What if Wokism is Implied in the Civil Rights Laws?

Over the weekend, thanks to John Derbyshire, I got to read Richard Hanania's "Woke Institutions is Just Civil Rights Law." I'll have my American Thinker piece up soon.

Let's say the piece cured me of my faith that the Civil Rights laws were a Good Thing, even if the quotas and diversity and wokism are a Bad Thing.

But politics is downstream from culture is downstream from religion is downstream from the meaning of "life, the universe, and everything." So now what?

Thank you, senator, I'm glad you asked me that. Let's start at the upstream source.

My "Vision of the Good Life Better Than the Left" is all about the question of the meaning of "life, the universe, and everything" in a world that, according to my reductive Three Peoples theory, has at least three different kinds of people in it. That means that society's ruling class needs to accept that creative people have needs and wants different from responsible people different from subordinate people. I develop an idea of how a society with three different sorts of people could work in An American Manifesto.

I say that creative people -- and I have the conceit to imagine that I am one such -- should accept the path of the Sacrificial Hero, in which life is a journey to the underworld of the unconscious followed by a creative attempt at the border between Order and Chaos, which will probably fail. This means, e.g., that if you want to get creative about sex as a transgender, you should understand that the whole thing is likely to end up as a total disaster for you and yours. That is the meaning of creativity: you will probably fail. But creative people need to understand that most people do not want this kind of life and do not understand why anyone would.

I say that responsible people should have the right to live boring responsible lives within the guardrails, living according to a fixed agenda set forth in one of the Axial Age religions or later modifications, such as the Code of the Bourgeois as developed in my Road to the Middle Class. But responsible people should understand that subordinates, the new migrants to the city, are scared and properly live in ethnic enclaves run by virtual ganglords until they learn the Code of the Bourgeois. But do not expect responsible people to understand creative people.

I say that subordinate people since time began have looked to a family patriarch or tribal chief or urban ethnic leader to provide a safe haven from a brutal world. But, in our modern world this is a mean and cramped life, for subordinate people since time began have been cruelly used as political cannon fodder by their leaders. If subordinate people want to live in their ethnic ghettos, so be it. But if they yearn for something higher and better, we noble creatives and responsibles should extend a hand and help them learn the Code of the Bourgeois as per my Road to the Middle Class. But do not expect subordinate people to understand responsible people or creative people.

Then there is the question of the religions that come downstream from the meaning of "life, the universe, and everything." We already have religions for responsibles and subordinates. The problem is the religion of the creatives, that right now is the false religion of Wokism. I say that the problem with the creatives' religion is that it has as its human ideal the Ego Hero rather than the Sacrificial Hero. The Ego Hero is the revolutionary that kills millions on his millennial quest, the activist that leads a community of subordinates to social hell, the nice liberal lady with virtue-signalling yardsigns in front of her house. Obviously our wokey friends will not change their religion until their current one fails them utterly: we can hope.

Then there is the question of the culture of the future. Well, obviously it would not be the current culture that only allows cultural expression by the creatives that endorse the current religious cult of wokism and cancels everything else. In other words, the culture of the future would feature cultural expression and experience not just for wokey college graduates that celebrate revolution, activism, peaceful protest, anti-racism, and gender bending. It would also have cultural space for ordinary responsible people that want to celebrate marriage, family, children within the context of a religion issuing from the Axial Age. It would also have cultural space for subordinate people and their cultural preferences -- I am ignorant enough not to know what that might be.

Now we get to politics. Politics is the art of uniting "us," the people, against "them," the enemy. It is pure tribalism, and, I say, all tribalism is "fake tribalism. Why? Because once humans get beyond the community of the kindred we invent a fake kindred, that might be a clan or a tribe or a class or a race or an order of nobles. Our wokey lords and masters have a politics of race, in which they are "allies" fighting for the "oppressed peoples" against the "white oppressors." My politics would be a politics of class, in which "we" ordinary Americans unite against "them," the wokey upper class of educated snobs and cancel cultists, while looking after the lower class of subordinates with a modest program of paternalistic support and understanding. It is totally fake, but every politics is fake.

Funny, isn't it? This politics has already been invented. That is what Trumpism is all about. It is nationalist, in the semse of America First -- or ordinary Americans first. It issues mean tweets to various ruling-class swells and functionaries and toadies and Democratic operatives with bylines, and it is avuncular towards the traditionally marginalized, with a below-the-radar offer to join the great American mainstream, any time you are ready, friend.