Richard Hanania’s The Origins of Woke

2,052 words

Richard Hanania’s The Origins of Woke is Christopher Caldwell’s excellent book, The Age of Entitlement, but in a less sober and more opinionated tone, and with more speculation on what’s to be done about the predicament. While both books get the point across, Hanania’s trying to get several other points across that distract from the central thesis: Our legal system contains a civil rights ratcheting mechanism that requires all corporations and organizations to promote a “Leftist” (anti-Christian, anti-white, anti-male, anti-straight) political agenda.

The secondary thesis of Origins of Woke is that Caldwell is in error:

In the Age of Entitlement (2020), he [Caldwell] argued that the only way to undo the damaging cultural developments that have emerged in recent decades would be through repealing the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Yes, as will be shown in later chapters, not legislation but mostly the innovations in civil rights law that came out of the federal bureaucracy and the courts have brought us to this point.

By re-framing the problem as wokeness rather than civil rights, and identifying wokeness as a deviation from rather than consequence of the Civil Rights Act plan, Hanania invites us to saw at branches instead of the trunk of the problem. This is perhaps preferable to the mainstream conservative approach of slapping aimlessly at leaves and twigs, but only marginally. More importantly, it’s bad legal theory betraying an unfamiliarity with how common law jurisprudence works in practice.

Ever since the Civil Rights Act (CRA) has passed, there has been a “shadow constitution” (Caldwell’s metaphor) with an entirely alien logic to traditional English common law jurisprudence that federal bureaucrats and the courts have had to consider their decisions relative to. The CRA steamrolled over keystone concepts such as freedom of association, freedom of conscience, and the presumption of innocence, necessarily requiring all of the subsequent bureaucratic policies and judicial decisions that led us to where we’re at.

Inventing the neologism “wokeness” was, if anything, a useful way to complain about “civil rights” without directly stepping in the taboo against complaining about the Civil Rights Act and its concomitant movement. We can see this strategy of hacking at the branches with euphemisms failing in real time with the sharks of litigation encircling Elon Musk. The evidence of his being merely less excited than average about diversity, queerness, and feminism is sufficient for crippling litigation under our CRA shadow constitution.

And that’s how the ratcheting effect works. With it being against the law to be less excited than average about diversity, the herd stampedes further left, establishing a new average. Since a lack of evidence of discrimination is no defense, the only defense is the evidence of lack: active, performative, even theatrical obeisance. One extreme example is the CEO of Chick-fil-A bowing before the feet of random black men in order to protect his enterprise from the civil rights racketeers.

The Civil Rights Act is clearly the problem, but Hanania insists it’s just being misinterpreted and misapplied:

While the Civil Rights Act itself was a popular bill passed by Congress and signed by the president, therefore giving it democratic legitimacy, later innovations mostly came from decisions made by and negotiations between the courts, big business, and the federal bureaucracy.

To hear Hanania tell it, “Most of the time these innovations ignored, or even contradicted, the plain text of the 1964 law and the original intent of those who wrote and voted for it.”

He explains, “While congress banned ‘discrimination’ based on certain protected categories in the Civil Rights Act of 1964, it never defined the term.” In his mind, the solution is simple: Demand that these things that aren’t explicitly defined be defined and understood in a less woke manner.

This manages to be an even worse idea than directly aiming for the repeal of the Civil Rights Act. The wokesters are broadly right about the legislators’ original intent, if not necessarily their foresight as to the consequences of those intentions. Explicitly defining there to be “protected categories” of people with more rights naturally implies unprotected categories of people with fewer rights. Slap generations of crystallized precedent atop this losing argument, and Hanania’s scheme is going nowhere.

The Right did prevail with this strategy in Roe v. Wade, of chipping away at a law they didn’t like until they were able to finally discard it altogether. But that’s only because the ratcheting effect works the opposite way on abortion. With each generation, people who are in favor of killing their own offspring are at a ratcheting demographic disadvantage. Had all of the fetuses terminated under Roe v. Wade survived to vote, the decision would have remained in place.

Having already spoken of leaves, twigs, branches, and the trunk, it’s time to talk about the roots of the problem:

At its root, the original push for quotas was based on sympathy for the situation of African Americans as they began to advocate for equal rights, white guilt over their plight, and a desire to make things better.

This is a surprisingly superficial analysis of the origins of the civil rights movement. In actuality, white guilt was only one of three big factors, and certainly not the dominant one. The first is Cold War geopolitical realities: America was in a competition with the Soviet Union for global hegemony, and it scrambled to adjust its domestic situation to align it with its international messaging towards ambivalent Third World states.

You can buy The Alternative Right, ed. Greg Johnson, here

An interesting factoid is that chattel slavery itself wasn’t fully expunged from American life until 1942, when Franklin Roosevelt commissioned a special task force to sweep through America and align facts on the ground with their Allied propaganda. There were still some blacks held in conditions indistinguishable from those before abolition who were liberated in the name of geopolitical expediency.

The second factor was the Organized Jewish Community, with its aggressive lobbying against the white Christian majority. The American political system was not prepared for the mass migration of highly intelligent, mobilized, organized, and antagonistic Jews who fled Europe before, during, and after the Second World War. Unlike America’s small community of founding-stock Jews, these recent arrivals saw czars, fuehrers, and pharaohs threatening them in every direction.

The Organized Jewish Community played an important role, well-described in Prof. Kevin MacDonald’s Culture of Critique, in not only getting the Civil Rights Act passed but weaponizing it judicially and bureaucratically in the service of their anti-Christian, anti-white agenda. Caldwell’s book features Roberta Kaplan’s Supreme Court farce as the quintessential example, without explicitly (or even intentionally) connecting the dots between her and the Organized Jewish Community.

