Eric Kaufmann
Subject: Has Woke Peaked?
Bio: Professor of Politics at The University of Buckingham
Reading: The Third Awokening: A 12-Point Plan for Rolling Back Progressive Extremism is here
Transcript:
Larry Bernstein:
Welcome to What Happens Next. My name is Larry Bernstein. What Happens Next is a podcast which covers economics, politics, and history.
The topic today is Has Woke Peaked?
Our speaker is Eric Kaufmann who is a Professor of Politics at The University of Buckingham and the author of the book entitled in the US, The Third Awokening: a 12 Point Plan for Rolling Back Progressive Extremism. Eric uses a different title in the UK for the same book, which is Taboo: How Making Race Sacred Produced a Cultural Revolution.
I want to learn from Eric what is driving this woke movement, how does it express itself, what are its core philosophies, and will there be political pushback from its opponents.
Buckle up.
Eric, please begin with your opening six-minute remarks.
Eric Kaufmann:
I my new book Third Awokening, I argue that we have hit peak woke but woke is not going to fade away like McCarthyism. This is because young people are roughly twice as intolerant on these issues as older people, and therefore there is demographic momentum to increasing wokeness.
I define woke as the making sacred of historically marginalized race, gender, and sexual minority groups. Out of this movement comes a set of moral intuitions, namely equal outcomes and minority harm protection for identity groups. The equal outcome part is diversity and equity. That is, even if we must discriminate based on race or sex to achieve a quota, whether it be admittance to Harvard or in the boardroom, we're going to do that. And then the second is the inclusion part, emotional harm protection, which means we must suppress free speech and inconvenient truths to protect the self-esteem of identity groups. You have a threat to merit coming out of diversity and equity and you have a threat to free speech and scientific objective truth coming out of inclusion.
I use a different title for my book in Britain. It is entitled Taboo. That's the mid-1960s anti-racism taboo, the big bang of our moral order, because it creates the sacredness, a kryptonite which you can weaponize and make people shut their mouths, you can make them afraid. If you tar them with this brush, they're then radioactive to others. The emergence of that mid-1960s race taboo is central. We then get that expanding anti-sexism, anti-homophobia, and anti-transphobia taboo.
We have the scope expanding away from just racial discrimination, for example, to saying anyone can make it in America or a master of the college. All these microaggressions are included in the definition of racism. You get the power of the sacred then spreading and shutting down debate and threatening merit and other values.
There've been a series of books that have been written. Chris Ruffo has written a book, America's Cultural Revolution. We've had books written by Yascha Mounk, Francis Fukuyama, James Lindsey, Rob Henderson and gender critical feminists like Helen Joyce and Kathleen Stock. Ruffo’s and Lindsay's talk about this march through the institutions, Cultural Marxists, giving up on class, and moving to identity in the 1960s. People like Herbert Marcuse, Angela Davis lead this war of position taking over institutions with a deliberate plan.
My argument is very different. It argues that it's not Cultural Marxism, but rather left liberalism, this idea of being nice, be kind, driven by guilt and compassion for identity groups.
This moral panic style fear, what I call fascist scare of the majority that somehow if you don't watch it, they're going to put gays back in the closet, black people will be segregated again. We're going to be back in 1930s Germany that left-liberal complex has metastasized to a world of speech codes and microaggressions.
It's influencing and infiltrating institutions because this is a bottom-up leaderless movement. It creates, as American Protestantism did, awakenings, these outbursts of moral energy. We have what I call the third awokening. The first awokening was the late 1960s when we had campus occupations, the creation of black studies as a movement. The second wave, 1980s, “Hey-ho Western Civ has got to go,” Eurocentrism and speech codes, political correctness. The third awokening is the 2010s is rise of DEI, critical race theory and cancel culture. I'm arguing that these three are related, that what we're living through is an acceleration and a continuation rather than a deviation from what came before.
Larry Bernstein:
In your book, you talk about those individuals who are ardently pro-free speech and you said that they were asleep at the switch and then they woke up one day in shock. And now, they realize it's going to be a fight within these institutions.
I want to give an example of this. We did a podcast on the incident at Stanford Law School when a Trump appointed judge had written an opinion that wasn't sufficiently pro-trans. He was invited by the Stanford Federalist Society and was attacked when he spoke on campus. The DEI Dean at the Stanford Law School took the podium and said, “I don’t think the juice is worth the squeeze.” The DEI Dean’s speech caused an uproar.
