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November 20, 2020

Liberal
Fundamentalism: A
Sociology of
Wokeness
by Eric Kaufmann

S
ix years on from the events at Ferguson, Missouri, and the explosion of cultural
radicalism that Matthew Yglesias calls the “Great Awokening,” it’s now possible to
see the woke movement for what it is: a decentered liberal ideology whose moral
innovators impel it toward fundamentalism.

The Awokening’s roots are more liberal than socialist. At this ideology’s core is a simple
emotional binary that began with the minoritarian liberalism of the nineteenth century, in
which minorities are viewed warmly and majorities coolly. I term this the liberal iden​tity.
The history of the liberal identity has been one in which the emotional volume has been
steadily turned up on this affective pair​ing, while the chosen form of “minority” has been
narrowed to concentrate on totemic racial, gender, and sexual categories. This is not
because these categories universally align with the most disadvantaged persons, but due to
their politico-symbolic potential.
At the extreme, minorities are viewed as hyper-fragile children that must be protected from
all harms, however microscopic or imaginary. The majority is hated and feared as a vicious
predator against whom one must constantly stand on guard, and which should be attacked
remorselessly.

Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky observed that people “aren’t rational, they rationalize.”
Jonathan Haidt makes a similar point with his metaphor of the elephant and the rider. Our
“elephant” is the fast-thinking emotive driver of our behavior, while our “rider” tells us a
story about why we act as we do. Split-brain experiments neatly show this, where a subject
with a split brain laughs in response to scientists making funny faces on one side of a split-
vision divider and tells the scientists on the other side that he is laughing because of what
they are wearing. Likewise, the ideological somersaults of the cultural Left (the “rider”) are
largely rationalizations for the liberal identity, its subconscious “elephant.”

The liberal identity has steadily diverged from liberal principles, and its blend of ideas is
now best characterized as left-modernism, a blend of cultural egalitarianism and modernist
individualism. Since the 1960s, left-modernism has absorbed revolutionary cadences from
Marxism, ratcheting its tone upwards towards today’s “woke” funda​mentalist apogee.
Novels, film, and educational campaigns, which re​peatedly evoked sympathy for minority
groups—especially blacks—while featuring white saviors as leads, have instilled a clear
narrative in the minds of left-liberals over decades. Little wonder, then, that when someone
from the majority actually or symbolically assaults a minority, especially when this involves
the sacralized category of race and a central script such as police violence against black
Americans, this resonates with liberal tropes and memories, activating uniquely intense
outrage. Similar assaults involving minority-minority or ma​jority-majority pairings don’t
elicit the same reaction.

Minority status alone doesn’t purchase left-modernist sympathy. A small demographic share
matters mainly as an indicator of powerlessness and disadvantage. Mormons are fair game
to be ridiculed in productions like The Book of Mormon, as are evangelicals. Jews, being
largely white and prosperous, receive reduced attention, though left-modernism’s worship of
trauma means it is willing to police anti-Semitism, especially if it comes from the Right. Left-
modern​ism’s emphasis on psychic egalitarianism means that no mat​ter how small whites
become as a share of the U.S. population, they will be viewed as benefiting from the
unearned psychic privilege of having been historically dominant. Perhaps it would take a
significant period of ethnic subordination, akin to that experienced by the for​merly domi​‐
nant Muslims of North India after 1947, before they get to call themselves a disadvantaged
minority.

The liberal identity’s decentered structure means it resembles dis​tributed schismatic

religions like Protestantism or Islam more than centralized ones like Catholicism. Its lack of
any high church estab​lishment, however, pushes it beyond Protestantism or Islam. Indeed,
there are almost no internal checks on its radicalism.

Viewing wokeness as a highly decentered liberal religion helps us understand the

movement’s extremism, its witch hunts, and its awakenings. It explains why high-status
people and elite institutions mouth its mantras, why its moderates can’t stand up to its
fundamentalists, and why it is both the product of, and an engine of, polari​zation.

Liberal Origins

Why liberal fundamentalism? After all, illiberalism in the name of “social justice” is this
movement’s calling card. This cognitive disso​nance doesn’t arise from liberal principles, but
from liberal identity. Liberalism’s concern with the tyranny of the majority has produced a
minoritarian sensibility that has morphed into a perfectionist left-modernism, which is
profoundly illiberal.

What Isaiah Berlin terms negative liberalism—the set of procedures that seek to regulate
conduct by maximizing a person’s freedom sub​ject to the rights of others—is logically sound.
But logic is not enough to inspire passionate social action. Even if the aim is limited to
negative liberalism—ensuring equal rights for all individuals—liberals must rely on the same
movement strategies as their adversaries. This means generating symbols, narratives, sacred
events, heroes, slogans, and charismatic leaders. Once again, these don’t just die when a
movement like women’s suffrage succeeds. They survive as memes (in the sense of Richard
Dawkins’s original coinage)—cultural replicators like viruses whose aim is to perpetuate
themselves.

This will to replicate is useful if a meme’s job remains unfinished. But at other times they
persist as powerful social identities which stretch their goals through “concept creep” to
ensure that they con​tinue to stay relevant and can call upon our passions and resources.
What Douglas Murray refers to as “St. George in retirement syndrome”—slaying phantom
dragons—is the result.

