Woke State
Contextual Quote
"The US seems to elect some of the most conservative politicians in the Western world, but has perhaps the wokest institutions. Civil rights law makes all major institutions subject to the will of left-wing bureaucrats, activists, and judges at the expense of normal citizens.
Thus, we see that every one of the main pillars of wokeness can be traced to new standards created by regulators and courts, mostly in the 1960s and 1970s but updated over time.
1) The idea that disparities mean discrimination is simply disparate impact.
2) Speech restriction is a hostile work environment.
3) The HR bureaucracy was created to enforce (1) and (2), in a world of vague and consistently shifting government standards to root out discrimination.
Recent controversy over Critical Race Theory training, like the debate about whether standardized tests are racist, misses the larger point that the entire concept of a full-time bureaucracy having to micromanage people’s work lives is a creation of government."
- Richard Hanania [1]
Discussion
Michel Bauwens:
Editorial: The Woke State as a roadblock for the commons transition
Everybody is by now familiar with the notion of woke capitalism, and there are a number of books documenting the shift of large corporations and philanthropic organization towards supporting the woke ideology, i.e. the race-conscious (and other forms of biological markers) group-based allocation of resources, the essentializing of race as an official ideology, segregated group organization as the basis of organizational and institutional life,, etc…
I don’t think it is exaggerated to say that at least in the anglo-saxon countries there has been a significant shift towards the woke-ization of companies and other elite institutions. The shift has been well documented as ‘already taken place’, and not something that is expected in the future.
But significantly under-reported and not yet named is the evolution towards a ‘woke state’ form, which is also very significantly advancing at least in the anglo-saxon countries. In fact, after Trudeau in Canada, Biden is probably the most consistent pro-woke government. Their very first week in office was a festival of identitarian measures, with clear discriminatory intent, some of these measures already invalidated by the courts.
What does a woke state mean in practice ? Here are a few elements to look at:
- A shift from the idea of equal citizenship and inclusive diversity policies, towards biology-conscious, race-conscious and exclusive-diversity group allocation (Biden’s Covid relief, vaccine prioritization in Vermont, etc …); i.e. ‘dominant’-deemed groups are systematically targeted in terms of diminishing the resources available to them
- Introducing and generalizing race and other essentialisms in public education, including segregated meetings, etc …; uni-dimensional teaching of history, etc.. ; hostility and cancellation to any practice that generates unequal outcomes and the levelling downwards of any requirements
- Making equal outcome the guiding principle of selection within the public sector, and thereby overtly or covertly trying to overcome the limitation of the Civil Rights Act
This transition from an egalitarian ethos to a hierarchy- and discrimination-based ethos based on privileged group membership is a huge shift for western culture, and is distinct from both the liberal ‘equality of opportunity’ regime (which was largely fictitious but ideologically powerful) and the social-democratic ‘equality of access to infrastructure for development’ regime that has been dominant in continental Europe. My hypothesis is that the existence of that second ethos is what has been a relative protection in Europe so far.
The woke state is ultimately also a deep change in the class structure of the capitalist state. Until the advent of neoliberalism, the main alliance undergirding the state was that between national capital and the leaders of the social democratic labor movement; after 1968/1973/1989, it was replaced by a neoliberal regime, which was an alliance between transnationalized capital and the leaders of the identity-based cultural rights movements, but with a significant maintenance of the labor-based social compromise.
I believe this alliance broke down with the crisis of neoliberalism which started with the financial meltdown in 2008. The crisis in the US particularly affected minority groups, and the cognitive elites within them.
Faced with the Occupy challenge of 2011 , an extremely dangerous narrative for hegemony as it pitted the 99% against the 1%; a new alliance was forged between the 1% and the leaders of cultural and minority groups (the 20%, i.e. the ideological cartels of the cognitive urban middle classes, the PMC, professional and middle classes) based on the promise of guaranteed group allocation and access to resources, a re-arrangement of the spoils within the top layers of distribution pyramid. This is based on a radicalization of identity from an integrative vision to a segregated vision, and a reversal of social hierarchies whereby it is no longer sufficient to broaden the norms towards inclusivity, but to abolish the norm and replace it with a counternorm. The supposed above will be the below, and the supposed below with be the new above.
