For several years, political scientist Eric Kaufmann has been among the most trenchant critics of the woke insurgency that has overtaken mainstream culture and public institutions across the West. In Taboo (titled The Third Awokening in the USA and Canada), he joins authors like Chris Rufo and Richard Hanania in seeking to analyse and explain this phenomenon. He goes further than some, though, in offering “a detailed twelve-point plan of policies to address the problem.” Kaufmann’s track record shaping debate and policy through his research and advocacy makes him a credible and important voice, but Taboo also reveals the weakness of anti-woke strategies that do not reckon with the failings of liberalism itself.
Kaufmann traces the origins of wokeness to “the left-liberal anti-racism taboo of the mid-1960s.” He persuasively argues this was the cultural equivalent of a cosmic “Big Bang,” which re-defined our social universe by introducing “a zone of unbounded Identitarian sacredness around race—a form of social kryptonite which irradiated anyone standing in its way.” This “powerful magic” was subsequently borrowed by sex and gender identity movements and weaponized by progressives to traduce national identities and traditional norms.
Kaufmann contests that this wider process resulted less from intellectual innovations by neo-Marxist revolutionaries than from the incremental expansion of existing liberal sensitivity around identity issues. Whatever its origins, he asserts that the race taboo must now be actively reformed from a sacred moral absolute “into a proportionate norm like any other.” This requires a conscious undertaking, and Kaufmann chastises those who claim that wokeness has peaked and will automatically recede. Using reams of survey data and other evidence, he skewers the inane pendulum fallacy, which assumes that cultural power swings back and forth between left and right, ultimately tracking a golden mean. On the contrary, Kaufmann demonstrates that encroachments made during each cycle of progressive activism are entrenched as a “new normal” and “locked in as banal institutional practices.”
With woke ideology embraced by most of the West’s cultural and administrative elites, Kaufmann argues that democratically elected governments are the only realistic means to “restrict the ability of mediating institutions to pursue illiberalism and deculturation.” In the short-term, this demands government action to “tame” wokeness and reform our meaning-making institutions: an approach perhaps best exemplified by Florida Governor Ron DeSantis. But in the long-run, “lasting change is only possible if our moral order ceases to revolve around the sacred totems of historically marginalized race, gender, and sexual identity groups.”
Contesting values suggests the importance of pre-political organising that goes beyond the electoral cycle. Yet Kaufmann argues that we should not give up on reforming institutions that have fallen to wokeness by trying to create parallel structures untainted by this ideology (think, for instance, of the recently-founded University of Austin). He observes that, while markets provide some opportunities to apply pressure through boycotts and other measures, all but the most competitive sectors have “stiff barriers to new entrants,” compounded by “first-mover legacy effects as well as locational advantages.” The relative impact of Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter (which he has since rebranded as X), compared to the founding of new social media platforms like Gab and Parler, demonstrates the seismic potential of re-capturing institutions from woke ideology.
For Kaufmann, schools are “arguably the most important driver of change.” He describes how left-wing teachers and progressive activists have enjoyed a more or less free hand to shape the rising generation, sometimes against the wishes of parents, while resisting well-meaning but desultory efforts by conservative politicians. Until recently, left-wing bias in education might be tolerated on the assumption that people frequently become more conservative as they get older. But this truism is becoming less common, and Kaufmann observes that Millennials are generally as left-wing in their thirties as they were at 18. This is partly attributable to earlier and more intense indoctrination, but also because more people—especially highly-educated liberals—now inhabit progressive social bubbles after leaving formal education. This helps preserve radical notions that might otherwise fade with age.
Citing Shelby Steele’s commentary on the aftermath of the U.S. Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts, Kaufmann pinpoints the mid-1960s as the decisive moment in the emergence of the new race taboo. Far from heralding renewed confidence about the future of a colour blind America, this period came to be interpreted as an “admission of guilt,” which delegitimized American history and embodied “White America’s fall from grace, for which it now sought redemption.” This led to a quest for absolution through social programs and affirmative action, whose real goal was “symbolic and exculpatory,” rather than actually improving the situation of ostensible beneficiaries.
Kaufmann repeatedly notes that these reforms were necessary and justified in the prior context of majority dominance and discrimination. However, by making race sacred, liberals overshot rational and proportionate boundaries. Kaufmann believes that liberal excess is something that can be fixed, and frequently stresses his own self-identification as a classical liberal, distancing himself from claims that woke is an apotheosis of liberal ideology. Even so, having argued that “modern liberals, not radicals, are largely responsible for our cultural malaise,” it’s unfortunate that Kaufmann doesn’t engage more seriously with liberalism’s substantive critics, besides passing mention of post-liberals like Patrick Deneen.
Kaufmann points to Japan and South Korea as liberal societies that “do not face the same problems of progressive illiberalism and deculturation that we do.” But far from disproving the idea that liberalism itself is the problem, this should prompt us to ask why these societies are different. In reality, alongside the trappings of liberal democracy, these Confucian-inflected cultures exhibit high social trust, strong traditional norms, a more traditional system of virtue ethics, and high ethnic homogeneity. Such wider factors may be essential if liberalism is not to degenerate into the late-capitalist despotism of anarcho-tyranny, which sees the state become increasingly menacing towards the law-abiding majority, and paternalistic towards criminals and other groups that disrupt social order.
