The Evangelical Origins of Wokeness

The Genealogy of Wokeism (Part 2)

A Recap of Part 1 & My Theory of Wokeism

This essay traces the historical genealogy of wokeism, the consciousness-first political style that has become one of the most contentious and poorly understood phenomena in contemporary politics. In the Part one essay, I established the definition: wokeism is a style of politics that presupposes that the awakening of a correct consciousness is the prerequisite for political solidarity and political action. Wokeism tends to manifest most in liberal-leftist politics these days, but it is not exclusive to it, and not all leftists are “woke.” It is a modeof political thinking rather than a coherent ideological doctrine, and the woke mentalityis not defined by any inherent ideological content, whether progressive or conservative.

The core component of wokeism is a particular disposition and approach to going about politics. “Woke” approaches to political thinking, activism, and social change operate under the assumption that people must wake up to what is deemed to be the politically correct views at a particular time for social justice to be actualized. This is why they are so obsessed with cultural hegemony, propaganda, ideology, and discourse, because the woke people tend to be convinced that people not thinking the right way or using the right language is the core barrier to the change they want to see. Rather than building movements by meeting people halfway where they are at, the woke mentality assumes that people must be re-educated and awakened to conform to a set of correct ideas. Wokeism envisions political change as a process of consciousness raising: a cultural revolution that later manifests into a political one. It prioritizes shared consciousness and etiquette over shared class interests, and presupposes that mass awakening to a new sensibility must occur before change is possible.

I then demonstrated how this definition captures the common denominator that ties together the phenomena most often associated with wokeism: political correctness, cancel culture, call-out culture, and identity politics. These are all manifestations of consciousness policing. If the key to justice is ensuring that everyone has the correct consciousness, the logical next step is controlling what people think and say. Wokeism inevitably leads to the policing of language and ideas, because the lack of a “correct consciousness” or the deviation from it within the in-group are seen as the main barriers to justice. I also argued that wokeism is fundamentally anti-political in character: it reduces politics to a matter of who thinks correctly and who does not, rather than engaging with the messy, pluralist work of building coalitions across deep disagreements to contest power and win material gains.

Part 1 also identified who the woke people are and where they come from. Drawing heavily on sociologist Musa Al-Gharbi’s 2024 book We Have Never Been Woke, I showed that the primary carriers of wokeism are not the genuinely marginalized and disadvantaged, but rather those whom Al-Gharbi calls “symbolic capitalists”: the stratum of the Professional Managerial Class (PMC) whose work involves the production and manipulation of discourse, rhetoric, and cultural meaning, including academics, journalists, media pundits, HR professionals, and those in arts and entertainment. Their political style is fundamentally post-materialist: they prioritize symbols, rhetoric, and cultural recognition over the material “bread and butter” concerns of working-class people. In woke-captured spaces, marginalized identities become valuable commodities, what Al-Gharbi calls “totemic capital,” in which victimhood functions as a form of status currency in the competition for scarce professional opportunities. Al-Gharbi’s materialist analysis explains when and why awakenings occur. My definition provides the missing piece: a concrete articulation of what wokeism actually is and how to recognize it.

What remains is the historical question: where does this consciousness-first template come from? How did a style of politics organized around awakening, conversion, and the policing of belief become so deeply embedded in American political culture? The answer, as this essay will show, lies not in Marxism, not in postmodernism, and not in any foreign import, but in one of the oldest and most characteristically American traditions: evangelical Protestant revivalism.

1. Genealogy I: The Protestant Origins of Wokeism

a. The First and Second Great Awakenings

While the word “woke” may have originated in African American vernacular, the sociological phenomenon of wokeism, the consciousness-first approach to socio-political thinking defined above, can be traced back to American Evangelism. To understand wokeism’s genealogy, we must begin with the First and Second Great Awakenings, the Protestant revivals that established the template for American moral reform.

The First Great Awakening (1730s-1750s) introduced something radically new to American religious life: the idea that genuine transformation required not just intellectual acceptance of doctrine but a personal, emotional “awakening.” Calvinist theologian Jonathan Edwards and itinerant preacher George Whitefield, two of the movement’s most influential figures, did not just preach theology; they sought to produce an inner tremor, a “new birth” that would fundamentally transform the individual.

The Second Great Awakening (1790s-1840s) built on these foundations while adding elements crucial for understanding contemporary wokeism. Unlike the First Awakening, which remained largely Calvinist, the Second witnessed a movement toward ideas of universal salvation and religious free will. Anyone could choose to accept grace rather than being predetermined for salvation or damnation.

Most significantly, the Second Great Awakening placed increased emphasis on “good works” and human agency in salvation, which helped spur the era’s numerous social reform movements: temperance, women’s rights, and abolitionism, among others. The camp meetings that characterized this revival featured simple, lively preaching that deeply affected participants, often producing strong emotional responses considered evidence of genuine conversion.

Now it is important to not confuse the great awakenings with “right-wing wokeism.” While Evangelical Christians tend to overwhelmingly lean to the right today, the Protestant revivals of the first and second great awakenings were not explicitly right or left wing. In many ways, they were quite progressive for their time and focused a lot on social justice. The First Great Awakening broke down traditional religious hierarchies by suggesting that individuals could have direct spiritual experiences without clerical mediation. Women, African Americans, Native Americans, even children were sometimes permitted to exhort when ministers recognized the Holy Spirit upon them. The democratization of Christianity that occurred with the great awakenings is also a big part of what made evangelicalism uniquely American.

Born-Again Christians: What Made Evangelicals Different

As historian Mark Noll documents in The Rise of Evangelicalism, the movement crystallized in 18th-century Britain and the American colonies out of the convergence of English Puritanism, continental Pietism, and High Church Anglican spirituality, defined above all by what historian David Bebbington identifies as its four core commitments: conversionism, biblicism, activism, and crucicentrism.¹

One of the things that made Evangelicals profoundly different from Catholics is the expectation to be a “born-again” Christian. In Catholicism, one can be initiated into the faith through baptism, participate in the sacraments, and belong to the Church without undergoing any dramatic personal transformation. For Evangelicals, this is not enough. The individual must undergo a personal “awakening” and arrive at the absolutely correct internal belief themselves. Mere observance, mere ritual, mere inheritance of the faith from one’s parents counts for nothing without the inner experience of conversion.

Modern wokeism operates on a parallel consciousness-first premise. It is a consciousness-first style of politics that assumes people must individually “wake up” to the correct political ideas as a strict prerequisite for solidarity, rather than building coalitions based on shared material interests. You cannot simply be a good person, support the right policies, or show up to the right protests. You must demonstrate that you have undergone the correct internal transformation.

The crucial link is the “born again” experience: awakening and the demonstration of belief are treated as the most important conditions of being an Evangelical. Salvation becomes legible through an inner transformation that must be narrated, recognized, and affirmed. You are not simply initiated into a community by inheritance or ritual. You are expected to testify that you have been changed. This is the template that wokeism inherits in secular form: conversion before coalition, awakening before action. Woke policing rituals often echo many of the puritanical tendencies of evangelical purification. First, you’re told you have unconscious bias, original sin. Then you need to become aware of it, awakening. You might have to share your journey or check your privilege publicly, testimony. You need ongoing training to maintain your awareness and discipleship.

God’s Plan: Literalism & The Democratization of Authority

The structural condition that produces these parallels did not begin with American Evangelicalism. It has its origins in the Protestant Reformation, which, when Luther established that the individual’s relationship to scripture supersedes the authority of institutional tradition, set in motion a logic whose consequences neither Luther nor his immediate successors fully anticipated. Once the principle was established that one’s personal interpretation of biblical text and one’s direct relationship with God matters more than the accumulated doctrinal tradition preserved by an authoritative clerical structure, there was no principled stopping point.

The result, unfolding over centuries, was a proliferation of competing Protestant denominations, each convinced of the correctness of its reading and none possessing an institution capable of adjudicating between them: Lutheranism, Calvinism, Presbyterianism, the Baptist tradition, and eventually, in America, Evangelicalism, Mormonism, and a wide range of increasingly fringe sects. The fragmentation was not a failure of the Reformation project. It was its structural consequence, the predictable outcome of removing the interpretive institution that Catholic and Orthodox Christianity had preserved through their more authoritative clerical structures and emphasis on doctrinal tradition over individual interpretation. American Evangelicalism represents the furthest development of this logic on American soil, the point at which the democratization of interpretive authority reaches its most radical expression.

But the democratization of interpretive authority carries a consequence that rarely gets named directly. When the accumulated weight of a clerical tradition is displaced in favor of direct, unmediated encounter with scripture, the text must bear the full weight of moral authority without any buffer, and this is precisely what produces literalism as the structural companion of democratization rather than as a separate tendency. A word stripped of its interpretive tradition is a word whose surface meaning becomes its total meaning. The history of revivalist Evangelicalism makes this dynamic visible in ways that are sometimes striking.