When liberalism was about metaphorically slaying despotic elites, its narratives were
grounded in ideas of “the people,” like democracy and nationhood. Once liberalism turned
from defending the rights of disenfranchised majorities to protecting minority rights, the
narrative shifted. When it came to the rights of Catholics and Jews (in Protestant countries),
racial minorities, or homosexuals, the “bad guys” were the majority, who menaced
minorities in need of protec​tion. The emotive pairing of majority with malice and minority
with empathy began this way. What started as a modest habit of mind has deepened into a
reflexive demonization of majorities and lionization of minorities, which is the “elephant”
driving the “rider” of contemporary left-modernism.

In theory, liberalism could have mothballed its mytho-symbolic arsenal once equal rights had
been achieved for disenfranchised groups. It could have remained agnostic about the merits
of majority and minority culture. But the liberal army was a living, breathing force, inspiring
loyalty, meaning, and identity among its followers. The liberal conscience collective became
a distinct entity from liberal principles, complete with its myth of the avant-garde and
memories of struggle. The liberal community became willing to violate liberal principles to
maintain solidarity and meaning.

Consider the fateful shift from color-blind racial liberalism to affirmative action represented
by President Lyndon Johnson’s 1965 Howard University speech, in which he argued that it
is not enough to liberate blacks through “equality of opportunity,” but that society must
achieve “equality as a result.” Johnson was correct that social policies to improve the lives of
blacks were reasonable, but this was not a liberal argument and therefore represents a major
conceptual rupture with the logic of civil rights. Nevertheless, in the liberal con​sciousness,
there is no break. Pre- and post-1965 liberalism appear as parts of a seamless organic whole.
This sleight of hand only goes unnoticed because of the continuity provided by liberal
emotions, narrative, identity, and organization. This wasn’t lost on astute ob​servers like
Bayard Rustin, who rightly saw the change as a betrayal of liberal principles. All of these
aspects show how different the liberal emotional-symbolic web is from liberal logic. The
former can smooth over logical contradictions in a way the latter, by definition, cannot.
Liberty and equality overlap when there are barriers to the equal treatment of individuals.
Once the question shifts to abridging liberty to achieve equal outcomes, the two part ways
and we supposedly get liberalism and egalitarianism. In reality, however, a liberal identity
that has become accustomed to empathizing with minorities against oppressive majorities
will incline liberals to depart from liberal princi​ples and adopt egalitarianism, all the while
retaining the “liberal” label. Various means were designed to square this circle, from assert​‐
ing that the weak need equality before they can exercise their rights to John Rawls’s theory
that if people had to choose a set of rules before knowing how privileged they would be,
most would opt for left-liberalism.

As a result, liberalism split into its right-liberal and left-liberal halves. In the United States,
gun rights, anti-government sentiment, and anti-communism represent a right-liberal
tradition that harks back to the “Don’t Tread on Me” principles of the founding. But Penn’s
tolerant Pennsylvania, the founders’ deism, anarchist individualism in the nineteenth
century, and liberal Progressivism in the early twentieth century have also birthed a left-
liberal tradition. Today’s woke legions are direct descendants of the early anarchists and
liberal Progressives.

Left-Modernism: A Radical Successor of Liberalism

What we have witnessed over the past century is a steady radicalization of the liberal
identity’s pro-minority/anti-majority emotional antinomy.

The liberal Progressive movement of the first decade of the twentieth century is an
important chrysalis for today’s dominant ideology, the blend of liberal and leftist ideas that I
term left-modern​ism. Liberal Progressivism brought together university-educated lib​eral
Protestants like John Dewey and Jane Addams with freethinkers like William James and Felix
Adler. While most Progressives favored restricted immigration and temperance alongside
social welfare and economic support for the working class, the liberal Progressives were the
first to combine leftist social reform with a truly cosmopolitan vision of the country. By 1910
they had influenced the ecumenical mainline Protestant elites of the Federal Council of
Churches, who embraced pluralism and the humanist rationale for liberal immigration. The
liberal Progressives didn’t fully abandon assimilation, but exchanged Milton Gordon’s
Anglo-Protestant “transmuting pot” for Israel Zangwill’s “crescent and cross” global fusion.
Already, Dewey chafed against the “New Englandism” of his birth, yearning for diver​sity. In
theory all groups were equal, including WASPs, but the affec​tions of Addams, Dewey, and
others were generally reserved for immigrant groups like Italians and Jews, while a wary eye
was kept on the Anglo-Protestant majority.

With the minoritarian liberal template now established, a new generation began the iterative
process of amplifying the majority-minority binary, explicitly denouncing the Anglo-
Protestant heritage of the country. The modernist avant-garde of 1910s Greenwich Vil​lage
combined experimentalism in the arts with enthusiasm for the new immigrants who were
remaking the ethnic composition of major Eastern Seaboard cities between the 1880s and
1920s. Randolph Bourne, the doyen of the Young Intellectuals in the Village, urged his
fellow Anglo-Saxons to slough off their stale provincial upbringings and leverage the
interesting new immigrants to find the “cosmopoli​tan note.” Immigrants like Jews, by
contrast, were urged to “stick to” their faith and culture and not to succumb to the
temptation to assimilate and thereby become “cultural half-breeds.” Elite young modernists
began embarking on “slumming” excursions to the Jewish Lower East Side or up to Harlem
to take in the new black jazz. The Anglo-Protestant heartland was derided as uninteresting.

