Eric Kaufmann
speaker
41 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Dec 2024
last heard Dec 2024
Eric Kaufmann’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Morning Wire · The Rise, Impact, and Potenial Decline of Woke Ideology | 12.28.24 · 28 Dec 2024
podcast
Well, the book is a critical analysis of the woke phenomenon. I should say I have an analytical definition of woke. You know, I know it is used as a political epithet, but the definition of woke I use is the making sacred of historically marginalized race, gender and sexual identity groups. That's the one sentence definition of woke. Hmm.
You know, from that flows a fuzzy ideology, which says that any inequality of outcome in desired social, you know, income, social status, et cetera, between racial groups, between men and women is an outrage in a way. It's a violation of a sacred value. And the second proposition is anything that harms women.
whether physically or psychologically, members of these historically marginalized groups is also an outrage. So any speech which offends members of such sacralized groups constitutes a kind of blasphemy, and you therefore are liable to excommunication or being canceled, in other words. So that is basically what woke is. You know, what I argue in the book is that we've had
three waves of this ideology. It's not just post-2015. Post-2015 is the third of these waves. So the first wave, I trace this back to the late 60s, where you did actually have cancellations occurred. Perhaps the first one was the Moynihan Report of 1965 on the Black Family, which was shelved by the Johnson administration. And we then had affirmative action, of course, in the late 60s.
And then we move into what I would call the second awokening. And these are waves of mobilization and emotional energy. And so we get speech codes and political correctness in that second wave. Then in the third wave, this is where we are. We have cancel culture, microaggressions. But there's a lot of continuity. Affirmative action and DEI is something with roots back to that first awokening.
So I kind of stress that. This is very much about continuity and acceleration of an ideology rather than a deviation. There are people around who seem to say, oh, everything was just fine in the 2000s. We didn't have a problem. And then all of a sudden this cancel culture came in because of the smartphone or something.
I'm accepting that things like smartphone and social media accelerate this, but... I'm arguing the problem lies with an ideology, and that ideology, in my view, is very much rooted in left liberalism and not so much in cultural Marxism.
Yeah. So Daniel Patrick Moynihan, who was doing a report, he was Democrat at the time, he issued a report for the Johnson administration. And he sort of was raising the alarm about a fatherlessness rate, which had reached 25%, which sounds small by today's standards. But he said this was the harbinger of many problems. He was absolutely right. That rate is now 70%, by the way.
And the white rate is higher than that. But yeah, So that was seen as unacceptable by certain black politicians and their allies. And so it was shelved as being too controversial.
Yeah. If you want to express a truth, if you want to freely express that truth, but it offends the sensitivities of a particular group or people who claim to be spokesmen for that group, then you have to shut up or pay the consequences. Right.
Well, I think there is a certain commonality between woke and religion, especially this distinction between the sacred and the profane, that if you cross a line, you are a heretic that must be cast out of the community. and banished. Also, this idea of rituals, for example, like land acknowledgements and taking the knee and jazz hands. And there's a lot of performative public religion.
It looks very much like public religion. Woke is, it stems from your emotional attachment to particular groups and particular movements. And this begins with the civil rights movement, which I argue is the Big Bang of our moral order. creates the sacredness around African-Americans.
And Shelby Steele in his book, White Guilds, is very good on this as an African-American who lived through the civil rights movement, which was, of course, just a liberal movement, but it essentially created a narrative of sin
and a narrative that essentially the cultural power and the moral authority flowed to African Americans, but it also flowed at the same time away from the right and the traditional American narrative towards the left. So this was a real shift of cultural power and of sacredness to these groups. And so... I argue that this detachment to these groups underpins the system, not any particular ideas.
So because of that, you get these unpredictable waves that can emerge of enthusiasm or moral panics that can emerge. We saw that with the racial reckoning in 2020 in Canada. We had this narrative of the residential schools, mass graves, the country committing genocide against Native peoples. There's not a shred of evidence for that, but it sort of became a talking point. So that's all I'm saying.
It's similar to the great awakenings of American Protestantism, for example.
Well, there've been a number of books by people like Chris Ruffo and James Lindsay and Francis Fukuyama and Yashima that talk about the role of essentially post-Marxism. So the white working class didn't bring the revolution.
So people like Herbert Marcuse and Angela Davis looked to other groups, so African-Americans, the third world masses as the source of their hopes for radical social transformation and the overthrow of capitalism. Now that argument that we moved who took the oppressor-oppressed paradigm out of Marxism and applied it to identity groups, I think has merit.
But what I would say is that a lot of what we consider woke actually does not begin with cultural Marxism. Now, it's true that critical race theory and radical gender ideology These ideas like systemic racism and patriarchy do owe their origin to cultural Marxist ideas.
But speech codes, for example, diversity training, affirmative action, none of that, political correctness, none of that comes from this Marxist tradition. Also, the way in which The radical elements have been so easily accepted. You know, Eldridge Cleaver and Angela Davis getting jobs at prestigious U.S. universities. The people of Seattle voting to defund the police by 51%.
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