has been driven out of the profession or, if they have a position from which they can’t be easily dismissed (as in the case of Amy Wax), they are subject to endless harassment and punishment. (While I am not at liberty to comment on the details of my situation at the University of Cambridge, note that I am raising money for a lawsuit against Emmanuel College and potentially the University.) There are many filters to ensure that ideological nonconformists won’t make it past graduate school, let alone to the level of tenured professor. Similar mechanisms are in place at leading corporations, government bureaucracies, and birdwatching clubs.

Second, people who survived the purges of the past several years have learned to avoid being cancelled by bending the knee to wokism. To the extent that cancellations have eased up, it is partly because people have adjusted themselves to the new reality, or simply given up resistance.

Third, wokesters developed the confidence to be more selective in their cancellations. It didn’t actually serve the interests of their ideology to cancel the Mexican American utility worker for cracking his knuckles. Now that their position of power is secure, they can more carefully investigate offenses without demanding immediate action.

Fourth, we still have a historically high level of cancel culture incidents, and no reason to think that the absolute number is going to return to pre-Great Awokening levels.

The fact that businesses have cut back on symbolic social-justice actions and DEI positions also doesn’t have the implications al-Gharbi suggests. The goal of these businesses was to signal that they are on the “right side of history,” which they accomplished even if they didn’t always follow through on the unpleasant part (actually writing checks). And we don’t need as many DEI enforcers for the same reason we don’t need to hire people to enforce the ideology that women have the right to vote or you shouldn’t sacrifice your children to Ba’al. DEI is just something that (almost) everyone accepts.

The failure to cancel Dave Chappell is not a blow against wokism. Chappell himself is woke, believing that racial disparities are due to racism. He made some jokes about transgenderism (which is a side issue), although even on this point he still largely supports the orthodoxy. His infamous Netflix special on transgenderism ends with his epiphany about how he needs to support his transgender friend.

Disney realized that most people, who are heterosexual, aren’t entertained by endless gay propaganda. This has nothing to do with a decline in wokism, which, again, concerns the cause of group disparities.

Last month, the Economist published a viral article making some similar points to al-Gharbi based on recent data. It purports to “quantify the prominence of woke ideas in four domains: public opinion, the media, higher education and business.” The article concludes that wokism “peaked in 2021–22 and has been declining ever since.”

Consider the first chart presented by the Economist to show that wokism is “nodding off”:

The first thing to notice is that the recent dip in four out of five measures of wokism is barely detectible, and levels remain at historic highs. There is no evidence here that the intellectual establishment is changing its position on race. The percentage of Americans agreeing with the statement that “Race is the most important issue in the US” has gone up and down with the news cycle, reaching peaks in the Trump years and after George Floyd. For this kind of question, many respondents probably say that the most important thing is whatever is getting attention at that moment. There is no evidence that society has given up on following the equality thesis to its logical conclusion.

Here’s another chart from the Economist, which is supposed to illustrate the demise of DEI culture:

I can repeat the points I made in response to al-Gharbi. The reason fewer academics are getting censured isn’t because dissidence is now being tolerated. How many dissident academics can you name who aren’t currently being subject to disciplinary proceedings and/or involved in litigation with their university? But the absolute numbers are down because there’s almost no one left to censure. In regard to DEI officers, dedicated ideological enforcers are in slightly less demand because they aren’t needed as much anymore. DEI has become a background fact of life that almost everyone takes for granted. If anyone steps out of line, punishment will be swiftly administered even if there is no official “DEI officer.”

What about the fact that some universities no longer require “diversity statements” from job applicants? Doesn’t that prove we’re winning the fight against wokism? This appears to be the position of the Economist. It points out that nine states banned universities from requiring diversity statements, and several universities including Harvard and MIT also stopped using diversity statements.

In reality, however, these developments mean very little. Universities in red states like Kentucky and North Dakota, where diversity statements have been banned by law, have many other ways to determine a job applicant’s political views. The laws will not stop hiring committees from discriminating against their political opponents.