The result is what I term asymmetrical multiculturalism: ethnicity as wonderful for

minorities, poisonous for majorities. This contradiction in the worldview of the left-
modernist bohemians established a minoritarian, anti-majority mold which occupies the
very soul of today’s woke culture. This isn’t to say that empathy for minorities wasn’t sorely
needed at the time, or that attention to the excesses of majority behavior was unwarranted.
Yet once the emotional valences had crystallized, the world became a much simpler place,
where reflex rather than logic ruled. It became considerably more difficult to take a
nuanced, contextualized view of the Anglo-Protestant majority group and its identity. To
cherish Anglo-American traditions and accomplishments in world-historical context, for
instance, or to appreciate the difference between Anglo-Protestants’ attachment to their
group and its traditions, and whites’ maltreatment of out-groups, became impossible.

While the Young Intellectuals criticized Anglos for being provincial, their successors in the
1920s were considerably less restrained, cranking anti-majoritarianism up several notches.
The sale of alcohol had been prohibited by the Low Church Protestant–inspired Vol​stead
Act of 1920, while the Johnson-Reed Act of 1924 established new immigration laws that
severely curtailed the influx from southern and eastern Europe. Outraged, 1920s essayist H.
L. Mencken attacked the ethnic majority:
 The Anglo-Saxon American[’s] is a history of . . . blind rage against peoples
who have begun to worst him. . . . The normal American of the “pure-blooded”
majority goes to rest every night with an uneasy feeling that there is a burglar
under the bed. . . . His political ideas are crude and shallow. He is almost
wholly devoid of esthetic feeling. The most elementary facts about the visible
universe alarm him, and incite him to put them down. Educate him . . . and he
still remains palpably third-rate. He fears ideas almost more cravenly than he
fears men.

In Sinclair Lewis’s novel Main Street (1920), Carol Kennicott, the lead character, longs to
escape her midwestern town, run by an Anglo‑Protestant middle class of “standardized
background . . . scornful of the living. . . . A savourless people, gulping tasteless food . . .
and viewing themselves as the greatest race in the world.” Sarah Jeong and others who make
similar criticisms of white people today are the intellectual descendants of the early left-
modernists.

Left-modernism’s roots lie in minoritarian liberalism, not socialism, which envisioned a

majoritarian uprising of the working masses. In this sense, socialism was closer to ideas of
“the people,” like nationalism and populist democracy, than to left-liberalism. In addi​tion,
socialists of the Second International (1889–1916) tended to believe that only “advanced”
societies and peoples were ready for revolution. Immigrants from what Marx termed
primitive, slave, or feudal societies would forestall the revolution with their backward
consciousness. Socialists were also generally supportive of both na​tionalism and
imperialism. Eugenics and immigration restriction were both popular with socialists, while
advocacy on behalf of African Americans was pioneered by the liberal naacp in 1908, whose
concerns were typically viewed by socialists as bourgeois.

At the same time, left-leaning liberals—the so-called lyrical Left—had a tense relationship with
socialism. While drawn to the utopian dreams of Marxism, many of these left-modernists
found themselves repelled by Soviet socialism’s doctrinaire conformity and political
demands. As the Young Intellectual Floyd Dell confessed, he was drawn to luxury,
sensuality, and self-indulgence rather than the drab​ness of socialist struggle, preferring
Freud to Marx. Still, many bohemians hoped the two balls could be kept in the air. The
Soviet Central Committee disabused them of this illusion in 1932 with the diktat that
experimentation in the arts was forbidden, and only social​ist realism would be tolerated.
 Twentieth-Century Cancel Culture

Many among the rising “New York Intellectuals” generation of 1930s left-modernists were
ex-Communists who lost their faith when Stalin banned artistic experimentation. The rift
deepened as Stalin began purging dissidents during the 1936 Moscow Show Trials and
signed the 1939 Nazi-Soviet Pact. Instead of the Communist dream, cultural radicals
gravitated to an expressive liberal-cosmopolitan utopia that resembled that of the earlier
Young Intellectuals. Some cooperated with the CIA to undermine Soviet Communism.

Nevertheless, the Marxist habit of shutting down debate with moralistic sound bites and
purity tests followed the New York Intellectuals as they transitioned from Communism to
cosmopolitan liberalism. In Communist circles, “bourgeois” was a moral statement, an
epithet designed to silence discussion and dissent. This was joined by the use of “fascist” in
the 1930s. In 1937–39, the present danger of fascism produced a “concept creep” in the use
of the term among left-modernists who had gravitated to liberalism. Now it was not only
Nazis but liberal-nationalist American Scene artists like Thomas Hart Benton or architects
like Frank Lloyd Wright who were attacked by left-modernist critics such as Stuart Davis as
fascist and racist. Cancel culture is the product of this transposition of moral rhetoric from
class conflict to cultural conflicts around ethnicity and race.

In the wake of World War II, as second-generation New York Intellectual Daniel Bell noted,
the once-vibrant intellectual Right all but disappeared in Europe and America. Communist
and anti-Com​munist versions of the Left battled for supremacy, with the latter emerging
triumphant. What Lionel Trilling termed the “adversary culture” had been confined to small
groups of bohemian writers and artists, though aspects of its outlook were adopted by the
urban upper-middle classes as early as the 1920s. By the 1940s, a reflexive sympathy for
minorities was becoming common in some East Coast establishment circles, whether
among progressive Democrats and the mainline Protestant National Council of Churches or
liberal business executives such as 1940 Republican presidential candidate Wendell Willkie.
In the 1960s, the massive expansion of universities and national television spread the
countercultural liberal identity to a rising “knowledge class” of tertiary-sector workers.

