The Prescience of The Origins of Woke

A tribute to myself

In 2023, I published The Origins of Woke. The book has been credited for inspiring Trump administration actions on DEI. Despite this attention, I think people don’t appreciate the more subtle ways in which the book was prescient on a wide range of issues related to the culture war. Since whenever I’m wrong about something, people like to bring it up on social media, and nobody ever pops up to remind people of things I’ve gotten right, I’ll have to do it myself.

Nicholas Decker has a series of posts expressing his appreciation for various economists, which I enjoy reading. There’s not enough praise out there for those who have contributed to the advancement of human knowledge, and often their methods are quite remarkable. Sometimes people write articles that are tributes to me, and I like to reward such behavior by sharing their work. I haven’t seen this particular tribute though. And for those who haven’t read The Origins of Woke, publishing it now can hopefully encourage you to do so.

It may seem that the book worked so well that it made itself irrelevant. Yet it would be a mistake to think of it as a political polemic. The Origins of Woke is more a socio-political deep dive that covers an important era of American history, and gets into profound questions regarding the nature of democracy, how the law changes, political salience, and the interactions between legal structures and social phenomena.

Below, I’ll quote extensively from the book to highlight three major things I’ve gotten right. I’ll then go on to explain what broader lessons we might draw now that we have experienced the first seven months of the Trump administration.

The Time Was Ripe for a Republican Administration to Roll Back DEI

I wrote:

Mass opinion is overwhelmingly against racial quotas, disparate impact, and the results-oriented approach to seeking group equality that has been the hallmark of civil rights law for half a century now….

Now, in addition to having public opinion on their side, conservatives have three new reasons to act that are the result of relatively recent changes in the political environment. The first involves already mentioned shifts within the Republican Party. The moderates who thwarted Ronald Reagan’s effort to repeal affirmative action and who made sure that the Civil Rights Act of 1991 passed with large bipartisan majorities are no longer there. The rise of populism means that, at least on the issues involved here, there is a growing faction within the Republican Party that is aligned with libertarianism rather than hostile to it. When a party is internally divided on an issue, decisive action can be impossible. Republicans after taking the House in 1994 found that abolishing affirmative action split their own caucus while uniting Democrats, tilting the playing field in favor of the latter despite there being majority support for the conservative position in the country as a whole. A unified right is very important here because of the tendency of the left to misrepresent their own positions in order to make them more palatable to the public. When they get help in such efforts from prominent Republicans, what starts as a political advantage for the right can quickly become a liability. Fortunately, there are few Republicans left willing to side with Democrats on these issues.

Second, Republicans have not only become more conservative and less subject to left-wing pressure campaigns, but they and their base are more obsessed with wokeness than at any point in the past. The idea that conservatives prioritize “owning the libs” over all else has become a running joke among liberals and other critics of the right, including those within the movement…

Finally, not only are Republican officeholders more likely to be committed conservatives than they were in decades past, but the political pressures operating on them are different. In a 2001 essay, John Skrentny found that, when he asked Republican congressional staff and think tank operatives why the party did not end affirmative action, the first thing they usually mentioned was fear that they would be called racist as their views were criticized and misrepresented in the media. In the last two decades, however, conservatives have grown increasingly immune to such concerns, as can be seen perhaps most notably in the rise of Trump and in the kinds of culture war legislation being adopted at the state level. Fox News, along with the growing importance of the internet and social networking sites, has helped create a conservative media ecosystem that has gained influence over Republican policymakers, drowning out traditional media and left-leaning civil rights organizations.

Alright, this one isn’t that impressive. I think people knew that the Republican Party was swinging to the right, and that a Trump second term, or even a DeSantis presidency, would lean in hard on the culture war. The next two, however, were things people would actually argue with me about.

The Backlash to Fighting Woke Would Be Extremely Limited

People used to tell me that if Republicans went after civil rights law, there would be mass resistance and a freak out like we have rarely seen before. I did not think so. Leftists have historically benefited from an obscure set of legal decisions and bureaucratic rules that meant they could misrepresent the issues involved. By turning DEI into a policy debate, conservatives would bring to the forefront partisan differences in an area where they have an advantage.