The Dean of the Stanford Law School wrote an essay condemned the DEI professional for violating the school’s codes on free speech, and she was terminated.
Organizations actions sometimes go too far. The public finds out about it, and there is shock and dismay among the professorate, and alumni. There was a push back. I'm not going to say that Stanford is perfect now, but I don't imagine that in five years’ time when a Trump appointed judge appears at Stanford Law School that a future DEI Dean or its student body will behave like this again. Maybe I'm overly optimistic. Tell me about the juice isn't worth the squeeze.
Eric Kaufmann
I'm less optimistic than you are. I've done faculty surveys which are extensive, which show that mandatory diversity statements are supported 2-1 by social science and humanities faculty. Decolonizing the curriculum, so-called race and gender quotas on reading lists are supported 60-40 by the faculty. In the case of Stanford, do I think they would've done any of this without intense political opposition from the right and scrutiny from politically minded donors and trustees? No.
The only reason Harvard has moved in the Claudine Gay case is outside pressure from the right. The only reason there was a rethink going on in many of these universities is partly because the right is now successfully abolishing DEI in many red states.
Larry Bernstein:
My daughter went to a private school in New York in high school and it was a progressive school for social justice. In that school, protest was part of the core curriculum. When Trump was elected, school was canceled, they sat in a circle, held hands and cried. I asked her what were plans tomorrow? She said that her homework was to make placards for a school protest at Trump Tower. My son's school, which was a more typical New York high school, seemed oblivious to Donald Trump’s victory.
We've recently had protests over Israeli actions in Gaza that has mimicked behaviors that students used in the sixties. Some people said, this behavior included outrageous destruction of property and other school code violations. And others said, protest is part of what it means to grow up. “This is what schools are supposed to do. I don't agree with the positions of the individual protesters, but protest should be encouraged.” Is protest as a social movement core to what education is supposed to be about?
Eric Kaufmann:
Protests are historically important, and it should be protected to a point. There should be time and motion restrictions when you can protest. You can't just take over and camp on private property for months and months.
But protest of course has its limits. It's fundamentally an anti-intellectual form of discourse.
The only thing that they are protesting is revolving around cultural socialism, whether there's oppression of sacred groups whereas they wouldn't protest masking for example. Unfashionable conflicts like Sudan that wouldn't bring anybody out onto the streets. I think they should be allowed a certain amount of freedom. University of Chicago handled it about right.
Larry Bernstein:
The Second Awokening was “Hey-hey ho-ho Western Civ has got to go.” This reflected changes in curriculum to fit within this new cultural milieu. And the reality is if you look at my alma mater University of Pennsylvania's history or its English classes, they don't teach Emerson and Thoreau, they teach diversity related content. If you look at Northern Illinois University, for example, they have a curriculum that's consistent with old school subjects like Western European history, World history, History of World War 2, etc. And so it seems particular to the most elite institutions that give their faculty more freedom to pick courses that fit within their research interests. And is this declaration that Western Civ has got to go, is that something that's peculiar to a few dozen institutions that don't have that many students?
Eric Kaufmann:
This emphasis on getting away from the Eurocentric perspective is widespread, and it goes to the community college level. What we're talking about is an uncritical elevation of non-European text with a very hypercritical approach to the European.
Shakespeare is done through the lens of colonialism or through whiteness. So, it's a way of privileging equality over merit and beauty.
I admit there's a certain trade-off and you want to bring in other voices. Absolutely. But the question is always where is the limit to how much we're going to bring in from other sources that may not be on the same standard?
The curriculum battles begin in the eighties, but have now morphed into the whole critical race, gender type perspective. I see that as continuous with that Second Awokening of the eighties. I surveyed 1500 American young people aged 18 to 20 asking what they were taught in school. And over 90% had heard at least one of five critical race theory concepts from an adult in school. That's systemic racism, unconscious bias, white privilege. We had about 90% penetration. This is overwhelming across private, public and parochial schools. This is not just a few elite private schools in New York. This is throughout the system now; it's taught more intensively in Berkeley than Oklahoma, but even in the reddest of red districts, they would have exposure to this.
