MacIntyre: Wokeness is not going away

I have had a running debate with other political commentators on whether we will see the ruling class back away from its focus on woke ideology. The regime’s insistence on relentlessly pushing transgenderist indoctrination onto children has created an incredible amount of organic backlash, their encouragement of the BLM riots during a pandemic has revealed the anarcho-tyranny of our system, and their focus on political loyalty over merit has created a competency crisis in both the public and private sectors.

The hegemonic control over the popular narrative that our rulers usually enjoy is starting to crack under pressure. The smart move for the regime seems pretty obvious: Put the woke away and pivot to some other justification for power that is less corrosive. This would be excellent advice for our ruling class, but they cannot heed it. Wokeness is not just some random ideology that the elites grabbed off a shelf. It contains key elements that allow for the expansion their power while also offering a theological justification for their rule. This radical offshoot of progressivism is both mechanically and spiritually necessary for the regime’s continued existence.

Everywhere and always, power seeks to expand and centralize. In its quest to secure more power, the state must ruthlessly eliminate all competitors, just like any entity that desires to establish a monopoly. Regional authorities and natural hierarchy represent innate barriers to the centralization of state power that organically arise in society.

In order for the central state to achieve total control, it must dismantle regional alternatives and collapse the emergent social structures that naturally arise during the formation of human social organization. Progressives seek absolute control so that they can alter human nature in a quest to bring about their warped utopian vision. Community, church, and the family all stand in the way of the total state that would be necessary for the left to achieve its goals.

The modern total state operates on the managerial structures described by James Burnham in his book “The Managerial Revolution.” Mass bureaucratic entities have become the default pattern of social organization for all advanced civilizations, reordering the way humans interact with work, government, media, commerce, and, most importantly, each other. Huge bureaucratic structures are the default because they promise abundance and prosperity through the miracle of efficiency produced by mass consumption and mass production.

The need for modern organizations to handle logistics of vast scale requires them to reliably produce the same result over and over again, like an assembly line manufacturing thousands of identical automobiles. Managerialism is the science of operating large bureaucratic structures, and the techniques employed by the modern managerial class allow for the level of standardization required to predictably extract the required efficiency from those organizations. Universalization is critical for a managerial class that wishes to continue increasing scale and efficiency.

In his book “Leviathan and Its Enemies,” Samuel Francis updates and expands on the work of James Burnham by looking at the mechanism through which modern bureaucratic organizations expanded their power. Francis explains that bureaucratic organizations demand uniformity to generate their efficiency but that individual humans are anything but uniform. Some people have religions that prevent them from working on Sunday. Some communities value having large families over their ability to purchase consumer goods. Some cultures have norms that would prevent them from allowing large numbers of immigrants to enter the country and reduce the cost of labor. These cultural and moral particulars serve as barriers to the uniform application of managerial techniques, which means they naturally limit the amount of power our ruling class can secure.

Wokeness is an indispensable tool for our ruling managerial class because it serves to homogenize all competing cultural and moral particulars into one uniform system of hyper-progressivism. The tenets of wokeness demand infinite deconstruction of the existing culture and an eternal revolution in which every aspect of identity is challenged and reconstructed.

The traditions, history, holidays, and symbols of a culture are demonized so that they can be dismantled and replaced with a new paradigm that will not interrupt the efficiency of managerial structures. The roles of parents, priests, community leaders, and all traditional authority figures are questioned until they can be replaced by activists, educators, and social workers loyal to the new order. Organic centers of moral authority like the family or church are undermined so that mass media can deliver a consistent stream of ideological propaganda that will generate a uniform set of social expectations and moral attitudes across the population. Hedonistic and cosmopolitan norms strip away all remaining forms of natural identity and moral taboo, creating the perfect frictionless consumer: a completely oblivious and malleable subject.

Wokeness is also useful because it inverts the natural hierarchy, creating a set of loyal foot soldiers who owe their social status entirely to the regime. The incompetent, mentally unstable, socially maladjusted, and physically unhealthy can claim power and status that they would never otherwise wield if they swear unshakable loyalty to those who are holding this inverted pyramid aloft. Anyone can rule their neighbors if they are willing to kiss the ring.

This means that wokeness infiltrates every institution, creating a patronage network where loyal sycophants are granted high-status make-work jobs that pay well but require no real skill set outside the wiliness to spread the regime’s propaganda and punish its enemies. Trans ideology captures children young and strips them of all inherent identity and social bonds while making them medically dependent wards of the total state and its managerial bureaucracies. This forms an ever-expanding voting bloc who see their very existence as entirely dependent on the current progressive order.

The functionality of wokeness is not just mechanical in nature, because it serves a spiritual function as well. All societies require a narrative about why their ruling classes should be granted power, a political formula that explains their position in society. Wokeness provides a story in which the evil demons of oppression are defeated by righteous agents of equity and social justice, but constant vigilance by the population is necessary lest the sinister forces of oppression burst forth from their cage and rule the land once more. The price of this vigilance just happens to be granting increasingly totalitarian powers of social engineering to the experts in the managerial ruling class.

A more competent set of elites would recognize the destabilizing effects of woke doctrines, but our leaders are true believers. They have drunk deeply from their own propaganda and genuinely believe that without the continuous application of their totalitarian social engineering, society would collapse into the dark ages and the mob would swallow them whole.

Wokeness cannot be put away because it is the operative narrative for global expansion. Our managerial ruling class seek to extend their grasp across the entire world, and to do so they must destroy the competing cultural and moral authorities that exist in other nations, just as they have done in America. This is why Starbucks runs ads about transgenderism in India and American celebrities complain about gay right in Uganda. Wokeness is the civilizational acid that is meant to dissolve these diverse cultures into one easily managed gray goo. The ideological drive toward hedonism and deracination is not an accident, but a critical aspect of a force meant to destroy all previous cultural forms and turn every individual on the planet into the perfect compliant subject. Our ruling class will continue to accelerate the woke agenda, no matter what other problems it may spawn, because they have bought into it on a spiritual level and it serves their material ends by providing a consistent vehicle for advancing managerial power.