Many if not most progressive forces in western society have shifted in degrees to this new positioning, which is paradoxically leading to their progressive electoral weakening, and to an identitarian backlash in which the majority working populations are shifting their allegiances to the populist right. As explained by Vivek Chibber of Catalyst magazine (the theory magazine attached to Jacobin), woke policies are an effective blackmail against real progressive policies. Whenever the populist left gets more popular, minority and race card arguments effectively undermine it (this is what happened to Sanders in the Georgia primary, while the antisemitism charge was used to undermine Corbyn). This represents a strategic difficulty for the left, from which it may not recover. With the avenue of class radicalization effectively closed, and social-democratic promises ineffective in a period of crisis, the only option may well be a further self-defeating wokeization of what remains of the left.
The populist right represents an alliance between the factions of capital that are the most territorially bounded, with the equally bounded rural and working classes (the ‘somewhere’s rather than the nowheres), i.e. those willing to sacrifice Empire to the Nation; while the woke coalitions are willing to sacrifice the Nation to Empire.
Having reached peak globalization and peak migration after the crisis of 2008, the anglo-saxon populist right is economically right-libertarian, and lacks credible social policies, which undermines their long-term support; while the continental populist right may a stronger solidaristic ideology, which seems to create a measure of stability in the countries they control, such as Poland and Hungary.
Paradoxically, the egalitarian ethos of the nation-state is now more inclusive in its principles and effects than the hierarchizing effects of the woke ideology, which explains the attraction of sovereignist movements for the working poor.
A number of progressive players, such as the Danish Social-Democrats, the Austrian Greens, are a joker in this new positioning, as they are returning to the earlier progressive tradition before neoliberal hegemony (in their positions against the unregulated flows of capital and people).
While the consolidation of the woke state seems inevitable, it is also equivalent to a civilizational auto-immune disease (very similar to how the Christians initially destroyed the cohesion of the Roman Empire), and it is hard to envision a long term viability of such a strategy of universal fragmentation, since it is targeted against the working poor of both majority and minority groups. It seems a short term marriage of convenience, not the basis for a viable cilizational model. It is hard to see any other outcome than civil war as it logics unfold. (I cannot see how an alliance of the 1% and the 20% can be an offset against an angry 70%)
All of this presents a difficult conundrum for any wished for commons-based transition policies. Historically, the red-green coalitions that were the most favourable political context for such policies, but they are fatally weakened by their drift towards woke policies, or at least, by the blackmail exerted by identitarian forces; but the right-populist movements, in their large majorities, do not have redistributive and ecological commons protecting orientations.
Needless to say, identitarian hierarchisation and group allocation is incompatible with actual commons development, but that makes the commons a unique defense for defending civil society against the woke state. What is at stake is the linkage with supportive political orientations. It is the latter alignment which has now been problematized by the growth of segregationist identitarianism and the support they receive from woke capital and the mobilization of the resources of the emerging woke state form."
(FB, November 2021 [2] )
Wokeness is Both Culture and Government
Richard Hanania:
"The strange thing about disparate impact is that gaps exist almost everywhere. Practically any criterion or test one develops is going to have gaps between racial groups and the two sexes. In a world where everyone has standards that create a disparate impact, government bureaucrats have a lot of discretion in who they go after. A corporation that stakes out a position as unwoke–or even tries to stake out a neutral position, like Coinbase did–paints a target on its back. Even if you make a real effort to treat women and blacks fairly, under current law you’re always dependent on liberal judges and regulators seeing things your way.
The “Great Awokening” has been traced to the early 2010s. Since there was no major law passed at the time that coincided with the shift, people have tended to see wokeness as purely cultural. Yet by the time of the Great Awokening, the federal government had been enforcing an extreme form of anti-discrimination law for two generations. Young people have never lived in a world in which every major institution that they interacted with was not assigning them oppressor or victim status and making decisions on that basis."
(https://richardhanania.substack.com/p/woke-institutions-is-just-civil-rights)
Proposals for Conservative Counter-Strategies
Richard Hanania:
"the anti-woke seem unaware that the things they care about have much to do with policy. They treat every cultural outrage as an isolated event, as just another instance of elites deciding to be “woke,” without such decisions being connected to anything government has ever done.
Getting rid of disparate impact and narrowly defining what “hostile work environment” means or even eliminating the concept entirely will not change the culture overnight. Things have already gone too far, and it took about half a century to go from the color blind ideals most Americans thought they were signing up for with the Civil Rights Act to a world of “birthing parents” and “white fragility.”
Constantine converted to Christianity, which helped spread the religion across the Roman Empire. Yet the reign of Julian the Pagan couldn’t undo Christianization; just because government helped create or spread a cultural phenomenon does not mean that government can likewise rewind the tape to an earlier point in history. Dobbin points out that when the Reagan administration tried to roll back civil rights enforcement, the business community fought back, as many large corporations had come to be staffed by true believers.