Kaufmann regrets a “missing optimum” between once-widespread discrimination and today’s progressive illiberalism. But if today’s problems result from the intrinsic dynamics of liberalism, as its critics allege, then trying to “turn back the dial to an optimal point” is a futile endeavour. Indeed, while Kaufmann’s outlook is generally pragmatic, it also reflects key weaknesses of classical liberalism, particularly as it developed under the influence of Utilitarianism and John Stuart Mill.
This is apparent when Kaufmann observes that “a cultural liberal perspective based on individual rights and equal treatment within a utility-optimizing system urges us to reach an optimum outcome across all groups.” The inadequacy of a “utility-optimizing” approach is vividly revealed, for example, when Kaufmann applies it to argue against gender neutral bathrooms, based on the claim they process fewer people per hour than separate bathrooms for men and women. While Kaufmann is rightly sensitive to women’s sex-based rights, such arguments risk reducing complex social issues to mere calculations of efficiency, and downplaying more fundamental concerns about dignity and safety. By elevating utility over custom and tradition, they also amplify the Jacobin impulse that every social arrangement must be justified on the grounds of rationality and efficiency. Moreover, this neglects the tragic fact that conflict over sacred values is sometimes unavoidably a zero-sum game.
Kaufmann is right to observe that wokeness, at heart, is a sacred value system, and it’s regrettable that he does not carry this insight further. The sociologist Émile Durkheim once defined religion as “a unified system of beliefs and practices relative to sacred things,” which unite its adherents “into one single moral community called a Church.” Durkheim observed that anything can be made sacred. By this thinking, the “Church” of woke is based on a shared acceptance of the sacred status of particular identity groups, with ethnic and sexual minorities coded as pure and white majorities and heterosexual males as impure. That such a doctrine should have toxic and destabilizing implications for Western societies should be obvious.
But before anyone had heard of wokeness, liberal ideology had already spent generations disenchanting Western civilization. Priding itself on championing personal freedom, liberalism undermined what political scientist James Burnham called “the great bulwarks” of Western civilization: spiritual and social ideals such as “God, family, king, honour, country,” and the institutions that supported them. This disenchanted world was ripe for a resurgence of sacred values that aligned with the prevailing left-liberal ideology, resulting in what Mary Harrington has dubbed “Progress Theology.”
Now, Western elites have sought to enshrine wokeness as the dominant creed of Western civilization. The magnitude of the resulting shift arguably recalls how the Emperor Constantine re-founded the Roman Empire on the Christian faith, allegedly after observing a cross of light in the sky and a divine message translated as In hoc signo vinces (“In this sign, you will conquer”). Today, the West’s elite-led revolution-from-above has encountered stiffest resistance when running headlong into the remaining sacred values of the public at large. The most obvious examples are the backlash against critical race theory and gender ideology in schools; and, at a societal level, against mass migration.
Against such a backdrop, it is naïve to contemplate a return to the pre-woke status quo ante by “desacralizing” subaltern identities. Nor is it enough to re-sacralize classical liberal values such as freedom of speech and the rule of law. To be effective, such principles must not only form part of a normative framework and wider body of unifying beliefs and practices—such as once prevailed in the West and does today in Japan and South Korea. Crucially, they must also be shared and enforced by the elite. In the United States, such principles are enshrined in the Constitution and held sacred by much of the population. But they have been only partially successful in slowing the rise of the managerial state, as elites have leveraged their influence over the bureaucracy, judiciary, and media to subvert attempts by democratically-elected governments to enact popular legislation against the progressive agenda.
In 1964—before the explosion of the race taboo—James Burnham called liberalism “the ideology of Western suicide.” This would suggest that the woke interpretation of “Progress Theology” has simply accelerated processes already causing the contraction and decline of the West. Reversing this process requires more than government action against specific woke outrages, or even, as Kaufmann advocates, the “return of a strong secular nationalism.” It means rebuilding “the great bulwarks” of Western civilization by connecting the issues which people care about most deeply to a broader body of sacred myths and symbols.
Of course, there is such a system already embedded in the collective consciousness, which stretches across the Western world. Kaufmann is sceptical about the potential for Christianity to resist wokeness, and it is true that mainstream Christianity has largely embraced progressive ideology and the pathological altruism that constitutes liberalism’s official morality. But Kaufmann also observes a notable dichotomy: that Christian identity “predicts populist right voting,” even while Christian practice predicts the opposite.
This suggests unmet demand for a traditional, non-sectarian, communitarian Christianity that balances a pragmatic embrace of robust Christian norms with an undemanding approach to individual devotion and theological nuance. While such a prospect may be difficult to imagine, many may still find it easier and less painful to contemplate than the ongoing re-constitution of the West according to competing sacred values: a process which secular liberalism set in motion and has proven powerless to resist.
