Addressing the Peril of Illiberalism Requires Correctly Specifying the Problem

In the podcast I share below, a debate between Yascha Mounk and Christopher Rufo, moderated by Bari Weiss, Mounk presents the correct history of woke, what he calls “identity synthesis.” Woke progressivism (really all progressivism, since the ideology grows up alongside multiculturalism in the transnationalist project—see my 2019 essay The Work of Bourgeois Hegemony in the Immigration Debate), DEI, critical race theory, queer theory, post-colonial studies, etc., are not Marxist or neo-Marxist but corporatist. These reactionary ideas eschew materialist-scientific class-based analysis for the backwards idealisms of identity politics and therefore work against the objective interests of labor, interests determined by the individual’s material relationship to the means of production. Put simply, woke progressivism stands Marxism on its head. This is in addition to its illiberal character.

CBS News Presents: A Town Hall with Erika Kirk – Honestly with Bari Weiss

Last week, Bari sat down with Erika Kirk for an hour-long town hall in front of a live audience on CBS. It was an extremely powerful conversation. Erika and Bari spoke about a lot—rising political violence in this very divided country; the way some people justified or excused Charlie’s murder; what Erika thinks about some of the controversial things Charlie said in his lifetime; her response to Candace Owens and the conspiracy theories Owens and others are peddling; the growing antisemitism on the right; and her decision to forgive Charlie’s killer. They also talked about the posthumous release of Charlie’s last book, Stop, in the Name of God: Why Honoring the Sabbath Will Transform Your Life. This town hall was the first of many conversations and debates Bari will be bringing to CBS News about the things that matter most. Which, of course, are often the hardest to talk about. We really hope you will tune in.  In case you missed this first one with Erika Kirk, we’re thrilled to share the conversation here on Honestly. And we can’t wait for you to catch the next one on CBS News. The Free Press earns a commission from any purchases made through all book links in this article. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

1. CBS News Presents: A Town Hall with Erika Kirk 53:14
2. Should We Legalize Assisted Suicide? 01:32:05
3. Is Designing Babies Unethical—or a Moral Imperative? 01:24:28
4. Would America Be Safer Without the Second Amendment? 01:07:41
5. Kids Don't Need Phones with Jonathan Haidt 01:20:16

The intellectual origins of the woke phase of progressivism lies in its embraces of anarchism, nihilism, and poststructuralism/postmodernism (which in gender ideology incorporates the sexology project, the synthesis that has handed to the medical-industrial complex its justification for hormonally and surgically altering bodies including children). Woke is an ugly philosophy—a politics of resentment and revenges—dressed up in and deodorized with fancy academic jargon, a crackpot frame for pseudo-intellectuals to seem clever and with which to command power.

I have been writing about this problem for several years on Freedom and Reason. I have been talking to anybody who would listen about this problem much longer than that, since the mid-1990s, actually, when physics professor Alan Sokal admitted that he submitted a hoax article to Social Text, an cultural studies journal, titled “Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity,” arguing that quantum gravity is a social construction. Social Text published his paper!

As I explained in my essay about Mounk in November of last year (see The Peril of Left-Wing Identitarianism), I was familiar with Mounk’s earlier work and was happy to see that his latest book about identify politics, published in September, 2023, confirmed my thesis (his argument sounds derivative of mine, to be honest). However, Mounk inadequately theorizes the big question: how the regression of woke progressivism carries any effect beyond the university. For a system of ideas to prevail, especially one that pretends to be popular and radical, there needs to be real power behind it, and in an overdeveloped capitalist society, the power that socializes big ideas emanates from the ruling class and its functionaries. It must therefore be useful to them. Indeed, woke progressivism is a formation in late capitalism, a corporatist project to disorganize the proletariat for the sake of the transnational project to establish a global neo-feudal mode of production in which workers become serfs managed on high-tech stateless estates and made stupid by tribal identities. Scroll through my blog to read the many essays I have published theorizing this development.

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For the life of me, I will never understand why those who share some version of the meme shown above don’t see that it makes the argument for securing the border, rounding up the invaders, and kicking them out—and calling out the collaborators. Democrats and establishment Republicans are in effect colonial collaborators betraying their people by welcoming the colonizes. They’re selling us out. Who are they selling us out to? Big corporate power.

There were Indians who resisted in the day. But, in the end, they lost. Many of them have failed to assimilate with power that long ago established itself as hegemonic. The truth is that America is not built on stolen lands. Nor do Americans occupy the continent. Europeans came to the New World and conquered it. These lands were won and they are ours. The time to do something about the foreign invasion of one’s land is in the moment. If you can’t resist, then you lose. The stronger side wins and their way of live prevails. In the process, the colonized depend on collaborators willing to betray their people. These are the lessons to be learned.