The hope would be that, just as the original creation of concepts like “disparate impact” and “AAPI” had eventual consequences few would have imagined at the time, reversing past policies could likewise shape the culture in the long term.
The punchline of all this is that an anti-wokeness agenda would involve, at the very least,
1) Eliminating disparate impact, making the law require evidence of intentional discrimination.
2) Getting rid of the concept of hostile work environment, or defining it in extremely narrow and explicit terms, making sure that it does not restrict political or religious speech.
3) Repealing the executive orders that created and expanded affirmative action among government contractors and the federal workforce.
One reason to be optimistic is that much of this work can be done without having to pass laws, which is almost impossible to do on controversial issues in the current environment, but through the executive branch and the courts. Republican administrations have tried similar things in the past, though usually without making anti-wokeness a real priority.
Understanding that wokeness is law may be able to help us get at the question of why conservatives are less motivated to be politically engaged than liberals. It’s not an exaggeration to say that conservative views on race and gender are often of questionable legality in the workplace. Even if conservatives cared as much as liberals, the state is always there with its thumb on the scale, having helped construct bureaucracies inside and outside government that create incentives against expressing certain beliefs or building institutions that are managed in ways that offend left wing officials and activists.
The result has been a kind of learned helplessness. Not only do conservatives feel like they can’t influence institutions, but Republican leaders haven’t even made the argument that they can ever actually change things. As the interview between Ponnuru and Cotton quoted above illustrates, the message has been “vote, give us your money, and don’t think too hard about whether we’re doing anything about your concerns.”"
(https://richardhanania.substack.com/p/woke-institutions-is-just-civil-rights)
Examples
Wokeness is Government Policy
Richard Hanania:
"Before proceeding, it is important to clarify what wokeness actually is. I’d argue it has 3 components:
1) A belief that any disparities in outcomes favoring whites over non-whites or men over women are caused by discrimination (Sometimes wokeness cares about other disparities too, like fat/nonfat, but those are given less attention. I’m putting aside LGBT issues, which seem to be at an earlier stage of wokeness in which the left is still mostly fighting battles regarding explicit differences in treatment rather than disparate outcomes, although the latter does get attention sometimes.)
2) The speech of those who would argue against 1 needs to be restricted in the interest of overcoming such disparities, and the safety and emotional well-being of the victimized group in question.
3) Bureaucracies are needed that reflect the beliefs in 1 and 2, working to overcome disparities and managing speech and social relations.
Each of these things can be traced to law. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 banned discrimination based on race and gender. While most at the time thought this would simply remove explicit discrimination, and many of the proponents of the bill made that promise, courts and regulators expanded the concept of “non-discrimination” to mean almost anything that advantages one group over another. An important watershed was the decision in Griggs v. Duke Power Co. (1971), in which the Supreme Court ruled that intelligence tests, because they were not shown to be directly related to job performance, could not be used in hiring since blacks scored lower on them, and it did not matter whether there was any intent to discriminate. People act as if “standardized tests are racist if they show disparities” is some kind of new idea, but it’s basically been the law in the United States for 50 years, albeit inconsistently enforced.
Standardized tests aren’t the only target of the doctrine of disparate impact. In 2019 (under Trump), the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) settled a suit brought against Dollar General for $6 million for doing criminal background checks that disproportionately prevented blacks from being hired. The Obama administration went after schools for disciplining black and white students at different rates, with predictably disastrous results. Police departments, fire departments, and other institutions use “gender normed” tests to stop the EEOC and private applicants from suing them for gender discrimination. This is of course completely insane; criminals can’t be relied on to go easier on female cops on account of their sex, but somehow we’ve all come to accept affirmative action policing and firefighting (in 2014, a guy who jumped the White House fence overpowered a female Secret Service agent and made it all the way to the East Room).
As the government invented new standards for what counts as “discrimination,” it was forcing more aggressive action on the part of the private sector. Executive Order 11246, signed by President Johnson, required all government contractors and subcontractors who did over $10,000 in government business to "take affirmative action to ensure that applicants are employed, and that employees are treated during employment, without regard to their race, color, religion, sex or national origin." The category of “sex” was added in 1967. In 1969, Richard Nixon signed EO 11478, which forced affirmative action onto the federal government itself.
