Why Wokeness is Locked In
How a Nimble Conservatism Can Outflank the Left
In the aftermath of the 2024 election, which brought a surprisingly strong victory from Donald Trump along with victories in several key Senate races, pundits of all stripes raced to explain why Kamala Harris lost. More helpfully, the data scientists also joined the fun (see Pew Research and Catalist). It became clear that Trump’s popularity extended far beyond the white working class—the favorite explanation for his 2016 victory—since he had gained votes among the young, among men, and among non-whites across the board. A significant factor in this (budding) realignment was the rejection of “woke” politics by many ordinary Americans. Transgender “rights” have been set back for the time being. Identity politics doesn’t resonate as much as it did in the wake of George Floyd’s death in 2020, an era that can now safely be called “peak Woke.” Support for immigration enforcement is skyrocketing. Even support for same-sex marriage has slipped slightly. The Woke brand is losing popularity.
How have Democrats response to this data? To date, they’ve done very little. A new book by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson is pushing the “abundance agenda,” which pushes back against anti-growth elements of the Left. They urge slashing regulations and red tap to enable Americans to build more houses, more roads, more parks—more of everything (including bringing in more immigrants). California recently signed a bill that will allow for faster urban development. Still, while abundance might solve the housing crisis, it doesn’t seem likely to cure the Left of Wokeness. And there hasn’t been many other changes of strategy. Most Democrats seem content to wait until benefit reductions in the One Big Beautiful Bill produce the long-awaited backlash against Trump.
I would like to suggest that the inability of the Left to adapt to changing circumstances is not contingent, but rather develops naturally out of the structure of the Left’s political coalition. If you’re a conservative fearfully anticipating a new, lean, mean Democratic Party, don’t worry. It’s unlikely to happen.
The key here is academia, which, as a college professor, I understand to some degree. The central fact about modern academia—politically speaking—is that it has been captured by radical Leftism. From top to bottom, in all fields, in both the classroom and the administrative offices, progressivism reigns almost unchallenged. What began in the humanities has spread to the social sciences and even to the physical sciences. And, from personal experience, I can affirm that the younger generation of academics is much, much more activist and “woke” than older generations, even though they all vote overwhelmingly Democratic.
The Leftist domination of the universities is usually portrayed as one of its great strengths. And it is. Since Progressives oversee most of the higher education in this country, they get to decide which issues are worthy of public discussion. They Progressives get to tout their “credentials” and pose as “experts” on problems. More fundamentally, the Right suffers from an anti-intellectual problem. I once read—I cannot remember where—that the lack of conservative intellectuals fuels low-quality discourse on the Right, and that strikes me as correct. I don’t believe that conservative ideas or theories are less plausible than progressives ones—just the opposite. But conservatives are more prone to conspiracy theories, to extreme language, and to populist rhetoric. One advantage of the Left is that, no matter how bad their ideas are, a professor can articulate them in a semi-intelligent way. The Democratic Party is increasingly the party of the college-educated. That doesn’t mean they’re better, but they are more articulate.
But this very strength can also be a weakness. Specifically, it reinforces radical progressivism within the modern Democratic Party, preventing it from reaching out to working-class voters. This is due to several features of academic life: (1) specialization, (2) the growth of “studies” departments, (3) the need to publish, (4) tenure, and (5) insularity. I will take them one by one.
Modern academia is highly specialized. Gone are the “Renaissance scholars” who know a little about everything. 500 years ago, a single person could read the most up-to-date scholarship on every topic. Nowadays, I’m intimidated doing an online search for literature on federalism (one of my “specializations”). Modern scholars pick a narrow area of focus and spend their entire careers publishing on that topic.
