Explaining the White Wokerati

I've been complaining for a while about the post-civil rights racial culture. Because I say that if racial discrimination is illegal in these United States then that is final. Any time someone commits a racist act then prosecute them and name and shame and shun them. And yet the interest in "racism" has soared in the post-civil rights era as this Google Ngram chart shows.

I know. How could it be that people have got more concerned about racism since the 1960s, the decade when the US made racism illegal?

(Ngram only goes up to 2008. Lord knows where racism has gone since.)

Up until now I have credited the notion that, once a political movement gets power it can stop being nice and really set about driving its enemies before it and enjoying the lamentation of the women. Or, when the Revolution fails to bring on the millennium, the believers ramp up their belief in a frenzy similar to the Reign of Terror and Virtue in the French Revolution.

But Christopher Caldwell, in his new book The Age of Entitlement: America Since the Sixties, has another explanation. He has written an article about his argument in Age here.

Caldwell argues that the Civil Rights Act of 1964 amounted to a new Constitution. That's because the ruling class decided that it wasn't enough to pass laws against racial discrimination. It had to stamp out the glowing embers.

What I am talking about are the emergency mechanisms that, in the name of ending segregation, were established under the Civil Rights Act of 1964... 

It created new crimes, outlawing discrimination in almost every walk of public and private life. It revoked—or repealed—the prevailing understanding of freedom of association as protected by the First Amendment. It established agencies to hunt down these new crimes—an expanded Civil Rights Commission, an Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC), and various offices of civil rights in the different cabinet agencies. It gave government new prerogatives, such as laying out hiring practices for all companies with more than 15 employees, filing lawsuits, conducting investigations, and ordering redress. Above all, it exposed every corner of American social, economic, and political life to direction from bureaucrats and judges.

The point is that the tools that the Civil Rights Act created were thought of originally merely as a tool to humble the South. But that's not what happened.

If the spirit of the law was to humiliate Southern bigots, the letter of the law put the entire country—all its institutions—under the threat of lawsuits and prosecutions for discrimination. 

Wow, the activists realized. This is a tool that we can use to drive our enemies before us. And so,

other groups, many of them not even envisioned in the original legislation, got the hang of using civil rights law. Immigrant advocates, for instance: Americans never voted for bilingual education, but when the Supreme Court upheld the idea in 1974, rule writers in the offices of civil rights simply established it, and it exists to this day. Women, too: the EEOC battled Sears, Roebuck & Co. from 1973 to 1986 with every weapon at its disposal, trying to prove it guilty of sexism—ultimately failing to prove even a single instance of it. 

And then LGBT got into the action.

Basically, if you are a white male under the new Constitutiojn you are guilty unless proven innocent. And, of course, this guilt falls on ordinary Commoner male whites, folks whose parents might have been the immigrants of the late 19th century that came over in steerage and struggled through two wars and a Great Depression to get their heads above water.

And now, it turns out they are bigots, baskets of deplorables. Shame on them!

OK. Too bad for us Commoner male whites.

Now, according to Caldwell, this new regime goes beyond the normal government sphere of hunting down malefactors. It contains a "moral element, almost a metaphysical element, that is usually more typical of theocracies than of secular republics."

Do you see how this changes the game for all male whites?

When you have a moral regime you have good and evil, you have saints and sinners. Nobody wants to be a sinner. Heavens no. So what do you do to become a saint and purge yourself of your racist sexist guilt?

Perfectly simple. You join the woke left. You damn everything about white northwestern European culture and become a flagellant monk in the Holy Order of the Bernie Wokerati.

But if you are a dumb Commoner you just go on living your life as a racist-sexist-homophobe deplorable.

However, for the wokerati, this really is a matter of life and death, because a white male cannot get on in a career in the professions, in public corporations, in the arts, in education and especially higher education unless he is a fervent believe in the wokerati faith.

So of course all your educated Gentry are driving Priuses and Leafs and making a public display of their wokeness, and eagerly read their New York Times for new memes with which to sneer at President Trump. That's how you prove that you have acknowledged your sin and been baptized in the River of Jordan, and been born again and saved your evil racist soul from eternal perdition.

Yeah. Funny how it all echoes the moral framework of fundamentalist Christianity that our wokerati absolutely despise! But as Hegel wrote, there's really no difference between the north pole and the south pole of a magnet except that they are opposite.

But how can we escape this moral Underworld? Well, I think that President Trump has made a start. He has stood tall for average Americans, and he has invited blacks and Hispanics into his America First tent. He is inviting them to become all-American Commoners instead of being unequal and separate and Little Darlings in the woke plantations of the educated Gentry.

If that happens that the moral anchor of lefty wokism will be destroyed. Because then lefty wokism will be all about special privileges for upper-crust women and Gentry LGBT, the most privileged people in America.

Gosh. Privileged people defending their privilege. Where have I heard about that before?