Wokeness on its last legs... Trump delivered the coup de grace

Declan Mansfield I 23 November 2024 I Spectator Australia

We’ve just witnessed the greatest comeback in American political history, and pundits are, as usual, busily explaining why Donald Trump was re-elected as president. The majority of the talking heads, though, are wrong in their analysis. Issues like the economy, abortion, immigration, race relations, foreign policy, technology, education, environmentalism, etc, will be cited – with different experts emphasising this or that issue as the key to the success of Trump’s campaign, while the core reason he has regained the White House will be mentioned in passing, if at all, but not given the importance it deserves.

Trump’s success relied mostly, but not only, on a repudiation of woke ideology, which underlay, in some form, each of the above-mentioned causes for his phoenix-like resurrection. The reason why woke ideology supplants other explanations about Trump’s success is that wokeness underpins the social, political and cultural factors that influenced how people voted. (It was the biggest issue among swing-state voters). Even if someone was concerned about inflation and the price of petrol, it was woke ideology that informed the economic decisions of the Biden-Harris administration. Harris, for instance, is reported to have scrutinised every piece of legislation to see if it conformed to the language of diversity, equity and inclusion.

At its core, like all extremist ideologies, wokeness corrupts everything it touches. It has an extraordinary ability, on the surface, to attach itself to institutions, whether they’re political, philosophical, religious or cultural, (from international tech companies to the local library), and, while using the superficial language of decency and kindness, insinuate itself into the decision-making process. It’s devilishly clever because it attracts midwits, the people who run organisations and who have slightly above-average intelligence, but who are, ironically, not intelligent enough to recognise their own cognitive limitations. Joe Biden’s, for example, transformation from good ol’ boy Joe from Scranton, Pennsylvania – scourge of illegal immigrants, jailor of anyone in possession of drugs, and, most disgracefully, from a woke perspective, a cis-heteronormative transphobe – into an advocate of ‘gender-affirming care’, (in other words, the mutilation of children), was accomplished by the seemingly plausible, worm-tongue-like nonsense whispered into his ears by Sarah (‘Tim’) McBride, the recently elected first transgender member of Congress in American history – and a close friend of the Biden family.

This is a perfect example of woke ideology in action. On the surface, it’s about glitter, smiles and dancing drag queens, but dig deeper and you’ll find the ideology destroys women’s rights to safety, privacy and fairness. It’s probably where the idea of ‘joy’ as the leading motif of the Harris-Waltz campaign came from, because trans ideology is all about, according to its advocates, ‘trans joy’, except, that is, when parents are told, without evidence, that you can have a dead son or daughter or a live trans child. It is not an accident that Trump’s first promise, post-election, was to ban transgender surgeries on children and to financially help detransitioners sue the doctors who mutilated their bodies.

Trans ideology is the Schwerpunkt of wokeness because if people are persuaded that sex is not a scientific fact then nothing is sacred. 2 + 2 = 5, which is a logical impossibility, becomes the truth, as Winston Smith is forced to state in George Orwell’s novel 1984. Wokeness makes people unsure about what to believe. The evidence, then, of your eyes becomes suspect and the idea of a female penis or a male vagina is no longer a grotesque abuse of reason.

To understand how wokeness underpinned the decisions of the Biden-Harris administration, it’s essential to understand the philosophy and how it impacted on policy. In simple terms, the woke believe that the cause of the world’s ills are white men who have created a system that favours themselves to the detriment of everyone else. The reason the southern border was open is that black and brown people shouldn’t suffer discrimination because they are not citizens. The reason educators didn’t stress reading, writing and arithmetic is because the three R’s are ‘white’ knowledge which oppresses minorities. The reason crime rates skyrocketed and perpetrators were not jailed is because minorities are treated unjustly in a systemically racist society. The reason why the woke support Hamas and the burqa-imposing mullahs of Iran instead of Israel, and why the Biden-Harris administration was equivocal about supporting Israel, is because the latter is a settler-colonialist outpost of white, heteronormative domination. The reason why fossil fuel production was stymied with regulations is because white men are exploiting the world’s resources.

In exactly the same way that Nazi conceptions of race and communist ideas of class underpinned every decision of their governments, wokeness informed the Biden-Harris administration. Woke, then, is simply the latest iteration of a radical adherence to equality, what the political philosopher Eric Kaufmann has called Cultural Socialism. Wokeness works by capturing institutions and imposing technological censorship, then it brands anyone who criticises the philosophy as a hateful bigot.

To state the case clearly, woke is the totalitarian ideology of the twenty-first century. Its grim, humourless, puritan demand for perfection – equity, in other words – transforms literally everything. Nothing is left unaffected by the blue-haired, uncompromisingly adolescent, visibly odd, mentally unstable, screamingly entitled, march of its adherents towards what they perceive, in a mirror image of their own solipsistic concerns, as a just and fair society. The fact that other people may have a different conception of the good and the true is immaterial. Like fascism, communism or Nazism, wokeness is totalitarian in its reach. It’s why your co-worker informs you that the word ‘mother’ is verboten because it’s not inclusive of men who are pregnant or why humour is now defined as bullying. And it’s why every policy decision and every seemingly inexplicable lacunae, (looking everywhere but at the problem), of the Biden-Harris administration – millions of illegals crossing the border, exploding levels of crime (even not helping people after a hurricane) – can only be understood through the prism of woke philosophy.

And ironically, despite all the nonsensical talk about the coming of the Fourth Reich, Trump’s re-election will have forestalled the inevitable, possibly violent, confrontation with woke ideology, because its negative, divisive, totalising effects, in the future, would have been too consequential to ignore.

Author: Declan Mansfield