What about the universities that voluntarily dropped diversity statements? This is best explained as a ploy to get Republican congressmen off their backs, not an ideological retreat. In the December 2023 Congressional hearings fiasco, the presidents of Harvard, MIT, and Penn arrogantly refused to give a clear answer as to whether “calling for the geocide of Jews” violated their code of conduct. There was an outcry among donors and politicians. Some universities realized the political utility of making symbolic gestures toward political neutrality. But they have no plans to hire non-wokesters. In fact, Harvard didn’t even really drop diversity statements, but simply renamed them “service statements.” (If you think “service statements” provide important information that is different from “diversity statements,” why didn’t Harvard ask for service statements before?) Anyone who writes about their service to the cause of free speech or colorblindness is not going to be hired by Harvard, where 2.9% of the faculty identifies as “conservative” or “very conservative,” and probably 0% of assistant professors.

At the end of the article, the Economist acknowledges “several reasons for caution”:

For one thing, although all our measures are below their peak, they remain well above the level of 2015 in almost every instance. What is more, in some respects, woke ideas may be less discussed simply because they have become broadly accepted. According to Gallup/Bentley University, 74% of Americans want businesses to promote diversity, whatever the troubles of DEI.

That is exactly right. Wokism has become a routine part of life with broad support for its goals (“diversity”) and little meaningful resistance. Therefore, there is less need for overt discussion or enforcement. Elsewhere in the article the Economist notes that “The share of new job listings that mention diversity continues to grow...as ever more firms add boilerplate about inclusivity at the bottom of ads.” Again, it is just a background part of life.

Not mentioned by the Economist is the fact that the woke agenda is being championed by the Democratic Party—the political party that represents America’s establishment elites. Christopher Rufo has documented how, under the Biden/Harris administration, the “federal government not only punishes and rewards individuals based on racial identity but also has dispensed billions of dollars toward building a DEI regime spanning government, academia, medicine, and contracting.” Kamala Harris, who is now the Democratic presidential nominee, is on video saying, “We have to stay woke, like everybody needs to be woke,” and then cackling. She released a campaign ad in which she explicitly endorsed the logic of wokism, asserting that “Equitable treatment means we all end up at the same place.” There is no context that I’m leaving out. Harris literally says “everybody needs to be woke,” she understands this to mean that we will achieve equity when we have equal outcomes, and the Biden/Harris administration has already put this agenda into practice in countless ways. Harris’s running mate, Tim Walz, has repeatedly claimed that there’s no First Amendment right to “misinformation” or “hate speech” (i.e., speech that wokesters dislike). Harris has overwhelming support from both the elites and young people. She leads Trump 3 to 2 among voters with postgraduate degrees and 2 to 1 among voters under the age of 30.

A couple weeks ago, the New York Times published an article, “The University of Michigan Doubled Down on D.E.I. What Went Wrong?,” with the subheading, “A decade and a quarter of a billion dollars later, students and faculty are more frustrated than ever.” Is the New York Times backing away from wokism? That appeared to be Christopher Rufo’s interpretation. He triumphantly tweeted:

When we launched the “abolish DEI” campaign last year, the Left criticized it as a fringe, right-wing plot. Now, the New York Times is advancing the same arguments and critiques. We are winning—and we will not stop until we abolish DEI and salt the earth over it.

Rufo is the most important anti-woke activist in the country, and I don’t want to take any wind out of his sails. But, unfortunately, this is not the right takeaway from the Times article. If you read it carefully, you will not find a single sentence that challenges the goals of DEI. It critiques DEI from the left, and makes the following specific complaints: DEI bureaucracy demands a lot of paperwork, well-meaning leftists are nervous about getting cancelled over misunderstandings, “D.E.I. theory and debates over nomenclature sometimes obscured real-world barriers to inclusion,” and DEI initiatives have failed to produce the hoped-for results. The top comment in the “NYT Replies” section says that “while I appreciate the goals of DEI, I haven’t seen meaningful results yet. Reading this article has helped me realize that the issue lies more with the execution rather than the intent.” The author of the article responded saying that the problem is taking “a movement rooted in political values and institutionalizing those values as an academic program.” Again, some perfunctory comments about “political diversity” notwithstanding, the Times is not challenging DEI values. To call this an attack on DEI is like saying Martin Luther attacked Christianity because he criticized the Catholic Church.

Top NYT Replies comment from the New York Times article that supposedly makes “the same arguments and critiques” as Christopher Rufo.

Go Woke, Go Broke?

According to the “go woke, go broke” theory, wokism is very unpopular, so businesses that promote this ideology are punished in the marketplace. This theory is not backed by the evidence.

