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The wokification of America was so rapid and shocking that it has inspired a lively, political spectrum-spanning conversation. There are multiple strands to this discussion, which tend to complement each other: Christopher Caldwell and Richard Hanania consider wokism as a twisted descendant of the Civil Rights movement, Yascha Mounk and Carl Trueman explore its roots in postmodern and postcolonial thought, and Musa al Gharbi takes a sociological angle, explaining how status-anxious elites have used identity crusades to preserve their own wealth and privilege. John McWhorter and Douglas Murray show that wokism can be understood as a kind of new, radical faith.
Each angle sheds its own light on the problem, and taken together they offer a fairly satisfying picture of today’s militant progressivism. There’s a certain reassurance in this exercise. We may not be in Kansas anymore, but at least there’s a bit of a map.
RESTORING AMERICA: ERIKA KIRK AND THE WOMEN AMERICA NEEDS
Helen Andrews, writing at Compact, has her own explanation of wokism. The problem, Andrews tells us, is not Marxist ideology or privilege-protecting elites; it’s women. Women have wrecked America’s institutions.
Now labeled the “Great Feminization,” Andrews’s theory suggests that modern women, presented with a historically unprecedented slate of opportunities, attained positions of influence and then ruined our institutions simply by being themselves. Women’s characteristics, rooted in “mists of prehistory,” have hardwired them to prioritize goods deeply in tension with justice and truth. Feelings are prioritized over facts. Friendliness trumps fairness. Behavior is policed through manipulation and shunning, not rules, codified standards, or meritocratic incentive structures.
Women’s biologically encoded value system, Andrews believes, is so detrimental to our courts, editorial rooms, and universities that they simply cannot function once women come to represent a majority there. A few feminine infiltrators could be managed, which is why there was some lag time between the expansion of female opportunity and the rise of wokism. Now that we’ve reached “the tipping point,” feminine mores will only intensify, gutting our knowledge and justice-related institutions. Say “goodbye” to rationality and “hello” to the softly despotic regime of empathy, safety, and cohesion.
It certainly isn’t a modest thesis. Nevertheless, it has resonated with many on the Right. And that’s because it does, in fact, capture some important truths.
Men and women really are different in certain ways. The modern workforce has done something historically unprecedented in allowing women to compete so freely in a wide range of professions. And it’s hard to deny that groups of women, taking advantage of those new opportunities, have behaved very badly in some professional spheres, allowing identity battles to undermine their institutions’ core missions. Andrews cites the 2005 fracas over Larry Summers’ famous diversity speech as a key example, but there are many other distressing cases, and it’s reasonable to set all these data points on the table and try to connect the dots.
Happily, that effort looks fairly promising, especially if we synthesize the strongest pieces of the Great Feminization narrative with insights from writers such as Caldwell, Mounk, and McWhorter. Indeed, all of Andrews’s most persuasive points start to look much more reasonable when combined with the work of other theorists. She is rightly offended by feminists who prioritize identity concerns over core demands of justice and truth. That concern dovetails nicely with the work of thinkers such as Mounk and Trueman, who explain why social justice movements, grounded in postmodernism, tend to attack society’s diseased and healthy tissues indiscriminately.
Andrews decries women who use antidiscrimination initiatives to secure unfair professional advantages for themselves. Gharbi explains that dynamic with great clarity. She sees, correctly, that some women are irrationally committed to their maladapted “values.” That phenomenon can be much better understood in light of McWhorter’s and Murray’s work on the quasi-spiritual dimensions of wokism, which has indeed become a kind of twisted faith for many people. Of course, those theorists don’t view this as a uniquely feminine problem, though it’s perfectly possible that men and women tend to respond differently to “woke evangelism” in ways that could be measured.
In its more modest form, the Great Feminization theory is both more reasonable and less apocalyptic. Women may need to work a little harder to discipline certain vices, but they don’t need to be chased out of our institutions. The key is to reinvigorate the defining standards that have historically given those institutions their purpose and form. Both men and women can adhere to these with better formation and incentive structures. Women may not function exactly like men in the workplace, but both are rational beings. They can be taught and expected to do their jobs.
It sounds like a satisfactory conclusion. Now, though, we might notice an interesting thing. Andrews is resistant to this kind of nuancing. From the very beginning of her essay, she makes clear to readers that she is offering the Great Feminization as a grand, all-encompassing narrative, meant to replace all others, not supplement. She wants to be a voice crying in the wilderness, not a participant in the conversation. Her theory’s explanatory power, she tells us, is “incredible,” a scales-from-eyes sort of epiphany. It “unlocks the secrets” of our age. “How did I not see it before?”
For Andrews, cancel culture is “simply what women do whenever there are enough of them in a given organization or field.” Men embrace open conflict and competition while women “covertly undermine or ostracize their enemies.” “Everything you think of as “wokeness,”” Andrews proclaims, “is simply an epiphenomenon of demographic feminization.”
What sort of reader delights in the dulcet melodies of that brand of determinism? It’s troubling to contemplate, but perhaps the most troubling thing about Andrews’s Compact essay is this: She offers what any reasonable person would see as a deeply damning portrait of women. Nevertheless, she insists that no value judgment is attached.
“The problem is not that women are less talented than men,” she explains late in the essay, “or even that female modes of interaction are inferior in any objective sense. The problem is that female modes of interaction are not well suited to accomplishing the goals of many major institutions.”
That’s difficult to buy after reading two thousand words on female unreasonableness, manipulation, “failure to meet basic standards of professionalism,” and vulnerability to the “tugs at the heartstrings.” Not that there’s anything wrong with that?
Even if this negative depiction of womanhood is just the unhappy truth, a more forthright discussion would set it squarely on the table and consider how much can be done to help women cope with this deeply unfortunate biological legacy. At least for anyone who thinks about human nature in a broadly virtue-oriented way, it’s impossible to claim, after everything else Andrews has said, that men and women are broadly equal. A less rational sex is clearly more vicious, no matter how good they are at soothing babies. There is no vive la difference between the sex that values truth and justice and the one that doesn’t.
But perhaps Andrews isn’t overly interested in helping people rise above their degraded, fallen impulses. Her aims were quite clear from the beginning. She wants to provide a master narrative that can unlock the secrets of our time. What sort of narrative has she provided, then?
MAGAZINE: WAKING UP TO THE BABY BUST
Looking at the Great Feminization through a broader lens, it’s impossible not to spy the outline of a very familiar story. It goes something like this: A particular group of people, oriented by nature toward universal goods, such as justice and truth, attains lofty heights of civilizational advancement. They are then infiltrated by a less rational group, which cajoles the elect into admitting them by playing on their pity and sense of fairness. The less rational proceed to undermine all the social goods that made membership desirable in the first place. The very traits that made advanced civilization possible become the source of its undoing.
Friedrich Nietzsche was the first to tell this fascinating tale, in Beyond Good and Evil: Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future and On the Genealogy of Morality: A Polemic. He had his sights trained on Christianity, but knockoffs have proliferated over the last century, including antisemitic and racist versions. It’s a standard of grievance literature, and its immense appeal lies in its apparent ability to explain everything in a way that reassures the aggrieved that they really are as naturally superior as they always believed themselves to be.
Rachel Lu is an associate editor at Law & Liberty and a contributor at National Review.
