Lengthy, depressing, and, I fear, entirely accurate

dorm poster

No, the Revolution Isn’t Over. None of the fundamental drivers of “Wokeness: have relented.

The author, N.S. Lyons, lists 20 reasons why we should be sad. I recommend reading the entire essay, because why should I be alone in my depression? but here are some excerpts:

1. One does not simply walk away from religious beliefs. What is called “Wokeness” – or the “Successor Ideology,” or the “New Faith,” or what have you (note the foe hasn’t even been successfully named yet, let alone routed) – rests on a series of what are ultimately metaphysical beliefs. The fact that their holders would laugh at the suggestion they have anything called metaphysical beliefs is irrelevant – they hold them nonetheless ….

2. The void of meaning still hasn’t been filled. I mean, did the gaping hole of meaning in people’s lives created by the uprooting forces of secular liquid modernity get resolved in some alternative way while we weren’t looking? You know, the spiritual void that this creepy chimeric faith-ideology and its romantic political crusades rushed to fill in the first place? Has there been some kind of genuine, organized religious revival? Has decadent nihilism stopped being the defining sentiment of the age? Did the young even become hyper-nationalists or revolutionary Marxist class-warriors instead? Have they found an alternative passionate heroic narrative to act out in some new Davos slide deck? No. ….

8. Majorities don’t matter. Unfortunately for those dreaming of harnessing a majority anti-woke popular will, the truth is that, as statistician and philosopher Nassim Taleb has explained in detail, it’s typically not the majority that sets new societal rules, but the most intolerant minority. If the vast majority generally prefers to eat Food A instead of Food B, but a small minority is absolutely insistent on eating Food B and is willing to start chopping the heads off of anyone who disagrees and serves Food A – and the majority doesn’t care enough to get all bloody dying on this particular culinary hill – all restaurants will soon be serving only Food B, the new national cuisine. This is especially true if the intolerant minority already holds a disproportionate position of influence within the system, given that…

9. Personnel is policy. Let’s imagine, for example, that some lawmakers officially ban the teaching of Critical Race Theory in their state’s schools or universities. Will this be the end of the matter? Will all the woke teachers and administrators who consider “consciousness raising” through “critical pedagogy” – or in general what Marxists call “praxis,” the constant need for the transformation of theory into practice – to be practically a religious commandment just stop doing so? No of course not. As one consultant/cleric recently advised teachers, “Don’t say critical race theory, just teach its precepts… You’re going to see how classroom teachers apply some of these pedagogical models in ways where they don’t even mention the words critical race theory but are doing anti-racist work.” Yes, the work of spreading the new good news shall not be stopped! After all, who is going to stop them? Will they be fired by the woke human resources department, or the woke principal? Abandoned by the woke teachers’ union? Reported to the state by their un-woke peers, all of whom have already been systematically purged from the collective for their heresy? If concerned parents do manage to get them fired, who will hire their replacements? Why… the woke HR department! The people who actually set the effective policy of any institution are inevitably the personnel located in the power centers closest to implementation.

10. All the institutional high ground is still occupied. Have the top universities already been retaken from the woke, or replaced? (No, one still imaginary university in Austin doesn’t count.) What about the elite finishing schools? The accreditation companies? Most mainstream news media? The social media companies? The publishing houses? Hollywood? The major foundations? The non-profits and the think tanks? The consulting and accounting companies? The investment banks? The NASDAQ? The digital service providers? The HR departments of the Fortune 500, and most of their boards? The law schools? The Bar Association? The permanent federal bureaucratic state? Heck, even Halliburton? No, at such a ludicrous suggestion the Cathedral merely echoes with the mocking laughter of the new woke high clerisy. They know from experience that…

11. Long marches are long. When Herbert Marcuse and the rest of the Neo-Marxists and critical theorists of the Frankfurt School finally took to heart Antonio Gramsci’s directive to seize “cultural hegemony” and first conceived of launching Rudi Dutschke’s “long march through the institutions,” it was only the start of the 1970s. It was not until almost fifty years later that their dream was realized. However much the last several years may have seemed like an avalanche of shockingly rapid ideological coup d'états to those who saw power abruptly change hands in their institutions, one after another, this suddenness was an illusion. Coups only succeed if the backers necessary to support them are already in place. And it took literally a generation of young intellectuals and activists simultaneously inspired and disillusioned by the left-radicalism of the 60s entering into and seeding the institutions, rising into positions of power, and cultivating another generation of trained foot soldiers for their influence to fully flower.

