We seem to be getting a step or two beyond “wokeness.” The moment presents an opportunity to think about what it meant. “Wokeness” is one label we’ve given to the phenomenon—“DEI” and “cultural Marxism” are other leading contenders. Earlier terms trace a chronology of related worries: critical race theory, cancel culture, intersectionality, identity politics, political correctness, multiculturalism, and the politics of difference and of recognition. All of these try to capture a kind of “successor ideology” that somehow worked to reshape our world.
General explanations have been offered up as well, such as, for example, in the claim of John McWhorter and others that some kind of “religious” impulse has been stirring us. Others focused instead on intellectual history, looking back, for example, to Rousseau, Herder, Hegel, Nietzsche, Freud, Heidegger, and others. Twenty years ago, most would have just said “postmodernism.” Today, many others, like leading anti-woke activist Christopher Rufo, explain it all by reference to neo-Marxist mastermind Herbert Marcuse (Rufo’s book on this topic was named the Intercollegiate Studies Institute’s “Conservative Book of the Year” in 2024).
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