Where Catholic and Orthodox theology treat the Church itself as the mediating authority between believer and text, centuries of accumulated doctrinal interpretation have shaped how passages are read, often understanding Old Testament covenant language as referring to the spiritual community of the Church rather than any literal geographic territory. Revivalist Evangelical Christianity tends to read the same passages as direct, concrete predictions about modern geopolitical events: the modern state of Israel, Jewish people physically occupying the biblical land, and the unfolding of apocalyptic prophecy in real time. The interpretive tradition that would complicate or spiritualize these readings has been bypassed in favor of the surface meaning taken as total meaning. The same literalism extends into the Evangelical understanding of divine providence. Because God is understood to be literally shaping every event according to a discernible and partly legible plan, prayer functions as a mechanism that produces literal outcomes rather than an act of orientation toward mystery. For many Evangelical communities, the correct belief is not merely the condition of one’s own salvation but is understood to be actively efficacious in the world. Prayer works because God literally responds to it. The apocalypse is not simply awaited but in some sense accelerated by the accumulation of correct belief among the faithful. The right consciousness does not merely describe what is coming; it participates in bringing it about. This is a structure of thinking that the essay’s later sections will find reproduced almost exactly in woke discourse, where changing the language is understood not merely to reflect a changed reality but to help constitute one. This is quite different from the Catholic and Orthodox sensibility, in which God may work in ways that remain opaque to human interpretation, and in which history is not presumed to be a readable script.

The consequences of this distinction become most visible on something like climate change. Many Evangelical communities, reading apocalyptic prophecy literally and understanding the transformation of the natural world as part of God’s unfolding will, tend toward acceptance and discernment rather than intervention. If what is happening is literally God’s plan being enacted, resisting it sits uneasily with the theological framework. Both recent popes, by contrast, have treated climate change as a moral emergency demanding urgent human intervention, which follows naturally from a tradition that does not presume the world’s unfolding to be a transparent expression of divine intention. The Catholic Church has historically understood itself as an active institutional presence in the world precisely because it does not assume that what is already happening is simply God’s will being done. The paradox is worth sitting with: the most radically democratized, anti-authority tendency within Christianity is also among the most literalist. Removing the interpretive institution does not free the believer from rigid readings. It tends to make those readings more variable and harder to correct.

This same dynamic helps explain why the internal diversity of interpretation that emerges in these movements is not necessarily a sign of intellectual vitality but of structural fragility. When any believer can read the text directly and claim authority for their reading, the result can be a proliferation of incompatible literalisms, each resistant to correction because no institution exists to adjudicate between them. The democratization of authority does not automatically liberate ideas. In the absence of mediating structures, it tends to degrade them as they pass through individuals without the conceptual guardrails that institutional interpretation would ordinarily provide.

The same pattern tends to produce characteristic forms of literalism throughout woke discourse. A racially charged joke is not merely offensive or crude; it is treated as literally enacting the harm it depicts. An aesthetic historically associated with fascism is not merely troubling or worth examining critically; it can be read as literally being fascism. Both the literalism and the consciousness-first thinking that wokeism shares with revivalist Evangelicalism are partly downstream of the same structural condition: the absence of any authority capable of preserving the nuanced, mediated interpretation of doctrine that a stable institutional tradition would ordinarily provide. In the case of wokeism, however, the consciousness-first orientation carries an additional and distinct driver.

As shown in Part 1, it emerges predominantly from symbolic capitalist industries, academia, media, art, and entertainment, whose professional lives literally revolve around the production and manipulation of symbols and discourse. People whose careers are built on the power of language and representation will naturally tend to see symbolic change as the primary lever of social transformation. Yet the absence of any central authoritative gatekeeper binding a single coherent woke ideology means that the frameworks these industries produce get taken up in contradictory and often extreme ways, varying enormously depending on how individuals choose to interpret the ideas they have been awakened to. This is precisely why defenders of wokeism can so readily move the goalposts whenever the movement is criticized. Ludicrous or extreme expressions of woke politics get dismissed as strawmen, and the defense invariably takes the form of insisting that the critics have misunderstood what gender theory, degrowth, feminism, or Marxist class consciousness really means. But this appeal to the true or original meaning is structurally hollow, because there is no coherent doctrine or institutional authority capable of legitimizing the intellectual’s claim to know what the ideology in question genuinely requires. The serious gender theorist, the committed ecosocialist, the principled Marxist who insists that the woke distortions of their frameworks are not representative face a problem that is not merely rhetorical but structural: without an authoritative institution capable of drawing and enforcing a boundary between legitimate and illegitimate interpretation, their claim to the correct reading carries no more weight than anyone else’s. What remains is an evolving body of politically correct language and narratives that keep getting adopted and reinterpreted by different people for different reasons, sometimes for status competition, sometimes out of genuine conviction, and often both at once.

These structural parallels between Evangelicalism and wokeism are significant, but they should not be pushed into a simple equivalence.

Wokeism is NOT a “Secular Religion”

It is tempting to make the argument that modern wokeism is simply evangelicalism without God. While evangelical revivalism was certainly an antecedent for the template of the woke mode of consciousness-first politics, it would be an oversimplification to say that wokeism is merely evangelical Christianity in secularized form. While modern wokeism (as shown in the Part 1 Essay) emerged through elite overproduction within the PMC and symbolic capitalists, the first and second Great Awakenings were much more so genuinely bottom-up mass mobilizations.

They spread through itinerant preaching, lay participation, voluntary association, and grassroots energy that could not be fully controlled from above. Whatever their ideological limits, Evangelical Christians were capable of producing thick, popular forms of community: people gathered physically, sang together, confessed together, organized together, and built durable local networks. In other words, revivalism did not only demand a certain consciousness, it also provided a social ecology that could bind ordinary people into a movement. This binding function is one of the core components of what defines religion from any other system of belief, and it is not an accident that the word “religion" itself is believed to originate from the Latin religare, meaning "to bind.”

This matters because it clarifies the precise claim of this essay. My thesis is not “wokeism is Christianity in secularized form.” The point is that Wokeism resembles a mentality and approach to societal change that is deeply-rooted in American culture rather than germinating from foreign imports brought by “neo-Marxist” intellectuals infiltrating American universities. Rather, modern wokeism tends to take a particularly intense expression in America, particularly due to its Evangelical protestant heritage. Wokeism is as American as apple pie, and it’s steeped deep into America’s Protestant Heritage. As we will see, modern progressive wokeism has far more in common with Evangelicalism than it does with Marxist materialism. The Great Awakenings are an early mass instance of that pattern, even if their organizational sociology was very different from the symbolic-capitalist variant that dominates elite institutions today.

And this is where modern progressive wokeism quietly flips the revival logic into something colder. Evangelical revivalism, even at its most fanatical, is still typically conversionist. It assumes the unawakened can be awakened, and it organizes itself around the attempt to persuade, recruit, and bring outsiders in. The movement is harsh in its moral categories, but it is outward-facing. It wants growth, it wants expansion, it wants to win souls.

Contemporary elite-progressive wokeism, by contrast, is far more policing-centered than conversion-centered. This is because unlike Evangelical Christianity, which tries to convert people by appealing to universal truths that are legitimized by a pre-existing theological doctrine (the Christian Bible), modern Wokeism explicitly tries to go against common sense while lacking the traditional legitimacy and doctrinal coherence capable of advancing its narratives.

Modern woke narratives tend to only carry legitimacy within symbolic capitalist institutions that woke people inhabit, but woke people are very bad at selling these narratives to normies outside the symbolic capitalist matrix. The wokes take their narratives and presuppositions as a given and often hardly even question them enough to fully understand why they believe them. As a result, when woke people get questioned on their ideological biases regarding issues like gender or race, they tend to resort to circular reasoning and/or appeal to authority (credentials, academic expertise, etc.) without patiently explaining the logic of their narratives to the people who have not already been exposed to them.

Thus, due to the inherently anti-social and self-referential tendencies of modern woke ideology, woke people often give up on trying to convince people outside their own bubble and end up spending much of their energy on surveilling the language, ideas, and behaviors of other people within their woke symbolic capitalist orbit. Recall the Part 1 essay’s discussion of Musa Al-Gharbi’s book which showed that wokeism emerges in part as a drive for status competition between struggling symbolic capitalist aspirants during cycles of elite overproduction.

When considering this, it’s not hard to see why woke “communities” so often implode into cancel culture as woke people turn against each other due to status competition over diminishing slices of symbolic capitalist power in the guise of moral debates over social sanctions, virtue signaling, and principled displays of correct consciousness. Consequently, modern wokeism ends up functioning more like an internal disciplinary regime rather than a missionary movement. It produces far fewer genuine converts because it often does not treat persuasion as the point. It treats compliance as the point. This is why it can dominate institutions while remaining socially brittle.

But contemporary wokeism represents revival without redemption. Christianity, for all its emphasis on sin and judgment, places grace and forgiveness near the center. Wokeism, by contrast, generates condemnation without much space for forgiveness, producing perpetual guilt and anxiety without a stable path back into fellowship.

Cancel culture, in turn, is the enforcement mechanism for consciousness conformity. It’s the contemporary equivalent of church discipline or, more accurately, excommunication. When someone violates the orthodoxies of woke consciousness, by using the wrong language, expressing the wrong ideas, or failing to demonstrate sufficient commitment to the cause, they must be cast out.

