The woke take America’s foundational “city on the hill” mythos and reverse it—creating a photo-negative version of our national fable grounded in the same exceptionalist and Zionist mythos. In the new woke myth, America is no longer the global savior or promised land. Instead, America is responsible for everything bad in the world. There would be no human tragedies if not for Judeo-Christian “settler colonialists.” If it wanted to, the U.S. government could fix all contemporary injustice and even historical wrongs—the legacy of slavery, colonialism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, you name it. All it must do is wave its imperial magic wand and bring global misfortune to an end—starting in Gaza.
Wokeness, or whatever you choose to call it, is a photo-negative ideology that merely inverts the country’s old Ku Klux Klan-style ethnopolitical mythos and updates it for today’s secularized—pseudo-multicultural and self-hating—era of Anglo American liberal culture. In wokeness’s new mythic ideal, no longer should the dreaded “white working class” MAGA Trump supporters be on top; rather, they should be on the bottom (double entendre intended), while their opposite-world enemies—Black, trans, handi-capable, antifa sex workers—should instead receive institutional preferences via DEI and whatever more aggressive social engineering project is planned next.
Wokeness represents modern American culture’s inability to come to grips with the failure of the country’s greatest LASP myth—the “American dream.” A mythos that denies the importance of socioeconomic class and tells us everyone can live in their own liberal-individual “success” bubble; occupy a home bubble with an individual fenced in yard; arrive at work in a protected individual metal automobile bubble. Watch personalized entertainment and, at all times, have a fully liberal-individual experience—judged entirely on its own personal merits. In the end, wokeness represents the post-liberalism of the fools. For, it recognizes the indelibly unfair outcomes of liberal capitalism but—as with the “socialism of the fools” that antisemitism so often represents—wokeness scapegoats its way toward a new system of racial stigmatizing as the solution. Instead of all non-Anglos and non-Protestants being the source of inferiority, a photo-negative KKK mythos has erected from the frustrated minds of academics disgusted with their own society. A wannabe multicultural nativism where “deplorable” “straight white men” are the source of all cultural backward inferiority and, therefore, everything wrong with the world. In the end, wokeness is not a true rebellion but merely a bizarro redrawing of old American ethnopolitical prejudices.
Yet bizarro Superman is still Superman. All the distinguishing aspects of the character remain recognizable even when artists draw his color scheme differently and reverse the giant “S” on his chest. The same principle applies with wokeness’s photo-negative, white supremacy mythology, which consists of the LASP-exclusivist bigotries of the Klan now inverted to target “white people.” Key to photo-negative thinking is its attempted reversal of the postwar Judeo-Christian alliance, which features radical Islamists—not as backward terrorists—but as the progress parade’s lead baton twirlers. At the core of the Marxist paradigm lies something scholars call the “labor metaphysic.” The phrase connotes the idea that only the working class can bring about true revolutionary change—not the peasants, nor the farmers, nor the bourgeoisie. In wokeness’s new revolutionary metaphysic, Marx’s beloved proletariat has been replaced with a progress-flag collage of morally superior, third world “people of color” and they/them nonbinary heroines. The discordance of queer activism with Palestinian activism is ignored by the woke because to acknowledge that Islamist political culture is violently anti-queer destroys their QTPOC revolutionary metaphysic, which the woke must believe is actionable for the rest of their photo-negative fantasy to hold. As with Marx’s folklore of all the workers of the world uniting to overthrow capitalism, global “decolonialization” can arrive only when all non-European “persons of color”—and “LGBTQ2SIAA” non-heterosexuals—unite and lead humanity to the intersectional Shangri-la.
Here the Palestinians play a central role. Palestinians—as reigning intersectional grand champions—represent the “true Jews” of the bizarro America that the woke wish to manifest into existence. And if, as prophesied in Deuteronomy, Jews must return to their homeland for Christ’s second coming then, through photo-negative logic, the Palestinians—as bizarro Jews—must have a state, which will be the true Israel. Then, and only then, can the day of true global liberation finally arrive.
Read the whole thing. The late Roger Scruton discussed the left’s “culture of repudiation:”
In all of his political writings, Scruton takes on the Left for scorning existing norms and customs, and for promoting a “culture of repudiation.” The Left is “negative.” It dismisses “every aspect of our cultural capital” with the language of brutal invective: accusing every defender of human nature and sound tradition of “racism,” “xenophobia,” “homophobia,” and “sexism.” Like 1984’s “two minutes of hate,” this language tears down, intimidates, and can never build anything humane or constructive—it is nihilistic to the core. At the same time, Scruton wants to reach out to reasonable liberals who eschew ideology and who still believe in civility and the promise of national belonging. His conservatism can discern the truth in liberalism (another Aristotelian trait) while the partisans of repudiation see half the human race as enemies.
But it’s both a culture of repudiation and the creation of a mirror universe worldview of how the rest of us see history and culture.