In Knowledge and Decisions, one of those works that everyone ought to read, Thomas Sowell identifies seven features of totalitarian ideology:
● “the localization of evil in Jews, capitalists, or some other group – so that comprehensive political solutions to age-old human problems seem feasible within a reasonable time horizon by surgically removing the offending group, leaving a healthy body politic intact”
● “the localization of wisdom, to explain why this miraculous cure has escaped so many minds for so many centuries, as well as explaining the necessity for superseding democratic institutions and beliefs”
● “a single scale of values by which priorities may arranged in every field of human endeavor, to be achieved ‘at all cost’”
● “the presupposition of sufficient knowledge to achieve whatever goal may be projected”
● “the urgency of the ‘problem’ to be ‘solved’ so that ruthlessness is the lesser of two evils”
● “a psychic identification with millions, whose opinions may nevertheless be disregarded and whose lives may be sacrificed in the cause, without feelings of guilt”
● the creation of “a self-enclosed system, to exclude alternative views and visions” and “convert questions of fact into questions of motive”
That list has a familiar ring, for it describes, with near perfection, the leading features of the version of “progressive” ideology to which the term “woke” is nowadays applied. Evil is the monopoly of “white supremacists” (including, needless to say, Jews). All past thought is tainted by racism and therefore unable to address the endemic evils created by whiteness. Political values are the standard for evaluating everything from music to Halloween costumes to statues of historical figures. “Identity” explains everything, so that no other knowledge is necessary or desirable. Because the white supremacists hold sway over all institutions, “lawful” resistance simply plays into their hands. The “woke” are acting in behalf of the BIPoC and LGBTQI (which I endorse as an acrostic: “Let’s Get Biden to Quit Immediately”) masses, who don’t understand their own interests. Finally, all who reject the ideology are motivated by “white fragility”, the refusal to encounter their own ingrained racism, so that argument is superfluous and coercion justified.
If the advocates of this ideology copied the tactics of the totalitarians of the past, they would be instantly recognizable. Woke militias would take to the streets like the brown shirts, black shirts and Red Guards of old. To a very limited extent, they do, but Antifa is a shadow of the SA. The militia of wokery consists of the tens of thousands of adherents who enforce its doctrines within the small circles over which they wield power. University administrators intimidate teachers and students. “Enlightened” CEO’s compel underlings to attend “diversity training” where they can be imbued with feelings of shame or hubris based on their membership in oppressor or victim groups. Vocal twits form online mobs to demand that breaches of woke etiquette be punished by expulsion from society. And so on.
No Mussolini or Hitler or Stalin or Mao directs these operations. They bubble up spontaneously: distributed rather than centralized totalitarianism. Being a decentralized phenomenon, the woke ideology is prone to mutation. Contemporary communism is very much like what Marx and Engels expounded, but what wokery today differs vastly from what it was just a few years ago. It transfigures itself almost before our eyes, as illustrated by the sudden emergence of the denial of biological sex as a central tenet or the way that “LBGT” has lengthened to “2SLGBTQQIA+” and will no doubt grow further by this time next week.
Distributed totalitarianism is something new under the Sun. Before the Internet, it was inconceivable. Now it threatens to overwhelm the institutions and values on which society rests. On the other hand, its protean character renders it, if I may borrow a favorite woke term, fragile. The day may come, in no distant future, when civil wars arise within the woke domain. That has already occurred on a small scale in the polemics between radical feminists and transgender sex-deniers. It would be no surprise if that teapot-sized tempest were to be the portent of raging storms. Lenin could impose discipline on the Bolsheviks. Can Ibram X. Kendi control his “allies”?
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