More Thoughts On Wokeness

While thinking about the whiter-than-white TV commercials I've seen lately, I ran into an essay by Victor Davis Hanson, "Why Are They Woke?". This outlines the fundamental contradictions in current elitist thinking:

Wokeism was never really about racism, sexism, or other -isms. Instead, for some, it illustrated a psychological pathology of projection: fobbing one’s own concrete prejudices onto others in order to alleviate or mask them.

It's worth noting that the picture of Gov Northam above dates from a 1984 yearbook, incongruously a full generation after the US Civil Rights movement. Northam appears in another yearbook from 1981 with the nickname "coonman". Yet this was while Northam was in post-Civil Rights formation to become a doctor, a member of the elite. There are similar implications in President Biden's routine slips and gaffes, like the one just this past week where he said, “It’s awful hard, as well, to get Latinx vaccinated as well. Why? They’re worried that they’ll be vaccinated and deported."

You don't have to dig too deep to realize Hanson has a point. Another point he makes is that claims of vocal leftists to be "Marxist" ring hollow.

So should we laugh or cry that Black Lives Matter’s self-described Marxist co-founder turns out to be a corporate grifter? Patrisse Cullors has accumulated several upscale homes and is under investigation by the IRS for allegations of the misuse of funds from one of her foundations.

I'm in complete agreement with Hanson's underlying theme here, that the political philosophy that motivates current establishment thinking is completely incoherent and in some ways just opportunism, but it also represents a return, or an attempt to return, to the post-Civil War, post-Reconstruction consensus accommodation illustrated in Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man (1952), where the post-Civil War southern social structure is the result of an alliance between southern segregationists and northern philanthropists who subsidize and control southern states by endowing local colleges and universities, while ensuring that northern cities keep the blacks who migrate from the south in ghettos.

Thus a feature of the Black Lives Matter movement, a drive to "defund the police", victimizes almost exclusively the people who live in those ghettos. It also stereotypes blacks by equating them with the lumpenproletariat, whom Marx thought, according to Britannica,

are not only disinclined to participate in revolutionary activities with their “rightful brethren,” the proletariat, but also tend to act as the “bribed tools of reactionary intrigue.”

That the BLM riots of 2020 were brought about by an alliance of the criminal class and angry elites corresponds remarkably well with this characterization. Che Guevara could be fashioned into a revolutionary martyr; George Floyd was never any such thing. And indeed, while Che was dangerous to world order, George Floyd, a feckless addict and petty criminal, was completely safe -- except, of course, to those who had to live around him.

The people the elites fear aren't the George Floyds -- they stay in their own enclaves, and they keep the poor down by victimizing them almost exclusively. The people they fear are Marx's "rightful brethren", broadly speaking the actual proletariat, the plebs, over much of the West a combination of the working and middle classes.

This is reflected in the abject terror the January 6 demonstation at the US Capitol fostered in the political class -- months and months of urban rioting in 2020 hurt only the poor and minority entrepreneurs. A day of protest at the seat of government was not in the script and a completely different matter.

I think this is because the elites recognize that the broad post-Reconstruction racial accommodation that formed a good part of the US social structure for 150 years is slipping away. Accusastions of "systemic racism" are, as Hanson pointrs out, projection from elites who've been comfortable with those arrangements all along and who in fact want them to continue.

Minorities are recognizing that their interests lie with a broad social order that supports a productive plebs made up of the working and middle classes, not a segregationist system that depends on a criminal class that victimizes the poor. Thus the elites, steadily losing the support of workers and minorities, must shore up their consituency with an unlikely alliance of petty criminals, feminists, Malthusians, trustfunders, and sexual deviates.

This doesn't seem like a recipe for success.