Along with the spread of drugs and the sexual revolution came a rise in accusations of
racism and, later, sexism. Left-modernism’s initial wave of emotional enthusiasm, the First
Great Awokening, began around 1964 at Berkeley, moving into high gear in the late sixties.
Race, and later gender and sexuality, took center stage as the Left increasingly pivoted away
from traditional class concerns toward those of the left-modernists.

Meanwhile, former Marxists embraced the cause of black civil rights and anti-imperialism,
as well as feminism and gay liberation. Herbert Marcuse brought critical theory’s Freudian
focus and con​cern with anti-Semitism into the American context. Despairing of working-
class revolution in the West, he embraced the cause of disadvantaged identity groups. For
instance, Angela Davis, a leading Black Panther, studied under Marcuse in Frankfurt and San
Diego. The productive tension between revolutionary Marxism and liberalism injected a
political radicalism into left-modernism, lending it a sharper moral edge which focused on
its emerging holy trinity of racism, sexism, and, in due course, homophobia.

With landmark civil rights legislation passed in 1965, the mainstream accepted the need for
change, and the racist charge now carried a moral weight in the wider society that had
previously been limited to progressive circles. As Paul Krugman recalls, statues of coachmen
in front of nice Long Island homes were suddenly repainted from black to white during the
summer of 1965 to remain au fait with the new taboo.

The sacralization of race by left-modernists would prove monumentally important in the

decades to come. The anti-WASP ethos of the early left-modernists gradually evolved into a
generalized anti-whiteness as white Catholics and Jews assimilated into a new un​hyphenated
white majority. Robin D’Angelo’s “white fragility” and Noel Ignatiev’s 1990s critical race
theory trope of “abolishing the white race” stem from the same liberal mindset as Mencken
and Bourne’s anti-WASP diatribes.

This development, it should be stressed, originates not with Marx​ism but with liberalism’s
minoritarian sympathies and anti-majority ethos. In effect, liberalism’s categories of
majority and minority cultural identities were plugged into socialism’s oppressor-oppressed
terminal, filling the blank slots left by the bourgeoisie and the pro​letariat. While those who
point to wokeness as a cultural form of Marxism are partially correct, these influences came
later, and ferti​lized a preexisting liberal matrix.

Competitive Radicalization: The Woke Moral Economy

A centrally directed system like a machine consists of a control center that directs the entire
apparatus. Complex systems like flocks of birds work from the bottom up, with order
emerging from the uncoordinated activities of individuals following simple rules. A
command economy is centrally directed by a state bureaucracy while a market operates as
an uncoordinated complex system. Individuals following price signals generate a system that
matches supply with demand.

The same distinction holds for idea systems. At the extreme, the fashion system is an almost
perfect marketplace, with virtually no limit on experimentation. Sumptuary laws once
regulated what each social stratum was permitted to wear. Once this collapsed, a market
model took over in which new trends, often originating with dandies or bohemian
innovators, were picked up by the fashion-conscious upper class. These then percolated
down the social scale. The lowest classes were always behind, with higher-status groups
using fashion as a means of distinguishing themselves. We find this pattern even in first
names, with lower-status groups slower to adapt to new conven​tions than elite strata.

Do values behave the same way? The marketing firm Cultural Dynamics uses the terms
pioneer, prospector, and settler to describe three values groups, with pioneers the first to
experiment with new trends. Once an idea goes from weird to safe, the trendy prospectors
seize on it to distinguish themselves. The conservative settlers are the last to change, only
adopting new values once they become well-established.

Moral orders differ to some extent from fashion orders inasmuch as they enforce norms of
behavior and set out the values of society. There is a stronger punitive aspect here, which
can take the form of ostracism or even physical punishment. But value trends operate in
similar ways to fashion trends.

Among moral idea systems, Catholicism, communism, and Irish republicanism are examples
of ideas with centrally controlled com​mand structures where official doctrine flows from
the top down. Protestantism, Islam, and Judaism, by contrast, possess competing religious
authorities, with wide latitude for preachers, imams, and rabbis to innovate. While national
establishments like Iran’s mullahs can exert power, in democratic societies it is difficult for
the religious authorities to clamp down on moral innovators. Anarchism and liberalism, the
two main sources of left-modernism, are even more distributed than Protestantism,
approaching levels of dispersion not so different from that of the fashion system.
 Fundamentalist Tendencies

One of the characteristics of highly decentered moral systems is a tendency toward

fundamentalism. Protestantism is a break from Catholicism, and while Lutheran and
Anglican establishments tried to create new hierarchies, dissenting preachers armed with
their own interpretations of Scripture forged new sects. Presbyterians separated from
Anglicans, the Free Church broke from Presbyterianism, and so on down to the
independent Protestant ministries of today. Schisms occasionally produced liberal offshoots
like Unitarianism but more often pushed in the direction of textual literalism, resistance to
mo​dernity, or emotional expressivism. New sects like the Methodists and Baptists or, later,
the Orthodox Presbyterian Church, inveighed against established denominations or secular
authorities, accusing them of being corrupted by worldly forces. In Islam, dissident imams
echoed this line of reasoning, assailing the laxity and un-Quranic mores of sultans and their
official clergy.