Looking back at the 1970s and 1980s, it is striking the degree to which these activists were able to frame the issues under debate. The Reagan administration took positions on civil rights law that would have sounded reasonable to most Americans if they could have gotten an accurate picture of what those positions were. Color-blindness, and requiring direct evidence of intent to infer discrimination rather than simply relying on statistical differences in outcomes between groups, in and of themselves made sense. Yet in an era before cable news, talk radio, and the internet, debates about civil rights law were filtered down to the public in the form of “liberals are more anti-racist than conservatives.”…

Yet the hyperpolarization of media and society can also allow for a fairer debate than in the past, particularly on issues where left-wing biases are particularly extreme. In few areas is the mainstream press less trustworthy than on issues of identity, as can be seen in recent years in various supposed hate crimes that journalists have championed being exposed as hoaxes, and the narratives about police shootings that they credulously reported on that turned out to unravel over the course of time. On the question of civil rights law, if there is anything resembling a fair debate, conservatives can win. The way that the left understands identity issues—namely their acceptance of a results-based approach to justice and theories such as institutional racism—is simply unpalatable to most Americans. It may be unacceptable to any people anywhere, as it is so illogical and full of contradictions that the whole system may require constant lying in order to survive. Hence the battle over teaching critical race theory, in which conservatives have been winning a series of political and legal victories ever since Chris Rufo brought the issue to the attention of the public.

Without public opinion on their side, leftists would be unlikely to push back hard on these issues. The expansion of civil rights law has flown under the radar of public opinion. This has operated to the advantage of the left on identity issues, but can now benefit conservatives.

The backlash will be limited for the same reason that the creation of woke policies drew so little attention in the first place. Concepts like whether anti-discrimination laws authorize class action lawsuits, who is entitled to attorney’s fees, the existence of punitive damages, and whether corporations must engage in extensive record keeping have never inspired much passion among the general public or even drawn its attention. This demonstrates that there is not always a strong correlation between how much energy surrounds a public policy debate and how important it ends up being. Just as how civil rights law, in terms of reach and scope, expanded in executive agencies and the courts without much public pressure, it can contract in the same way. Of course, the analogy is not perfect. When civil rights law expanded, it did so with the support of a well-organized lobby, a bipartisan consensus in Washington, and the sympathy of the media. This may make rolling it back more difficult, but in a world where conservatives recognize the importance of the issues involved, they will form their own lobbies that seek to influence the government and help level the playing field. Greater polarization in the media and the general public relative to decades past ensures that the backlash to any changes to civil rights law is muted.

Leftist activists never explicitly came out and argued for race-based governance. They dressed their goals up in euphemisms about diversity and commissioned fake studies about unconscious bias and how having more women of color around was good for business productivity. They all but mandated quotas and preferences while saying they were doing so in the name of “equal opportunity.” They got away with it because Republicans were historically out of power, or either too afraid or too distracted by other things to resist.

Could a book with blurbs this impressive be wrong?

Both sides outsourced their thinking on identity issues to seemingly non-partisan bodies that spoke with one voice. As recently as 2019, Ron DeSantis appointed someone who ended up being an enthusiastic champion of DEI to the University of Florida Board of Trustees. Of course it seemed like woke would be with us forever. Conservatives weren’t even paying attention!

During the Bush era, and even to a certain extent well into the 2010s, the salience of wokeness as a political issue was low. The Origins of Woke played a part in changing that, and DEI went from something we all accepted as a normal part of corporate practice and governance to a way of viewing the world that needed to be explicitly defended. It could not survive long in the spotlight, at least with Republicans conscious of the ways civil rights law has been abused in positions of power.

Note that while many of Trump’s more controversial actions are getting blocked in court, anti-DEI initiatives related to racial preferences have generally either not been challenged or allowed to go forward, sometimes by Democrat-appointed judges. It appears that many on the left are in their hearts not that enthusiastic about woke policies, and, if they have to pick their battles, will let Trump dismantle race and gender preferences before letting him have his way on other matters. They may even be secretly grateful that DEI is on the decline, given what a political liability it has been for them, even though they never would’ve moved against it themselves. From the Republican side, it has helped that, even though it sometimes depends on exactly how a question is asked, opposing DEI is one of their more popular positions.

