A conspiracy of kindness? How woke won over the Western world – largely by accident

Steven Tucker

July 18, 2024 15 Reactions

Throughout, Kaufmann provides numerous figures and graphs demonstrating conclusively that left-wingers now outnumber right-wingers in fields like academia and journalism to a similar extent that black women now outnumber white men in the photo album of Dawn Butler. Together, these unbendingly self-righteous people collude to keep conservatives and liberal-minded folk like Eric out of their captured professions, thereby to ensure their continued dominance of civil society.

So, Kaufmann must believe in the Gramscian Long March conspiracy theory too, right? Well, no, actually.

Just because you’re paranoid, it doesn’t mean they’re not out to get you   

Kaufmann’s basic thesis is that there never was any grand, over-arching, centrally-controlled Marxist plot, and that all this just happened fairly organically, from the bottom-up. Dubbing the whole process of institutional takeover “cultural socialism”, rather than “Cultural Marxism”, he says it grew from the basic moral shift in 1960s America away from anti-black racism, with the end of segregation laws and suchlike, which was motivated by fairly ordinary left-liberal considerations like fairness and compassion.

As racism became increasingly stigmatised over the following decades, however, the normal left-liberals and conservatives who traditionally controlled the West’s institutions began to see racial prejudice as the worst sin of all, allowing them to be subjected to moral blackmail by actual full-blown radical Cultural Marxists who employed a merciless campaign of moral blackmail against them in order to get their way, until, finally, by the 2020s we ended up with a world run by Dawn Butler by mistake.

As Kaufmann perceptively writes:

“Left-liberals today, like radicals, worship the totems of equal outcomes and harm protection for minorities. They accept this is the North Star towards which morality must orient. This renders them powerless in the face of radicals to their left. Like pious Muslims trying to argue against Islamic fundamentalists who point to passages in the Quran to authorise their violent global jihad, left-liberals are tied into a common moral framework with the fundamentalists, making it nearly impossible to resist their claims.”

As Eric further explains, you can’t “explain religious fundamentalism without religion. Fundamentalists are important, but rely on a [prior] enabling belief structure”: here, of a pre-existing general post-1950s left-liberal aversion to racism. “If few believe in [mainstream] Christianity, fundamentalists seeking to ban drinking, dancing, or Sunday opening, get nowhere.”

And that, dear reader, is why the white heterosexual cisgender males who still (just about) run the higher echelons of the UK Labour Party will never, ever, take it upon themselves to punish a black, queer-friendly Far-Left backbench female MP like Dawn Butler for posting racially unwise material about melanin on Twitter – they’ve all glugged far too much of the ‘anti-racist’ [sic] Kool-Aid to be able to do anything sensible like that ever again.

Thus, there was no organised Gramscian conspiracy per se at all, just an “ecstatic leaderless revivalism” in which anti-racism became a sort of new left-liberal religion, believed in by people who wished only to protect previously marginalised or discriminated-against groups like blacks from emotional harm, initially by treating them equally and then, once the race-hucksters had got their claws into them, by treating them more-than-equally, like the pigs in Animal Farm. Observing this with interest, other once-despised groups, like gays and transgenderists, began copying what the race-Marxists had done, guilt-tripping institutional gatekeepers into redistributing the ‘social capital’ of straight people and non-trannies over to them, too.

Basically, Kaufmann discerns no intentional Marxist-led takeover of civilisation, more a cautionary tale of human folly akin to those cases you sometimes hear of in which a naïve, liberal-minded white person opens their door to an allegedly ‘vulnerable’ homeless black crack-addict, who subsequently takes over their host’s home wholesale, before persuading them to alter the ownership deeds, kicking them out onto the street, and then altering the locks for good. In my own current analogy, the black crack addict is Dawn Butler, and the house being so occupied is the House of Commons.

A conspiracy of silence?

I find this all perfectly plausible myself, but then I never interpreted the Long March theory as being one of centralised Protocols of the Elders of Zion-type control by a Comintern-style Marxist ‘Hidden Hand’; I always presumed Gramsci’s advised course of action was intended to operate independently and leaderlessly anyway. That way, it was still highly deniable. Plus, howsoever it happened, the salient fact still remains that it happened! Consider this passage of Kaufmann’s:

“What occurred in the decades after 1965 was the steady replacement of cultural liberals and conservatives with cultural socialists, one funeral at a time, one department at a time, one institution at a time … Leftist graduates [then] flowed into meaning-making fields like journalism, education, charitable foundations, the motion picture and television industries, and the human resources and communications departments of large organisations. From these heights, cultural leftists spread the gospel.”

In other words, the Gramscian Long March Through the Institutions did take place, then… except largely self-conducted by thousands and thousands of people who had probably never even heard of Antonio Gramsci at all. Kaufmann almost ends up sort of awkwardly half-arguing against his own main thesis at such points.

