Is Everything Really Political?

Don’t like wokeness? What do you have to hide?

Wokes interrogate critics of wokeness by asking what it is that wokeness has inhibited them from doing. The implication is that they want to do bad things, like shout racial slurs, and would be doing it right now even if it wasn’t for wokeness. To be a leftist is to see the world as being in a state of fundamental conflict between opposing forces. Leftist politics, violent or non-violent, totalitarian or libertarian, become the only hope of redemption for mankind from the forces of capitalism, nationalism, the patriarchy, and whatever other evils are added to the menu.

This battle for the human soul requires the total triumph of the Left over everything else. And thus also total control over everyone and everything to root out all these many human evils.

What wokes see as liberation, critics of wokeness see as total tyranny.

To understand why these two groups see wokeness so differently requires also understanding the leftist mentality and the concept of wokeness. To be ‘woke’ or aware is to see the entire world as political. While to oppose wokeness is to see wokes imposing politics on everything.

Critics of wokeness protest politicization while wokes insist that everything is already political.

This premise lies at the heart of leftist politics and also the opposition to it by apolitical people who may not be conservative or have any political agenda of their own except being free.

Leftism is a giant conspiracy theory. Its paranoid schizophrenic view of the world is not unique. The perception that the world is invisibly controlled by forces and agendas that most people are not aware of pervades many cults, conspiracy theorists and radical movements. But what is unique about the Left is its image as an intellectual movement and a cultural force that has enabled its paranoid worldview and its raving hostility to the world as it exists to dominate the discourse at the expense of the ideas, beliefs and cultures that predated it.

The central leftist conspiracy theory is wrapped in academic theories taught in every university, and its premises are as deeply embedded in our culture as they were in the USSR and much of the western world, willingly or unwillingly, knowingly or unknowingly, has come to see at least some of reality through the lens of leftist conspiracy theories and to echo its messages.

Wokeness is the act of ‘awakening’ people to that alternate reality by imposing that lens.

Leftism is a way of seeing the world and a moral system about how the world should be. This morality is premised on seeing invisible systems of power, whether it’s capitalism or systemic racism, that it defines and seeks to dismantle to make way for its new moral order to take over.

Freedom is incompatible with that worldview. Leftism assumes that the vast majority of people have been incorporated into systems, ideologies and ways of being that they have to unlearn or be forced to unlearn. Under the impetus of identity politics, leftists may concede that some ‘indigenous peoples’ untainted by western capitalism might be pure enough to function on their own without a ‘wokening’ being imposed on them, but most of us will have to be ‘untaught.’

And the unlearning of the old and the awakening to the new is a repetitive process that requires constant monitoring to avoid backsliding. Individualism is subsumed by collective monitoring. Workplaces, schools and eventually all of society become a giant panopticon where activists seek out errors and sins to punish through public humiliation, financial loss and even violence.

The more intensive wokeness gets, the more extreme its activists become in monitoring everyone’s habits, associations and speech. And this is what most people view as ‘wokeness’ and come out against. They see wokeness not as leftist politics, but as being monitored and forced to be afraid and to censor themselves because of the total politicisation of everything.

Much like Communism, wokes argue that freedom might one day be realizable, but not until everything bad has been unlearned and everything good has been taught. And since the Left keeps generating new evils to unlearn, like heterosexuality and cis’ness, the final unlearning and the embrace of true wokeness or Communism is an event that can never actually arrive..

Since everything is political and since everything not fully woke is evil, everything must be destroyed. The habit of seeing the world through a lens of leftist conspiracy theories, and identifying more things to destroy as part of the larger goal of justifying the destruction of everything becomes the fundamental intellectual and cultural activity of leftist wokeness.

This system of deconstruction that defines impossible utopian ideals against the worldly evils that it identifies is the political engine of the machine. Its purpose is not so much to find new things to celebrate, like transgenderism, as to use them to wage war on old things. New things are of no use unless they are destroying the old and then they too must be destroyed.

Opponents of wokeness come to see this as a totalitarian assault on their freedom and their individuality. What begins as a war against systems quickly becomes a war on individuals. Dismantling ‘isms’ stops being just about waging war on institutions and boils down to waging war on individuals. The war on capitalism or the patriarchy isn’t out there, it’s inside you.

There is no freedom without individualism. And there is no individualism when everything is politicised. The backlash to wokeness is a backlash against that tyranny of conformity.

Wokes view any resistance to wokeness as immoral. Cancel culture they argue is just consequences culture. Individualism doesn’t exist. The people who claim to be individuals are just complicit in the systems such as capitalism or colonialism that they seek to preserve.

Wokeness claims to be pursuing liberation through tyranny which it can only justify by claiming that its tyranny is saving people from a much worse invisible tyranny all around them. And if they don’t feel saved, that’s because they’ve become complicit in that tyranny. And need to ‘check their privilege’ and ‘decenter’ themselves. And thus freedom becomes slavery.

And slavery becomes freedom.

Wokeness is not a temporary phenomenon, under its varied names it’s the inevitable next stage of leftist politics which begin with promises of utopia and end with a tyrannical dystopia.

Most people don’t recognize the nuances of leftist politics let alone understand that behind the grab bag of causes, some seemingly random, solar panels, Gaza, drag queens, is a larger operating modality, but they know when they are being threatened and intimidated.

Leftist policies seem good to people when they offer financial benefits, like free healthcare, or feelings of heroism, like civil rights, without looking into the details, but the package deal is that the integrated whole is a machine built to destroy everything they love and care about. Underneath the smiles and buzzwords is a paranoid hostility to people as they are and a worldview trained to see the bad in everything old and the good in everything new it does.

Wokeness is the transition from leftism as an economic and social benefit to a mandatory worldview. And it is here that people wake up and realize that it’s not freedom: it’s slavery.

Daniel Greenfield is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. This article previously appeared at the Center's Front Page Magazine.

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