Rolling Back Progressive Extremism

3,199 words

Eric Kaufmann
The Third Awokening: A 12-Point Plan for Rolling Back Progressive Extremism
New York, Nashville: Post Hill Press, 2024

Eric Kaufmann is best known as the author of Whiteshift (2019), a thick book on the future of white majorities in Western nations. The book’s thesis is that whites must be offered a bit of carrot as well as stick to reconcile us to being gradually phased out of the nations our ancestors created. This would involve official toleration of a white ethnic identity in the society of the future as long as that identity is kept “open” to those not fully white at the biological level. The model appears to be Brazil, where nearly half the population “identifies” culturally as white, even though most have some admixture. Among the blessings Kaufmann expects to accrue to the West from such a shift in white identity is an end to “Right-wing populism” as represented by Donald Trump and the European nationalist parties.

This will strike most white advocates as a rather pathetic and not very tempting olive branch, but it was more than enough to render the author suspect within his academic milieu. A quick look at Wikipedia turns up a typical reaction: Whiteshift’s lack of any discussion of “settler colonialism or of the place of first Nation populations and enslavement of African Americans and Jim Crow segregation in the USA [represent] serious — in fact, fatal — omissions in a book concerned to rehabilitate symbols of white identity.”

Kaufmann resigned from a tenured position at Birkbeck University of London in 2023 following five years of “steady hostility from radical staff and students.” He is now at the University of Buckingham, described by Roger Scruton, another Birkbeck refugee who found shelter there, as “probably the least politically correct university in Europe.” His new book is a polemic against the malicious bigotry he and so many others have had to endure from out-of-control radicals.

The last couple of years have witnessed a partial retreat from the collective madness of 2020’s Summer of George Floyd. A county in Virginia has restored Confederate names to a couple of high schools; a few companies have revoked racial policies that turned out to be bad for business; some states have banned “diversity, equity, and inclusion” programs in their public colleges. We should not be in any rush to declare victory. Revolutions always undertake more than they can fulfill. They are followed by periods of stabilization which set limits to them, but also render permanent some of the changes they introduced.

So it is with genuine insight that Kaufmann begins his study of our “woke” era by recalling a forgotten episode of the MacNeil-Lehrer News Hour from 1991. At that time, “political correctness” was a newly-fashionable term for strange goings-on at prestigious American colleges and universities:

When Robert MacNeil declared to a young Dinesh D’Souza that political correctness “has already begun to pass” due to its excesses being ridiculed in the press, D’Souza wisely replied that while it was “somewhat on the defensive,” the proponents of PC were “not a handful of radicals” but rather “institutionalized . . . [representing the] establishment.”

MacNeil’s complacency was not uncommon. It was hard for many people to take seriously a movement characterized by students chanting “Hey hey, ho ho, Western Civ has got to go,” claims that Isaac Newton’s Principia was a “rape manual,” or Modern Language Association presentations with titles such as Jane Austen and the Masturbating Girl. Books were brought out in the “humor” category collecting over-the-top examples of academic craziness. Not a few expected the whole business to collapse from its inherent absurdity.

The trouble was that the imposters who had taken over the American academy were not laughing. They were too busy indoctrinating the brightest of the rising generation at the nation’s most prestigious universities. Beneath all the silliness and pretentious “postmodern” jargon, the upshot of their message was that law, rationality, and truth itself — along with the entire tradition of Western science, philosophy, and imaginative literature — were part of a multimillennial conspiracy by “white males” to subjugate and oppress the rest of humanity. While they appeared to face broad popular opposition, most of this was focused on damage limitation such as keeping Shakespeare in the curriculum. As I saw it, this was absurdly inadequate: Our institutions had to be purged with fire and sword. If these bastards were not stopped dead in their tracks, their thinking would dominate the entire United States within a generation.

You can buy Jonathan Bowden’s collection The Cultured Thug here.

And that is exactly what has happened.

