Taboo

A thread

What follows is a slightly modified thread I just published to summarize my new book Taboo, published today, election day in Britain, Independence Day in the US.

1/ Woke won’t fade away because it is rooted in left-liberalism, the basis of modern western culture.

A thread on my new book Taboo: How Making Race Sacred Produced a Cultural Revolution (The Third Awokening in North America), released today:

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Taboo-Making-Produced-Cultural-Revolution/dp/1800752660

https://www.amazon.com/Third-Awokening-12-Point-Progressive-Extremism/dp/B0D459XT8N

2/ Woke is a useful analytical concept that describes a distinct phenomenon in the world: the making sacred of historically marginalized race, gender and sexual minority groups. Woke people are emotionally attached to minorities and cold toward majorities.

3/ Despite firms cutting back on DEI and less talk of ‘white privilege’ in the media, woke cultural socialism is not going away. Why? Because young people are a lot more woke. In 20 years they will be the median voter. Generational turnover will mainstream woke.

4/ Woke is not new. It was created around 1965 when Black Americans were sacralized in polite society. This is the ‘Big Bang’ of our moral order, the sun around which it revolves, as Shelby Steele - a black conservative writer who lived through it - recognized. The die was cast.

5/ As in the Civil Rights Movement, modern liberals, not cultural Marxists, led the way. White guilt, compassion toward blacks and fear of the white majority were the engines, not a desire to overthrow capitalism. This spawned Affirmative Action, the beginning of DEI.

6/ Woke is based on stories that drive the moral emotions of “majorities bad, minorities good.” This creates DEI, or cultural socialism. First, outcomes must be equal by race and sex. Second, minorities must not experience emotional harm. Anything less is sacrilege.

7/ To translate, “Diversity, Equity” means equal outcomes, “Inclusion” means emotional harm protection, for sacred groups. Jonathan Haidt terms these the equality & care/harm moral foundations. “DE” discriminates against whites & men, “I” censors free speech.

8/ Because this ideology emerges from emotional attachments & stories, it spreads from ‘below’, infiltrating institutions like universities, schools & the bureaucracy more than elected government.

9/ Woke is empathizing, emotional and emergent, not a top-down intellectual system like Marxism. More like pentecostalism than Catholicism, it produces Protestant-style awakenings. We are in our Third Awokening, not our first. Woke is a continuation, not a deviation.

10/ Because woke spreads from below, it must be resisted in the institutions. One way of doing this is to mobilize people, but taboos around race, sexuality and gender enable small numbers of DEI speech police to quash resistance in organizations.

11/ Even so, progressive illiberalism is not mainly about a spiral of silence. Most left-liberals genuinely believe in DEI initiatives like mandatory diversity statements and ‘decolonizing’ race/sex quotas for authors on reading lists. Hard to resist the misleading sugar-coated labels that conceal authoritarianism: ‘equity, diversity, inclusion, anti-racism, opposed to homophobia and transphobia, welcoming…..’

12/ Since woke is centred in elite institutions bound by its taboos, only elected government – the one institution voters control - can neutralize its power. This means enforcing political neutrality in public bodies, schools, university administrations & monopoly tech firms.

13/ The public school curriculum is crucial. This reinforces the ideology of equal outcomes and emotional safety. National sins should only be taught alongside sins of non-Europeans (Aztec, Comanche, Ottoman, etc). Woke bias is warping our historical consciousness.

14/ 2 in 3 voters are anti-woke in the UK, US & Canada. This is an open goal which conservative parties need to focus on, raising the profile of culture war issues. Only when the cost to the left is high can moderate leftists like James Carville gain the upper hand over the woke.

15/ Libertarians who think the market will solve all problems, and government is the enemy, are useful idiots for the cultural revolution. Most sectors are subject to monopoly effects. Devolving power away from elected government places it in institutions the woke left controls.

16/ The culture war is not a campus sideshow but a fight for the basis of our civilization. What will it be: truth, freedom, excellence & cohesion, or equal outcomes & emotional harm protection?

17/ The culture war is not just about culture. Woke taboos make it impossible to address crime, immigration, falling educational standards, minority achievement, homelessness, military & police recruitment, polarization and other concrete problems.

18/ This is less about winning minds – it’s easy to refute woke - as winning the subconscious hearts that drive people. We need to reconfigure our emotional regime, creating new narratives to lower the volume on woke’s sacred categories while raising it on others.

19/ Conservatives & classical liberals need a moral argument to match the woke “be kind.” As in the Cold War, this means talking about wealth, freedom & human flourishing as moral imperatives. Cultural socialism, like economic socialism, stifles & immiserizes.

20/ A post-woke vision foregrounds resilience over victimhood, focusing on all aspects of human flourishing. It seeks to optimize, not maximize, diversity, equality and inclusion. Today’s woke cultural socialism leads only to division and stagnation.