How to Respond to the Evil Trinity of Wokeism? Live Not by Lies!

Mao's Cultural Revolution reflects wokeism better than Marx!

One of my favorite magazines is Chronicles. The latest issue focused on the question, "Is Wokeism Marxist?" All of the writers came to the conclusion that it isn't. Marxism warred against capitalism and the inequality between workers and owners. It's target was economic inequality and the downfall of capitalism. That is not what's running the engine of wokeism. One writer made a compelling case that Mao's cultural revolution offers a more accurate portrayal of our current crisis. 

In his article, The Maoist Rage of Woke Ideology, Michael Rectenwald writes: 

With wokeness, Marxism's underlying economic theory and its explicit class analysis drop out of the picture entirely. Instead of Marxism's precise (althoug mistaken) theory of exploitation -- exploitation equals the amound of "surplus value" (derived from unpaid labor time) expropriatedf from workers by capitalists....wokeness purveys the nebulous and nearly ineffable notion of privilege, which apparently, despite ongoing efforts, can never be fully annulled or adequately atoned for. In strict Marxist terms the leveling down or stripping of social superiors of undeserved "privilege" has nothing at all to do with achieving "social justic" or "equity."...If he were alive today, I submit that Marx would argue that even if the aims of woke social justice could be achieved, the most significant matters of material inequity, exploitation, poverty, and social domination would remain intact.

What characterizes wokeness isn't so much economic disparity, but "Westernized Maoism," i.e., cancel culture writ large. The past represents all that's wrong and must be erased. Rectenwald writes:

Cancel clulture, internet mobbing, the renaming of streets, word policing, changing the definitions of words, and the violent iconoclasm of Black Lives Matter -- their penchant for destrooying cultural artifacts such as statues and historical monuments -- recall the features of the Maoist Cultural Revolution....ideological purging, relctification, purification, or the molding of the minds of individual sujects to revolutionary ends, i.e., thought reform.

Big corporations are going woke with no threat to their capitalist underpinnings. They benefit from government largesse and praise for their virtue signaling. Meanwhile workers and small business owners are losing ground -- all in the name of victimization and identity politics. Meanwhile, no one benefits from the collapse of civilization that wokeness brings. Ask business owners in our cities how they feel about the poor victims of privilege robbing their stores enabled by the left.

Another article in the same issue, by Henry George (The Post Christian Moral Order) emphasized how race is being used as the centerpiece of wokeism. George quoted American dissident academic, Brandon Van Dyck, who said in a 2022 interview,  "race is at the very centre of our moral order, but the categories of sex and sexual orientation are secondary and round out a kind of holy trinity of victimology. In this holy trinity, race sits on the throne, with sex and sexual orientation to its left and right." What an intriguing way to put it and how much it illustrates the evil of the woke left which creates a demonic inversion of the Holy Trinity.

Everything coming from the left today focuses on race, "gender", and sexual behavior and the demand to eliminate history and western values that call for moral responsibility and integrity. Morality must be recast to reward the approved victim groups and punish those considered to be the privileged oppressors, not by anything they've done, but by the fact that they are white, or Christian, or believe in personal responsibility, or simply disagree with the left's agenda.

Alexandr Solzhenitsyn

George points out that those who embrace woke politics represent only 6-8% of the population. Unfortunately, "the rest of the populace either acquiesce to the domination of their rulers or eventually come around to affirming their pervasive ideas...because the true believers control the levers of social, legal, political, and cultural power." We certainly saw that during COVID which brought us closer to a police state here in he U.S. and closer to one-world-government. And the beat goes on, unfortunately with the help of many in the Catholic Church. 

While none of the authors offered suggested solutions to the woke revolution, we have heroes of the past to guide us, particularly Alexandr Solzhenitsyn. His essay, Live Not by Lies, gives us a blueprint for responding to wokeism.  Fight back with the truth undergirded by prayer. May we always be guided by Jesus Christ, the Way, the Truth, and the Life!