What the indolent left (greens and ABC) lead to in western societies.
Most in positions of unfirable luxury.
Calvin Robinson the telegraph 21/8
Hard times create strong men, strong men create good times, good times create weak men, and weak men create hard times.”
It is hard to see the rise of wokeness as embodying anything other than the third stage of author and former US Marine G Michael Hopf’s cyclical understanding of history.
Take the example of micro-aggressions. These, we are told in the pseudoscientific language of critical race theory, include “indirect, subtle or unintentional discrimination”. Examples cited in the past have included telling a black person you like their hair, complimenting a foreign language speaker on the quality of their English or even suggesting the most qualified person should be given a certain job.
How would you even begin to explain such a thing to an Afghan woman passing her baby to a soldier over a fence in the hope of securing for them a better life, or to the inmate of a Xinjiang re-education camp?
Only a society as decadent as the modern West (think ABC, Greens) – freed from most basic wants, relieved of existential external threats and with a surfeit of time and energy – could have dreamt up the modern woke canon with its array of largely non-problems, imagined slights and hysterical, free speech-denying reaction to any opposition. With little to worry about, we started manufacturing problems and, seeing no enemies on our borders, we went looking for them within.
I would never deny that this has sprung from a good place. Many among the woke Left have good intentions and there are undeniably still problems with bigotry and prejudice that demand to be addressed, even if their efforts to create a more equal society are more likely to entrench division. It isn't wrong in times of wealth and plenty to seek new ways to advance society.
Observing events around the world, however, I fear we are entering the fourth stage of Hopf’s cycle; that hard times are coming, enabled by a weak West that is not equal to the task of overcoming them.
The chief culprit has been President Joe Biden. His administration, with the gratingly right-on Kamala Harris at his side, has been a wokefest from the start, whether it was rescinding Donald Trump’s ban on critical race theory-inspired implicit bias training for federal employees on his first day, signing ill-thought-through executive orders on trans rights, or jumping on every other virtue-signalling bandwagon he could find.
His commitment to these Left-wing shibboleths has won him not only the faltering support of the Democrats’ influential young radicals, but that of America’s media establishment, which has covered shamelessly for a president who should have spent more time worrying about his role as commander-in-chief and his obligations to the people of Afghanistan than trying to rival Justin Trudeau or Jacinda Ardern for “wokest world leader”.
Events in Afghanistan have exposed what truly matters and how inconsequential much of identity politics really is. Wokeism developed as a luxury, and it is a luxury that our society can no longer afford.