Why fundamentalism? One reason lies, oddly enough, in value consensus. When everyone
agrees that morality stems from the word of God as written in the Bible, it’s very difficult to
argue against Scripture in favor of rationalism or syncretism. The fundamentalist gets to
occupy the moral high ground and holds cultural power. Something similar occurs in ethnic
conflicts when, within a group, extremists “outbid” moderates who wish to sign a peace
deal. Since everyone identifies with the community first, moderates can easily be cast as
sellouts who are betraying the memory of communal martyrs who died in past conflicts. In
Northern Ireland, for example, the hardline Loyalist Ian Paisley accused the moderate David
Trimble of being a “Lundy”—the name of a famous seventeenth-century Protestant traitor
who tried to trick the inhabitants of Londonderry into surrendering to the Catholics—for
signing up to the Belfast power-sharing agreement. Soon after, Paisley’s party defeated
Trimble’s. Similar outbidding processes have occurred in hot spots such as Sri Lanka and
the former Yugoslavia. Once again, the reason has to do with value consensus: everyone is
loyal to their ethnic group first rather than the multiethnic state, so accusations of disloyalty
work to shut down competing claims.

So too with left-modernism. Whenever an institution like a uni​versity or newspaper comes

to be mainly populated by the cultural Left, value consensus is assumed and left-modernist
moral entrepreneurs rise up to “outbid” others in their commitment to communal values.
Even where centrists rather than extremists are dominant, appeals to the liberal identity—in
which minorities carry a positive valence while majorities are viewed as threatening—are
tricky for moderates to morally contest. Fundamentalist innovators like Ibram X. Kendi and
Robin D’Angelo, or keyboard social justice warriors like Alyssa Milano, are left-modernism’s
Sayyid Qutbs and Jerry Falwells. Moral entrepreneurs pioneer politically correct terms like
“Latinx” and “lgbtq,” or tropes like cultural appropriation. They advance new issues like
transgender emotional safety, institutions such as speech codes, or religious practices like
jazz hands and taking the knee. Their religious equivalents are prayer breakfasts, speaking in
tongues, Christian rock, terms like “pro-life,” and educational cam​paigns like creationism.

Protestant fundamentalism’s politics has typically focused on a small number of mobilizing

issues that people can easily grasp. Ritualism in the Anglican church in twentieth-century
England, drink and the saloon in early twentieth-century America, and, more recent​ly,
abortion, school prayer, or gay marriage. Liberal fundamentalism also tends to prioritize a
few high-profile issues. It cares a bit about disability and poverty, but mainly concentrates on
the holy crusades of race, gender, and sexuality. The “critical” race, gender, and queer
theories detailed by Helen Pluckrose and James Lindsay in their book Cynical Theories are
the philosophical riders, but the elephant push​ing the movement is the liberal identity.

Rather than Scripture, the core of the left-modernist faith is the minoritarian liberal identity,
with its affection for minorities and hostility to the majority. This paves the way for a leftism
that seeks to weaken the strong and strengthen the weak. Transposing the leveling impulse
from “scientific” majoritarian Marxism to anti-scientific minoritarian liberalism is what led
to organizing around race, gender, and sexuality. This in turn enacted a victim-oppressor
moral hierarchy, with racial groups deemed oppressed on top, followed by wom​en and
sexual minorities, with other intersectional categories lower down the scale.

As John McWhorter notes, the religion of anti-racism has its high priests (like Ta-Nehisi
Coates), its rituals (taking the knee), and its incantations. White males are the fallen, and
redemption comes in the form of prostration to, and allyship with, “people of color.” In
place of the thousand-year reign of Christ on Earth, or the Workers’ State, comes the
multicultural utopia of equality-in-diversity. The communal emotions called forth by
religious reasoning give rise to periodic waves of mass enthusiasm and innovation. The First
Great Awakening (1725–50), Second Great Awakening (1815–40), and the Azusa Street
Revival (1906–15) furnish examples from American Protestantism. Left-modernism has
similarly enjoyed three Great Awokenings. The first took place in the late 1960s, the second
in the late 1980s and early ’90s when “political correctness” came into vogue, and the third
from 2014 with the explosion of social media and the catalyst of the Ferguson riots.
We can visualize these waves by tracking the use of the terms “racism” or “sexism” over
time. As figure 1 shows, each Awokening corresponds to an upsurge in the use of the word
“racism” in Ameri​can English–language books. A very similar pattern holds for “sex​ism.”
Importantly, each wave consolidated and built upon the success of previous waves. This
reflects left-modernism’s successful “march through the [elite] institutions,” beginning with
universities in the 1960s and spreading to the media and corporate world, beginning in the
early 1990s but especially since 2014.