First, everyone cites the same two or sometimes three examples of allegedly successful boycotts: Target, Bud Light, and (possibly) Disney. Even if all three of those companies went broke—which is not what happened—it still wouldn’t necessarily support the view that wokism is bad for business, since virtually all major businesses are woke.

Second, all three boycotts were a response to LGBTQ propaganda, not DEI per se. As I mentioned before, the Economist cites a Gallup/Bentley University poll which found that “74% of Americans want businesses to promote diversity.” No business has been boycotted for discriminating against whites, Asians, or men.

Third, the “boycott” of Target mainly took the form of physically harassing and/or making threats against its employees. In May 2023, Target released a statement saying:

[W]e’ve experienced threats impacting our team members’ sense of safety and well-being while at work. Given these volatile circumstances, we are making adjustments to our plans, including removing items that have been at the center of the most significant confrontational behavior. Our focus now is on moving forward with our continuing commitment to the LGBTQIA+ community and standing with them as we celebrate Pride Month and throughout the year.

It’s true that Target’s sales and stock price decreased in the period after the “boycott,” but this may have been a consequence of post-COVID economic trends rather than the wrath of conservatives. A small number of individuals intimidated a business by making physical threats, there was a dip in revenue that probably had little or nothing to do with the boycott, and Target put out an official statement affirming its commitment to LGBTQ ideology. This is not the conservative victory it has been portrayed to be.

Fourth, Disney is doing just fine making the same race propaganda as before, with slightly less emphasis on gay and trans propaganda, which most people find boring. To the extent that they were hurt financially, it was through Ron DeSantis punishing them with the power of the state (taking away their self-governing authority in Florida). The boycott had little or no effect.

The boycott of the cheap beer brand Bud Light is the only relatively clear-cut example of conservatives using their market power to hurt a company whose politics they don’t like. But Bud Light evoked the ire of conservatives not because of its DEI policies, but for making a cartoonish trans woman the star of an ad campaign. The boycott wasn’t even about wokism.

Rise of the Zoomer Red Guard

Clearly, wokism is not “nodding off.” Why do I say it will get worse?

When it comes to predicting the future, what matters isn’t the percentage of the population that believes X, but the percentage of young people that believes X. Eric Kaufmann shows in his book, The Third Awokening, that there is a huge generational divide when it comes to support for cancel culture in the service of wokism. Each generation is more extreme than the previous one, and there is even a significant gap between millennials and zoomers.

In 2021 and 2022, subjects in the US and the UK were asked whether Google was right to fire James Damore—the computer engineer who suggested that the average woman might be less likely than the average man to want to spend 12 hours a day in front of a computer screen writing code. The over-55 demographic leaned toward classical liberalism, with only 35% and 25% in the US and the UK, respectively, supporting Damore’s cancellation. Among 18–25-year-olds, the overwhelming majority—just over two-thirds in both countries—thought that Damore should not be allowed to earn a living.

Support for Google’s decision to fire James Damore in the US and the UK, from Kaufmann’s The Third Awokening, Figure 8.1.

Most young PhD holders in the US, the UK, and Canada passively or actively support firing academics with controversial views. When asked about eight possible cancellation campaigns, which were all based on real-life events, between around 1/3 and 1/2 of respondents aged 35 and younger say explicitly that the unpopular academic should be fired. A substantial proportion (on average 4/10) say they “don’t know” whether they would support a dismissal campaign. This means that the vast majority of young academics are active cancellers or “don’t know” what they would do, i.e., they would probably go along with a cancellation campaign that was being waged by others. This is a significant break with previous generations. Respondents aged 35 and under are more than three times as censorial as those who are 65 and over.

From Kaufmann’s The Third Awokening, Figure 8.3.

You might think that no one likes living under cancel culture, and therefore it is inevitable that young people will eventually rebel against it. But, in fact, most zoomers are happy with this situation. Americans were presented with the following statement: “My fear of losing my job or reputation due to something I said or posted online is a justified price to pay to protect historically disadvantaged [groups].” In 2021, a majority of 18–25-year-olds agreed.

From Kaufmann’s The Third Awokening, Figure 6.2.