Across the federal government and among contractors, affirmative action assumed that “but for discrimination, statistical parity among racial and ethnic groups would be the norm.”
Government interpretation of the Civil Rights Act also invented the concept of the “hostile work environment.” UCLA law professor Eugene Volokh has written about how this has been used to restrict free speech. Writing in 1997, he pointed out that
The scope of harassment law is thus molded by three facts:
1. On its face, harassment law draws no distinction among slurs, pornography, political, religious, or social commentary, jokes, art, and other forms of speech. All can be punished, so long as they are “severe or pervasive” enough to create a “hostile environment.”
2. The vagueness of the terms “severe” and “pervasive” — and the fact that the law is implemented by employers, who have an incentive to oversuppress — means that the law may practically restrict any speech that an employer concludes might be found by a fact-finder to be “severe or pervasive” enough.
3. Finally, because an employer is liable for the aggregate of all its employees’ speech, wise employers will bar any sort of statement that might, if repeated by enough people, be “severe or pervasive” enough to create a hostile environment.
Putting all this together, harassment law potentially burdens any workplace speech that's offensive to at least one person in the workplace based on [protected characteristics] … even when the speech is political and even when it’s not severe or pervasive enough to itself be actionable.
..
The rise of HR departments can be directly traced to the federal government’s race and gender policies, which involve direct control of the federal bureaucracy, the “carrot” of government contracts, and the “sticks” of EEOC enforcement and lawsuit threats.
As Harvard sociologist Frank Dobbin wrote in Inventing Equal Opportunity, it was civil rights law that revolutionized the American workplace. Corporations started to hire full time staff in order to keep track of government mandates, which were vague and could change at any moment. There was a sense of “keeping up with the Joneses,” in which every company and institution had to be more anti-racist and anti-sexist than the next one, leading to more and more absurd diversity trainings and other programs.
To decide whether an institution had discriminated against a protected group, courts and regulators would often use a “best practices” approach, meaning that if your competitors adopted the latest fad coming out of academia or the HR world, you felt the need to do the same. As I discussed in my podcast with Jesse Singal, this could help explain the success of the now-discredited Implicit Association Test, along with more modern innovations like Critical Race Theory-based training.
In their paper “The Strength of a Weak State: The Rights Revolution and the Rise of Human Resources Management Divisions,” Dobbin and Jack Sutton discuss the effects of 1960s and 1970s regulations on business practices in not only race policy, but environmental policy and retirement benefits.
The continuing ambiguity of compliance standards led management writers to advocate permanent antidiscrimination offices to track legal shifts. Because the courts were so fickle, Marino (1980, p. 25) advised executives to adopt the “Good-Faith-Effort Strategy,” the heart of which was a special office designed to signal that the employer was making every effort to figure out how to comply. In a Harvard Business Review article, Antonia Chayes (1974, p. 81) noted that “vigorous enforcement” had brought “serious top management attention to antidiscrimination legislation....Now the penalties imposed under employment discrimination laws are seen as posing a severe financial threat.” She advised executives to set up EEO and AA programs that could prevent lawsuits. Meanwhile, compensation of upper managers was being tied to affirmative action performance, and this led them to support dedicated antidiscrimination departments.
In their paper, the authors questioned 279 public, for-profit, and non-profit organizations on what kind of offices they had. One can see the growth of bureaucracy meant to keep up with government regulations over time."
(https://richardhanania.substack.com/p/woke-institutions-is-just-civil-rights)
Canada: University Policies
“Jonathan Kay wrote about a meeting in Canada where 53 top Canadian university administrators came together to discuss their new policy goals and guiding principles for higher education.
Given the intense financial strain the pandemic has inflicted upon the Canadian university system, one might assume that such a meeting would focus on finances and building new educational models designed to ensure high enrollment. Yet the 89-page meeting agenda that was given to Kay revealed a near-exclusive focus on radical ideologies couched in the language of “social justice” and “race consciousness.”
The report’s main theme is that university leaders must decisively reject the idea of “colour-blindness” (which the author asserts should properly be termed “colour evasion”) in favour of becoming “race-conscious individuals” who “explicitly reflect on their ethno-racial identity and group membership.”
Kay further described how diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) initiatives have “embedd[ed] their precepts into the ostensibly neutral administrative machinery of the institutions they serve,” which he believes has created a kind of ideological positive feedback loop that makes future reversal nearly impossible.”
More information
- On the wokification of American 'empire': The Imperial Faith w/ Malcom Kyeyune https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=odEhRluwRJk&t=956s