Some of Kaufmann’s most interesting data and arguments centre upon the fact that schools and the media are now successfully indoctrinating the young to the extent that the gap in opinions between under-thirties and their more liberal or conservative-minded elders on previously highly fringe issues like whether or not J.K. Rowling should be cancelled for accurately observing that women tend to possess vaginas, is now a yawning chasm. Youngsters now tend to believe that protecting allegedly ‘vulnerable minorities’ from ‘verbal violence’ wrongthink should always outrank petty little considerations of freedom of speech, whilst older folk tend to think the precise reverse.

As Eric correctly points out, these indoctrinated Young Pioneers, as they enter universities and the workforce, are today successfully mobilising to try and force the institutions they enter to bend to their will. Sometimes they fail, due to at least some of their bosses or lecturers possessing actual spines and saying ‘No’. But, as more and more under-30s become this way inclined, and more and more older people retire or die, these modern-day Red Guards-Lite will increasingly become the West’s median employees and median voters: Kaufmann predicts this will happen by the 2040s.

Once this is so, these fanatical illiberal prigs will never willingly allow others of a dissenting political nature into their captured institutions to operate freely, as their own liberal door-openers foolishly once did to them through a naïve sense of political fair-play from the 1960s onwards. And then what will happen? Perpetual cultural socialist dictatorship by stealth, disguised by what Kaufmann calls the “iron hand inside the velvet glove” of disingenuous #BeKind rhetoric of so-called ‘harm reduction’, ‘emotional safety’ and ‘equity of outcomes’.

Given all this, whilst I appreciate Kaufmann is probably quite correct about there never having been any centralised Comintern-style Marxist conspiracy to seize, hollow out and subvert our institutions from within, given that in the end, this very same process appears to have happened half by accident anyhow, isn’t the precise opportunistic methodology the Gramsci-lovers used to pursue their Cultural Revolution 2.0 something of a moot point?

1984 – in 2040?

Just because there is currently an increasing amount of public fightback against wokery across the West, this does not mean we have now passed ‘peak woke’ as some optimistic dissidents might proclaim, warns Kaufmann: it just means that some people have finally noticed what is going on at last and started to object. But is it all too late?         

Before the 2040s dawn, and Junior Trots become our median voters and bosses-cum-commissars, Kaufmann says conservatives and classical liberals have to ally, win elections, and use the power of central government to forcibly intervene in intermediary institutions like schools, universities and the media, to return them to a position of sturdy political neutrality.

Defunding ideologically captured courses, insisting upon more conservative-minded appointments to the leadership teams of public bodies, stricter ideological neutrality rules with harsh punishments for those who disobey, all must be pursued. Our entire culture must be reformed, so we stop excessively centralising the marginal – making captive toddlers read books about minority gay penguins rather than ordinary majority straight ones like Pingu, for example – and denigrating the normative, as when all white people are automatically dismissed as the progeny of racist slave-traders, advises Kaufmann.

Yet cultural and institutional transformation is now inherently far more difficult for those on the right than for their opponents on the left to pursue. Left-wing governments can just sit back, issue no explicitly Cultural Marxist directives whatsoever, and rely on their natural allies who today staff schools, HR departments, etc, to do their ideological work for them on the quiet anyway. Then they can disingenuously claim they’re not pursuing any kind of culture war at all.

Right-wing governments have no such luxury, and must lean into this existential battle much more relentlessly and loudly, like Ron DeSantis in Florida. The trouble is, most politicians in so-called mainstream ‘conservative’ parties these days are really conservative in name only, actually being little more than milquetoast economic liberals of a broad Thatcherite-Reaganite bent, who care little for culture-war issues at all, just money, so can’t be relied on to help much. Pressure, therefore, has to be placed on them to wake up and comply with the desires of their average voters, who, as Kaufmann’s data shows, overwhelmingly reject wokeism overall… at least until the 2040s dawn.              

But there is yet another problem. As Kaufmann acknowledges, bureaucracies, once successfully stuffed with leftists, often simply refuse to implement central government orders in the name of some imagined higher moral law. In the US, as of 2023, fewer than 20 percent of universities maintained legally compliant free-speech policies. What happened to the other, non-legally compliant 80 percent? Nothing.

Kaufmann is confident such problems can be overcome, and I hope he is right. Personally, however, I think his book, whilst certainly well-researched, should be read in conjunction with other recent texts that diagnose the West’s current woke ills from a different perspective, like James Lindsay’s Race Marxism, or Patrick J. Deneen’s Why Liberalism Failed, as in my opinion our current civilisational death-spiral has its roots in many different patches of poison, not just one. TABOO is a sensible contribution to this whole debate and successfully provides part of the answer as to how it is we got here, but not, in my view, the whole one.

Perhaps the real question, though, is not how we got here at all – but, rather, where the West ends up going next. A full-blown Dawn Butler dictatorship of highly melanated gay giraffes, maybe?

Do you agree with Kaufmann's conclusions? Leave your comments below.

Steven Tucker is a UK-based writer with over ten books to his name. His next, Hitler’s & Stalin’s Misuse of Science, comparing the woke pseudoscience of today to the totalitarian pseudoscience of the past, will be published in summer 2023.

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