16. Money is still power. Those who live outside places like Washington D.C. or San Francisco might hear the word “philanthropy” and think it means feeding the hungry, or something naïve and low-brow like that. But “philanthropy” is really a word for how the concentrated power latent in oligarchic money is transformed into applied political and cultural power. In this process, money from concentrations of wealth (today mostly from the tech industry) flows (tax free!) into very special institutions called foundations, where it is laundered of any appearance of corrupt influence or nefarious motive, and then handed out to the vast constellation of non-profit NGOs, activist organizations, think tanks, and academic programs that subsist almost entirely on such money, where it can find a way to “inspire change.” A large proportion of the elite in places like Washington are engaged in helping facilitate this process as their full-time labor. (How to spot a budding young elite aspiring to join this trade: simply scan their job applications for polite requests to be given some power, pretty please, such as a stated desire to “make an impact” or “change the world.”)

This means the foundations have truly tremendous influence over public policy, because every nominally independent think tank, for example, automatically tailors its projects to attract the blessing of their funding. Government officials, being lazy, and chummy with the non-profit “experts” and executives (who are often former or future colleagues), simply copy their ideas almost directly into the rules they implement. Alternatively, those in the government with an agenda can hand over trial policy ideas in the other direction to be validated “independently” by the other side of the blob. This Wealth-Foundation-NGO-Government Complex thus works in unison to pour huge amounts of money-power into causes that are essentially by definition progressive ones (being to affect rapid change). Today this means there are massive tides of woke capital hard at work changing the world. How much money? Well as Thomas Edsall writes in the New York Times about just one cause du jour:

Before [George] Floyd’s death, Candid found that philanthropies provided “$3.3 billion in racial equity funding” for the nine years from 2011 to 2019. Since then, Candid calculations revealed much higher totals for both 2020 and 2021: “50,887 grants valued at $12.7 billion” and “177 pledges valued at $11.6 billion.”

Among the top funders, according to Candid’s calculations, are the Ford Foundation, at $3 billion; Mackenzie Scott, at $2.9 billion; JPMorgan Chase & Co. Contributions Program, at $2.1 billion; W.K. Kellogg Foundation, $1.2 billion; Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, $1.1 billion; Silicon Valley Community Foundation, $1 billion; Walton Family Foundation, $689 million; The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, $438 million; and the Foundation to Promote Open Society, $350.5 million.

With this much money spent, the priorities of the non-profit sector have already been firmly set for at least the next few years, as budgeted projects are implemented. Hundreds of new institutions will have been set up to get in on the feeding frenzy. And all of these now have an incentive to justify their existence in perpetuity by hyping whatever problem they purportedly exist to solve. The inertia is now immense. In time, their specific priorities may change as the foundations’ priorities change, but one thing you can be sure of is that those priorities will stay woke – because if you begin to dig into what, say, the Ford Foundation has gotten up to in its lifetime, the deeper you go the more and more horrifying it gets – until you learn they were the ones who essentially invented modern left-wing identity politics in the United States in the first place. (The Ford Foundation is also a great example of how the foundations often run riot well beyond even the intentions of their donors. Henry Ford II went to his grave lamenting the family had ever set theirs up in the first place, describing it as “a fiasco from my point of view from day one,” having “got out of control” because, “I didn’t have enough confidence in myself at that stage to push and scream and yell and tell them to go fuck themselves, you know, which I should have done… we can get thrown out or we can go broke; but those people, they’ve got nobody to answer to.”)

But even the foundations, despite their zeal and close relationship with government, may ultimately wield only a shadow of the influence exerted more quietly by titans of finance like the “Big Three” asset managers, BlackRock, Vanguard, and State Street. With a collective $22 trillion in assets under management, and owning an average of 22% of the typical S&P 500 company, these three firms have the power to dictate corporate policy across the world, both by acting as voting proxies for their index fund investors, and through the environmental, social, and corporate governance (ESG) standards they choose to set as requirements for investment. And because these firms’ leaders are now woke (or at least see advantage in acting woke), there is now, as Vivek Ramaswamy has explained in detail in Woke, Inc., constant pressure on companies to get woke too, or face losing critical access to capital.

19. None of the levers of power have changed or will change hands. At the risk of sounding like one of them conspiracy theorists: who really controls the power centers in the United States? The intelligence agencies; the domestic security services; the military officer corps; the diplomatic service; the regulatory administrative state; the Ministry of Information [sic]; and so on. Are all these run by elected representatives accountable to the people, including an elected president and his appointees, who then set a policy direction which is faithfully executed? It may be worth considering that this is simply not the case. That, instead, these power centers are run by a certain interchangeable class of people who already staff them permanently and run them as they think best and only cooperate if they so please. And who all happen to have went to the same schools (let’s go Hoyas!), and received the same prestigious fellowships from the same foundations, and share overlapping networks, and marry each other, and hang out at the same parties, even though secretly they actually all mostly loathe one another. And who hire each other as they cycle seamlessly between the public and private sectors. And who all consume the same media, and like to send each other the same latest “must-read piece” in The Atlantic, or whatever. And who somehow all use exactly the same identical phraseology when they humble-brag on LinkedIn as when they issue a State Department press release. What if this is the real body-politic?