What we call Wokeism was predated by its previous iteration “political correctness” in the 1990s and political correctness itself was predated a generation before by the New Left. The New Left was composed of both an identitarian vein and an environmental vein and the two veins have been operating symbiotically since. (Think of hippies reading Silent Spring on their way to Montgomery.) I used to think of Woke as primarily identitarian, but the correlation of beliefs between identitarians and environmentalists seems so high that the movements for some reason appear to see themselves as compatible and symbiotic.

Note: A while ago reader Charles Pincourt contacted me with some thoughts on the nature of the “Woke” revolution and its challenge to liberalism and civilization. I found that we disagreed in ways that made for an interesting discussion, so we decided to turn the conversation into a mini-debate series of short essays for you all, below. Charles views Woke – through the lens of Friedrich Hayek – as a radically collectivist threat to classical liberalism, while I suggest Woke is instead better viewed as radically individualist, and a product of liberalism itself. This is an important distinction, because it will necessarily shape how we ought to best respond to the challenge.

Charles Pincourt: Woke Is a Collectivist Ideology

In the Road to Serfdom, Friedrich Hayek describes the illiberal nature of totalitarian regimes using the Soviet Union and the Third Reich as iconic examples. When the book was written in the mid-1940s these regimes were (and continue to this day to be) considered antithetical to one another on account of where they fell on the political spectrum. Hayek, however, explains that the regimes were much more alike than they were different. What they had in common, and what characterized them more profoundly, was that they were collectivist regimes. The common and most defining feature of collectivist systems according to Hayek is the “deliberate organization of the labors of society for a definite social goal.” What distinguishes different collectivist regimes is the “nature of the goal to which they want to direct the efforts of society.” That collectivist systems seek to organize the “labors of society” towards a singular goal leads them to an “all-overriding desire to give the group the maximum of power to achieve these ends.” This implies a moral or ethical system that places the one goal above all other competing, and thereby subordinate, goals. As a result, the “ends justify the means” “becomes necessarily the supreme rule” to reach the societal goal.

As a result, Communism and National Socialism were not antithetical to each other. They were, rather, the same system albeit with different “definite goals.” The true antithesis to both these systems, and to collectivist systems more broadly for Hayek, is liberalism. To Hayek, liberalism is defined by an inclination towards the individual – and indeed all individuals – relative to the collective, and the many freedoms and negative rights this implies. These rights and freedoms (rights and freedoms that we expect and are accustomed to in the Anglosphere) include: freedom of speech, freedom of conscience, freedom of movement, and freedom from arbitrary imprisonment. The latter is particularly important since it harkens to another critical characteristic of liberalism: the rule of law. Hayek explains that, while often misunderstood and misconstrued, the rule of law is simply the principle that the law applies to all individuals equally, that all individuals are equal before the law, and, as importantly, that laws also apply to the state. It is typically easier to understand the liberal rule of law not through its definition, but through its ideal manifestation. Under the rule of law, individuals know how the state will act in any circumstance, and that the state will act in the same way towards all individuals. If an individual breaks a law, they know what the consequences will be. As important, the individual knows what the state will not do, e.g. arbitrarily violate their fundamental freedoms.

It would be easy to think that this all sound like ancient history, no longer relevant almost 80 years after the fall of the Third Reich and 30 years after the fall of the Soviet Union. Thinking this way is wrong and could be catastrophic. We are now living in a time where a contemporary collectivist movement has obtained control of almost all elite institutions, including the executive branch, the Senate, the legacy media, our universities, and the most influential corporate boardrooms. That collectivist movement is known by the name, of course, of “Woke.”

Unlike the Soviet Union or Nazi Germany, Woke currently has two “definite goals:” Identitarianism and radical Environmentalism. Identitarianism seeks to retributively redistribute resources from so-called oppressor to so-called oppressed identities. Environmentalism, meanwhile, seeks to eliminate the so-called environmental impact that humans have on the natural world irrespective of the impact on humans themselves.

These two definite goals are both necessarily collectivist. The Identitarian collectivist strain relies on categories into which individuals are placed and which are ranked along an oppressor-oppressed continuum. The categories are used to justify whether resources or opportunities should be provided to, or denied, members of the different categories. Environmental collectivism starts from an assumption that individuals will not, on their own, behave to sufficiently reduce or eliminate their production of various environmental pollutants or effects, such as greenhouse gas emissions. That people will not on their own behave appropriately justifies increasingly invasive and restrictive collective coercion.