Law Influences Culture

People seemed most skeptical of my idea that wokeness could largely be explained by legal requirements. See Scott Alexander and Oliver Traldi. There’s no way to test the historical argument beyond the evidence presented in the book, but if my general outlook that law changes culture is correct, we should have expected to see a connection between conservatives taking action on DEI issues and a move away from woke in the broader culture, particularly among corporations.

I wrote that I didn’t think that woke had deep cultural roots, and discounted the comparisons to religion. In the Conclusion of the book, I had a subsection called “Is Wokeness Inevitable, or a Paper Tiger”?

Some have argued that to see wokeness as a phenomenon that can be defeated in the short or medium term is unrealistic. They compare it to religious faith, which, unlike a political view, is usually seen as much deeper and more powerful.1 I’d argue that the definition of religion has two key pieces, and both are necessary to consider. Religions are of course distinguished by a metaphysical belief system that inspires individual passion. But another important aspect of religions, and the one that many of those who make the comparison to wokeness ignore, is that they are distinguished from other belief systems by their proven ability to survive across generations under a wide variety of conditions.

Christianity, Judaism, Islam, Hinduism, and the rest of the world religions are, to use the phrase popularized by Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Lindy, meaning that because they have been around for a long time we can expect them to be around in the future. They have survived through historical eras in which they have been supported by the state, oppressed by it, or treated with indifference. As they have remained strong after an endless number of trials, we can conclude that something very deep in human nature causes many to find each of the major world religions appealing…

The key thing to realize about wokeness in this context is that it has never faced a real stress test. Its fundamental tenets have been law in the United States for over half a century. Practically every major nonreligious institution in the country is forced to be conscious of race and sex, censor the speech of its employees in the name of sensitivity, act as if disparate outcomes are a sign of discrimination, and employ an internal bureaucracy to enforce these rules. Wokeness thus has no history of surviving without state support. In fact, even with state support, and with practically unlimited rhetorical backing from elite institutions, it still struggles to win hearts and minds. Wokeness remains mostly a political loser for the left, which is why it obfuscates on issues like critical race theory and the fact that civil rights law in its current form all but requires speech restrictions and racial quotas. Wokeness does not appear to be able to motivate its adherents to make the extreme kinds of sacrifices that are the hallmarks of true religious faith. It can’t even convince liberals to keep their kids in inner-city public schools.

It’s now become cliche to talk about the vibe shift, so much so that it is difficult to remember what things looked like a few years ago. From circa 2017 to 2023, it appeared as if the medical establishment, the media, universities, the federal bureaucracy, the schools, and corporate America, particularly big tech, were all marching in lockstep. While conservatives had gotten used to liberal bias in institutions, the breadth of domination that the left seemed to enjoy was without precedent in US history. Corporate America, traditionally apolitical, started to come down hard on one side of the culture war. Big tech in particular seemed to be hostile to conservative views and this was particularly disturbing given how central online discourse has become to politics and culture.

People would say that this was all about ideology, and certain mind viruses had captured educated elites. I thought that corporations and other major institutions were semi-woke before the mid-2010s due to civil rights law, and if they later went even further to the left it was because they were responding to an increasingly energized left, which did not hesitate to use whatever political levers it could get its hands on to enforce its hysterical views on identity issues. The corollary of this was that if you ever got a decidedly anti-woke administration, which would change incentive structures, the movement would largely fold.

But even I didn’t expect that the cultural change would be so rapid and extreme. For his second inauguration, Trump put Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, Elon Musk, Bill Gates, Tim Cook, and Sundar Pichai on the podium like trophies. Tim Cook comes and just gives him a solid gold bar in the White House on national television in return for tariff relief. One after another, firms have been announcing the dismantling of DEI programs without a peep from employees who would have been up in arms just a few years ago. I don’t think this is only about the blowing of the political winds, and believe Elon Musk buying Twitter is also important. But that’s not what makes tech tycoons kiss up to Trump. These are self-interested businessmen, not committed ideologues, and will always bend the knee to power. If ideology motivated them to any serious degree, they would have gone into politics, activism, or journalism rather than become successful executives and entrepreneurs.