After progressives captured the universities, they re-shaped them to fit their priorities and values. The result has been a proliferation of “studies” departments that are explicitly based on leftist theoretical foundations and that, in practice, are little more than activism. This include: “gender studies” (it used to be called “women’s studies,” but it was changed to “gender” because … well, you already know why); “ethnic studies,” which includes sub-fields in every possible racial or ethnic group; studies of “sexuality,” including sub-fields for every possible “sexual minority;” “urban studies;” “disability studies;” “fat studies;” “postcolonial studies;” and so on and on. Even traditional departments have been colonized by activist and highly politicized scholarship. It is hard to exaggerate the frustration I experienced while on the job market, where about 30-40% of the already small number of jobs explicitly required adherence to some kind of progressive dogma. A job advertisement might ask for a candidate who focuses on, say, global inequality, or racial disparities in health care access, or intersectional feminisms. While there is nothing wrong with studying these kinds of topics per se, the kinds of people who make them their research focus are overwhelmingly radical progressives. I think conservatives have a lot to say about racism and racial disparities, but it’s hard to imagine a conservative pursuing an advanced degree in that field nowadays. The hostility would be too great to handle, and it would be hard to find a mentor. In sum, more and more fields of study have been captured by progressives, and alternatives perspectives on those topics are ruthlessly sidelined.
Scholars need to publish—a lot—to advance in their careers. This means that, once a scholar had chosen a specialized field, it’s hard to switch lanes to study something else. It’s easier to pursue publications that build upon a previous publication, or perform the same kind of analysis on different data. Switching to a new topic requires grasping many new theories, finding new data, advancing new hypotheses, and brushing up on hundreds of previous studies. Most professors lack the time or incentive to do this.
The goal of all of this publication is tenure. While fewer and fewer professors have tenure (my small Christian college doesn’t even offer it, although they seem to rarely fire anyone), it is still a massive incentive. Once a professor gets tenure, it’s almost impossible to fire him. Tenured professors enjoy almost unlimited free speech rights and are almost never fired for something they say or write.
Finally, academia is a sheltered and insular place. America as a whole is increasingly experiencing class-based and education-based segregation—we are less and less likely to live next to someone from a different social class. This is especially true of the professorial class. It’s fun to engage in abstract debates about a passage from Plato, for instance, but it creates a disconnect with most of the population, who don’t even know who Plato was. Academia is increasingly an echo chamber.
What all of this amounts to is that academics are not well positioned to adapt to changing circumstances. And because there are (many) more professors in the Democratic Party than in the Republican Party, the Democratic Party is going to have a more difficult time transitioning to a more popular political platform. The thought leaders of the Left are radical activists who have chosen a narrow, far-left field in which they have to keep publishing. They aren’t interested in understanding why many Hispanics reject mass immigration, or why many women vote for “sexists.” They have ready-made explanations (“structural racism,” “internalized misogyny”) and are not in a position to re-think them. To the man with a hammer, everything looks like a nail. To a man hired to use (only) a hammer, everything had better be a nail, or else. If the theory of structural racism is wrong or at least exaggerated, for instance, then the whole edifice collapses. Everyone loses their job. In chapter 11 of Leviathan, Thomas Hobbes wrote that people will defend any position in order to preserve their power and privilege. He even argues that scholars would defend blatantly false mathematical truths if it served their interest: “For I doubt not, but if it had been a thing contrary to any mans right of dominion, or to the interest of men that have dominion, That the three angles of a Triangle, should be equall to two Angles of a Square, that doctrine should have been, if not disputed, yet by the burning of all books of Geometry, suppressed, as farre as he whom it concerned was able.” It’s even easier in moral philosophy or social science, where the right answer is not certain.
As a side note, I should also say that some leftist academics are not capable of publishing anything other than radical activist scholarship. The fields that are the most dominated by progressivism—but especially the many “studies” departments—are the least academically rigorous. While scholars in these fields can be top-notch, much “scholarship” in something like “gender studies” is of very poor quality. They reference the same people, over and over. (Foucault is most-cited scholar ever, Noam Chomsky is second or third, and even Sigmund Freud is fourth according to one metric.) They assume the truth of certain moral theories, such as critical race theory or feminism. They reproduce the same terms. It feels very cut-and-paste. I doubt that some of these scholars could produce in other fields.
My sense is that the academic class within the Left is mostly uninterested in re-thinking its fundamental assumptions about reality. This includes, most fundamentally, the idea that “disparities” between groups cannot be explained by anything other than (mostly invisible) power and privilege. This is the essence of “woke,” and it’s everywhere in academia. Getting rid of it will be hard. And, as in all political movements, the educated class plays an outsized role in leading the Democratic Party. So, while opportunists like Gavin Newsom will try to downplay the “woke” elements of the party’s platform, Democrats as a whole are unlikely to learn from their 2024 electoral defeat.