Elite Holdouts Will Keep Wokeness Alive By David Reaboi
https://tomklingenstein.com/elite-holdouts-will-keep-wokeness-alive/
While we’ve since learned that Chinese Premier Zhou Enlai’s legendary quip about the outcome of the French Revolution being “too soon to tell” was the result of a mistranslation rather than a zen-like sweep of history, there’s something wise about taking the long view.
The defeat of some of the most obvious excesses of “wokeness” — both in policy, through a flurry of Trump executive orders, and among the public, as seen in recent polling — is certainly cause for celebration (and, for those of us who’ve been on the battlefield in large or small capacities, a sense of accomplishment). Perhaps the greatest sign of its waning power in the public consciousness is that it has, finally, become ridiculous; its association has traversed the distance from earnest righteousness to a source of mockery.
The Right should be cautious, though, as political and social battles are rarely (if ever) won for all time. “Liberalism” and “Progressivism” are two labels that required multiple rebrands across several generations due to failing fortunes with the public — and yet maintained enough elite support to return, just as powerfully as before.
Those of us on the Right understand that what’s now known as “wokeness” isn’t new or a heretical deviation; rather, it is the necessary outgrowth of the Left’s assumptions and assertions about the world, inseparable from its conception of “progress.” Most ordinary Americans, though, are busy with their lives and haven’t traced the Left’s radicalism as it lurched from college campuses in the 1970s into the mainstream of elite consensus.
The Right’s smarter activists understand that, since its inception, the Left fails when its excesses are made flesh. For example, women’s sports and childhood medical transitions were crucial battlegrounds in the war against “wokeness,” as they exposed the radicalism of gender ideology in ways that didn’t require lengthy philosophical explanations. Even in defeat, Americans need to be shown the horrors of childhood medical transitions just as the victorious Allies needed to remind the world of the Nazi death camps: the fight was a righteous one, and the enemies deserved destruction for what they’d done.
Given enough time and distance, however, a period of revisionism always arrives, and the battle must be taken up anew.
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