While on the face of it the definite goals seem very different, the two collectivist movements have found common cause in their desire to accumulate power to organize “the labors of society for a [their] definite social goal.” Increasingly this is done through the subordination of individual freedoms. This is seen in the contemporary Anglosphere informally, and more ominously and increasingly, formally, through legislation or the administrative state.

Informally, the subordination of individual freedoms such as those of speech and conscience is observed daily around the Anglosphere. People are publicly shamed, “canceled,” lose their livelihoods, etc. for expressing views contrary to the diktats of Woke collectivism. Moreover, Woke collectivists find evidence for insufficient progress towards ever-more fine-grained indicators of their definite goals. The response to this is to find more and more ways to subordinate personal freedoms and the rule of law to achieve these goals. Identitarians advocate, enshrine, implement, and legislate different forms of affirmative action whose goal is to ensure that people are treated unequally according to their group identities. Radical environmentalists, on the other hand, try everything from banning plastic bags, to replacing automobile with bicycle lanes, to setting automobile emissions standards that are only achievable by electric vehicles.

As noted by Hayek, the most notorious past examples of collectivist regimes (Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union) were characterized by singular definite goals: Nazi Germany with German “racial” supremacy and the USSR with communism. The current Woke collectivist movement on the other hand is characterized by the competing Identitarian and Environmentalist streams. Given the collectivist orientations of both these movements, one wonders whether their coalition can be maintained. Should Woke collectivism continue to gain more control over the levers of power in the West then, given the different definite goals of these two movements, won’t there eventually and necessarily be a conflict between them? The answer seems obviously to be yes, therefore begging the question: “which would win?”

While both streams of Woke collectivism are fanatical, they don’t appear to be equally so. For example, while questioning the narrative of apocalyptic human-induced climate change may result in a Twitter storm and the loss of current or future research funding, there are no cases of tenured professors being fired for such Environmental Woke-heretical views. The same is not true for those challenging Identitarian doctrines – indeed most cases of tenured professors or other high-profile cases of being fired seem to be due to Identitarian transgressions.

Similarly, both streams of Woke collectivism are able to co-opt almost any domain, although not to the same extent. Environmental collectivism does this to almost any area of enquiry through the adoption of the word “sustainable”: from sustainable investing to sustainable architecture. Likewise, Identitarian collectivism is able to subordinate any discipline with the word “justice” such as corporate justice or educational justice. Importantly, however, while Identitarian collectivism has been able to subordinate Environmental collectivism through the term “environmental justice,” the opposite is not true – there is no racial environmentalism.

Both of these examples point to a more effective, extreme, and ruthless militancy that Identitarian collectivism appears able and willing to impose upon unbelievers. As a result, if I had to make a bet, I would put my money on Identitarian collectivism as the winner in a face-off with Environmental collectivism. That collectivist movements seem to coalesce around one definite goal, suggests that an impending clash may soon be at hand.

Personally, I am against collectivism in any form, be it Identitarian, Environmental, or Cuddly Stuffed Animal collectivism. At the same time, the most threatening collectivist strain currently appears to be Identitarian collectivism. Given the power that the Woke collectivist coalition now has, it needs to be fought and overcome if we are to keep our society free. If we are unable to, we may very well end up living under an Identitarian collectivist regime – only this time it will not be called National Socialism.

N.S. Lyons: Woke Is Individualist

Charles, I find your classification of racial idenitarianism and radical environmentalism as the two competing “pillars” of “Woke” to be particularly interesting, and want to hone in on that. This is because I think this classification misidentifies the true competing forces among the Woke, and in doing so accidentally elides its true origin and character, and therefore the broader nature of the challenge to our societies. Obviously this diagnosis is important to get right because the answer will structure how we should respond.

To me, the existing internal divide among the Woke doesn’t appear to be between identitarian racialism and environmentalism (the latter of which notably long predates Wokeism and seems to have simply agglomerated itself to Woke via common association among the people involved in Progressive political movements). Instead the obvious divide seems to clearly be between the two big camps of Race and Trans.

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