But wait...isn’t there a law of nature that says people get more conservative when they get older? No, there isn’t. Analysis of the Euro-Barometer surveys and the World Values Survey shows that people’s values tend to remain relatively stable after young adulthood. The graph below shows the proportion of individuals in different birth cohorts who hold “materialist” vs. “postmaterialist” values over time. Materialists value tradition, conformity, and physical and economic security while postmaterialists prioritize self-expression, autonomy, tolerance, and diversity. In the graph, 0 represents an even split in an age cohort between materialists and postmaterialists. Above the 0 point there are more postmaterialists, and below 0 there are more materialists.

“Cohort analysis: Percentage of Postmaterialists minus percentage of Materialists in six West European countries (Britain, France, West Germany, Italy, Belgium and The Netherlands), 1971–2009,” from Ronald Inglehart’s Cultural Evolution, Figure 2.2.

Fluctuations within birth cohorts largely track inflation rates. Economic hardship makes people more materialist. But, as the World Values Survey’s former director Ronald Inglehart notes, “over a period of four decades we find no overall tendency for the members of given birth cohorts to become more Materialist as they age.” When it comes to materialism vs. postmaterialism, people’s values are mostly shaped by the economic conditions that prevailed in their childhood. With the rise of wealth and security, subsequent generations have been leaning more and more toward postmaterialism.

There is a set of issues about which individuals have changed their values over their lifetime, but they did so in a liberal, not a conservative, direction. When it comes to “individual-choice norms” concerning tolerance toward homosexuality, divorce, and abortion, social change has been driven more by within-cohort change than by cohort replacement. The World Values Survey shows that many people who were opposed to homosexuality twenty or thirty years ago have reversed their position. The same is presumably true with regard to transgenderism, which became widely accepted quite suddenly about nine years ago.

A rise in individual-choice norms (i.e., acceptance of homosexuality, divorce, and abortion) due to within-cohort change and cohort replacement in 14 high-income countries, from Ronald Inglehart’s Cultural Evolution, Figure 5.5.

There may have been a historical tendency for Americans and Brits to increasingly vote for conservative parties as they got older. Regardless of how one interprets this, millennials did not follow the same trend, and there is nothing to indicate that either they or zoomers will turn conservative.

Woke Dystopia

Within the next couple decades, millennials and zoomers who have no commitment to free speech or free thought will take charge of academia, our major corporations, government bureaucracies, and the judicial establishment. In every area of life, people will be treated according to their position in the woke race and sex hierarchy. Ideas that are currently regarded as extreme in the US such as reparations for slavery, explicit racial quotas, prioritizing healthcare on the basis of race, and legal restrictions on speech will become mainstream, and probably written into law.

The US election currently looks like a tossup. If Kamala “Stay Woke” Harris wins, we will continue the ascent of Mount Woke with direct assistance from the government. There is a high probability that Trump and his MAGA followers will do something to discredit themselves and their movement, which will destroy all organized opposition to wokism in the US. (Organized resistance in other anglophone countries such as the UK is virtually nonexistent.)

A Trump win would be better, but unless it’s combined with a hereditarian revolution, it won’t make a difference in the long run. Trump can reverse the Biden administration’s most noxious DEI policies, appoint conservative judges, and tighten the borders. But nothing he does will make liberals give up their conviction that the meaning of life is to wage jihad against the mystical forces of bigotry that lead to racial disparities. If anything, Trump winning the election will reinforce young and educated people’s identity as leftists and Democrats.

However, there are reasons to be optimistic about the prospects for a hereditarian revolution.

First, because of the Internet, it’s impossible for the establishment to hide scientific information about race differences. Almost anyone who spends time online is going to be exposed to “hate facts” (although it can be challenging to separate “hate facts” from “hate stupidity”). A race-realist information campaign will not be starting from zero.

Second, although generational turnover will make society as a whole woker and more delusional, it will have the opposite effect in the (relatively small) world of right-wing institutions. Almost all zoomer and millennial intellectuals on the right know about race differences, and they understand the political implications. The reason mainstream conservative institutions don’t allow discussion of hereditarianism is mainly because of boomer and gen X gatekeepers who accept the left’s race taboos and think we can defeat wokism by talking about Ronald Reagan and quoting Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech. When the rising generations of right-wing intellectuals take the reins at institutions like National Review and the Claremont Institute, they may implement a more effective strategy.