As the liberal identity and its left-modernist ideology spread, it pushed on an open door.
Few in the academy had the wherewithal to mount a sustained intellectual pushback against
left-modernist moral​ism. Conservatives were preoccupied with economics and foreign
policy and hoped to curry favor with the Left by acting as rule-takers in the cultural realm.
The main constraint on wokeness at the time was the supply of activists and the breadth of
their imagination. Both expanded as grievance studies fields and equity and diversity officers
proliferated. This led to the unfolding of left-modernist logic and personnel into new
frontiers like trans rights and fat studies. In the past, left-modernist activists might interfere
with a speaker, such as James Coleman, whose 1976 American Sociological Association con​‐
ference address on the impact of busing on white flight featured pick​eters with swastika
signs on stage. At other times they might occupy a building and demand fifty ethnic studies
professorships, as at San Francisco State University in 1968. In the political science faculty
of the University of British Columbia in 1995, an entire department was paralyzed for
months by nonspecific accusations of “systemic” racism and sexism. This could have
happened far more often if activists were better organized and globally connected. If
activists had social media in the late 1960s or early ’90s, I have little doubt they would have
hit upon cancel culture.

In some religions and nationalist movements, an establishment which is viewed as the

repository of tradition can check fundamentalists. Fundamentalists threaten the power of
the religious and political establishment, who act to suppress them, as in Egypt, which jailed
the Islamist Sayyid Qutb. Among Irish nationalists, dissident extremists who wanted to
continue the armed struggle after 1998 had to contend with the prestige of the Provisional
IRA and its political wing, Sinn Féin, which had signed up to the deal. During the Chinese
Cultural Revolution, the regime could step in to curb the activities of pro-regime moral
innovators, as when Zhou Enlai unleashed the People’s Liberation Army against Red Guards
who wanted to destroy the Forbidden City. Often establishments will accuse extremists of
being heretics or dividing the community, a charge which Official Unionists leveled at Ian
Paisley and which Jewish rabbinical authorities aimed at ultra-Orthodox rabbis.

For liberals, there is no analogous power center. There seems to be a vacuum at the heart of
liberalism, with no established institutions able to successfully counter the claims of woke
innovators. While the courts tend to uphold traditional liberalism and many liberals
excoriate wokeness and cancel culture in the media, they are not systematically organized
into a network within universities, newsrooms, foundations, or corporations. No liberal
Vatican exists which can draw on traditional legitimacy and organizational depth to curtail
the moral authority of woke preachers. Instead, universities, sections of the media, and
corporations tend to swiftly fall into line behind the latest radical movement and buzzword.

Secularization, Leading to Polarization

Fundamentalism is often a response to secularization. The desire to draw a firm line

between religion and secular modernity leads to the desire to define a set of anti-modern
doctrinal fundamentals which cannot be abridged. This can alienate moderates from the
faith. Since the mid-twentieth century, liberal or modernist sects, such as main​line
Protestantism or reform Judaism, have been hemorrhaging mem​bers to both nonreligion
and strict religion. Secularization lends ur​gency to fundamentalism, but fundamentalism
also propels moderates to leave religion.
Likewise, the populist challenge to minoritarian liberalism in Europe since 2014, and in
America since 2015, has profaned liberal sacred values by campaigning to reduce
immigration and openly at​tacking political correctness. This has invigorated left-modernist
fun​damentalism. Radical excesses in turn power populism, with Trump leveraging public
disgust with political correctness to his advantage. The result is a ratcheting polarization and
culture war. In the middle, people are forced to take sides. Some liberals climb aboard the
woke express while others find themselves “red-pilled,” alienated from minoritarian
liberalism, and move right. Some conservatives shift the other way in response to populism.

Polarization is less evident in elite institutions, however, whose policies and

pronouncements on race, gender, and sexuality remain uniformly left-modernist. This is why
Trump exiting the scene may reduce radical outrage, but is unlikely to slow the woke
express. Institutions with a progressive ethos, like the feminist academic jour​nal Hypatia,
are highly responsive to woke accusations because they are deeply invested in left-modernist
iden​tity.

It’s one thing for moral innovators to appear in such progressive spaces, but how might we
explain phenomena like woke corporations or their “bobo” (bour​geois bohemian)
employees who seem so keen on adopting the latest moral fashions? Recall that in the
fashion system, elites seize on new styles devel​oped by bohemian innovators to distinguish
themselves from those below. In the Cultural Dynamics values model, the mores of the
pioneer values innovators influence the trendy prospectors who work in the new knowledge
economy, with the older, more working-class settlers resisting value change. Woke morals
enjoy high status, and many employees in tertiary industries are liberal graduates. Firms are
keen to adopt left-modern​ist moral innovations to both please their woke employees and to
distinguish themselves from their less “pro​gressive” competitors. Sig​naling left-modernist
virtue through adver​tising campaigns or diver​sity training programs is therefore partly about
a company trying to keep up with, or attain a status advantage over, its competitors.

But this puts the cart before the horse. Firms are hardly going to take up the latest
evangelical Christian cause. Left-modernism’s moral status thereby stems from a liberal
fundamentalist elite operating beyond the business world. Only after left-modernism’s
sacred val​ues, such as anti-racism and anti-sexism, are recognized as the curren​cy of the
moral realm do companies act to maximize their quantity of these goods. As Max Weber
noted, people act in self-interested ways, but only within a preset value system. Left-
modernist moral supremacy comes first, and the virtue-signaling status machine second. In
effect, status considerations are secondary to moral authority.

The moral DNA of elite institutions is provided by a taken-for-granted minoritarian

liberalism that began over a century ago, bor​rowed from cultural Marxism in the sixties, and
has been deepening its grip on elite institutions ever since. This laid the seedbed for today’s
left-modernist innovators to assert moral authority, pressing organizations for implicit bias
training, equity, and diversity policy, and, where necessary, the canceling of problematic
employees and products. There is no countervailing moral power in most institutions, and
thus no competing source of values to counter the tide of liberal fundamentalism.

