Civil Rights Law, Corporate America, and the Triumph of Identity Politics
* Book: The Origins of Woke: Civil Rights Law, Corporate America, and the Triumph of Identity Politics by Richard Hanania, 288 pages, Broadside Books (September 2023)
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Review
Oliver Traldi:
"In The Origins of Woke, Richard Hanania argues that wokeness is primarily legal and political in nature, and that its history is traceable to civil-rights-era developments in law and policy. “Intellectuals tend to put a great deal of faith in the importance of ideas,” he writes, but that leads them to get this phenomenon wrong. According to the intellectualist story, which I’ve discussed in my review of Cynical Theories and my forthcoming assessment of The Identity Trap, philosophers like Marx or Foucault somehow planted the seed of wokeness in college students’ minds, with the help of their hyper-lefty professors. Ergo, the antidote to wokeness is the work of liberal intellectuals, like John Stuart Mill, which tells us how to evaluate philosophical and political theories on their merits according to our best habits of rationalism and empiricism.
Hanania looks down on this sort of intellectualist account. In common with many woke advocates, he describes the “marketplace of ideas” as a “myth” and argues that the best way to understand politics is by following events back through the tendrils of political power to their source—the federal bureaucracy. For instance, there is “a problem for the idea that wokeness came from the university[:] the fact that identity politics had to originally be forced upon much of higher education by Washington, with the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare originally coercing schools like Columbia and UC Berkeley to adopt quota-based faculty hiring during the early 1970s.”
Debates about the nature of concrete political systems and their relation to ideologies are not new, but their emergence within the anti-woke movement may point to a new level of sophistication within those circles. Materialist (or realist) and intellectualist (or idealist) accounts of political history and theory have always been at odds, and for every theory that accounts for political behavior in terms of people’s genuinely held ideas, we can offer a corresponding theory that accounts for political behavior in terms of people merely pretending to hold those ideas in order to gain some material benefit or avoid some material harm. On the (broadly speaking) Left, you can see this debate play out among Marxists, moralists, and misinformation theorists, for example. It is also part of international-relations theory, dividing the hard-headed realists from the liberal idealists. Idealism is pretty standard in an anti-woke discourse saturated with idea-centric thinking, and so Hanania’s book is in many ways a welcome entry to the conversation. On its own, though, his power-based perspective is just as incomplete.
For Hanania, “wokeness has three central pillars”: “The belief that disparities equal discrimination” (when those disparities favor the “advantaged” groups), “speech restrictions,” and “human resources (HR) bureaucracy.” These first two pillars have been called “equalitarianism” and “cancel culture,” respectively. It’s Hanania’s focus on the third—“how wokeness is enforced at an institutional level”—that makes his book distinctive."