Consider the ritualistic nature of a typical cancellation: the initial accusation (testimony against the sinner), the pile-on (congregation affirming the sin), the demanded apology (confession), and the debate over whether the apology is sufficient (judgment on the sincerity of repentance). Even the language used, “problematic,” “harmful,” “violence,” is itself evidence of this enchanted relationship to the word, in which terminology does not merely describe a wrong but enacts one. This is the direct inheritance of evangelical literalism: once interpretive mediation is removed and words carry full moral weight on their own, policing what people say and policing what people think become the same activity.

This also helps explain why the popular line “wokeism is a religion” is both true and misleading. It is true in the sense that it has a moral cosmology, a language of sin and impurity, and a demand for public proof of righteousness. But it is misleading because it lacks the very thing that makes a religion socially powerful, a shared way of life anchored in durable institutions and collective ritual. Revival Christianity, for all its excesses, built churches, congregations, mutual aid, embodied practices, and a concrete metaphysical horizon that could stabilize the believer. Progressive wokeism often offers the moral urgency of religion without the communal glue of religion. It generates fervor without durable fellowship, and it generates condemnation faster than it generates forgiveness.

The result is a peculiar paradox. A consciousness-first movement that lacks binding communal practices will increasingly substitute symbolic compliance for real solidarity. That substitution is one of the reasons modern woke politics is so easy for elite institutions to absorb, professionalize, and weaponize.

Yet the deeper point is that this revival template can be filled with very different political contents, sometimes producing real moral progress, other times producing coercive crusades.

There is, however, another difference between wokeism and evangelical Christianity that points toward an even older genealogy. Evangelical revivalism, for all its emphasis on personal awakening, is still steeped in appeals to universal truths: scripture, divine law, a moral order that applies to everyone regardless of who they are. Contemporary wokeism tends to move in the opposite direction. Rather than grounding itself in universals, it appeals to the subjective experience of particular identity groups, a framework scholars call standpoint epistemology. Knowledge is treated not as something accessible to all through reason or revelation, but as something that depends on where you stand in a hierarchy of oppression. This is why woke discourse so often goes against common sense: its claims are not meant to be validated by ordinary experience but by the privileged perceptions of those who have been properly initiated into the correct theoretical frameworks. Or by marginalized groups whose experience of alienation from the dominant culture is supposed to make them uniquely positioned to access certain truths concealed by “the dominant ideology.” For this reason, one can argue that modern wokeism is even more like Gnosticism than it is like Evangelicalism.

b. Wokeism as Modern Gnosticism

Gnosticism refers to a family of religious movements that emerged in the first centuries of the Common Era, drawing on early Christian, Jewish, and pagan sources. The word comes from the Greek gnosis, meaning “knowledge.” Gnostics believed that the material world was not the creation of a benevolent God but the product of a flawed or malevolent lesser deity, a demiurge, who trapped divine sparks in matter. The visible world was therefore a kind of prison or illusion, and salvation came not through faith, ritual, or good works, but through acquiring a secret spiritual knowledge that revealed the world’s true nature. Orthodox Christianity condemned Gnosticism as heresy precisely because it divided believers into two castes: the ordinary faithful, who could only see the surface of things, and the “knowers,” who had been initiated into a deeper, hidden reality. It is this epistemic structure, not the specific theological content, that makes the Gnostic analogy useful for understanding wokeism.

Gnosticism matters here not because wokeism is secretly an ancient heresy revived, but because it captures a recurring epistemic temptation: the belief that politics begins with privileged perception. Gnosticism drew a hard line between those who live in appearances and those who possess special knowledge, a deeper awareness that reveals the world’s true structure. Much of woke discourse adopts the same posture. Reality is framed as hidden by ideology, language is treated as a veil, and moral truth is reserved for those who have undergone the proper initiation into the right way of seeing.

Once politics is built on this premise, consciousness becomes the precondition of legitimacy. The primary task is not to organize around shared interests but to awaken the unseeing, and to cleanse the community of those whose perception is deemed corrupted. That is why woke politics so easily turns disagreement into moral failure, and why it treats dissent less as a normal feature of coalition building than as evidence that someone has not yet been awakened, or has been politically conditioned by the wrong ideologies. It transforms politics into an epistemic sorting mechanism, separating the “initiated” from the “uninitiated,” and calling that separation justice.

In contemporary woke discourses, this Gnostic posture takes a specific form. Power structures are portrayed as all-powerful, invisible forces, patriarchy, white supremacy,heteropatriarchy, that permeate every institution and interaction but can only be perceived after one has been awakened to the correct critical theories. Before initiation, you are complicit in these structures without even knowing it. After initiation, you can finally “see” what was always there. This understanding of reality then gets projected onto how woke people approach structural change. Because the structures of oppression are framed as social constructs, the assumption follows that they can be deconstructed and reconstructed through the right language and the right consciousness. “We just made these structures up, so we can change them again.” The appeal is seductive, but it rests on a conflation: the fact that something is socially constructed does not mean it is infinitely malleable or that it yields to discursive intervention alone.

This Gnostic logic is visible in the everyday language of woke discourse. Phrases like “educate yourself” and “it is not my job to explain this to you” function as epistemic gatekeeping, treating political knowledge not as something advocates should be persuading people of, but as hidden wisdom the uninitiated must earn access to on their own. The very notion that disagreement stems from ignorance rather than genuine difference of perspective, that the critic simply “does not get it,” is a Gnostic move dressed in progressive language. It forecloses debate by recasting it as a deficiency of perception.

Magical Thinking & Politics as Manifestation

What follows from this Gnostic posture is a kind of magical thinking. Once politics is reduced to consciousness, it becomes easy to imagine that the right thoughts, the right words, and the right symbols do not merely describe reality but actively conjure it. This is why many woke-minded people react to criticism as though naming a weakness already strengthens the enemy. An ideology stripped of interpretive mediation, like a text stripped of its tradition, can leave the individual with only the surface, and a surface taken with total seriousness tends to feel as though it constitutes reality rather than merely describing it.

It is a recurring feature of revivalist puritanism in its more radical forms, and one that woke consciousness reproduces in secular terms when it mistakes changing the discourse for changing the conditions. If a critique of the left happens to overlap with something the right also says, they often treat the acknowledgment itself as a form of capitulation. The possibility that the criticism might actually be true, and that one should learn from it, gets displaced by a quasi-magical fear that affirming it gives it force.

You see the same logic in anti-imperialist subcultures that insist they are nothing like liberal woke politics. Point out that American hegemony is not collapsing in the dramatic way they hoped, or that rival powers are not the emancipatory counterweight they imagine, and the response is often that you are helping empire by repeating imperial propaganda. But this confuses analysis with affirmation. It assumes that stating a balance of power helps sustain it, as though political reality bends to incantation. At that point politics starts to resemble manifestation, the fantasy that the correct consciousness can summon the correct world into being.

This also clarifies the deeper constructivist impulse of woke discourse. If social reality is thought to be constituted primarily through discourse, then changing discourse begins to look like changing reality itself. Masculinity and femininity are reduced to constructs, therefore they must be endlessly reconstructable. Gender is treated as wholly socially constructed, therefore identification is presumed capable of overriding the stubborn facts of sexed embodiment.

This is why hostility to biology is not incidental. Woke milieus are often allergic to any appeal to biological constraint, especially to evolutionary psychology, sex difference research, or even commonsense claims about embodiment, because such appeals interrupt the fantasy that consciousness can simply rewrite reality. It is not a mere coincidence that both Evangelicals and Woke people today tend to be hostile to evolutionary science and express a kind of magical thinking. This odd homology is downstream of the consciousness-first mode.

And it is no accident that this mentality finds such a natural home among symbolic capitalists. Precisely because their social power is rooted in the production and management of symbols, language, prestige, and knowledge, it is deeply convenient for them to believe that changing symbols and minds is what changes the world. In their own professional terrain, discourse really does shape reputations, legitimacy, and access. That is why even very educated people can arrive at remarkably foolish conclusions here. Their intelligence does not protect them from the bias. It often rationalizes it. The more one’s class position is bound up with symbolic power, the easier it becomes to mistake symbolic control for social transformation.

This also explains why postmodern and poststructuralist theorists are so attractive to woke-minded symbolic capitalists. It is a mistake to view thinkers like Foucault and Derrida as the originators of woke ideology; rather, the expansion of the PMC and the symbolic capitalist industries led wokeism in academia to gravitate toward these thinkers because their frameworks legitimize the consciousness-first worldview. Derrida’s demonstration of the fluidity of meaning and language gets taken as proof that structures and meaning can be infinitely rewritten, deconstructed, and recentered. Foucault’s analysis of power is used to delegitimize traditions, rationalize institutional changes, or simply tear things down by framing everything as a product of power relations. Judith Butler’s argument that gender is a construct that is performed leads to the conclusion that people can be taught to perform differently: if people perform the way they do because of conditioning, then they can be reconditioned to be less sexist, less gender-binary, and so on.

Within this framework, the attempt to forge reality through language and consciousness becomes a legitimate path to progress. But the mode of thinking precedes the thinkers. These theorists are attractive to symbolic capitalist minds not because they invented a new politics, but because they provide intellectual legitimacy for a worldview that was already convenient: that the world changes through the production and revision of symbols, which happens to be exactly what symbolic capitalists do for a living.

