Elite efforts to enforce ‘woke’ ideology create a bubble that can engender a fierce backlash.
Elite efforts to enforce ‘woke’ ideology create a bubble that can engender a fierce backlash.
G radually, then suddenly, a conceptual constellation of race, gender, sexuality, U.S. history, and the person as a whole has gone from relative obscurity to being the official creed of the federal government, Fortune 500 companies, many American media corporations, and the establishments of many professions (including education and medicine). Whatever it is called — “social justice” or the “Great Awokening” or “equity” or the “successor ideology” (as the essayist Wesley Yang has termed it) — it has been transformative. The successor ideology has scored many victories by working outside the democratic process — in corporate boards, elite universities, the judiciary, credentialing organizations, and the permanent federal and state bureaucracies. A vanguardist movement has been able to mount an “awokening from within,” as views that a few years ago were held by only a small percentage of the public have now become the dominant institutional consensus.
This sweeping transformation has caused some progressive activists to celebrate, and members of the center-left to alternate between bewilderment and anxiety. The Right is torn between hostility to this ideology and, at least for some, a touch of envy at the success of its tactics. Yet a politics of the commanding heights can face a certain paradox: In a democratic society, a comprehensive elite takeover can lay the groundwork for a broader political defeat. Institutional elites risk becoming increasingly insulated from the public at large. This opens the door to a democratic reversal — backlash, rebellion, electoral reckoning, call it what you will.
The very things that have made the Great Awokening so powerful have also made it rigid, and thus potentially vulnerable. A concentrated fervor — replete with “workshop” struggle sessions, guillotine-studded Slack channels, and swelling bureaucracies — has helped impose a radical new political paradigm. Proponents of the successor ideology are quick to call out any deviation from the emerging party line, and particular vitriol is reserved for “allies” who have fallen short on some loyalty test. Many of the purges that swept American institutions in the summer of 2020 targeted those whose professions of devotion to “equity” were not effusive enough. Members in an institution might not have begun as true believers in revolutionary wokeness, but they have numerous bureaucratic incentives to play by its rules.
This dynamic has encouraged compliance and obedience to a “social justice” vanguard. However, the resulting revolutionary intensity has also battered the institutions of the commanding heights themselves. Activists can leverage an atmosphere of paranoia and high-stakes personal destruction to impose their agenda, but this atmosphere poisons the internal networks of an institution. Co-workers suppress any difference of opinion, and the possibility of robust collaboration withers. This atmosphere causes the institution to fracture from within and to appear increasingly extreme to those on the outside.
The combination of revolutionary fervor and hard-core power politics has weakened many institutions. Newsrooms have seen their credibility drop, as the effort to craft a disciplined ideological narrative has edged out “all the news that’s fit to print.” The rise of social media and the slashing of news jobs have created the broader economic conditions for a shift in the mores of journalism, and anti-Trump activism over the past five years created a new permissions structure. To respond to what editors and journalists saw as an existential emergency, many of the traditional standards of reporting — from vetting information from sources to summarizing accurately the remarks of public figures — were either diluted or thrown out the window entirely. Unsurprisingly, this exception to media norms in reporting on Donald Trump soon moved beyond Trump himself.
All this has exacted a cost in credibility. In early January 2021, the research firm Edelman found that trust in media outlets had dropped significantly in 2020, with 56 percent of those polled believing that “journalists and reporters are purposely trying to mislead people by saying things they know are false or gross exaggerations.”
Education has been one of the great flashpoints in the current battle over identity politics. Powerful teachers’ unions in many states were able to prolong the closure of public schools. School closures during Covid and ideologized education have caused home-schooling numbers to double since early 2020. Conservative activists — most notably Christopher Rufo — used the growing extremism of the current educational “reckoning” to ignite a broader movement of parental involvement.
Commanding-heights efforts to tamp down on this parental rebellion have backfired. In 2021, the leadership of the National School Boards Association (NSBA) collaborated with the Biden administration in drafting a letter asking the White House to investigate whether parents protesting identity politics in public schools were engaged in some form of domestic terrorism. When Attorney General Merrick Garland announced a task force to pursue this topic, the letter blew up spectacularly for the NSBA, and the organization had to release a follow-up statement apologizing for it. So far, 17 state associations have cut ties with the NSBA. This mass exodus could cause the organization some financial pain and has damaged its mission to be a national school boards association.