Larry Bernstein:
How do you make sense of Queers for Palestine?
Eric Kaufmann:
The enemy of my enemy is my friend. At its simplest, it's white male bad. Good minorities being racial, sexual preference or female. I know that's an odd concept of minorities, but it's that very simple worldview. Now what that does is erases the contradictions between Muslims and gays or between women and trans or gay and trans. If you delve into the details, the logic of what they want is diametrically opposed. But you don't go there. You just want to have a rainbow coalition and not look too closely at the clashing colors in that rainbow. I notice you don't tend to find Palestinians for Queers. But in the Queers for Palestine, they see this rainbow of oppressed people race, gender, sexuality against this monochrome conservative white male structure.
Larry Bernstein:
When Title IX prevented due process, such as witness cross-examination, it resulted in political repercussions. The Republicans found this an issue and repealed many aspects of Title IX because this wasn't law. The next administration could just repeal the repeal and back where you started. How should we think about when things have gone too far that there is a reaction?
Eric Kaufmann:
If it breaks into the news, if it breaks into electoral politics and if the Republican Party cares enough about this issue, it will essentially repeal what the Biden administration has done and restore due process on campus. But if we take another example like affirmative action, now I know the courts have issued a ruling. However, the universities are going to conduct business as usual using other proxy criteria. But the Republican Party has not historically cared enough about affirmative action to abolish it in the states it controls, except with a few exceptions. It's only banned affirmative action in about four states.
They don't want to be accused of being racist, again, the taboos coming in, or they just want to focus on foreign policy and tax cuts or whatever else that their donor base wants to focus on, then they'll allow a consensus to exist around something like affirmative action and they won't touch it and they won't go after it.
A lot of the speech codes on campus and harassment codes, so-called rape culture type codes, fell into that category for many years. Don't forget, under the Trump Administration, that was the first real attempt to try and rule reign that in. Similarly with critical race and indoctrination that's happening in schools, the Republican Party and conservative parties in other countries have not been serious. These issues have not ranked high enough for their voters to notice and to vote on these things.
Now, that's maybe starting to change. We saw Glenn Youngkin in Virginia winning on his stance on critical race theory in schools and the teaching of gender. Those things would need to be deciding elections on a regular basis for a natural check and correction mechanism.
We know from the surveys; people do not want teachers teaching American school kids that the US is a racist country built on stolen land. That's not what people want. But until that becomes a political issue, it can go on and on and on. And this has been the case with the history curriculum. The right has put up some sporadic resistance, but it's always been at a distance by the educational establishment that would have to change. You're going to need a Ron DeSantis type figure who is determined, has the stamina for the fight against the teachers’ unions and is willing to make that an issue. I don't believe in a natural correction mechanism.
Larry Bernstein:
I have personal friends who are on the board of my alma mater at the University of Pennsylvania and are on the advisory boards of the Wharton Business School. And they were aware of certain things that were going on in university they didn't like, but they didn't think it was that bad. And then during the recent debate over Palestinian issues, it became quite aware that restriction on free speech and opposition to Jewish students on campus was worse than they thought. So, they revolted when they saw what was going on; they forced the removal of the president of the university and the chairman of the board of the trustees. They've also put forward ideas like those used at the University of Chicago.
Is this a photon effect, where there's this simmering, and then it reaches some level which gets the response function. In general, trustees at cultural institutions don't believe it's their job to get involved in day-to-day activities. They give the president, the art curator the ability to do their job and to the extent there's some of this nonsense going on in the background, what are you going to do? But when it gets to a certain level, they go, this is too much. People got to go. We got to change these institutions. We got to put in guardrails that we're missing. I didn't realize the frog had started to float to the top of the boil. How should we think about the photon effect as it relates to pushback?
Eric Kaufmann:
Let's not forget that this starts with the presidents being hauled in front of a congressional committee. That's that outside pressure from Republicans playing a key role as well as the media scrutiny. Now the other thing too is Jews don't have that many impression points, but they have a few more points than WASPs.
Larry Bernstein:
That amazing. WASPs ran these institutions from their origin until the 1960s and they abdicated their role in these institutions voluntarily without a fight. What happened?