This also clarifies why the Gnostic parallel is ultimately more precise than the evangelical one. Evangelical Christianity, for all its literalism and moral absolutism, is fundamentally generative. It builds churches, founds schools, creates thick communities, and actively seeks to expand through conversion. Its orientation is outward: it wants more people inside the fold, and it organizes its entire institutional life around growth, transmission, and the reproduction of a positive doctrinal vision across generations. Whatever one thinks of its theology, evangelicalism has been remarkably successful on its own terms precisely because it offers converts something to belong to, not merely something to reject. Modern progressive wokeism inverts this logic almost entirely. It is defined far more by what it opposes than by what it affirms: anti-colonial, anti-patriarchal, anti-capitalist, anti-Western, anti-heteronormative. Its characteristic intellectual operation is deconstruction, the dismantling of existing frameworks, traditions, and forms of social reproduction that are deemed complicit in structures of oppression. The “awakening” it offers is not an awakening to a positive vision of the good life but an awakening to the pervasiveness of hidden domination. Once awakened, the convert does not join a thick community with durable practices and a shared way of life. They adopt a posture of permanent critique, one that is structurally incapable of generating the kinds of stable institutions and social bonds that sustain movements across generations. This is why wokeism depends so heavily on capturing existing institutions (universities, media, HR departments) rather than building its own. It lacks the generative capacity to create durable alternatives to the structures it deconstructs.

Gnosticism suffered from exactly the same structural limitation. It offered initiates a secret knowledge that the material world was a prison, but it provided no positive program for living within that world, no thick communal life, no durable institutional form capable of reproducing itself. Its orientation was entirely toward negation: the world is false, the body is a trap, the ruling powers are corrupt. Historical Gnosticism was marginalized and eventually extinguished with relative ease, not because its opponents were simply more ruthless, but because a movement organized around secret knowledge and the rejection of the material order lacks the social infrastructure required to sustain itself across generations. It cannot build what it is constitutionally committed to deconstructing. The same logic explains the cyclical pattern documented in Part 1: each Awokening erupts with intense energy, captures institutions for a period, and then dissipates once the material pressures ease, leaving remarkably little behind, because nothing durable was built. The evangelical megachurch outlasts the diversity office precisely because one is constructive and outward-facing while the other is deconstructive and inward-facing. A movement that can only spread by awakening people to how bad things are, without offering them a way of life worth reproducing, will always burn itself out.

With that side-analogy in place, we can return to the more historically decisive genealogy, the evangelical template of awakening, conversion, and moralized belonging that would later reappear in secular form.

Before tracing how the woke mode eventually took on a secular form, crystallizing during the 1960s with the rise of consciousness-raising movements and the New Left during the countercultural decade of the 60s, it is necessary to understand what it displaced: class politics, which based solidarity in mutual material interests rather than shared beliefs.

c. The Rise of Class Politics & Marxism

The nineteenth century transformed every dimension of political life. Industrial capitalism uprooted millions from agrarian communities, concentrated them in factories and cities, and subjected them to conditions, child labor, twelve-hour workdays, poverty wages, that made the Enlightenment promises of freedom and equality ring hollow. Out of this upheaval emerged class politics: the idea that solidarity is grounded not in shared belief or cultural identity but in the shared material interests of those who labor for a living.

Marxism was the most influential expression of this materialist politics, and what distinguished it from the many other socialist currents of the time was a specific claim about the direction of causality. Material conditions determine consciousness, not the other way around. You do not change society by changing how people think; you change how people think by changing the material relations in which they live. The working class, in this framework, was not revolutionary because of who they were or what they believed, but because of their structural position in production. Concentrated in factories, collectively producing the wealth on which the entire system depended, workers possessed an organizational power that no previous exploited class had held. Their leverage was not moral or epistemic. It was structural.

And it is precisely this starting point that wokeism reverses.

Marx Was Not Woke

Contrary to the popular narratives of right-wing ideologues like James Lindsay and Jordan Peterson, who insist on blaming “cultural Marxism” for everything, Karl Marx was not woke. The more nuanced paleoconservative thinker Paul Gottfried made precisely this point in his article “Marx Was Not Woke,” and demonstrated how completely the New Left deviated from the old class-first left in his 2005 book The Strange Death of Marxism. Classical Marxism, in many ways, was the opposite of woke. Marxism is based on a materialist conception of social change, not an idealist, consciousness-first approach. A Marxist looks at racism and says: “This emerges from the economic need to justify slavery and divide workers.” A woke person looks at racism and says: “This emerges from wrong thoughts that need to be corrected through education.” A Marxist says: “Organize workers across racial lines to fight capital.” A woke person says: “Center the most marginalized voices and defer to their experience.” A Marxist says: “Material equality will lead to cultural change.” A woke person says: “Cultural change will lead to material equality.”

Wokeism is consciousness-first. Marxism is material-first. They are not the same thing; they are opposites. Marxism does not claim that the working class will rise up simply because they suddenly realize they are oppressed. The working class is not revolutionary because of who they are but because of their role in production, because they have the collective power to shut down the system and reshape it. It is about structure, not sentiment. Wokeism operates on the opposite premise: that people must be re-educated into the correct way of thinking before society can change. It places ideology before structure, thought before action.

The Wokeification of Marxism and “Class Consciousness”

Marxism, insofar as it actually has anything to do with the ideas of Marx and Engels, is the antithesis of wokeism. It grounds solidarity in mutual class interests, not in shared political consciousness. In fact, Marx and Engels did not even use the language of “left” and “right” to describe their political project. They framed their communist vision as a class struggle rooted in the objective structural conflict between the laboring classes and the property-owning classes.

However, for many socialists and communists today, Marxism has been more of a fan club for disaffected academics and student autodidacts than a political project that involves the working class. In many Marxist circles, the question of how to mobilize workers becomes less important than the obsession with having the correct Marxist “take.” Entry into politics becomes a matter of theoretical credentialing. It is not “What coalition can we build?” but “Do you understand the doctrine?” In such cases, Marxism takes on the exact same social form as wokeism: belief first, coalition second, and power perpetually deferred. You end up with a subculture that is very confident in its analysis, very fluent in denunciation, and strangely incapable of building durable institutions. The Cultural Revolution (which I covered in-depth in one of my most widely viewed documentaries on the 1Dime YouTube channel), and other episodes of hard-left moral crusading, show how quickly a putatively materialist politics can mutate into purity tests, public rituals of self-criticism, and ideological policing once correct consciousnessbecomes the real basis of legitimacy.

A common case of this “woke Marxism” manifests in the notion of “class consciousness,” which is interpreted and misused by many Marxist activists who are sociologically far removed from the working class they claim to speak for. Marx and Engels originally did not regard class consciousness as some magical spell that intellectuals bestow on the masses from above. They treated it as something that would naturally arise in response to the objective conditions and struggles of the working class, something that emerges organically when material pressures sharpen and collective life makes certain interests obvious. Intellectuals and political leaders could direct class consciousness toward particular political projects, but Marx did not imagine it was the job of some elite intellectual vanguard to cultivate it.

Yet many Marxists in contemporary leftist activism treat class consciousness as a gnostic secret they must awaken the masses to, rather than as something the working class naturally possesses through its objective life experiences under capitalism. We have all encountered the type: the prototypical self-identified Marxist with the Che Guevara T-shirt, whose habitat is typically college campuses and faculty lounges rather than factory floors, and who is convinced that the reason workers are not flocking to socialism is a “lack of class consciousness.” This often leads to the assumption that all that is needed to advance socialism is more propaganda. Repeat “capitalism is bad” loudly enough, and the masses will awaken, and organization will magically follow.

What this misses is that the barriers to working-class organizing are structural, not merely ideological. Union density has collapsed not because workers are too ignorant to recognize exploitation, but because the institutional and economic costs of organizing have become brutally high: capital mobility, globalization, a growing reserve army of labor, intensified replaceability, and real retaliation risks that make unionizing a dangerous bet for ordinary people.

Ironically, many New Leftists would champion the very policies and ideologies that inadvertently contributed to this crippling of working-class power. In the name of progressivism and internationalism, much of the left would end up championing globalization, mass migration, pressuring women into the workforce, and outsourcing family functions to specialist functions of the state and medical industry. In some cases, leftists would even embrace neoliberalism outright, as described in Johanna Bockman’s book Markets in the Name of Socialism: The Left-Wing Origins of Neoliberalism. The working class is not “failing” to gallop toward communism because they lack the right consciousness. They often have not been presented with a viable political party, a convincing policy plan, and a feasible path to achieving it that would actually improve their lives. Ambivalence toward socialism and communism is not merely the result of brainwashing. It is rational skepticism born of historical experience with attempts at socialism that carried far more risk than reward.

The notion that the people must change first, that they must be taught class consciousness from a priestly class of Marxist intellectuals and leftist activists, is Marxism in a woke mode. Attempts to meet the actually existing working class where they are, without first re-educating them out of supposedly “bourgeois” or “reactionary” prejudices, get dismissed as “tailism,” a charge rooted in the presumption that working-class sentiments are illegitimate, confused, or morally tainted.

But in a liberal-democratic society, the legitimacy of a political movement is contingent upon its ability to secure broad public support. Any remotely successful political project will inevitably have to adapt to a broad constituency and to form coalitions with those who may disagree on many things while sharing certain goals. If the success of a political project requires the impossible goal of the majority of people adopting the political ideology of that project, rather than the other way around, its outcome will be self-marginalization at best or totalitarian at worst.

