I agree that the kind of messianic progressivism we’re seeing has aspects of blind faith to it, but I’m not sure that it’s a replacement for religion because the people who tend to be progressives pushing this ideology are disproportionately white, wealthy, educated and secular, and so I suspect people like this wouldn’t have been particularly religious even in earlier eras.
If you’re interested in my thoughts about why this whole over-the-top progressive movement started, I think it’s complicated and a combination of things, but mostly it’s something that came out of academic humanities departments that first began to get infiltrated by Cultural Marxists in the 1960s, when the free-speech-crackdown-supporting, minority-agitating father of the New Left, Herbert Marcuse, was a household name. It took some time — a generation or so — for the seeds Marcuse and his ilk had sown to come to fruition, but they began to do so in a big way in the 1990s and after, when humanities departments underwent a massive ideological shift to the left, identity-studies departments began to proliferate, and their hateful identitarian ideology started to go mainstream. I won’t go into the details here because I wrote a long article in Areo earlier this year in which I went into what I think happened (as well as my personal journey through that realm), backed up with statistics and other evidence:
No obligation to read this, of course, as it is long, so only delve in if you’re interested. I’ve also written separately, late last year in Tablet, on the topic of Cultural Marxism itself, which has been described by some on the left as a loony antisemitic conspiracy theory. In the article, I separate out the real ideas that constitute the core of Cultural Marxism from the nutty conspiracy theory. This one is a bit shorter than the other one, but still decently long, so, again, only dig in if you’re interested in this stuff. What I tried to do — which I hadn’t seen done anywhere else until then — is actually summarize the ideas of the major thinkers that were the biggest players in the Cultural Marxist canon (so that people would actually understand what this is about instead of throwing around an empty label), and the article got a decent amount of publicity at the time, including a very positive re-Tweet of it from the NYT’s David Brooks (not my favorite thinker in the world, but a compliment is a compliment). Anyway, here’s the article:
As for your hope that the money will eventually run out, and the woke movement will run out of steam shortly after, I hope that’s true. There are certainly signs of it in the declining ratings and revenues of some of these identity-peddling, Trump-hating organizations that pretend they are just objective journalists, and I’m hoping that some of the over-the-top antics of these people, like the recent Nike flap with the Betsy Ross flag, will generate enough mainstream attention to get significant pushback. The push for reparations for slavery is another such instance. I don’t think these people realize that stuff like this is why Trump got elected in the first place. The more they keep doing it, the better his chances, and frankly, the current environment, I’m happy about that. But I also do fear that some of these crazy ideas these people have are going mainstream because of the extent to which they control media, academia, the entertainment industry, etc. They’re impossible to tune out completely, and this new trend of woke capitalism, with Google, Facebook, Twitter and other tech giants engaging in virtue signaling and censoring conservative speech in all kinds of ways, I don’t know if the money will really run out. So I’m not sure which way things will ultimately go.