One of the strengths of The Third Awokening is its broad historical perspective. Eric Kaufmann understands that present-day wokeness, which he dates from about the mid-2010s, has its roots not only in the “political correctness” wars of the early 1990s (the second “awokening”), but that these stretch back to the cultural revolution of the late 1960s (the first). Indeed, American anti-majoritarianism goes back at least to Randolph Bourne and the Young Intellectuals of Greenwich Village in the 1910s. These writers championed recent immigrant groups from Europe as a relief from the supposedly stuffy and dull Anglo-Saxon establishment. In those days, Scandinavians were regarded as exotic bearers of the needed “diversity” — the heroine of Sinclair Lewis’s Main Street (1920) feared they might one day fall victim to cultural assimilation.

Then, between the 1940s and the 1960s, and without a lot of fanfare, American attitudes on race and ethnicity underwent a sea change. Asian exclusion was repealed in 1943, the US military was racially integrated from 1946 through ‘48, and history textbooks were rewritten to emphasize immigrant contributions in the 1950s. In 1944, 52% of American whites still agreed with the statement that “White people should have the first chance at any kind of job,” a figure that sank to 3% by 1972. Asked “If a negro with just as much income and education as you had moved into your block, would it make any difference to you?” only 35% said no in 1942; by 1967, the figure was 67%. In 2020, Kaufmann conducted a survey of older Americans to try to get their sense of when the modern stigmatization of “racism” began to prevail: respondents gave a median date of 1959, with 95% of responses falling between 1954 and 1963. The so-called Civil Rights Movement was largely complete by 1965.

The first “awokening” began almost immediately thereafter. At least three points distinguish this development from the quieter and more gradual shift in sensibility just reviewed: 1) a certain narrowing in moral outlook, 2) an unprecedented decline in the authority of America and its institutions, and 3) the rise of uncoordinated moral panics as vehicles of cultural change.

1) Alluding to Jonathan Haidt’s moral foundations theory, Kaufmann points out that before this time America was committed to a number of moral ideals which had to be kept in balance:

When one moral intuition, such as equality or harm protection, bumps up against another, such as liberty or patriotism, an individual becomes aware of trade-offs and is more careful to temper the kind of normative extremism that expands the scope of taboos. Once one’s morality becomes unbalanced, there is no check on pushing for maximal normative sanctions on an ever-expanding range of increasingly microscopic transgressions. This is effectively what happened in Western societies, beginning in the mid-1960s. . . . Anti-racism, a community norm within the reformist left and liberal-humanitarian circles, suddenly became hegemonic within the entire American public sphere.

For a significant number of Americans, morality got reduced to equality and harm avoidance focused on sacralized racial and sexual identity victim groups. Blacks provided the original paradigm, but the thinking has exploded like a moral equivalent of cosmology’s “Big Bang” to cover other racial and sexual identity groups and to cast opprobrium on seemingly non-racial matters such as standardized testing and punctuality. There seems to be no inherent limit to its expansion, nor to the triviality of “micro-aggressions” it can become aggrieved about. As Kaufmann notes:

Stigmas are not like laws. Where laws involve logical consistency, balancing competing principles, and applying proportional penalties calibrated to the severity of the offense, taboos take a Manichean, black-and-white view of the world. If you violate a stigma, this excites a disgust reaction, leading, at the very minimum, to social ostracism.

In the absence of counterbalancing moral concerns, a sentiment takes hold that no sacrifice is too great for the eradication of “racism” and the realization of the egalitarian utopia which is supposed to result. Other social values, such as those embodied in traditional American freedoms, cannot survive in this atmosphere.

2) Most countries’ histories contain unpleasant episodes, as Kaufmann writes, but they normally find ways to “rationalize, contextualize, or downplay these sins.” America used to do this as well: “When Black people (1870) or women (1920) acquired the vote, or anti-Semitism faded (1940s), there was no collapse in American moral authority.” Yet such a collapse did occur beginning in the late 1960s, a delegitimation of both whites and the country they had created. Shelby Steele recalls:

The lines of moral power, like plates in the earth, had shifted. White guilt became so palpable you could see it on people. At the time, what it looked like to my eyes was a remarkable loss of authority. And what whites lost in authority, blacks gained. You cannot feel guilty about anyone without giving away power to them.

Many whites sought redemption through institutional reforms such as racial preferences or diversity training. This did nothing to help blacks, but that was not the point: the actions were symbolic and exculpatory. At the same time, a small but henceforth significant minority of zealots arose for whom there could never be any exculpation for “racism” — America’s real and alleged historical wrongs called for nothing less than the death penalty.