For those who might say that the vibe shift started before Trump won, so this couldn’t have been the decisive factor, I should note here that the legal war on woke did not begin on January 20. As I pointed out in Tablet last year, well before Trump was elected for the second time, states, most notably Florida and Texas, were taking steps like cracking down on leftist intolerance on university campuses, pressuring woke corporations, and getting rid of DEI programs in state government. Judges were also starting to strike down long-standing race-conscious government programs. The actions of Trump’s second administration have been the most significant events in a broader trend of Republicans starting to take seriously the wokeness as law issue.

What We Can Learn from This

Of course, Trump largely followed my advice, and I’m still not happy. I opposed wokeness as law because it was anti-merit, involved social engineering, and infringed on individual and institutional autonomy. The administration has come out fighting against racial discrimination against whites and Asians, but has made Jewish students a “protected class” based on the same logic that originally led to speech codes on university campuses, demanded DEI for MAGAs, gone after international students, and even tried to deport people for writing op-eds or engaging in other forms of constitutionally protected speech.

Trump has basically done everything I wanted on DEI. But I forgot to add a chapter saying “Oh, by the way, don’t dismantle American science in the name of Zionism and try to deport Asian girls studying in Ivy League schools who have been in the United States since they were little kids.”

Nevertheless, I think my way of seeing the world has been vindicated. Compared to other people, I put more stock in emotions, social desirability bias, and especially the state of the law, which derives from a strong belief in the power of incentives to shape behavior. I put less emphasis on culture as a standalone force and ideology as having its own internal logic that necessitates certain kinds of behavior and stays consistent over time.

To quote myself again, this time from a previous article:

The Origins of Woke was written in the context of a debate in which I saw culture and ideas getting about 90% of the attention, and law maybe 10%. My view is that we need a corrective, as I’d put law at maybe 60% and culture and ideas at 40%. These numbers are made up, but what I’m trying to make clear is that what government does is actually important, and has many downstream societal effects that most people can’t even begin to imagine.

I particularly reject what I call “ideaism,” which is the belief that you can explain the world by looking at what thinkers have said or ideological doctrine without knowing all that much about historical or policy specifics. The Aporia review mentioned above is a particularly extreme representative of this view. One reason to doubt such theories is that they’re always retrospective. No one in the 1960s ever said “You know, I just read Marcuse and, given his influence in intellectual circles, I can predict that in future decades we’ll have a country where you can’t have standardized tests in hiring and corporations will praise dead black criminals, but capitalism will be safe and economic inequality will be just as extreme as ever.” In contrast, Goldwater did in fact foresee the ultimate impacts of the Civil Rights Act.

That is because Barry Goldwater focused not on the ideas behind the Civil Rights Act, which he acknowledged were mostly noble, but on the incentives that the law created. As a libertarian – and not of the Mises Caucus variety – he had a much more accurate model of the world than most people in politics. The idea that people might intend one thing and get a different result is natural to those with libertarian or classical liberal sensibilities. This is a foreign concept to conspiracy theorists on both sides of the political spectrum and the modern antitrust movement.

We can zoom out a little bit, and argue that this focus on incentives explains a lot about the world that would otherwise be mysterious. It is often argued that there are deep roots to economic growth and democratic systems of governance. Yet democratic capitalism has spread to places like Eastern Europe and East Asia, which looked like permanently inhospitable terrain a few decades ago. Intellectuals used to argue that Confucian values would stand in the way of East Asia adopting political structures associated with the West. But higher-order race realism has been refuted, and for many outcomes we care about, systems matter more than the traits of individuals and populations.

As it turns out, democracy and capitalism are compatible with a wide range of cultural traditions and states of public opinion, just as authoritarianism is. That’s why winning the political war on woke could be expected to cause a massive shift in the culture. I was right about this, though even I underestimated how quickly things would change.