Eric Kaufmann:
What happened is something internal to WASP culture is that the liberal ecumenical strands in mainline Protestantism, that liberal progressivism became the dominant elite philosophy amongst the WASPs. And you see that in mainline churches. And so that led them to liberalize and to open it up. You also had groups, particularly Jews, were doing very well, rising in the ranks, and were knocking at the door. The election of the first Catholic president in 1960. Left liberalism becomes the dominant elite creed within the Protestant establishment.
A great book to read on this is Digby Baltzell’s the Protestant Establishment where he's a old northeastern WASP from Pennsylvania lived on the mainline. And he says, we must keep it elite but open it up to people of talent. And that just becomes the dominant force.
But just to get back to this issue, if you had for example, a terrorist outbreak in South Africa against the Afrikaners, no one would give a damn if it was a white Protestants terrorist attack. I don't think you would have had the same mobilization. But because you can tie in, even though Jews have some touch points.
There is the Holocaust narrative; the antisemitism accounts for something. And so that can give cultural power to trustees or to other people to push back against this. The faculty are very opposed to the trustees. They're very opposed to any outside pressure. They see that as the greatest threat to their academic freedom, not DEI. And they think Claudine Gay and Liz McGill were a stitch up by the Republicans sustained by outside pressure.
Larry Bernstein:
In Animal House, Dean Wormer articulates to his students a certain moral code and he might as well be talking to a wall. They viewed him as a ridiculous figure. The thought that the senior administrative staff could instill certain values, particularly in a fraternity house is absurd on its face. Are we overselling Dean Wormer's influence on young people today?
Eric Kaufmann:
I would say that the teachers coming up through the K-12 system would have more influence, but we know the universities don't make much difference to the attitudes of young people from several studies. 80% of these young people, at least in the top couple of hundred universities, believe that someone who says that trans is a mental disorder or Black Lives Matter is a hate group should not be allowed to speak on campus. So that's a very strong majority and 70% believe that if a university professor says something that offends the students in class, he or she should be reported to the administration.
So, we have strong support. Now it may be that that support is not strongly held. If you say is the U.S. a racist country, you get a majority support, 60% now amongst 18 to 25s. I do think that that is just the air that they breathe growing up.
Larry Bernstein:
There was one chapter of the book where you talked about gender differences on the political spectrum over time. In 1970, young women were more conservative than young men. 10 years later even, and now it's a 25-point gap. I was shocked, why would young men be more liberal than young women in 1970? And the thing that occurred to me was that young men were getting drafted to go to Vietnam. Second thing was young men smoke pot more than young women. How is it possible that women were more conservative in 1970 and what is driving this?
Eric Kaufmann:
Women tend to back up the dominant social more, whereas men are more likely to be the contrarians. Women are always more against free speech than men. It might've been that in the past the free speech would've been unpatriotic, anti-religious, and the women were against that speech. Now it's social justice and it's about minority sensitivities and women are against that speech. So, they back up the existing moral order. Today, the moral order is woke at the elite level, so they're going to back that up. If it was religious, they would back that up. It's not till about 2004 that we start to see men becoming more conservative than women in the U.S.
Free speech in 1970 was likely to be thought of as left-wing whereas now it's very clearly coded on the right. And that tells you something that in 1970, free speech meant freedom to deface the flag or protest the Vietnam War and women would've been more opposed to that than men. Fast forward to now and free speech is about being critical of trans or BLM.
Larry Bernstein:
You are a Canadian educated in the U.S. teaching in Britain. You're of mixed race who identifies as Jewish. In your book you not only describe the US experience, but you contrast it to what goes on in Canada, Britain and Australia, and we see nearly identical themes. For all of them to get to the same spot at the same time means that it's not about Donald Trump, it's not about the Vietnam War, it's not about draft deferment in the US. There's nothing particular to public policies; we got here because of something philosophical. Why are the English speaking world in the same place on these issues?
Eric Kaufmann:
Really good question, Larry. I think you're right. There is a commonality. What is it? I would say that what is in common in the Anglosphere is a left liberalism that emerges out of a Protestant version of Victorian Humanistic Protestantism in the early 20th century. That's the seed of the change. The U.S. had an experience with diversity arguably earlier than the other countries. And so you had not just the African-American presence, but also the European immigrant Catholic and Jewish numbers were larger there earlier. You had the beginnings of pluralism and multiculturalism in the 1910s and twenties, which the beginning and that influences the other countries as well. But this idea of left liberalism is key as a philosophy that it's a blend of humanitarianism with egalitarianism. coming out of Christianity refined through Mainline Protestantism, and that is the seed bed in these countries for this sensibility, which is essentially elevating to a level of virtuosity.
