Nathan Cofnas is a fellow in Philosophy at Cambridge and a blogger, who has written a detailed essay showing how Marxist socialist collectivist wokism, with all its racialist elements, is alive and well. Despite Trump’s victory, it’s not going anywhere. The commitment that the leftist elites and chattering classes have to the ideology holds strong. Cofnas says that the idea that wokism has peaked and will go away is “flawed... [S]ocial justice warriors are in our boardrooms, universities, and government bureaucracies putting their ideology into practice.”
What this means is that those who view Trump’s election as the death of DEI and other woke socialist ideological movements are premature in their celebrations. According to Cofnas, Trump’s election will not deter the woke movement. Instead, “wokesters are on a path to achieve absolute power in the next ten to thirty years.” He ominously predicts that the turnover from Boomers and Gen X “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.”
Image by AI.
In his essay, Cofnas explains that wokism’s ideological foundation holds that there is no difference in individual abilities and potential. This means that unequal outcomes can only result from evil environmental forces and social sins that the government must counteract and neutralize. The government must intervene to impose equality of outcome, something that justifies suspending freedoms and punishing those who would object.
The empirical premise that generates wokism—the equality thesis—has been the orthodoxy among establishment intellectuals since the 1960s, if not earlier. Why, then, was there a time lag between this concern and the recent Great “Awokening”?
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. [snip] Each subsequent generation of children was subjected to increasingly intensive brainwashing until the Noble Lie was genuinely believed.
Cofnas points out that the George Floyd death and its aftermath caused a significant uptick in woke racialist activities, while the professions and academia increased their push to enact the woke agenda. He systematically debunks the research intended to show a decline in wokeness. In every case there are declines but still a lot of activity, just down from the peaks in 2021 and 2022. The effects of intimidation and censorship meant that there were fewer people to offend the woke guardians.
Interesting, Cofnas considers the transgender tensions as coming from a different point of conflict. I would have to disagree because the movement is definitely the product of Marxist ideological sources intent on effecting cultural revolution.
Cofnas suggests a sensible alternative to wokism, which he terms “hereditarianism.” This means recognizing that people inherit their strengths, talents, and weaknesses, all of which will produce inequalities. From our childhood on, we all know we are different and not equal to others in many ways, good and bad. The government can’t make me equal to anyone. I have to make myself what I can be. That’s life!
John Dale Dunn is a retired physician and inactive attorney in Brownwood, Texas.