3) It is not easy to specify an exact date for the “first awokening,” but Kaufmann locates a possible turning point in a seemingly unimportant episode recalled by columnist Paul Krugman: the repainting of lawn jockeys in front of Long Island homes in the summer of 1965. “While it didn’t literally happen overnight,” Krugman remembers, “it did happen fast.” Nobody ordered the change. Some nameless liberal presumably got a bright idea one day about how he could “make a statement,” and suddenly the race was on: No one wanted his house sporting the last negro lawn jockey in town. The Great Long Island Lawn Jockey Repainting Race of 1965 prefigured later moral panics in its lack of coordination and its rapid spread, suggestive of tinder waiting for a random spark to fall upon it.

Every great social or political movement is characterized by a small, hard core and a much larger and fuzzier periphery. Hardcore radicals are important, but they cannot achieve much without broader social support. Kaufmann offers an analogy: Fundamentalist Christians might want to ban dancing and enforce laws against businesses opening on Sundays, but they can only hope to succeed in societies with many less committed Christians at least susceptible to being won over to their cause. Or again: There are plenty of Muslims who sincerely dislike suicide bombings and the beheading of infidels, but it is easy for radicals to put them in an embarrassing position by wielding the accusation that they are being “un-Islamic.” This hits home for people who recognize the same authorities as the radicals themselves.

All modern moral panics (of which the “racial reckoning” that followed George Floyd’s death was the largest and most recent) display this same pattern. They are sparked by what Cass Sunstein has called “opprobrium entrepreneurs,” but can only succeed because far larger numbers of people are willing to give at least passive support to the zealots. Kaufmann writes:

While radical ideas like Critical Race Theory or gender ideology have gained ground, they have only succeeded because they resonated with an established left-liberal hypersensitivity around identity issues. This attention to the demand side, or consumption of ideas, is missing from many books which focus only on the radicals and the ideas they produce.

Kaufmann is correct, and this broader approach is a major strength of his book.

* * *

No agreement has ever been reached on what to call the perverse mentality now dominating our institutions: “political correctness” and “cultural Marxism” are among the labels that have come and gone. Kaufmann introduces “cultural socialism” as his own preferred moniker. He acknowledges that, unlike economic socialism, it is a set of emotional responses rather than a doctrine. Yet it shares

the defining feature of socialism, [namely,] its egalitarianism, linked to a worldview which explains inequality as the result of social relations and coercive power rather than talent or hard work. An oppressor-oppressed, power-centric worldview is integral to both economic and cultural socialism.

You can buy Tito Perdue’s novel Vade Mecum here

Kaufmann is not a racial realist; he emphasizes history and culture as the sources of ineliminable group inequalities rather than evolution. But he does maintain that “a person who demands equal outcomes by race or sex should be treated as every bit as extreme as one who insists that every person enjoy the same wealth, power and prestige.”

Among the most visible features of the “woke” era has been the dismissal of dissenters from their jobs and from public life, popularly known as cancellation. Some critics argue that concern over “cancel culture” is exaggerated because the phenomenon is uncommon, and the author readily admits that “the number of people who lose their jobs or reputations to cancel culture is only a tiny fraction of the population.” The problem with this appeal to infrequency is that “it ignores the vast iceberg of self-censorship that sits underneath the statistically unusual examples of people being fired or defamed for speech.” The system operates like a mafia. Students of the Sicilian mafia know that they do not practice violence for its own sake; they prefer to keep it to the minimum necessary to maintain the credibility of their threats. But this is enough to keep an entire society living in fear. Cancellations, such as Google’s 2017 firing of James Damore for citing evolved sex differences in an essay criticizing the company’s diversity policies, are infrequent top-down acts, but they depend on the support of bottom-up and peer-to-peer ideological pressure.

Kaufmann has conducted detailed surveys on commitment to traditional liberal freedoms vs. support for disciplinary measures against dissenters within contemporary organizations. Importantly, he did not simply ask about people’s belief in freedom of conscience or freedom of speech in the abstract; nearly everyone claims to support such ideals until they come into conflict with the supposed need to protect a sacralized identity group from harm. Kaufmann’s survey questions presented dilemmas forcing respondents to choose between classical liberal ideals and the avoidance of harm to such groups.

