Third Awokening
* Book: The Third Awokening. Eric Kaufmann.
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Review
Noah Carl:
"Kaufmann begins with an admonition to his readers: rumours of the death of woke have been greatly exaggerated. Yes, its opponents have won some victories with boycotts of woke corporations and bans on the teaching of Critical Race Theory, but that doesn’t mean the battle is over. After all, the woke remain substantially overrepresented in centres of cultural influence like media and education. And perhaps more significantly, young people are disproportionately woke. Which means the ratchet of generational replacement may take us, ineluctably, to an ever woker future.
Where did wokeness come from? The key event for Kaufmann was black radicalism during the Civil Rights era, which gave rise to what he calls the “big bang” of the race taboo. Over a relatively short span of time, liberal elites became intensely exercised about the plight of black people – their change in outlook spurred more by guilt and compassion than any revolutionary impulse. They also began to imbibe the activists’ identitarian rhetoric and Manichaean worldview, setting the stage for the illiberal social engineering that succeeded the Civil Rights Act.
Kaufmann’s account of woke origins therefore differs from both Rufo’s and Hanania’s/Caldwell’s in that he posits a largely bottom-up process, rather than one driven by a small cadre of academics or the judges who reinterpreted Civil Rights law. Regarding the supposedly crucial role played by the Frankfurt School, he argues that its members were not as woke (or proto-woke) as is often claimed. For example, Theodor Adorno once called the police on student activists who disrupted his lecture, denouncing them as “left-wing fascists”. As for the claim that wokeness flowed naturally from Civil Rights Law, Kaufmann notes that even when legal pressures were temporarily eased in the mid 1980s, most large companies continued to comply with affirmative action.
Another question Kaufmann addresses is why Republicans went along with the left’s social engineering for so long – or at least until the early 1980s. And he has a satisfying answer: it was the middle of the Cold War and they were focussed on the threat of socialism. To take just one example, the Nixon administration devised the Philadelphia Plan, which required government contractors to hire minority workers, in a cynical attempt to weaken Democrat-supporting labour unions.
What should be done about wokeness? Kaufmann advocates an unapologetically interventionist strategy, whereby the state gets involved and actually forces institutions to be neutral. This is in contrast to the hands-off approach favoured by some classical liberals, which calls for changing the culture through persuasion – or else giving up on compromised institutions and trying to build alternatives. Should Big Tech firms be able to ban people based on their political views? Kaufmann says no. Should schools be free to teach dubious and divisive subjects like Critical Race Theory? Kaufmann says no. Should public buildings be able to fly the LGBT flag and make other blatantly political statements? Again, Kaufmann says no."
(https://www.aporiamagazine.com/p/review-of-the-third-awokening-by)