This is what makes the genealogy of class politics essential to our story. Class politics represented the most serious historical alternative to consciousness-first politics. Its decline did not simply leave a vacuum. It left a vacuum that was filled by the very template it had sought to replace: the revivalist logic of awakening, conversion, and moralized belonging, now dressed in secular clothing. Understanding how and why that decline happened is the subject of the next section.

2. Genealogy II: The Decline of Class Politics and The Rise of The New Left (1960s-1970s)

To understand the decline of class politics and the rise of the consciousness-first politics that replaced it, we need to look at structural transformations, not just the spread of ideas. Many people tend to get this part of history backwards by myopically looking at the academy rather than the real objective changes in the global economy that created the material conditions for the awakenings we discussed in the previous essay. Two developments in particular radically expanded the number of people aspiring to become symbolic capitalists: the managerial revolution and the massive expansion of higher education.

In his 1941 book The Managerial Revolution, James Burnham argued that capitalism was evolving not toward socialism, as Marxists had predicted, but toward a new form of society dominated by managers. Ownership was being separated from control. A new class of technical, organizational, and administrative personnel was becoming the real power holder in modern corporations and government bureaucracies, even as they did not own the means of production in the classical sense. Burnham’s thesis anticipated what Barbara and John Ehrenreich would later theorize in 1977 as the “Professional Managerial Class”: a distinct social stratum defined not by ownership of capital but by its monopoly on credentialed expertise and its role in the reproduction of culture and social relations. This was the class that would eventually dominate left-wing institutions, and whose political style would reshape what “leftist” politics even meant.

The second transformation was the massive expansion of higher education in the postwar decades. The GI Bill of 1944 opened university doors to millions who would never have attended otherwise, and Cold War-era investment in education further swelled enrollment. In 1940, only 4.6% of American adults held a bachelor’s degree. By the early twenty-first century, that figure had surpassed 37%. This expansion created a vastly larger class of people whose primary asset was their education and cultural sophistication, and whose professional lives revolved around the production and management of symbols, language, and knowledge. It also created the conditions for elite overproduction: when there are far more credentialed aspirants than positions available for them, the resulting insecurity generates the intense status competition that, as we discussed in Part 1, manifests as moral crusading.

These two structural shifts, the managerial revolution and the expansion of education, produced the class that would eventually fill the vacuum left by the decline of the Old Left. But to understand why that vacuum opened in the first place, we need to examine the crises that destroyed working-class politics as an organized force.

The PMC takeover of the Left did not happen overnight. It was, rather, the product of decades-long structural decomposition, a slow unraveling whose causes are less conspiratorial than commonly supposed. The temptation to attribute this transformation to CIA infiltration of progressive organizations, to academia’s promotion of cultural Marxism, or to some coordinated campaign of ideological subversion is understandable; it is also wrong. These explanations, however satisfying to those who prefer a villain with a face, substitute narrative convenience for structural analysis.

The truth is more consequential, and more depressing. The Old Left did not lose because the New Left won. The New Left emerged because the Old Left had already collapsed, and into that vacuum rushed a politics shaped by very different class interests and cultural priorities.

Consider the mid-twentieth century conjuncture. In the 1950s, American labor still possessed genuine institutional power. Unions commanded mass membership, wielded real bargaining leverage, and pushed the Democratic Party toward redistributive commitments that would be unthinkable in the current moment. Socialists and Communists, despite their organizational weakness relative to European counterparts, maintained a presence within the labor movement that kept class politics visible, even if never hegemonic. That conjuncture dissolved under the pressure of three overlapping crises, each compounding the others.

The first was ideological, and it struck in two distinct phases. The Red Scares of the late 1940s and early 1950s did not merely target individual communists; they systematically dismantled the institutional infrastructure through which the Old Left had exercised influence in unions, universities, and media. It is important, however, not to mistake the Red Scare for the cause of communism’s unpopularity. Communism was already deeply unpopular in America, because its collectivist, statist, and totalitarian ethos fundamentally conflicted with the American creed of Christian individualism and democratic liberalism. Atheist totalitarianism did not sit well with a country whose political culture was steeped in both religious voluntarism and liberal constitutionalism. As discussed in Part 1, communism in America tended to be more prevalent among symbolic capitalists than among workers, at least from the 1920s onward and especially in the post-Great Depression era. The Red Scare did not create anti-communist sentiment; it capitalized on it, and in doing so it damaged far more than communism itself. By associating anything that emphasized class struggle, socialism, or inequality with Soviet-style communism, the Red Scares delivered a blow to the labor movement as a whole, pressuring it to moderate and wed itself to status quo politics. People increasingly distanced themselves from class-based analysis to avoid being tarred with communist associations, and even those who were not communists were deterred from utilizing Marxism as an analytical tool due to the reputational risks it carried. The result was not merely the marginalization of communists but the marginalization of class politics as such.

This was the organizational blow, delivered before the deeper intellectual crisis had even begun. That crisis arrived with Khrushchev’s secret speech of 1956, which exposed the full architecture of Stalinist repression: the gulags, the purges, the manufactured famines. The blow to left-wing intellectual morale was severe. Some drew the obvious anti-communist conclusion. Others clung to the hope that socialism might be reconstructed on more humane foundations, that the authoritarian aberration could be separated from the emancipatory project it had claimed to embody.

The Prague Spring of 1968 extinguished that hope. When Soviet tanks rolled through Czechoslovakia to crush what reformers called “socialism with a human face,” even committed Marxists like Sartre were forced to reckon seriously with what this meant about the relationship between socialism and state power. By the end of the 1960s, the American left had lost both its institutional scaffolding and its intellectual confidence in the very idea of a systemic alternative to capitalism.

The second crisis was economic. The stagflation of the 1970s, the combination of inflation and unemployment that Keynesian theory had declared incompatible, exposed the limits of the postwar settlement. The OPEC oil shocks of 1973 and 1979 revealed the fragility of an industrial order built on cheap energy. More fundamentally, the profitability crisis of the 1970s demonstrated that the welfare state compromise, the arrangement by which capital accepted redistribution in exchange for social stability, had become untenable from the perspective of accumulation. The era of managed capitalism was over.

What replaced it was neoliberalism, and here the standard account requires a necessary correction. Neoliberalism was not simply imposed by the right against a resistant left. Left parties across the Western world embraced market reforms, selling them to their constituencies as modernization, as efficiency, as a more sophisticated liberation freed from the bureaucratic paternalism of the postwar state. This embrace was not purely opportunistic. The New Left’s emphasis on individual autonomy, self-expression, and freedom from institutional constraint meshed naturally with market ideology’s celebration of consumer sovereignty and personal choice. Collective power was reframed as collectivist coercion; individual choice was reframed as freedom. The Left lost not only the argument but the conceptual vocabulary through which a different argument might have been made.

The third crisis was structural: the globalization of production and the hypermobility of capital. The bargaining power of organized labor had always rested on a simple asymmetry: workers could withhold their labor, but they could not be easily replaced. That asymmetry dissolved as corporations gained the capacity to relocate production across national borders, disciplining American workers by pointing to cheaper labor in the global South. Capital became increasingly mobile; workers remained, by necessity, rooted to particular places. The mere threat of relocation, whether or not it was always carried out, was sufficient to break the credibility of collective action. The strategic question was no longer how to win a strike, but how to prevent the factory from simply leaving.

The consequences reshaped what working-class politics could even aspire to. Workers who had once organized to demand democratic control of the workplace were reduced to negotiating over the conditions of their own dispensability. Union membership collapsed, not merely as a statistical fact but as an organizational reality that removed millions of workers from the only institutional form through which class power had historically been exercised. The gig economy that emerged in subsequent decades was not an accident of technological change; it was the perfected form of an employment relationship designed to atomize workers, to dissolve any collective identity that might generate shared political demands.

This is the structural context within which the cultural turn of the Left must be understood. When an increasingly credentialed left-wing intelligentsia, drawn disproportionately from the professional-managerial class, confronted the wreckage of the Old Left’s organizational infrastructure, what remained available as a political terrain? The workplace, as a site of collective organization, had been effectively neutralized. Socialism carried the historical weight of Soviet atrocity. Material politics, in the sense of organized struggle over the distribution of economic power, appeared not merely difficult but structurally foreclosed. What remained was identity, representation, and the politics of recognition, a terrain that happened to correspond rather precisely to the professional and cultural capital of the class fraction now dominant within left institutions.

The 2008 financial crisis briefly interrupted this trajectory, demonstrating that material interests remained politically legible even within a PMC-dominated Left. The surprising resonance of Bernie Sanders’s campaigns represented a genuine, if incomplete, attempt to resurrect Old Left politics within the structures of the Democratic Party. But the attempt also revealed the structural obstacles to its realization. Sanders’s movement was, in its composition, disproportionately college-educated and urban, and its eventual consolidation behind the Biden campaign destroyed precisely the working-class credibility that the project required.