The paradox of the commanding heights also bears on the political troubles facing the Biden White House. Joe Biden won the Democratic nomination and presidency in part through claims of being a centrist, of offering a return to normalcy. But plugged-in progressives in 2020 hoped that President Biden would offer not normalcy but increased political combat — and their wishes have been granted. On spending, immigration, education, international affairs, public rhetoric, political norms, and identity, the Biden administration has often chosen polarization rather than moderation.
Biden undoubtedly benefited in the 2020 presidential campaign from the almost universal support he enjoyed from the professional Beltway political and administrative classes, but the increasing monoculture of the Beltway and many elite institutions has risked locking his administration in a feedback loop of increasingly leftward provocation. The president’s approval rating has collapsed in recent months, in part because of the consequences of its decisions (on the southern border, Afghanistan, and elsewhere). The leftward drift of the Democratic Party has hampered it in down-ticket races, such as the Virginia governor’s race last month, and potentially endangers its standing in immigrant communities, many of which moved in the Republican direction in 2020.
The possibility of a democratic correction to the commanding heights is not, of course, the guarantee of one. First of all, this correction might fizzle electorally, if the candidates supported by the non-woke repel the electorate. While Donald Trump was certainly helped by the leftward lean of the Biden campaign, Trump’s own brand of governance so alienated suburbanites that Biden won the White House. And Trump’s attempt to overturn the 2020 election in turn helped deliver a Democratic trifecta in January 2021. Similar missteps could pull down Republicans in 2022 and 2024. In 2021, Democrats were able to check some partisans of the successor ideology in primaries; for instance, a moderate won the New York City Democratic mayoral primary. Faced with a breakdown of public order, San Francisco mayor London Breed has recently announced plans to restore some policing efforts. But at the federal level and in many states, moderate Democrats have struggled to push back against the new ideology of the commanding heights.
Moreover, even if politicians are able to use dissatisfaction with the commanding heights to win office, they might not take policy or personnel steps to derail this ideology. The Trump administration is instructive here. Trump partly had a political opening in response to the economic dislocations of neoliberalism and the growing radicalism of cultural elites, but his term in office ultimately saw the woke strengthen their hands in government agencies and private entities. Republicans might face a similar temptation if they are able to win majorities in the years ahead: Wave the bloody shirt of “cancel culture” and then, in office, go about cutting taxes. It remains to be seen whether opposition to the commanding heights will be translated into a comprehensive agenda to reimagine government policy for education, finance, identity, and other areas.
While policy cannot do everything, it might also play a role in tackling the underlying conditions that have shaped the trajectory of this revolutionary crusade. One need not be a Marxist to find that the Great Awokening in some way intersects with the skyrocketing inequalities and economic frustrations of the high neoliberal era. The citadels of privilege — blue-chip investment firms, elite Manhattan private schools, and so forth — are also palaces of the successor ideology. The increasing concentration of economic power in the hands of a few has likely exacerbated profound pathologies of privilege. The financialization and digitization of the U.S. economy have not only given those who control the commanding heights the ability to “unperson” dissidents — those very trends also might fuel ideologies of purgation. (A similar moment could be seen during the age of the 19th-century robber barons, who sent their privileged scions to institutions that would teach them the virtues of hardship. However, the moral reformation of that era was explicitly religious and tied to a sense of national obligation that the successor ideology has left behind.) A correction in favor of market decentralization for technology and finance could help check some of those ideological tendencies. Policies to make family formation easier could promote attachment and belonging, which counteract the alienation that fuels revolutionary disruption on both the left and the right.
Our current controversies reveal broader insights into the nature of political life in a democracy. It has long been recognized that trust and participation in institutions can help maintain an open, democratic society. The current battle over revolutionary change illustrates how openness itself can be useful for preserving institutions. When an institution is ruled by revolutionary terror, it grows sclerotic and risks disintegration. Maintaining any institution requires a combination of coherence and diversity, and different institutions might strike different balances.
Especially in a country as large and diverse as the United States, the commanding heights command only so much. When one elite class grows too entrenched and estranged from responsibility, the democratic process allows for the possibility of a political correction. And a tolerance for pluralism within elite institutions can itself be a way of applying that spirit of responsibility and attentiveness to the complexities of life.