Is Woke Losing?

There is much evidence to suggest that modern democracy, and with it modern political consciousness more broadly, is inclined to endless self-radicalization. Wokeness is only the latest manifestation of what Eric Voegelin called “modernity without restraint.” As the French scholar Jean-François Brunstein has written in a fine book on the subject, Wokeness is a secular religion born in the universities, one that sees the Western democracies as “systematically” sexist, racist, and colonialist and therefore as illicit and beyond redemption. As a result, the Woke show no tolerance toward those who resist its identification of any and all inequalities with “discrimination” and who oppose its efforts to remake human nature according to the requirements of gender theory.  As Braunstein aptly puts it, Wokeness inevitably culminates in a dictatorship of a crudely defined “social justice.”