The third factor, white guilt, is the only one Hanania merits mentioning, and he gives whites too much credit for their alleged awakening. Bussing, integration, and the rest were wildly unpopular for decades after the Civil Rights Act was already penned and the basic outline of its impact on our society was already dictated. Federal troops had to be mobilized to impose the Civil Rights Act’s consequences on an American public who were dragged kicking and screaming into the shadow constitution’s new political order.

A cardinal theme in Hanania’s political work is rejecting conspiratorial thinking in favor of describing what occurred as the unfortunate emergent consequence of people who don’t understand what is going on muddling along. Being adjacent to the dissident Right and allergic to conspiratorial thinking, this would be refreshing if he didn’t take things too far in the opposite direction:

Like an act of Congress, wokeness can similarly be seen as a “logrolled” set of cultural beliefs. . . . [T]he whole project of seeking a grand philosophical explanation for wokeness relies on a conceptual mistake, likely rooted in the need of intellectuals to exaggerate their importance.

According to Hanania, because the actors in this historical process typically don’t individually understand their role in the larger process, and because the civil rights movement where it currently stands (wokeness) continues to exist in a muddled compromise with the original Constitution, the whole thing is best understood as an unfortunate accident. At the risk of exaggerating my importance, I assert that this is a planned process being directed by wealthy and powerful radicals in government, academia, and the private sector.

I can lean on my own direct experience, having been sued in federal court for exercising my original constitution rights that were in violation of the civil rights shadow constitution. Roberta Kaplan — the same one — joined with the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) — the same one going after Musk right now — to conjoin the civil-rights precedent with antique, Reconstruction-era conspiracy statutes to essentially criminalize the free assembly of unprotected categories of people.

The fact that the trial didn’t go as Kaplan and the ADL planned, leaving a muddled conclusion that damaged but didn’t conclusively break the right to free assembly, doesn’t negate the fact that there was indeed a coordinated — dare I say “conspired” — plan. Perhaps Hanania will read the trial transcripts and the jury verdict and arrive at the conclusion that the parade of Leftist Jewish attorneys into the courtroom were just coincidentally Jewish, coincidentally radical, and coincidentally working to undermine constitutional protections for Right-wing dissidents.

Hanania’s work in charting out specific changes that could roll back “wokeness” is impressive, including detailed tables targeting specific laws and rulings that can be challenged or reversed. In his mind, the Republican Party is a vehicle that can be relied upon to achieve these goals, stating, “We live under a political duopoly, with one of the two major parties strongly united in opposition to wokeness as both a cultural and political phenomenon.”

This is counterfactual. The Republican Party as an institution is just as captured by, controlled by, and beholden to the logic of the shadow constitution as any other bureaucracy. While the vast majority of its constituents are indeed anti-woke, opponents of the advancement of the civil rights blob have always been in the numerical majority, but structurally deprived of institutional vehicles to achieve their political goals.

Even if some clever procedural wins can be achieved, as long as the Civil Rights Act itself stands, then the ratchet will continue clicking. This is not to say that progress can’t be made. We did, after all, recently see Affirmative Action fall in the Supreme Court. But within hours of achieving that proximate goal, the institutions had already worked their way around it. The answers aren’t institutional.

The answers lie in demagoguery, devolution, and the deep state itself. The best illustration lies in the recent Bud Light boycott. The GOP leadership and institutions actively tried to stop it, as Anheuser-Busch INBev has bribed both parties, as per the game. They were powerless to stop it, and it proved to be a rare success against the advance of wokeness precisely because it did not rely upon political institutions and processes as a vehicle.

Devolution also works. The institutions that are irrevocably captured by the shadow constitution are necessarily centralized and monolithic in nature. When you’re working from home in a rebel flag bikini — not me; don’t picture that — for a small business that’s too small to have a human resources department, there’s not a whole lot they can do about it. Technological progress will continue its current devolutionary course, with the increasingly woke bureaucracies having less relative latitude to control people.

Finally, a limiting condition is the same that triggered it; broader geopolitical realities. We’re already seeing the early outlines of how this will take form with Vladimir Putin’s political speeches to the West pertaining to the Ukraine conflict, one where he derides the transgender hysteria and Russian intelligence play up the West’s transgender activists in Ukraine to achieve tangible geopolitical goals. At some point, hostile foreign actors will seize upon white resentment of their humiliating status to discredit American geopolitical soft-power prerogatives.

I don’t wish to pour too much cold water on what Hanania is proposing here. I wholeheartedly support and would encourage any of the particular reforms spelled out in this comprehensive work. I am also a big fan of Stephen Miller’s law firm and the excellent work it’s doing in taking up anti-white discrimination cases. These things do matter, but I don’t believe Hanania’s being realistic about the prospects of patient and persistent institutional reform through the Republican Party and its affiliated political vehicles.

I would be happy to be proven wrong.

*  *  *

Counter-Currents has extended special privileges to those who donate at least $10/month or $120/year.

1. Donors will have immediate access to all Counter-Currents posts. Everyone else will find that one post a day, five posts a week will be behind a “paywall” and will be available to the general public after 30 days. Naturally, we do not grant permission to other websites to repost paywall content before 30 days have passed.
2. Paywall member comments will appear immediately instead of waiting in a moderation queue. (People who abuse this privilege will lose it.)
3. Paywall members have the option of editing their comments.
4. Paywall members get an Badge badge on their comments.
5. Paywall members can “like” comments.
6. Paywall members can “commission” a yearly article from Counter-Currents. Just send a question that you’d like to have discussed to [email protected]. (Obviously, the topics must be suitable to Counter-Currents and its broader project, as well as the interests and expertise of our writers.)

To get full access to all content behind the paywall, please visit our redesigned Paywall page.