This idea of being humane to the weak is the humanistic psychology where you affirm their feelings of being harmed and their traumas. It also permeates into speech codes and this idea of sense hypersensitivity diversity. Racial sensitivity training comes out of that strand and then winds up in microaggressions.
The civil rights movement was very influential in other English-speaking countries and even beyond that. The Quebec nationalists styled themselves the Black Americans of Canada. In Northern Ireland, the Catholics talked about the Northern Ireland Civil Rights Association. It established the taboo elsewhere around the world. Affirmative action, you can find that in Ontario, which had essentially no black people in 1962, but already was talking about the possibility of positive action. Systemic racism comes up from the US, and it's influential in Bob Rae’s Ontario 1992 left of center government.
The groups that are elevated as sacred, there's different emphasis in the different countries. Blacks are very important, but there are very small group certainly in Canada, Australia and New Zealand. They're very small for a long time. It's the Indigenous that play that role. As I mentioned in the book, there's an episode which I don't think the Americans can match for craziness, not even at the height of the George Floyd moment.
215 bodies were buried at this native residential school that was run by missionaries. Malfeasance was assumed and a set of tall tales that have never been refuted and yet all of the media and the political class haven't walked back their positions even though there is no evidence, nothing.
It's a complete bust and yet it lives on because they don't want to offend the so-called Knowledge Keepers on the Reserves. This hoax has resulted in over a hundred churches being burned. It's led the Canadian government to keep their flag at half-mast. It's led to new public holidays. The whole edifice has been built on a hoax.
The woke movement has also spread into Continental Europe. I was just in Amsterdam; you see lots of pride flags. There are plenty of reports of cancellations and self-censorship in Dutch universities in German universities and even in France. Now France is more resistant and Quebec is more resistant. But even there you have certainly a battle going on and Latin America, even India, I understand there are these battles.
Larry Bernstein:
I end each podcast with a note of optimism. What are you optimistic about?
Eric Kaufmann:
We have seen public opinion on the trans issue in Britain and the U.S. has shifted against the trans activist position by about 20 points in the last five years. So, there we have a measurable loss. A lot of these issues have shifted in the left liberal direction and maybe in many cases for good. But here we see a movement the other way, and you'd be hard put to find many instances of that in attitudes of the last 60 years and attitude trends. You've started to see even in Canada, some of provincial premiers are starting to move on the gender question. Could the gender issue be the Stalingrad or Waterloo of this movement that overreached, and it starts momentum going back the other way?
Now against that you have the generational dynamics that the younger generation will carry those values with them. However, you have the energy, the creativity is on the anti-woke side, there's no question about that. The defenders of the woke order I don't think are in the driver's seat in terms of what's new in the culture. So, if I had to be optimistic, I would say that that the anti-woke side are registering victories, particularly on the gender issue, that is probably the most hopeful thing we can point to.
Larry Bernstein:
Thanks Eric, for joining us today.
If you missed our previous podcast, check it out. The topic was the President Won’t Seek Reelection. Our speaker was Luke Nichter who is the author of the new book entitled the Year That Broke Politics: Collusion and Chaos in the Presidential Election of 1968. After LBJ decided not to seek another term, the election was wide open for the candidates Richard Nixon, Hubert Humphrey and George Wallace.
There is much to learn from previous elections, especially with the 1968 election which was very polarizing and much like the present. The third-party candidate and former Southern Democrat George Wallace played an important spoiler role much like RFK Jr.
I would now like to make a plug for next week’s podcast with Stanford Law Professor Michael McDonnel. The topic will be the repeal of the Chevron Doctrine, which is the Supreme Court’s most important ruling of the year. This change in policy ends judicial deference for reasonable decisions made by bureaucrats in Federal agencies.
You can find our previous episodes and transcripts on our website whathappensnextin6minutes.com. Please subscribe to our weekly emails and follow us on Apple Podcasts or Spotify. Thank you for joining us today, good-bye.
Check out our previous episode, The President Won’t Seek Reelection, here.
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