Gov. DeSantis warns bad changes are coming
Gov. Ron DeSantis warns we’re at risk of tugging the nation into a “hell” of “Woke Marxism.”
It raised the prospect of a dystopian future that had escaped me until now. Marx himself recommended we transfer goods and services on the principle of “from each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs.”
DeSantis has left it to us to figure out what woke abilities are, which ones to put in the pot, who has woke needs, and how many woke units are required.
He is hardly the only Woke Cassandra. This season, other presidential, congressional, and state legislative candidates are running angrily against wokeness. It may just be another ephemeral, imagined scourge, but grown men and women are staking their future on the nation rising as one against it.
Whatever it is, it’s difficult to fit it into the Hegelian dialectic.
I assume the governor is basically picturing a Soviet-style authoritarian government in which a strongman decides the correct books we can read, medical procedures we can have, who we can love, which bathroom to use, who shouldn’t vote, whose rights are targeted and, among other outrages, what we can say and how we should say it. Oh, and which live shows and theme parks to go to.
No wonder he’s upset.
Go to Amazon and you will find books – some purportedly scholarly – entitled Woke Fascism, The Woke Warpath, as well as Woke Racism. Theologian Owen Strachen’s Christianity and Wokeness smells an apparently threatening echo of the social justice movement, a set of values that at least used to mean that much of what God delivers is a process of making things fair for others. Lest that catches on, one refreshingly direct author went straight to Wokeness is Wrong. The Independent Institute’s Victor Davis Hanson adds, “Wokeism’s natural logic is to destroy the lives of people of both genders, of all races, and—if need be—those of every age.”
The governor, himself a graduate of Yale and Harvard Law School, is just one of the putatively credentialed theorists to join the movement to stamp out wokeness.
In fact, “conspiracy theorist” apparently has become a profession. For example, Jerome R Corsi, a Ph.D. also from Harvard, describes himself as a conspiracy theorist. (It sounds like an admission that “I make things up for a living,” but I must be wrong.) He has authored, among other books and essays, Who Really Killed Kennedy, Obama Nation, Killing the Deep State, as well as “The Truth about Energy, Global Warming and Climate Change.” He recently released 529 pages of The Truth about Neo-Marxism, Cultural Maoism, and Anarchy: Exposing Woke Insanity in an Age of Disinformation. One of his tweets revealed that “Electric Vehicles Are An Ideologically Driven Misadventure.”
“Anti-wokeness” became Republican policy after “defund the police” flickered as a cause celebre amid a faction of the left. Looking at this year’s election cycle, Amy Walter of the Cook Political Report observed, “Republicans have used a war on ‘woke’ to rally their voters. It feels as if there’s more energy on the right for defeating the ideology of ‘wokeness’ than in defeating President Biden.”
Indeed, the polling firm Navigator found more than half of those surveyed had heard about “wokeness,” but a plurality admitted they didn’t know what it means. They were concerned that politicians are focusing on the “wrong things.” They’d like them to talk about “wokeness” less.
It’s hard to judge which party is worse in these matters. Both Right and Left emphasize imperiled genders, masculinity, or lack thereof. Secret governments steal elections or secret governments steal justice. Diluted religion invites tragedy and undiluted religion invites hypocrisy. One side suspects all public health crises. The other replaces economic status with race.
You’re either moral or you’re not. Sexual orientation is a sin to some, and a grievance to others. The privileged (secret or not) are evil, the rest of us are exploited, and no matter what you do or say or how you behave, you always will be privileged or exploited. These are un-washable stains. You’re an objectionable Identity. There is nothing you can do to change it.
The proof for such, moreover, consists mostly of partisans’ emphatic declarations.
In 1994, Higher Superstition: The Academic Left and its Quarrels with Science examined how researchers abuse science to achieve their political goals. Regardless of the method, the result is “pseudoscientific alarmism.” The authors, the late Norman Levitt, a mathematician at Rutgers, and biologist Paul R. Gross, professor emeritus at the University of Virginia, mourned that Enlightenment ideals of universalism, rationalism, and arriving at truth through repeatable experiments are endangered species.
“Essentially embarrassed” by some of the scholarship surrounding sociology research and hoping to demonstrate how respectable pseudoscience had become, James A. Lindsay, Peter Boghossian, and Helen Plukrose submitted twenty pretty funny “hoax studies” to well-respected academic journals. At least seven of their twenty papers were accepted for publication.
One study, “Human Reactions to Rape Culture and Queer Performativity at Urban Dog Parks in Portland, Oregon,” raised concern that humping incidents at the parks amounted to dog rape. One reviewer of the “study” gravely complained that the researchers “didn’t respect the dogs’ privacy.”
In a brief film, Lindsay explained they took “absurd and horrible ideas and made them politically fashionable.” In one of their “studies,” they lifted arguments directly from Mein Kampf. Another examined “The Complex Relationship between Marxism and Wokeness.”
Perhaps Governor DeSantis and the scores of other political candidates making it a tentpole of their campaigns didn’t get the joke.
Lindsay allows that similarly biased research “is pervasive across many disciplines.” With his partners, he contends “the same rigor” of real research should apply to our political agenda.
Take note, Governor.