If Woke Is Dead, What Comes Next? › American Greatness

[mystery-ak]

If Woke Is Dead, What Comes Next? › American Greatness
Stephen Soukup
8–10 minutes

The other day, The Wall Street Journal published an op-ed by Eric Kaufmann, a professor of politics at the University of Buckingham in England, proclaiming the death of woke and the end of the Progressive Era. This is more than a “vibe-shift,” Kaufmann writes; it’s “the end of the 60-year rise of left-liberalism in American culture.” He continues, arguing that the backlash against the left’s aggressive embrace of identity politics and its imposition of that politics on every aspect of our lives is far more profound and widespread than the 1990s reaction to “political correctness” and has even seeped into the left’s own organs of cultural transmission, including the mainstream media. This, in turn, has created a crisis of confidence among cultural liberals, leaving them disorganized, despondent, and marking the end of “the age of progressive confidence.”

On the one hand, I think Kaufmann is unequivocally right about all of this. I have written about the death of woke and the end of this current era of leftism myself, and I believe that Kaufmann has identified the causes and indications of the cultural left’s collapse quite nicely and succinctly.

On the other hand, I’m not sure that the death of woke will necessarily be the panacea some might hope. As even Professor Kaufmann concedes, “What replaces progressivism as our cultural lodestar will become evident only in the fullness of time.” Unfortunately, if past is prologue, “progressivism’s” replacement may well be even worse.

more
https://amgreatness.com/2025/05/17/if-woke-is-dead-what-comes-next/

[Fishrrman]

What comes next...???

"After me... the deluge..."

[The_Reader_David]

I'm not holding out any hope, but I'd really like to have the original American Left back. I was neither Marxist nor socialist.  It was anarcho-syndicalist, embodied by figures like Sacco and Vanzetti and by the Wobblies (the I.W.O.W.) before the Communists took it them over.  They were as suspicious of the government as most of us on the American Right are.  They just wanted workers to run the enterprises they worked for.  I think pure syndicalism would have problems with capital formation, but enterprises jointly run by the capitalists and the workers without our current plague, the professional managers -- a natural compromise that would have been worked out had our Left kept its distinctive characteristics rather than being subsumed by the Comintern -- would likely be better than what we have now.

[Smokin Joe]

Careful, folks.

Communism never flourished like it has since it was declared "dead".

[The_Reader_David]

Communism never flourished like it has since it was declared "dead".

Not really.  Except North Korea where it mutated into a bizarre mixture of hereditary monarchy, ancient oriental despotism and a Stalinist police-state, all the nominally "Communist" countries are now actually fascist.  (Central planning doesn't and can't work for the reasons Hayek and vonMises told us it couldn't even as Lenin and company were giving it a go.)

[Smokin Joe]

Not really.  Except North Korea where it mutated into a bizarre mixture of hereditary monarchy, ancient oriental despotism and a Stalinist police-state, all the nominally "Communist" countries are now actually fascist.  (Central planning doesn't and can't work for the reasons Hayek and vonMises told us it couldn't even as Lenin and company were giving it a go.)

Here, they have rebranded it "Socialism", but really, it is in practice, the same thing. And it is plenty healthy here, just with a new label.