How the Woke Is Put Away

Looking Back on Old Battles

Near the end of 2022, 39 House Republicans joined with the Democrats to vote in favor of the “Respect for Marriage Act,” which enshrined federal protection for non-heterosexual marriages in the United States. Once it was then sent off to the Senate, 12 Republicans joined the Democrats and their caucused Independents to send the law to President Biden’s desk for signature. Federal protections for non-homosexual “marriages” were signed into law, and thus ended the decades-long battle for gay marriage and legal recognition of civil unions before the full-on sacrilege of Marriage itself.

Those who have a longer political memory can recall an older time when the boogeymen on the Left were tightly organized, political culture warriors; when the pull of the “Moral Majority” had dyed-in-the-wool progressive screenwriters like Aaron Sorkin writing Republican Senators and operatives in the television show The West Wing who proposed things that sound completely sensible, from English as the national language, burnings of the American flag reclassified as a federal crime, and being “tough on crime.” I mention these culture war flashbacks because almost none of these things are in the zeitgeist of American political battles today, save for being tough on crime. The Vietnam War-era battle over flag burnings has disappeared, and just as with the lionization of Martin Luther King, Jr., conservatives of today have no problem with America’s polyglot society — to the point of having Republican Senators such as James Lankford of Oklahoma pushing for a “border deal” that will be nothing but a left-wing victory if passed.

This brings me to the current insanity of today’s battlefields of Culture War 2024: from the Competency Crisis, to “Gays Against Groomers,” to anti-White sentiment in every facet of the legal system and the private sector, to the Secretary of Homeland Security being a former board member of HIAS, and (let’s not forget) “anti-racist” slogans in every NFL end zone. As we transition (no pun intended) into election year mode — and as companies begin laying off thousands as the “Go woke, go broke” mantra makes its way into everything from Microsoft to Disney’s box office failures — some would argue that the “woke” (i.e., progressivism) might be on the retreat in an effort to maintain power in the midst of rising grassroots and elite backlash. This has reached a point where Dr. Neema Parvini (Academic Agent) and Auron MacIntyre have a running bet/gag about whether or not the “woke will be put away” by the beginning of 2025.

While I don’t have a stake in that bet, I still am firmly on Auron’s side: at least regarding the United States, it, being the progressivism, won’t be put away. It can be retarded back a bit, yes, but it marches on as it has throughout the West since the end of the Second World War. The “Woke” gets put away not because it is destroyed but because the next generation becomes so inculcated with progressivism that the next generation of opposition leaders have already accepted leftist presuppositions. We’ll be looking at these two points in detail down below.

Cultivation theory is a communications theory whose primary tenet is that the more time people spend “living” or watching and consuming television media, the more likely they are to believe that the real-world social reality aligns with the television reality. And in turn, their media reality becomes their day-to-day practices, rituals, and total conceptualization of how life should be outside of the media, leading to action, protest, and societal change in perspectives and practices. Boost this social media trend, and with the right social conditioning people cultivate and live in a reality that is far from anything accurate. In fact, this is how you can get certain parts of America overestimating that 23.6% of Americans are gay or lesbian while the actual number is under 5% of the total national population. Throw in progressive messages in commercials, such as framing resistance to traditional middle-class parents as the progressive ideal of apotheosis, and you have the ability to throw out the old order within a generation. When you can create a reality with its own set of axioms that seem so contradictory to how the real world was or currently is, the next generation will in turn be activists of the government they will inherit. Spokesmen for the next franchise or product — which in turn becomes the culture which the populace consumes and replicates on their own — propagate the next generation’s ideas of “normal” and “progress.”

An example

The second factor in how people give up, or just accept that the Left has won a particular battle, is the mechanism of containment. One needs only to go back to The Atlantic in 2017, wherein the Atlantic Council’s Uri Friedman discusses how center-right parties help contain and fight against its radical-right fringes. This idea, of course, comes from Daniel Ziblatt, author of Conservative Parties and the Birth of Democracy.

Friedman writes:

Ziblatt also documents how conservative parties have repeatedly struggled to confront radical right-wing forces that pose challenges to democracy. And he articulates a theory for how all this contributed to the breakdown of democracy in 20th-century Germany and the blossoming of democracy in 19th-century Britain. Where conservatives in Western Europe have developed strong party organizations — maintaining control over the selection of candidates, the financing of campaigns, and the mobilization of grassroots activists — democracy has historically tended to be more stable, he argues. The study of conservative parties offers “a framework to understand European history,” Ziblatt told me.

Ziblatt argues that Trump, Hitler, and other right-wing fringe figures who rise to power and prominence are aberrations, just as Marine Le Pen lost when many center-right voters either went for Macron or didn’t vote at all. You see this as well with so many “anti-Trump Republicans” going all-in on Haley or for Biden. Those two authors, while certainly not American in any sense of the word, do highlight the trend of containment, moving the ratchet leftward in a way that allows them to drive progress, but at the speed limit.

American writers have made similar observations. George Hawley, in his 2015 book Right-Wing Critics of American Conservatism, highlights a similar historical trend of America’s dominant right wing, the fusionist neoconservatives of the William F. Buckley years, still maintaining the spot as king of the hill. This was written before Trump, mind you, but it covers individuals ranging from John Derbyshire to Joseph Sobran, alongside attempts to categorize those ranging from Lew Rockwell to Rod Dreher. Hawley notes how prominent firings, or expulsions, from the National Review and the effective ostracization of the John Birch Society demonstrate Ziblatt’s thesis. We’re beginning to see this happen now, where people making tangible, digestible right-wing (also factually true) arguments while, say, going after the real legacy of Martin Luther King, Jr., are seeing pushback from the more moderating factions of the right as well as neoconservatives.

Despite being seen as “far-right” by some peers or by anyone in the mainstream press, I would probably be called a liberal or “not seeing the writing on the wall” by the conservatives and reactionaries whom Sam Francis called friends nearly fifty years ago. All of what I have written so far should emphasize to our readers and fellow writers the importance of keeping as much pressure as one can not to lose out on what actually matters to him. In Wars of Belief, denying your God or Doctrine is Defeat.

“Woke,” a term I hate, shouldn’t be used by anyone in this thing of ours because of its roots and because it serves as a rhetorical catch-all term with none of the specifics. Yes, the new Marvel movies are “woke,” but they’re made by people who hate the great American artform and wish to instill in the minds of children and manchildren alike that the “bad guys” are those who stand in the way of diversity and progress. Leftism isn’t put away by leftists themselves, unless for tactical reasons, but even then the revolution must go on on all fronts, from the press, the universities, the border, and our government. The revolution is put away because people just begin to accept revolutionary tenets and beliefs, accepting their frame even as they oppose the very next step of the revolution. This is what Auron MacIntyre calls the “neocon cycle,” and it is that cycle that has to be broken if any form of this progressive cancer gets put away. If not, we’ll end up exactly as Stonetoss so prophetically illustrates below: