Wokeness is actually two things

And George Galloway is one of the only politicians who realises this

An audio version of this piece is below the paywall (narrated by me).

I’ve made this prediction on a few podcasts, but have yet to put it in print. So here goes (and at the risk of being proved thoroughly wrong): transgenderism is on the way out, along with all the other manifestations of twenty-first century hyper-progressive gender politics. For good and ill. 

That means that your great-grandchildren will not use they/them pronouns, and the military and police will never end up 50/50 female. It also means that the US Presidency will never be won by a woman, and in the (relatively near) future there will be many fewer women found in positions of authority in public life. If the last few decades of gender politics are remembered at all, it will be as a humorous blip. “Did you know that people in the early twenty-first century believed that women had penises?” some Stephen Fry-like figure will chuckle on a quiz show centuries from now, to the disbelief of his all-male panel. 

But that doesn’t mean that wokeness per se is on the way out. Far from it. 

One particular branch of wokeness that is going absolutely nowhere is the politics of racial grievance. In fact, it’s set to accelerate, particularly in some countries. Expect to see more affirmative action in higher education and more race-based quotas for government contracts. Expect to see more controversy over two-tiered policing. Expect, above all, to see more wins for politicians like George Galloway, who have cottoned onto the fact that appealing to voters’ sectarian instincts is often a successful strategy. “Free, free Palestine”? Buy buy buy! 

The reason for this is demographics. Put simply, the people who are into woke ideas about gender and race are not the same as the people who are into woke ideas just about race, even if their political aims sometimes overlap. And these two groups have wildly different migration and fertility patterns. Gender wokeness is on the way out because the people who are attracted to gender wokeness are on the way out, given that their birth rates are so far below replacement. Meanwhile, race wokeness (of a kind) is on the rise because of the large and rapid demographic changes currently taking place in the West. 

Let’s start by discussing the group of people who are most enthused about gender wokeness: WEIRD progressives. That is, people from Western, Educated, Industrial, Rich, and Democratic societies (to borrow Joseph Henrich’s term) who have adopted the ideology that I prefer to call ‘progressivism.’ 

I used to be a WEIRD progressive, so I understand this ideology as an insider. It is motivated by two beliefs: a strong commitment to egalitarianism, and also to the blank slate view of human nature. So WEIRD progressives don’t believe that any group of people could be innately different from any other, even on average. And they don’t believe that any kind of social hierarchy is ever morally justified. Rather, they insist that any and all of the differences we see across sexes, classes, ethnicities, and nationalities must be the product of some kind of unfairness, and WEIRD progressives are willing to lend their support to anyone who finds themselves at the bottom of one of these hierarchies. 

 Much ink has already been spilled on why this class has adopted such an unusual set of beliefs. In general I’m skeptical of the idea that any of this is downstream of academic theory (even I haven’t read Marceuse, and I went to Britain’s most Leftist university). The possible material factors at play include a long period of peace following the Second World War, historically unprecedented levels of affluence, and the influx of women into public life as a consequence of technological and economic change (bringing with them their feminine temperaments, i.e. the feminisation of public life hypothesis, which I discussed with Cory Clark in a recent MMM episode). Plus the interaction of some Christian ideas that I discussed at length in another recent podcast episode, not least the Catholic church’s prohibition on cousin marriage from the Middle Ages onwards, which reduced clannishness in Western European culture. 

WEIRD progressivism is derived from some clear ideological principles, but in practice it is not internally coherent, since its adherents tend to just scoop up a whole load of groups at the bottom of various hierarchies and adopt their causes, even though their causes might be in tension with one another. 

The pro-Palestine protests held across the West over the last month have drawn attention to this phenomenon. ‘Queers for Palestine’ is a funny slogan, obviously (the jokes write themselves: ‘Turkeys for Christmas’, Chickens for KFC’, etc.), but the problem the slogan represents is a serious one. There were two particularly revealing videos that emerged from the various protests in London: one showing a Progress Pride flag being snatched from the hands of a person we must assume is a (very startled) WEIRD progressive, and another showing a white guy with an American accent and Antifa outfit being harangued about LGBT issues by some young Muslim women. “In our religion you can’t do that” they insist, without an ounce of shame. Dumbfounded, he eventually retreats. 

This meme just about sums it up. WEIRD progressives lack cultural theory of mind (as Gad Saad described it in our recent conversation). They don’t realise how little they have in common with the various marginalised groups they’ve scooped up. In particular, they have radically overestimated the willingness of immigrants to adopt WEIRD progressive ideology. Their own attitude towards their fellow countrymen is more like that of Mrs Jellyby, the satirical character in Dickens’ Bleak House who neglects her own children while devoting all of her time and energy to setting up a mission in Africa. In other words, they are so incredibly low in in-group preference that they fail to even recognise it when they see it. 

Which brings us onto the politics of racial grievance, and the importance of ethnonarcissism in intra-woke dynamics.