It’s one of the more ludicrous ironies of the “woke” movement that its members believe that they have a better grasp of history than do their non-woke adversaries—the ones who, we are to assume, are still “asleep.”
Our woke scolds see the past that’s represented by the Jefferson Memorial, Columbus Day, and “Ozzie and Harriet” as a big lie, and hence, they see present-day worshippers of those things as big liars. What old-fashioned Americans and pre-21st-century textbooks taught them goes by the names whiteness, colonialism, and patriarchy. People who ate it up in former times and still embrace the bias just don’t get it, or maybe they do but profit from it too much to let it go. Wokesters despise them.
To be woke, then, is to have a better remembrance, a staunch un-learning of the old falsehoods. That’s what they think. They have the truth, you don’t. The position flatters them. You can see the pride a young wokester takes in his superior understanding when he confronts a conservative and condescends, accuses, mocks, or cry-bullies them. His energy waxes and face glows. He enjoys the power.
It doesn’t take much to sap his spirit, though. If you asked him what that horridly hypocritical Thomas Jefferson actually wrote and meant in the Declaration of Independence, he would mumble and go blank. Then, he would deliver a few talking points about slavery, a set script as predictable as it is simplistic. If immigration came up and the wokester denounced the nativism and xenophobia of tightened borders, and you then noted how, for decades, Big Business and free-market fundamentalists have loved open borders, she would stare dumbly. She couldn’t take it in. On the subject of white supremacy in America, a few questions about the Ku Klux Klan would stump her.
At a dinner a few years back, a friend who’s a liberal noted a sexist fact about the United States. When women started to enter the workforce in big numbers in the 1970s and ‘80s, he stated, wages in the fields most popular with women went down. His conclusion: The more women choose a particular job, the more that job diminishes in value. He didn’t explain the market mechanism that made it so, only cited the bare dollars and cents. It was a neat judgment, tidy and decisive, and he uttered it with the quiet conviction of a man in possession of a patent truth.
I started to note an obvious, non-sexist reason for the trend, which is that when you flood a field with new workers of any kind, wages go down. But I held back, knowing that the fact wouldn’t penetrate. The numbers meant too much to him to let them go. Instead, I asked, “Why?” He shrugged, as if it was up to me to draw the inescapable inference that America doesn’t respect women in the workplace. To him, the salary drop proved what progressives have argued all along. Other explanations are distractions and diversions.
What we have here is wokeness as higher knowledge, a firmer grip on the truth, with 1619 as real and verified and 1776 as mythical and propagandized. Wokesters have moral clarity; the rest of us are compromised. We might wonder then why they come off so shrill, so emotional. Why have a tantrum when a conservative takes the podium? People with better discernment and more facts should have more composure, one would think.
Not wokesters, though, and the reason is right in front of us. It’s because they actually don’t have more discernment and knowledge. All they have is moral arrogance, and in discussion or debate settings, that isn’t enough. A few scratches on the surface of their outlook show that the ones who claim to have exposed the hypocrites and exploded the myths haven’t done much homework. They take down the Founders, but they don’t tell rich, compelling stories showing those revered figures’ clay feet. They loathe white supremacy, but they can’t describe any important white supremacist books or speeches. They have moral fervor, yes, but that doesn’t make up for historical ignorance, especially when they profess historical acuity.
This is where the hollowing out of history instruction in high school and college has proven so damaging. Instead of teaching young Americans a version of the past that makes them feel as if they are entering a world shadowed by greatness, the schools hand kids a legacy of shame and greed and bigotry. Adolescents hear it and lose their curiosity. Why dig down and find out more about abusive and disappointing people? Why read further about immoral episodes? Condemnation discourages extra effort; false heroes aren’t inspiring.
Remember, our audience is young, no longer children and not yet adults. They’ve begun to envision themselves out of the home and in the world, apart from parents and on their own. They’re insecure, uncertain, wavering. They‘d like to know what to expect, how they’ll be treated. The history they learn partly answers that question, and the history that our white-guilt, male-guilt, American-guilt curriculum provides doesn’t boost their confidence. They want stability and order in the world, and goodness, too, not a list of crimes and exploitations. Heroes are better than villains, victors better than victims, if we are to appeal to the adolescent temper. I mean this as a psychological matter. If you don’t give a youth a positive history, if you don’t offer her a vision of achievement and fairness and greatness, you have deprived her of a necessary foundation.
I would go so far as to call this a matter of mental health. Our wokester don'-know-much-about-hissss-tory, but she craves a usable past. She needs one. With wokeness, she’s found it, but it’s a distorted vision, negative and vengeful. When we see her melt down over the prominence of Jordan Peterson and Ben Shapiro, when she inserts three pronouns in her Twitter profile, when she feels terrible agony over the sufferings of another group two centuries earlier, we should understand that not only has she been politically corrupted, she has also been historically malnourished.
