Protesters gather outside the University of North Carolina where former U.S. Vice President Mike Pence was speaking about "Saving America from the Woke Left," in Chapel Hill, North Carolina in 2023.ALLISON JOYCE/AFP/Getty Images
Jen Gerson is the cofounder of The Line.
A pernicious thesis is making the rounds in conservative circles. Built from a blend of evolutionary psychology and cultural analysis, it’s a Theory of Everything, identifying the singular cause for all of liberal society’s “woke” rot.
The culprit? Women.
According to conservative writers such as Helen Andrews, who elevated this discourse with her essay “The Great Feminization,” the illiberal effects of “wokeness” are the inevitable consequence of “demographic feminization.” That is, when more women enter institutions, they trend toward a passive-aggressive communication style stereotypically associated with women. “Everything you think of as wokeness involves prioritizing the feminine over the masculine: empathy over rationality, safety over risk, cohesion over competition,” Ms. Andrews wrote.
For an essay that lionizes rationality over emotion, “The Great Feminization” has a lot of obvious and sloppy over-generalizations. Yet many self-described level-headed men are taking it very seriously. So unfortunately, we have to, too.
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One problem: Ms. Andrews never really defines “wokeness.” When progressives use the term, they generally mean it positively: an effort to rectify systemic inequalities. Centrists tend to agree with that goal, but object to the process, abhorring woke tactics such as stigmatizing dissent. Meanwhile, racists rail against “wokeness” out of fear that white people will lose unearned positions of power and privilege.
But no matter your position, “wokeness” was a cultural phenomenon we all experienced, including the self-censorship, public shaming, institutional bullying, deplatforming, and rapid, imposed-feeling shift of cultural mores. It’s perfectly reasonable to wonder what happened and why. But the soothing answer pulled from the well-worn sexism of yesteryear – women gone done it – is not reasonable.
Was “wokeness” a particularly feminine phenomenon? Ms. Andrews points to evidence like the reputational collapse of former Harvard president Larry Summers, the rise of anti-discrimination laws, and the supremacy of corporate HR. This, she says, shows a move away from adversarial institutional norms, patriarchal rules-based orders, truth-seeking, and a general rise in social mobs undermining hierarchy and authority.
I think there is some truth to this. But Ms. Andrews defines “wokeness” awfully narrowly to make the argument stick. The cultural moment was perhaps more notable for things like physical riots in the wake of George Floyd’s killing, and overtly aggressive acts of intimidation. Mobs aren’t feminine; mobs are human. And to the extent to which they do harm, it’s because they are abetted by the failures of those in power to assert rules and norms – power typically held by men. Indeed, in many of the institutions swamped by woke upheaval, bullying and threats were met by leaders capitulating. But personal weakness isn’t really a gendered phenomenon.
There’s a much better lens we can use to understand why woke happened, and it’s one that the right avoids, and that the left has abandoned for discourses about intersectionality and privilege: class.
In 2013, a scientist named Peter Turchin began writing about “elite overproduction.” In recent decades, he argued, we’ve produced too many college-educated individuals for a small or shrinking number of positions of power and niche cultural influence. The result has been growing political instability as insecure would-be elites compete for relevance and status.
Seen in this light, “woke” was not a revolution. It was a cultural movement that boiled down to class- and status-signalling – a way to communicate the correct manners by elites to other elites. It’s politics as a fashion, but one that ultimately reifies hierarchical class and power structures (as all fashion ultimately does). That’s why wokeness has been so ineffective at making any real or lasting structural changes in society, despite all its loudly asserted and visible good intentions: The visibility and the loudness became the ends in and of themselves.
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If we have, indeed, produced too many college graduates, this is the sort of behaviour we would expect: greater class insecurity amid growing pressure to conform to ever more radical intellectual dogmas to maintain precarious footholds in narrow cultural in-groups. Who dares risk censure and dissent when there are 20 others just like you with nowhere else to go?
We’ve seen versions of this play out in both progressive and conservative spheres in recent years. Arguably, Ms. Andrews’s own essay is an example of this from the right: a radical position intended to secure her own status among a largely male conservative audience.
To the extent that elite overproduction is disproportionately female – our universities are graduating disproportionately more women – there may be some truth to the Feminization thesis. Women are different from men – indeed, there would be no reason to pursue equality of opportunity if we were all the same. But gender alone can’t adequately explain “woke.” Anyone who misunderstands this fact is just looking for an easy out that affirms some very ancient and easy biases.