Private Truths, Public Lies

Religions, whether otherworldly or secular, sometimes retreat from the world, while at other
times they pursue power to rule and harm others. Salafism is usually quietist, but when
mixed with Marxist theories of action, produced bin Laden’s Salafi-jihadism. In Algeria,
Islamic fundamentalists during the civil war in the 1990s turned out​ward, killing fellow
citizens whom they accused of being insufficiently “woke” in Islamist terms (i.e., attentive to
God’s law). Islamists who make accusations in the name of their society’s sacred values
signal their virtue and gain moral stature. This allows them to punish dissent.

The same transpired in colonial Massachusetts, where hapless women were accused of
being witches while no countervailing mo​rality to Puritanism existed. In 1960s China, the
best way to neutralize an enemy was to tar them as a “capitalist roader.” Today, moral
entrepreneurs win plaudits by slinging the “racist” charge. Those whose lives and
reputations are destroyed are scalps to be displayed as trophies on social media, as when
journalist George Eaton of the New Statesman celebrated his canceling of Roger Scruton by
posting a photo of himself swigging a bottle of champagne.

Once a taboo comes to be respected, even a small number of liberal fundamentalists is

enough to quell opposition. Moderate liberals who might speak against woke innovations
like safe spaces fear that others will view them as reactionaries or racists for standing against
sacred minoritarian values. Their view of what others might think pulls down a veil of
silence. This produces Timur Kuran’s “private truths, public lies” in which public reality
becomes the performance of a lie. The best the majority can do is to drag its feet or change
the subject in the hope that activists will go away. They won’t.

On the one hand, the woke system is like the emperor’s new clothes, a fragile illusion
waiting to be exposed. A critical mass of open dissenters can set off a cascade in which
fence-sitters move, con​vincing the next set of undecideds, and eventually exposing the entire
racket. Desacralizing wokeness is therefore partly a matter of suffi​cient dissidents raising
their voices until a tipping point is reached and a self-fulfilling dynamic collapses the entire
edifice. This means that even one brave person in a committee meeting or studio audience
can be enough to unmask its pretensions, desacralizing liberal fundamentalism. In complex
systems, small causes around a tipping point can have massive effects.

On the other hand, left-modernist extremism is durable due to its hold on the consciousness
of well-educated people. Even if its lack of logical and empirical foundations is exposed, it
has a claim on the emotions of many liberals. A wide swath of opinion cleaves to the
minoritarian liberal identity which underpins left-modernism and is the dominant moral
reflex of western societies. While nervous about woke overreach, most have imbibed stories
about right-wing excess while remaining comparatively ignorant of the sins of the Left. Even
if there is a vague sense that Mao or Stalin did something wrong, there are no emotional
attachments to these stories equivalent to the sins of Jim Crow or the Nazis. Film, novels,
and schoolbooks offer few psychosocial profiles of leftist regimes, failing to bring them to
life. Liberals instinctively fear the Right more than the Left, and thus there is a deep
sympathy for the sacred values that left-modernist moral entrepreneurs skillfully evoke.

Might Wokeness Be Desacralized?

Consider two examples of successful moral defenestration. In the late nineteenth century,
temperance was viewed as a prestigious moral crusade. Between 1890 and 1920, however,
the class composition of the leading temperance organization, the Women’s Christian
Temper​ance Union (WCTU), slid from elite to lower-middle. By the 1920s, the American
elite endorsed prohibition repeal and stood against the now lower-status WCTU. In 1933,
thanks in part to Al Capone’s antics, the elite won the argument and alcohol was sold once
again.
Another case of downward value mobility is the way social class counteracted
fundamentalism among American white Protestants in the early twentieth century. Fire-and-
brimstone Baptists held the religious high ground over the more moderate Presbyterians and
Episcopalians, but Baptists who achieved upward mobility tended to switch to become
Methodists or Presbyterians, who in turn graduated to Episcopalianism. Secular prestige
offset moral power to keep fun​damentalism at bay until this system collapsed in the late
twentieth century.

While raw status considerations played a part in the resistance to fundamentalist pressure in
both cases, this was bolstered by a rising liberal ethos that endowed the modernizing side
with moral authority. Likewise, in the case of Ulster Unionism, liberal moral appeals played
an important role within the Protestant middle class, helping to counteract Ian Paisley’s
accusation that voting for the 1998 Belfast Agreement was a betrayal of the Unionist
community.

It’s similarly easy to imagine liberal fundamentalism losing pres​tige. Professors in grievance
studies disciplines have long held lower status than those doing work where conceptual
clarity, measurement, and testing are the measure of excellence. Top-cited journals tend to
be quantitative, analytic, or, for historians, archive-driven. Increasingly frequent attacks on
the excesses of cancel culture from liberals occupying prestigious positions are difficult to
rebut. Edgy comedians such as Dave Chappelle lend a hipness to the growing anti-woke
counterculture. Might the lower status of the fundamentalist left eventually spell its demise?
While this is necessary, it is not, in my view, a sufficient condition for change.