What remains is the configuration we inhabit today: a Left structurally incapable of organizing workers, institutionally dominated by PMC sensibilities, and increasingly absorbed in cultural contestation while the class war proceeds on an entirely different terrain. The problem is not that cultural politics is without significance. The problem is that when cultural struggle replaces rather than supplements material struggle, when the superstructure becomes the primary site of political investment precisely because the base has been conceded, a politics of liberation has already foreclosed the conditions of its own possibility.

a. The Cultural Turn & The Counterculture

The 1960s witnessed a fundamental transformation in left politics, what scholars call the “cultural turn.” The revivalist template traced in the previous section, with its emphasis on awakening, conversion, and moralized belonging, did not disappear with secularization. It reappeared in new forms. As class politics started to gradually decline from the 1960s onward, the vacuum was filled by “consciousness raising” movements and identity politics.

But we must be careful not to invert the causality here. The cultural turn did not cause the decline of class politics. Rather, the weakening of class politics created the conditions in which consciousness-raising movements could flourish. As the institutional bases of working-class solidarity eroded and class organizing became harder to sustain, moral and cultural frameworks became a more available basis for political mobilization, especially within the expanding college-educated strata. In that sense, the rise of consciousness politics was less the motor of the shift than one of its products, a substitute form of mobilization that grows in the vacuum class politics leaves behind.

Instead of organizing workers to demand higher wages, material politics, you organize students to examine their privilege, consciousness politics. Instead of building coalitions across differences to win concrete gains, you build affinity groups of the already-awakened.

The New Left

The New Left that emerged in the 1960s was fundamentally different from the Old Left. While the Old Left was organized around working-class politics that put working-class people at the center regardless of race or gender, the New Left was composed mainly of students, career activists, and people adjacent to the Professional Managerial Class in urban areas. Despite retaining some commitment to socialist politics, the New Left began to prioritize different issues: race, gender, sexuality, and cultural liberation, issues that sometimes intersected with class but often did not. As mutual class interests were no longer the focal point around which different leftist movements could rally, New Left politics tried to unite various groups around more diffuse ideological categories: shared goals of “liberation,” freedom of self-expression, or victim-identity narratives of shared oppression. Into this vacuum, the New Left popularized secularized revival methods: consciousness-raising circles, self-interrogation, public witness, and the moralization of everyday life.

The Consciousness-Raising Movements of the 60s

The connection between wokeism and 1960s-70s consciousness-raising movements reveals a reincarnation of the Evangelical Protestant revival template in a secularized form. The women’s liberation movement explicitly adapted religious “awakening” concepts when developing their consciousness-raising (CR) groups and workshops. Activists like Kathie Sarachild explicitly modeled CR on the language of awakening, framing the process as one through which women would come to see reality as it truly is.

Conversion became awakening. Just as religious conversion involved passing from spiritual blindness to sight, CR groups promised passage from false consciousness to true awareness. You had to “wake up” to systemic oppression, experience that fundamental shift in worldview. Testimony morphed into confession and critique. Revival testimony, public declaration of conversion, transformed into personal narrative, public confession, and ongoing self-critique as proof of sincerity. In CR groups, women shared stories not just for catharsis but as political acts, demonstrating awakened consciousness. This pattern surfaces today as apology posts, privilege acknowledgments, and cycles of denunciation and absolution. The performative aspect remained: you must publicly demonstrate your consciousness transformation.

Once politics is framed this way, it becomes easy to imagine that transforming how people see, speak, and identify is not merely useful preparation for political change, but is thought to be neccesary for political change, and/or even constitutes political change itself.

From the Factory to the Ivory Tower

What made this consciousness-raising template so consequential was its portability. The CR format, once developed in activist circles, could be transplanted into any institutional setting that required ideological formation. As class politics receded through the 1970s-90s, universities, NGOs, and HR departments became the primary venues for ideological formation. The training ground for public action shifted from union halls to seminar rooms. These venues rewarded formation, how people talk, present, and are assessed, more than organization. The belief-first sequence flourished: orientations, workshops, statements, rituals, enforcement procedures. Critical theory and postmodernism, emerging from academia, expanded oppressor/oppressed categories beyond economic terms to include colonial, sexual, racial, and gender oppression; power became the supreme category, society an arena of warring identity groups.

Many leftists today who consider themselves to be post-woke or agnostic on the question of wokeism often like to tell themselves that the problems associated with wokeness are just a problem with liberals or the “liberal left” but not the “real” socialist left. However, all it takes is to spend a little time in academia, Twitter, and “radical” leftist activist spaces to see that this sort of mainstream progressive wokeism often finds its way into “radical” leftist organizations, even Marxist ones. The prevalence of woke politics in radical left spaces is very much a residue of the cultural turn that occurred with the rise of the New Left in the 60s, and the collapse of the Old Left.

b. The Rise of Identity Politics and Race Consciousness

In my Part 1 Genealogy of Wokeism essay, I already discussed why the Civil Rights movement was not “woke” in the sense I am using the term. Unfortunately, the same can’t be said about all race politics. When it comes to “identity politics,” it is important to distinguish the Civil Rights movement from the Black Power movement. I do not consider the Civil Rights movement to fall under the wokeism frame, due to its universalist character. The movement’s core was universal and material: equal citizenship under law, desegregation of public life, the vote with federal enforcement, due process, and access to the concrete goods of modern life, jobs, housing, schools, and transit. Its language was constitutional; its method was a mass, cross-class, interracial coalition; its instruments were church-linked organizations, unions, boycotts, courts, and legislatures. Folding abolition or the Civil Rights movement into woke politics erases their universalist core and their institutional strategy.

But then you started getting the rise of the Black Power movement. Black Power saw various different political currents come and go during the tumultuous years of the 1970s. It involved groups like the original Black Panther Party, a group with a class-based agenda that focused on helping poor black communities by building clinics, breakfast programs, tenant unions, free schools, voter drives, and self-defense committees, autonomy in order to bargain better. After the collapse of the original Black Panther Party, you started to mostly get Black Nationalist movements that prioritized race over class. As scholars like Adolph Reed Jr. and Cedric Johnson have argued, this turn from class-universalist politics to race-particularist politics represented a retreat from the material agenda that had defined the most successful phases of the Black freedom struggle.

Black nationalist movements embodied the consciousness-first style of politics in a way that civil rights leaders like Martin Luther King and A. Philip Randolph did not. This is because black nationalism, in its essentialist forms, rested on a premise that is structurally identical to the woke template: the preconception that people of a particular color share a common essence, and therefore a common consciousness, that must be awakened as the basis of political solidarity. The same structural move appears in white nationalism, which imagines that white people across different countries and continents share a deeper political and cultural unity than blacks and whites of the same country, the same class, or even the same neighborhood. This is not to morally equate black and white nationalism; their historical contexts and power relations are vastly different. However, both embody a consciousness-first conception of politics that places the social construct of race as the basis of political solidarity, above more materially grounded variables like shared culture, environment, and class interests.

The critical analytical point here is the conflation of color with culture. Woke approaches to race, whether from the left or the right, frequently treat phenotypic categories as though they carry inherent cultural content. You see this in how some progressives talk about the appropriation of “black culture” or assert that “there is no white culture,” which has been met with the white identitarian reaction that tries to celebrate whiteness by associating it with “Western civilization,” lumping together the highly diverse cultures of American, European, and even Roman civilizations, even though these cultures would not have seen themselves as part of the same “white race.” Both moves commit the same error: they conflate race with culture, mistaking an abstract category based on colorism for the real materiality of lived cultural experience.

This distinction matters because it reveals why racial essentialism is consciousness-first politics by structural necessity, not merely by inclination. Culture has a genuine material basis. Ethiopians share a language, a territory, a history of institutions, a cuisine, and a way of life. Ethiopian nationalism, whatever one thinks of it, is grounded in something real. The same can be said of Irish nationalism, or even British nationalism, however contested its boundaries may be. But “black nationalism,” in the transnational sense that Marcus Garvey envisioned when he sought to unite African countries with Black Americans, or “white nationalism” in the sense of a shared political identity among all people classified as white, are not grounded in any shared culture, language, territory, or way of life. They are grounded in nothing but color, a phenotypic abstraction.

And precisely because colorism has no material substrate capable of naturally generating solidarity in the way that a shared culture does, the only way to make race-essentialist politics cohere is through consciousness-raising. You have to construct the solidarity from the top down, because it does not emerge organically from people’s lived conditions. A black professor at Harvard and a black sharecropper in Mississippi do not share material interests by virtue of their skin color. A white investment banker in Manhattan and a white coal miner in Appalachia do not share a “culture” in any meaningful sense. To insist otherwise is to impose an ideological construct onto people whose actual lives contradict it, and that imposition requires precisely the kind of consciousness-first politics this essay has been tracing: awakening people to an identity they would not naturally organize around on the basis of their material circumstances alone.

This is why it is no coincidence that Marcus Garvey, one of the earliest figures associated with the language of “waking up” (his 1923 rallying cry “Wake up Ethiopia! Wake up Africa!”), was also a practitioner of race-essentialist politics. The language of awakening was not incidental to his project. It was structurally necessary, because the transnational racial solidarity he envisioned had no material foundation capable of sustaining itself without constant ideological cultivation. The politics could only work if enough people were awakened to a racial consciousness that overrode the far more concrete divisions of class, nationality, language, and actual culture.

