Woke War I has led to Woke War 2, which is unleashing a Communist-Islamist fury. By Abe Greenwald at Commentary.
Last week, I wrote about Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s assessment that “Woke 1 was crazy.” While many on the right are angered by her lighthearted dismissal of what was a massively destructive and violent force in American life, my concerns mainly lie elsewhere. It’s counterproductive to relitigate the last war when the next one is already upon us. …
Woke 1, for all its horrors, expressed maximalist and deformed versions of very American sentiments. Its obsession with “black lives” and “white privilege” was tied to America’s undying remorse over the country’s original sin of slavery. The call to defund the police can be seen as a twisted strain of our exceptional anti-authoritarianism. And the unbridled gender madness was a debauched declaration of individual liberty.
Woke 2 is foreign in every respect. The Democratic Socialists of America aren’t talking about tearing down statues. They have plans to raze or replace the basic architecture of American governance, including the Senate, the Supreme Court, and the presidency. They want to abolish capitalism and private property. They eschew individual liberty for class consciousness. There is no meaningful or legitimate precedent in American history for this kind of movement. It is overtly Soviet and Maoist …
The Islamists changed the focus of left identity politics and centered it on the longstanding grievance of the Middle East’s Muslims: from black Americans to Palestinians in Gaza, and from white Americans to Jews worldwide. …
Woke 2 is unleashing a Communist-Islamist fury. It’s wokeness boiled down to its darkest, most illiberal essences: compulsion and bigotry. My point was that Woke 2 is evil, and evil is more persuasive than crazy is. …
Prediction:
I don’t think for a moment that homegrown Gen Z Marxists and Islamists will finally achieve what their stronger, more committed forbears couldn’t. … These movements are seeded with failure, especially in an American context. They’re antithetical to our understanding of human flourishing, and we should expect to see a large majority of the country reject them.
But, like the ruined regimes that they’re trying to import, they can do a tremendous amount of damage before they’re defeated. Which is why I’d rather focus on the fight before us than roam the battlefields of Woke War I.
