Why liberals go berserk: Understanding the great awokening

What the hell just happened? Seriously, what? Progressive America looks as if it has walked into a trap it set for itself. Kamala Harris, a supposedly pragmatic politician, allowed Donald Trump of all people to paint her as a weird extremist, who believed in taking taxpayers’ money to pay surgeons to perform sex-change operations on prisoners, and wanted biological men to compete in women’s sport.

And for once Trump wasn’t even lying. In Kamala Harris’s world, it was entirely normal to believe that a man could be a woman just by saying he was. The rest of the country was a little more equivocal, and the Trump campaign poured money into making sure that everyone knew about Harris’s niche views,

Maybe you want to say that whatever the left does is irrelevant. Trump and his kind win by using the right’s vast propaganda machine to lie their way to victory. And indeed, now that Elon Musk has turned X (Twitter) into his private mendacity machine, the whole world can see how unscrupulous they are.

Or maybe you want to believe that there is no evidence that the right’s attacks on trans and other “woke” issues won it the 2024 US election.

In 2019, Matt Yglesias, a US commentator, came up with the resonant phrase “the great awokening” to describe how “white liberals have moved so far to the left on questions of race and racism that they are now to the left of even the typical black voter.”

But today he doubts whether attacks on wokeness had a significant electoral impact in 2024.

Having seen the damage heresy hunts and demands for ideological purity have done to the liberal press here in the UK, I am not at all sure he is right on that.

But even if he is, a pressing question remains.

Since Karl Marx, radicals have been infuriated and mystified by the willingness of the working class to vote for conservatives and against its “real” interests. But, as I have said before, the willingness of middle-class and indeed wealthy people to apparently act against their interests and engage in left-wing politics is equally in need of explanation, especially when they go off on one of their ideological berserkers.

For with the regularity of a comet returning to our skies, largely privileged progressive people are consumed by frenzies on a 30-year cycle – from the communism of the 1930s, via the counterculture of the 1960s, to the political correctness of the early 1990s, and on to today’s great awokening.

The question that gets closest to the knuckle is: When progressives are shouting from the rooftops does anyone actually mean what they say? Or is this a game among the privileged where contestants use their identities and victimhood to grab jobs and money, and rearrange the seating plan at the top table?

The trans issue makes my point for me.

Instead of just saying that the tiny number of people with gender dysphoria should be treated with kindness, campaigners have made sweeping claims that any man who wants to be treated as a woman is a woman and vice versa, and they have done it with extraordinary vehemence.

And yet when you look at who progressives choose to date and marry it is quite clear that most straight men and lesbians do not treat transwomen as if they were no different from biological women, any more than most straight women and gay men treat transmen as actual men.

What progressives say in public bears no connection to what they do in private.

Or to go back to Yglesias’s point about white American liberals. Critical race theory holds that the attempts to emancipate African Americans in the civil rights era were mere window dressing that allowed whites to feel good about themselves.

The US remains a white supremacist society where racism is so deeply rooted mere laws are powerless against it.

But suppose a government from the extreme right were to annul all civil rights legislation – and thanks in part to the failings of US progressives America now has a government from the extreme right.

Would progressives shrug their shoulders and say they didn’t care because equality laws were a swindle? I don’t believe for a moment they would.

In We have never been Woke: The Cultural Contradictions of a New Elite, the American sociologist Musa al-Gharbi makes a bold attempt to explain why his class (and mine) is so prone to striking poses.

He is not a woke-bashing conservative, but an admirer of Bayard Rustin and W.E.B. DuBois and other civil rights thinkers who were suspicious of the moralism of the white left and wanted tangible changes to institutions rather than postures.

In my view his work fails in the end because he does not think hard enough about where progress come from, and is too dismissive of the undoubted commitment of at least some of his targets.

For all that, he has an admirable willingness to bite the hands that feed him, and even if you don’t agree with his conclusions, the ride to reach them is well worth taking.

I asked why it is that every 30 years or so years liberals go berserk. When al-Gharbi first arrived in New York, he saw white people holding Black Lives Matter banners, while ignoring homeless black people who lay in the gutters beside them. He put that same question in a politer form.

“If the social justice discourse and the symbolic ‘justice-oriented’ actions that contemporary elites gravitate toward seem to have little to do with tangibly addressing social problems—if they don’t seem to well reflect the will and interests of the people who are supposed to be ‘helped’ by these gestures—what do these conspicuous displays actually accomplish? What functions do they serve?”

He finds an answer in the peculiar tensions faced by members of the intelligentsia or by what he calls, rather clumsily, “symbolic capitalists”.

Academics, lawyers, publishers, researchers, liberal journalists, advertisers, artists, and others in the wider culture industries earn a living, often a very good living, from the business of producing and manipulating information.

Nearly everyone involved claims a higher motive than money. Their second homes and servants are irrelevant. They are members of professions that have a wider ethical role. Indeed, their ethical standards – their virtue, if you prefer –justifies their privilege.

As the American sociologist Randall Collins once said

“The altruistic professions, in fact, are among the highest paid, and their ‘altruism’ gives a further payoff in the form of status and deference.… The introduction of stringent ethical standards among professionals has always resulted in an improvement of their economic and social position and a restriction of their ranks.”

Altruistic claims heighten class advantage. But they also leave members of the intelligentsia wide open to attack. They can be criticised on genuine grounds by people pointing out their hypocrisies and failings. But they are also threatened by careerists who want their jobs and salaries and all the perks that go with them.

Al-Gharbi continues:

"This mode of legitimation also sets the stage for a unique form of status competition within the symbolic professions: those who are perceived to be more effective or committed to promoting the common good and (especially) helping the vulnerable, marginalized, and disadvantaged are generally perceived to be more worthy of prestige, deference, autonomy, and so on. Meanwhile, those who are successfully portrayed as possessing values, priorities, and behaviors that seem unworthy of their profession will often find their jobs and social status in a precarious position. And when times get hard, symbolic capitalists grow even more aggressive in trying to preserve or enhance their social position by demonstrating that their peers and rivals have never been woke."

In short, the culture war between left and right is accompanied by and on occasion started by culture wars within the left.

People panic. They realise that if they do not go along with the most arcane doctrines their jobs could go and their lives could be ruined. They fly to the extremes because, strangely, the extremes have become safe havens.

Competitions for status explain much of the ugliness of progressive culture since the crash of 2008.

For example, in commercial terms it makes no sense at all for publishers to drop successful authors who have faced fake accusations of racism. Why lose the sales?

In terms of the careers of individual publishers, however, it makes all the sense in the world.