Christopher Chantrill – I ordered Richard Hanania’s The Origins of Woke back on August 9 when the far-left Huff Post was trying to cancel him for being far-right Richard Hoste twenty years ago.

Hey Broadside Books at HarperCollins! Thanks for not canceling Hanania’s book; we far-right fascists will remember that, after the revolution.

Hanania’s book is a blow-by-blow account of how the whole civil rights/affirmative action/diversity racket works — at the Department of Labor, the EEOC, the Civil Rights Division at the Department of Justice, the Office of Civil Rights at the Department of Education — and how it makes complete sense that corporate America has signed on to the holy quest for “Justice!” It’s just too hard — and expensive — to push back.

He then goes on to show how it was government that prompted the creation of all the new races and genders, and how top-down “social engineering” causes all kinds of problems.

Then there’s Chapter 7: What Is to Be Done, a blow-by-blow account of how the next Republican administration can excise the woke cancer in the body politic. “What is to be done:” that rings a bell, somehow.

Hanania ends up with a chapter on “Unleashing American Freedom and Creativity.” He writes:

Civil rights law is an extreme form of central planning in an area of life where centralization of power can do some of the least good and some of its worst damage.

“Central planning”: could you just check with social scientists Joe Stalin and Mao Zedong about the results of their central planning research, dear liberal friends?

Hanania doesn’t think that the woke equality operation is as strong as it looks. He thinks that when a Republican president starts issuing executive orders to take down Woke, that the “backlash will be limited.” After about ten years, people will just forget all about wokeness.

Hanania believes that Woke is the consequence of the government’s steady expansion of the civil rights racket. I go bigger, using Crane Brinton analysis in The Anatomy of Revolution and say that Woke is signaling the failure of the liberal project. Brinton says that when a revolution fails, it ends in the final frenzy of a Reign of Terror, a Great Purge as the revolutionaries confront the failure of their Holy Quest. Since he wrote his book, we’ve had Mao’s Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution and the U.S. Woke Frenzy to prove his thesis.

For Brinton the revolution ends with Thermidor, when ordinary people can’t take it anymore. As I wrote:

Humans cannot live forever in a fervor of holy rage; eventually the tension breaks and people fall back into a more normal life.

But will that moment occur next year or in the next decade? You be the judge.

Hanania ends with:

The effort to roll back civil rights law will not be the final battle in the war on wokeness but the beginning, allowing those who want to build a society based on the ideals of freedom and progress a fair chance in the struggle.

He is speaking like the educated-class intellectual he is. “Freedom and progress” are educated-class things, and I’m all in favor of them. But, Earth to intellectuals:

There are more things in heaven and Earth, Horatio,
Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.

The ordinary middle class wants jobs, families, a home of their own, and a future for the kids. The lower class, including the D+37 single women, just want to be taken care of. The challenge is to allow a society to come into being that allows all these “diverse” views of life an equal standing.

How do we do that? I’ll tell you. We need a ruling class with a lot less power, and especially a lot less power to direct top-down everything.

And we are not going to get there just with a Republican president setting the Chris Rufos of the world on wokey bureaucrats and NGOs and lawfare. Not a chance.

We would need a society in which nice liberal ladies — that presently signal their virtue with #WeBelieve signs in the yard and EVs in the carport — are telling their friends: “I can’t believe that we swapped Jim Crow racism for DEI racism… I can’t believe that the Democrats are shutting down energy production… I can’t believe that we don’t defend the border.”

But what would it take? Read this. The Aussies did a “survey of 1,943 young people aged 15–19 years living in Australia” on climate change. The kiddies are outraged that older people don’t share their concern, their “feelings of worry, powerlessness, and frustration.” Gosh: I wonder where the kiddies got their feelings on climate change? Obviously not from their parents.

So Job One is to demolish the gubmint education system and put parents in charge of child education. For the first time in 150 years, Horace Mann.

SF Source American Thinker Sep 2023