I suppose it had to happen some time. The vision of woke, using politics to bend the arc of history towards justice, is experiencing a bit of a cock-up on the victim front.
The way that wokism works is that the ruling class gets to define who-whom — in the felicitous phrase attributed to Vladimir Lenin. Who get to do what to whom.
Every ruling class, according to Gaetano Mosca in The Ruling Class, has a “political formula,” As I wrote:
Ruling classes do not rule by power alone, but invent a moral or legal basis for their power. Mosca calls this a political formula. The ruler might be a king that rules as God's Anointed, or he might be a US president that rules by the will of the people. There is always a "political formula.”
Our ruling class believes that it is the savior of “oppressed peoples.” I call this an over / under political formula, where the ruling class and the underclass combine in a coalition against the middle class. This is expressed in the notion of Allyship, that I interpret as:
We are the Allies of the Oppressed People fighting against the White Oppressors.
Who are the Allies? They are the ruling-class liberals that hold political power in the western world.
Who are the Oppressed Peoples? They are all groups of people that the ruling class decides to categorize as oppressed.
Who are the White Oppressors? They are ordinary straight white middle class people, especially straight white men.
But why? Why would the ruling class want to set up a conflict like this? Can’t we all just get along?
Good question. The answer is quite straightforward and obvious, and it was formulated by Nazi jurist Carl Schmitt in his book The Concept of the Political. I quote (italics in the original).
The specific political distinction to which political actions and motives can be traced is the distinction between friend and enemy.
Various people have descanted upon this notion:
Curtis Yarvin: “There is no politics without an enemy.”
Mao Zedong: “Who are our enemies? Who are our friends?”
Óscar R. Benavides, of Peru: “For my friends everything, for my enemies the Law.”
Me: “If you want more politics, you are really saying you want more enemies.”
I could go on.
So the answer to the question: “why don’t we all just get along?” is simple. If you are a politician or an activist you don’t have a job if everyone just gets along. There must be an enemy, somehow, somewhere. If there is no enemy then we don’t need a government, and we don’t need politicians, and we don’t need an army, and we don’t need political activists.
Obviously the ruling class does not rule forever battling against the same enemies. For centuries, the Brits had the French as their enemies. Then in 1914, they switched and decided that the Germans were the enemy. The US? First the Brits were the enemy, then the Mexicans, then the Spanish, then the Germans, then the Soviets, and now the Russians and the Chinese both.
Then there are the internal enemies. In the US, first it was the Southerners. Then the Robber Barons, then the Malefactors of Great Wealth, then the Economic Royalists. Then the Southern racists, then the sexists, then the Christian fundamentalists, then the homophobes, then the Islamophobes, then the transphobes, and now the white oppressors in general and the ultra-MAGA extremists in particular. In between don’t forget the Greedy Bankers of the 2008 crash.
Really, none of these so-called enemies are enemies of the people. Nor are our Deep State members of the ruling class enemies, who are merely corrupt fools and knaves.
Right now the current ruling class and its woke Allyism is hitting a pothole over the Palestinian Question. The little kiddies have been carefully taught in university that the Palestinians are helpless victims and the Israelis are cruel colonizers. But liberal Jews are suddenly waking up and realizing that, while fighting for the oppressed peoples against the white oppressors is all very well when it comes to Trump and his MAGA supporters and keeps the kiddies busy in mostly peaceful protest, the Palestinians need not apply. And I agree.
So, our ruling class is going to have to change gears a bit on the oppressed peoples front. But I am sure they are up to the challenge.
Another thing they might want to be careful about is climate change. EVs are cool for the smart set, but not so much for ordinary middle-class Joes and Janes. And I don’t even want to think about EV battery fires in condo garages all across the nation. Wind farms and solar farms are also cool, but they don’t keep the power on. Nuclear plus natural gas peaking plants do that.
But I keep wondering what the political formula of the next ruling class is going to be. I hope it is something better than over / under. I’m about done with that.