The logical endpoint of this consciousness-first racial politics is revealing. When two movements both organize around racial purity and racial separation, even from opposite ends of the racial hierarchy, the structural convergence can produce strange alliances. Marcus Garvey, founder of the Universal Negro Improvement Association, secretly met with the Ku Klux Klan’s Imperial Wizard Edward Young Clarke in 1922, finding the Klan more “honest” about their racism than white liberals and seeking to negotiate shared goals of racial separation. In 1961, Nation of Islam officials met with KKK representatives in Atlanta to secure a nonaggression pact: the KKK agreed not to harass NOI members in exchange for the NOI’s commitment to oppose civil rights integration. The NOI even hosted American Nazi Party founder George Lincoln Rockwell at a 1961 rally in Washington, DC, where he donated $20 and received applause, and then invited him to address their 1962 Savior’s Day convention in Chicago before over 12,000 attendees. These episodes are not historical curiosities.

They are the logical outcome of a politics organized around racial awakening rather than universal interests. When both sides define belonging by racial consciousness and reject the premise of a shared political community across racial lines, they end up agreeing on the fundamental point: separation. The content differs, but the form overlaps.

This also illustrates the self-marginalizing tendency that is inherent to consciousness-first politics, which I discussed at length in Part 1. Black nationalism, as a political project in a country where Black people are not the demographic majority, was structurally incapable of building the kind of broad coalition required to win durable political power. It could generate fervor, cultural pride, and a sense of solidarity within the in-group, but it could not, by design, expand beyond it. This is the same self-contained opposition that plagues all forms of woke politics: when a movement is predicated on enough people “waking up” to a certain consciousness, and when that group’s consciousness is defined in terms that most of the population cannot or will not adopt, the movement’s ceiling is built into its premises. White nationalism faces an analogous problem in an increasingly diverse society, and even historically it was never the powerful unifying force its advocates imagined, because whites themselves were deeply divided by religion, ethnicity, and class. Colorism, as a political foundation, simply never generated durable mass movements, because a construct without a material basis cannot sustain the kind of thick solidarity that real political power requires.

Why “Intersectionality” Fails

The Combahee River Collective, the Black lesbian feminist socialists who coined “identity politics” in the 1970s, argued that liberation required simultaneous awakening to interwoven oppressions of race, gender, and class, which are treated as separate categories that often intersect. Many leftists who avoid confronting the reality of wokeism like to distinguish the kind of mainstream liberal identity politics of today with the kind of real “grassroots” identity politics advanced by the Combahee River Collective (CRC). They call it “intersectionality.” Let’s dismantle intersectionality for a second, because this logic is one of the roadblocks to getting leftists to seriously think about the problem. While the CRC in some ways avoided the trap of woke politics, as it acknowledged class and strove for a socialist politics open to coalitions between different identity groups, the framework of “intersectionality” has many problems that still hinder leftist movements today.

While intersectionality, which, at least when it adds class to the equation, may be well-intentioned and tries to be more “radical” than liberal identity politics, it nevertheless, by design, leaves itself very easily prone to co-option and self-marginalization. This is because by treating race, class and gender as separate but interconnected categories of equal importance, intersectionality ends up reifying race and gender, which are ultimately consciousness-based identities, whereas class is the only category in this equation that is grounded in real social relations and shared material interests.

This is why intersectionality, while being useful from the standpoint of academic research or demographic research, rarely ever works when it comes to politics, as its unifying pretense ends up fracturing into identity-based divisions in practice. This is because the core premise of its equation is wrong. Race and gender, at least nowadays, do not always intersect with class, and when shared experience of “oppression” is the common denominator of an intersectional coalition instead of shared class interests, there is no substantive glue holding the coalition together. Every political movement needs a power bloc to succeed in advancing its agenda, just enough votes to win. For bourgeois establishment politics, it is different blocks of big business industries and corporate lobbyists at the front, followed by constituent groups like bureaucratic elites and political insiders. For anti-establishment politics like social democracy, socialism, communism, or populist communitarianism, the basis of political power is usually the working class and other classes and strata closer to it, like small business owners, farmers, well-paid professionals, managers, and occasional wealthy class traitors who believe in the cause.

Unlike the labor movement or socialist class coalitions, actually existing intersectional politics (which often gets described as a “rainbow coalition “) manifests as a “popular front of the vulnerable” held together by nothing other than a shared identity of being “oppressed” as opposed to an “oppressor.” It is a coalition based solely on ideology, and due to being driven by symbolic capitalists, it gets tied up in the woke mode.

Without clear shared material interests holding this vague intersectional coalition together, it becomes very easy for political parties, corporate structures, and elite institutions to pit these groups against each other. A working-class white man does not share many common interests with an upper-middle-class white woman. An upper-class black person has very different economic interests from a working-class black person. Without a power bloc independent from the corporate establishment, those trying to advance intersectionality desperately try to appeal to political elites and work with corporate PR boards and elite institutions like academia.

This dependence on elite institutions raises a prior question: what produced the class of people who populate those institutions in the first place, and why does their political style diverge so sharply from the working class they claim to represent? The answer lies in one of the most consequential but least discussed class divides in contemporary politics: the education divide.

The Education Divide: The Hidden Class Divide

The massive expansion of higher education, from 4.6% of U.S. adults holding a bachelor’s degree in 1940 to 37.6% by 2022, created a much larger PMC than ever before. With this expanded educated class, there’s a substantial class of people whose primary asset is their education and cultural sophistication. For this expanded PMC, wokeism serves multiple functions. It provides a sense of moral purpose that transcends their often meaningless corporate jobs. It offers a way to differentiate themselves from both the working class (who lack the education to master woke discourse) and the capitalist class (who supposedly lack the moral sophistication to care). It creates new professional opportunities in diversity, equity, and inclusion. The PMC’s embrace of wokeism helps explain why the movement has been so successful in capturing institutions while failing to achieve grander political change.

The difference between a worker with a college degree and a worker without one is significant for a simple reason: social mobility. Even if a garbage truck driver earns more income than a barista struggling to balance university and work, the difference is that the university-educated barista probably will not be a barista in the future. A worker without a college degree will likely remain in the industry they are in, with minimal chances of climbing the social hierarchy. While it might seem like many university degrees are more “useless” today, university credentials are in fact strongly correlated with higher incomes, social mobility, and even mating prospects. Even the most well-paid blue-collar professions, like plumbing or working in the fossil fuel industry, still carry less prestigethan a random white-collar office job that requires a university degree to obtain. It could be a bullshit job with a sophisticated name like “consultant,” but it would probably still sound more impressive to your spouse’s parents than cleaning toilets or tables. The degree also carries extra cultural capital and can come with network connections that further enhance job prospects.

But during cycles of high unemployment and elite overproduction, class conflict manifests quite differently among PMC aspirants, especially those whose primary skill is language, not their hands. This is why class conflict today is confusing for many leftists to understand. What might be an objective class issue for blue-collar workers without degrees (like immigration, or revolt against educated PMCs trying to lecture them about white supremacy and patriarchy) might not seem like a problem at all to a cosmopolitan PMC. What might seem like a real class issue for a PMC (like representation of women, transgender people, and minorities in elite positions) might seem like a first-world problem to workers at the bottom.

It is tempting to conclude from this pattern that the remedy is simply to expand higher education further, on the premise that more credentials produce more rational, clear-eyed citizens and thus better politics. This assumption flatters the PMC worldview and has long served as a convenient justification for the credentialing economy, but the woke educated class is, as it turns out, the strongest argument against its own premise.

Yet this embrace of wokeism by the highly educated reveals a profound irony. Al-Gharbi documents what he calls the “curse of knowledge”: contrary to their self-image as rational, evidence-based thinkers, the highly educated are often more susceptible to cognitive biases, not less. Their intellectual sophistication makes them more adept at motivated reasoning, allowing them to skillfully rationalize their pre-existing beliefs and partisan loyalties. As psychologist Keith Stanovich observes, “If you are a person of high intelligence… you will be even less likely than the average person to realize that you have derived your beliefs from the social groups you belong to.”² The evidence suggests that “far from being independent thinkers… symbolic capitalists are instead more likely than most to be dogmatic ideologues or partisan conformists.”³ This explains why wokeism flourishes most intensely in precisely those institutions that pride themselves on critical thinking: the very skills that could enable genuine reflection instead become tools for more sophisticated self-deception.

This is also why symbolic capitalists, whose livelihoods depend on the manipulation of symbols, discourse, and prestige, are especially prone to overestimating the power of consciousness itself and to mistaking symbolic revision for structural change.

Universities and Cultural Transmission

Universities have become the camp meetings of contemporary wokeism. Just as the Great Awakenings led to the founding of numerous colleges (Princeton, Brown, Dartmouth, Rutgers), contemporary wokeism has transformed existing educational institutions into centers of ideological formation and activism. It is well known that universities play an integral role in the proliferation of progressive “woke” ideology. However, many people on the right make the mistake of attributing a consistent ideological doctrine to this “woke” tendency in universities, often mashing together very different tendencies like postmodernism and postcolonialism with neo-Marxism. The role universities play in the facilitation of these woke tendencies is more sociological than ideological. Universities are a training ground for the Professional Managerial Class rather than the incubators of Marxist revolutionaries.