Steven Pinker’s rationalism may be higher status than the critical race theory of Ibram X.
Kendi, but the rationalists lack the moral authority to contest left-modernism. Their
emotional arsenal—heroes, memories, narratives, symbols—cannot compete with left-
modern​ism’s victim-oppressor pantheon of heroic resistance to slavery, imperialism, and
patriarchy, with the promise of a millennium of equality and diversity. To change course we
need to replace the elephant, not just the rider.

Appeals to freedom of expression and reason need to be augmented by the cultural work of
constructing a usable past, complete with memorials and martyrs. Given how much blood
has been spilled to win the right to freedom of expression, this shouldn’t be difficult, but the
truth is that most in the West, especially the young, only know the culture of minoritarian
liberalism. It’s in their music, their movies, their TikTok, their schools. They know far more
about Hitler and slavery than Stalin. Few have any idea about the struggle for press freedom
and habeas corpus in eighteenth-century Britain or the ex​cesses of the Cultural Revolution
in China.

It is noteworthy that those who have successfully answered back to left-modernism have
invoked religion or patriotism. Basketball player Jonathan Isaac of the Orlando Magic
refused to take the knee, citing the Bible and God’s glory. Chicago Red Stars soccer player
Rachel Hill also stood for the anthem, citing her family’s military service. The problem is
that both nation and religion are viewed as lower-status values and are therefore unlikely to
win over the elite professionals who run society’s liberal institutions. Both are also identified
as morally problematic by left-modernists. While faith and flag are critical for buttressing
resistance within the nongraduate settler population, these forces are unlikely to dent the
growing problem of institutional left-modernism.

The way forward must therefore involve bolstering an emotionally compelling narrative of
freedom which foregrounds the threats ema​nating from a politics of psychic redistribution.
Government has an important role to play here, balancing the teaching of minoritarian
narratives of slavery, Jim Crow, and the Holocaust with an equivalent appreciation of the
illiberal atrocities and cultural totalitarianism committed by perfectionists claiming to speak
for the weak, like Stalin and Mao. Revulsion at the thought control portrayed in Orwell’s
1984 needs to become a cultural reflex. This will balance today’s minoritarian liberal
sensibility with an equally potent vigi​lance against the threats that those speaking the
language of equality pose to expressive freedom.

Communism is majoritarian, but its central cultural program—ideological control of free

speech, internal purging of the impure, authoritarian and arbitrary justice, brainwashing,
and prop​aganda—have been taken over by today’s minoritarian Left. Today’s liberal fear of
majority tyranny must be counterbalanced by the horror of leftist thought control in order
to undergird a rational liberal order that prioritizes science, logic, and evidence over left-
modernism’s feelings-based, minoritarian epistemology. Together with an appeal to national
solidarity and the falling intellectual pres​tige of wokeness, a more balanced liberalism can
reappear to restore sanity.

The institutional power of left-modernism must also be addressed. Across the media, there
is already plenty of viewpoint diversity, but in the policies and pronouncements of elite
institutions there is virtually none. Liberal institutions like universities, government agen​cies,
and the courts are vital to protect. Their institutional prerogatives, however, cannot be
permitted to override individual rights. Democratic governments must proactively intervene
when a state-controlled and state-funded institution has been captured by a pres​sure group
and has become corrupt, no longer upholding the rights of individuals. This is a delicate
balance, as elite institutions are needed to safeguard liberalism, and state power should
always be limited by the constitution and to the minimum required to protect people’s
rights. But liberal institutions can be captured, and cannot simply be permitted to break or
reinterpret the law and do whatever their activist captors desire. This means conservatives
need to temper their instinctive fear of using government policy, recognizing that
democratically elected governments are more likely to uphold freedom than institutions
captured by left-modernists.

When southern universities failed to admit black students in the early 1960s, or when
schools in Britain came to be controlled by Islamists, the government had to step in to
protect students’ rights. Governments should regulate universities on an annual basis, fining
them or withdrawing funding if they fail to uphold due process or academic freedom, and
providing avenues for the accused to appeal to a higher government authority. Employment
law should be changed so that companies cannot fire “at will” but only for just cause.
Political discrimination should be included among the list of protected characteristics except
where politics is central to an organization’s mission. These measures will remove chill
effects, emboldening dis​senters and undercutting the power of political correctness. Like
the child who exposes the emperor’s new clothes, this can upend the entire moral economy
of liberal fundamentalism. On the other hand, a Biden presidency, which is predicted as of
this writing, could re​move the few restraints that currently exist, abetting the spread of
left‑modernism.

Patrick Deneen, Christopher Caldwell, Ryszard Legutko, and other conservative critics of
liberalism correctly identify liberalism as central to the excesses of cancel culture. But in
throwing the baby of liberalism out with the bathwater of left-modernism, they are making a
grave mistake. Principles of negative liberalism are essential for a good society. They
underpin much of what the West has achieved. What instead needs reform is the liberal
identity, a mytho-symbolic construct that reflexively fears majorities and venerates
minorities. This gives rise to a liberal fundamentalism which demonizes the former and
sacralizes the latter. What is required is to rebalance this fundamentalism with a healthy
Orwellian fear of egalitarian thought control, backed by a proper understanding of the
history of leftist attacks on expressive freedom. Alongside the draw of national loyalty and
prestige of scientific reason, this coalition of forces can shift elite institutions back to the
cultural center, reducing the need for popu​lism and healing today’s divided societies.

This article originally appeared in American Affairs Volume IV, Number 4 (Winter 2020): 188–208.