What he found is that skeptics who go along with the pressure to protect their jobs are outnumbered by those sincerely supportive of at least some sanctions against dissent. In the author’s own words: “There is no silent liberal majority just waiting to find its courage; left-liberal conviction, not cowardice, accounts for the power of cancel culture.” He insightfully compares today’s cultural socialists to the worshipers of a demanding God who dishes out fearful punishments to followers who fall short of his demands: they may fear the punishments, but that does not mean their loyalty to their God is insincere. Indeed, the relation between fear of and support for cancel culture is significantly positive:

A stunning 49 percent of Americans who worry about losing their job or reputation for speech agree [that this is] “a justified price to pay to protect historically disadvantaged groups.” Support for cancel culture seems to flow from a person’s moral belief system, which operate on a different plane from their personal concerns. Fear of being disciplined for speech isn’t going to turn people against cancel culture.

For us, this means focusing less on shaming others into acquiring a backbone and more on demonstrating the falsity of the beliefs on which anti-majoritarian tyranny rests.

Support for cultural socialism is greatest among the young, women, and those Kaufmann calls the “highly educated,” but whom I would prefer to call the “extensively schooled.” It is also stronger among whites than the non-whites who are its intended beneficiaries. This should not surprise anyone familiar with Kevin MacDonald’s account of moralistic utopianism as an outgrowth of certain aspects of Northern European culture.

High support for cultural socialism among the youngest birth cohorts is, of course, an especially worrisome finding, particularly when combined with evidence that the common pattern of persons becoming more conservative with age has broken down in the Anglosphere since the birth cohort of 1981-96 (“millennials”). The recent climbdown from the excesses of the “Summer of Floyd” has been the work of older liberals who will pass from the scene long before the next “awokening,” for which the tinder is already quietly being laid now.

Kaufmann finds little support for the view, always popular with American conservatives, that a religious revival is the key to solving our problems. Survey data reveals that the people in the pews are roughly as infected with the woke mind virus as everyone else. Indeed, the sacralization of victimhood may represent in part an unhealthy hypertrophy of certain aspects of Christian doctrine. If religion is to play a role in defeating “wokeism,” it will have to be a religion consciously adapted for that purpose.

We shall also have to rid ourselves of the notion, still common in libertarian circles, that government is the exclusive threat to our freedom. As Kaufmann writes:

Cancel culture tends to flow from the bottom up rather than the top down, resulting in an “emergent authoritarianism” that largely arises from activists bullying institutions rather than elected officials telling them what to do. . . . I remain skeptical that older donors and the media have the stamina to do more than slow the advance of younger, more numerous and committed woke activists in the institutions.

Politicians, by contrast, are susceptible to popular anti-woke pressure. Gov. Glenn Youngkin of Virginia is no rock-ribbed conservative or even classical liberal, but he saw widespread outrage against Critical Race Theory (CRT) in public schools as a political opportunity, rode it to the governorship of Virginia, and kept his promise to eliminate it.

But Florida Governor Ron De Santis’ actions “represent the boldest application of state power in the service of anti-woke institutional reform to date.” Besides banning CRT, he has passed a Parental Rights in Education bill to prevent the sexual propagandizing of children before the third grade (a measure apparently viewed as controversial). He has gutted the diversity and equity bureaucracies at Florida’s institutions of higher learning, done away with “diversity statements” as a requirement for academic appointments, and even placed one small state college — New College of Florida — under the control of cultural conservatives, leading to the resignation of 40% of the faculty.

Kaufmann closes his book with some concrete proposals for using government power to roll back cultural socialism. These include protecting individuals from firing or other forms of retaliation for stating their views, enforcing political neutrality on public bodies and tech algorithms, adding political belief to the list of characteristics covered by anti-discrimination law, and mandating that schools teach about the First Amendment. But he warns that “at a deeper level, lasting change is only possible if our moral order ceases to revolve around the sacred totems of historically marginalized race, gender and sexual identity groups.”