The early protestant great awakenings were bottom-up moral mobilization, messy, ecstatic, and often led by outsiders. In contrast, the modern great “awokenings” come out of an institutional pipeline, more precisely, a product of an imbalance in that institutional pipeline (elite overproduction). It is staffed by administrators, mediated by credentials, reinforced by HR logic, and transmitted through the symbolic industries that shape prestige, language, and reputation. This is why the progressive variant of wokeism feels less like a mass revival than a top-down cultural regime. It is not emerging primarily from the dispossessed. It is being curated, refined, and circulated by the very strata whose careers depend on controlling the production of symbols.

Woke Capitalism and Institutional Adoption

A degree from an elite university increasingly signals cultural capital. Language and concepts like intersectionality, diversity, and awareness of injustice become markers of educational sophistication, creating a new form of cultural capital that can be exchanged for professional and social advancement.

Those who are on the more precarious side of the PMC often adopt woke sensibilities because it will give them a cultural capital advantage over the competition for scarce jobs in academia, the media, art, and entertainment, or conform to and/or avoid challenging woke discourses out of necessity to avoid risking career prospects. With deindustrialization and economic crashes intensifying competition for white-collar jobsin a slowing economy, PMC aspirants become ever more careful to conform to the expected speech codes and etiquette of the PMC habitat.

Corporations, however, adopt “woke” language and sensibilities for slightly different reasons than the PMC symbolic capitalists who work for them do.

The speed with which corporations adopted woke rhetoric reveals something important about the nature of consciousness politics: it’s far easier to change language than to change material conditions. A company can update its mission statement, add pronouns to email signatures, and mandate DEI training far more easily than it can raise wages, improve working conditions, or share profits with workers.

Does this mean that wokeism failed because it was “co-opted”? No. This would miss the entire point. As we showed in the part 1 essay, wokeism already emerged as an intra-elite competition as a result of elite overproduction in the first place. So the idea that elites defeated “the real movement” by co-opting what was ostensibly a radical “stay woke” movement with real potential is simply a delusion. In reality, the movements that became associated with wokeism failed due to the internal contradictions of the woke mode of politics itself.

Why Woke Politics Fails: Self-Contained Opposition

Again, as I showed in Part 1, this does not mean that race or gender issues are inherently bounded to the woke mode of politics. The Civil Rights movement didn’t believe it had to brainwash white people into being less racist in order for blacks to fight for racial equality. They aimed for political change, desegregation, equal political rights, and anti-discrimination laws. When the political rights were guaranteed, what civil rights leaders like Martin Luther King Jr. believed was that the next obstacle to be overcome was not “deconstructing whiteness” and “heteronormativity” but rather to improve the economic conditions of black people and the working class, subject to wage slavery in general. The idea was that desegregation, integration, and anti-discrimination laws would eventually help normalize relations between black and white Americans over time as they were able to interact in society together. Put simply, the transformation in consciousness (reducing racism) was expected to occur after the transformation in political structures and socio-economic conditions. The woke approach gets this backwards because it starts from the opposite premise.

Nevertheless, by the 1990s, there was a sense that racism was on its way out. But the fourth great awokening (discussed in Part 1), following the consequences of elite overproduction resulting from the 2008 economic depression, changed all of this, and brought a rise of heated racial culture wars discourses that people are still reacting to today. The lesson of all of this is that identity politics does not fail because identity issues don’t matter but rather because the woke approach suffers from its own anti-political tendency that prioritizes the cultivation of consciousness before a change in conditions.

Even if advocates of woke politics claim to want real material change, the woke mode of politics reaches a point of oversaturation and undermines itself after being limited by its own self-marginalizing tendency, relegating it to self-contained opposition. The woke disposition treats awakening to the “right” consciousness as the precondition for political solidarity and the basis of political movements. Woke people operate from the presumption that “if everyone thought the way I do, then the world would be a better place.” This makes it inherently exclusionary and self-limiting.

A social movement will fail to resonate with the broader demos if it is centered around representing racially essentialized identity groups who are assumed to possess a particular radical form of consciousness, rather than on common goals and universal interests that a broad enough group of people has an interest in supporting. The focus of these kinds of woke-captured social movements tends to revolve around changing attitudes, language, and the way people talk about things, rather than building coalitions of various groups of people who may have many disagreements but nonetheless share some common goals and interests. The woke conception of politics simply doesn’t work, especially with a large diverse population and a relatively liberal democratic society. There are hard limits to how many minds you can change and how many people you can get on board with a naturally minoritarian cause.

Without a mass democratic power base, elite capture becomes inevitable. As a result, the best-case scenario for advocates of woke politics is to lobby elite politicians and institutions to try to get them to adopt some of their ideas and policies. However, as we have seen with the success of woke politics of the liberal-progressive activist variety, what ends up happening is that they are able to achieve some degree of “progress” without winning approval from the majority of citizens. Yet, this progress is dependent on the will of opportunistic interest groups with different class interests, who can easily dispense with this progress if it no longer suits their interests. This is precisely what happened with woke politics: those who were able to push universities, corporations, and politicians to adopt certain progressive policies (DEI, etc.) achieved change that was ultimately precarious because it lacked a democratic foundation.

The advertising industry has played a parallel role in spreading woke consciousness to the broader culture. Woke capitalism, the adoption of social justice rhetoric by corporations, represents not a genuine commitment to social change but a recognition that consciousness signaling has market value.

This created a feedback loop that embedded wokeism in the economy itself. Universities produce woke consciousness in students, corporations market to that consciousness with woke advertising, media reinforces that consciousness with woke content, and institutions validate it through diversity programs. The result is consciousness politics as consumer lifestyle, wokeism as brand identity that you can buy your way into.

None of this is conspiratorial. It is path dependence. Institutions adopt scripts that promise order, legitimacy, and reputational safety, even when they redistribute neither power nor wealth.

3. Conclusion

Wokeism, despite its fanatically radical moral posturing, is functionally conservative in practice. At best, it changes symbols and not structures, and at worst, it ensures that political activism becomes self-contained opposition. It does not challenge material conditions; it merely reshapes the discourse around them to make some people feel goodwhile encouraging resentment among others.

It replaces collective struggle with personal virtue-signaling. And in doing so, it diverts energy away from real political action and into performative self-flagellation. The endless cycles of denunciation, confession, and absolution substitute for the difficult work of building political power and changing material structures.

The pseudo-radicalism of wokeism serves a structurally conservative function. Since a leftist revolution is not imminent, it is often the case that “radical leftist” pseudo-revolutionary posturing that denounces any gradual reformist change functionally allows symbolic capitalists to righteously condemn the system while continuing to benefit from it, dismissing any practical reforms as pointless tinkering. The result is a politics that sounds revolutionary while changing nothing. As Barbara Fields observed, race itself becomes a tool that “richly serves the interests of the powers that be,” not because minorities invented the framework, but because elite institutions find it far easier to redistribute symbols than to redistribute wealth.⁴

You cannot awaken your way to universal healthcare. You cannot consciousness-raise your way to affordable housing. You cannot cancel your way to economic justice. History does not change when people have the right thoughts; it changes when people act, and it is far more realistic to get people to act and build coalitions based on mutual interests rather than political alignment alone.

This genealogy, from evangelical revivalism through secularized consciousness-raising to institutional capture, reveals the deep structure beneath the surface of contemporary woke politics. But identifying the historical roots of the problem is only the first step. The deeper question is what comes next. Are we entering a post-woke age? If so, what is replacing wokeism, and why do so many left responses to its decline keep repeating the same mistakes? In Part 3, I turn from genealogy to diagnosis: the current crisis of left politics, the futility of vanguardist fantasies, and what a genuine alternative to consciousness-first politics might look like.

Bibliography & Cited Footnotes

Al-Gharbi, Musa. We Have Never Been Woke: The Cultural Contradictions of a New Elite. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2024.

Burnham, James. The Managerial Revolution: What Is Happening in the World. New York: John Day Company, 1941.

Ehrenreich, Barbara, and John Ehrenreich. “The Professional-Managerial Class.” Radical America 11, no. 2 (1977): 7–31.

Johnson, Cedric. “The Panthers Can’t Save Us Now: Debating Left Politics and Black Lives Matter.” Catalyst 1, no. 1 (2017).

Noll, Mark A. The Rise of Evangelicalism: The Age of Edwards, Whitefield, and the Wesleys. Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2003.

Piketty, Thomas. “Brahmin Left vs Merchant Right: Rising Inequality and the Changing Structure of Political Conflict (Evidence from France, Britain and the US, 1948–2017).” WID.world Working Paper 2018/7. 2018.

Reed, Adolph, Jr. Class Notes: Posing as Politics and Other Thoughts on the American Scene. New York: The New Press, 2000.

---

1. Mark A. Noll, The Rise of Evangelicalism: The Age of Edwards, Whitefield, and the Wesleys (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2003), 19–20.↩︎

2. Keith Stanovich, quoted in al-Gharbi, We Have Never Been Woke, 198.↩︎

3. al-Gharbi, We Have Never Been Woke, 205.↩︎

4. Barbara Fields, quoted in al-Gharbi, We Have Never Been Woke, 285.↩︎