This piece by the liberal NYT columnist Tom Edsall is the most hopeful thing I’ve read in a while. In it, he details how so many left-wing activist organizations are tearing each other apart internally over wokeness. Excerpt:

There has been a burst of stories in recent weeks describing devastating internal conflicts within progressive organizations, the most conspicuous of which was Ryan Grim’s June 13 Intercept piece, “Elephant in the Zoom: Meltdowns Have Brought Progressive Advocacy Groups to a Standstill at a Critical Moment in World History.”

Grim’s assessment resonated across the internet and was quickly followed by Molly Redden’s June 17 HuffPost account, “Inside the A.C.L.U.’s Post-Trump Reckoning”; Jon Gabriel’s article in the Arizona Republic on June 18, “Who needs a right-wing plot when progressives are busy eating themselves alive?”; Zack Colman’s June 19 Politico column, “Justice or overreach? As crucial test looms, Big Greens are under fire”; and John Harris’s June 23 Politico essay, “The Left Goes to War with Itself.”

According to Grim (and those other reports), disputes over diversity, equity and inclusion — over doctrine, language and strategies — have paralyzed much of the left advocacy and nonprofit sector.

William Galston, a senior fellow at Brookings, has a sharp eye for what’s not working in Washington and has long been a critic of those he feels are pulling the Democratic Party too far to the left. Galston emailed me his take on the current situation:

In recent months I’ve had the chance to talk to several presidents and executive directors of established left-leaning centers and groups. They all tell versions of the same story:

Around 2015, something changed. The young people they were hiring were focused on issues of race, gender, and identity as never before, and they were impatient with — even scornful of — what they regarded as the timid incrementalism of the organizations’ leaders. They wanted equity (as they defined it) immediately. They were acutely sensitive to what they saw as microaggressions, including the use of terms to identify different groups that they regarded as out of date and insulting. They were prickly, quick to take offense and to see malign motives rather than inadvertent mistakes.

This generation gap has forced leaders to devote unprecedented time and energy to internal governance, sometimes to the detriment of their organization’s mission. The left has a long tradition of turning on itself, and what I’ve reported is the latest chapter in a long running saga.

One high-ranking nonprofit official who has been in the middle of these battles, but who declined to be identified because of the repercussions he would face within his organization, commented by email:

Difficulties addressing D.E.I. issues and identity politics are part of the problem, but they are symptoms as much as causes. There’s a new perfectionism in our organizations that gets in the way of actually dealing with challenges in our imperfect world.

The fundamental problem, he wrote, is “the presence in every progressive organization of a small but very vocal fringe that views every problem as a sin.” This hyper-moralization of internal disputes spills over into real-world but otherwise routine disagreements, he continued: “It has become too easy for people to conflate disagreements about issues with matters of identity.”Every leader of a nonprofit organization, he contended, “is struggling with the same problems regardless of the race, gender, or identity of the leader.”

You love to see it.

There's more:

The current factional difficulties on the left bring to mind the work of Richard Ellis, a professor of political science at Willamette University and a liberal, who wrote the 1998 book “The Dark Side of the Left: Illiberal Egalitarianism in America.” Ellis described the transformation of the radical 1960s group Students for a Democratic Society:

“How did S.D.S. move from the nonviolence of the Port Huron Statement to the violent fantasies of the Days of Rage?” Ellis asked.

Answering his own question, Ellis argued:

The impulse to effect social changes was increasingly pre-empted and distorted by a desire to retain an uncorrupted honesty or purity. The S.D.S. worldview increasingly became one of “us” versus “them,” the good inside versus the evil outside.

A similar process overtook two subsequent movements, in Ellis’s view:

Characteristic of both radical feminism and radical environmentalism is the tendency to dismiss the choices people make as a product of false consciousness. Under conditions of inequality, Catharine MacKinnon insists, female consent is merely male coercion concealed. Driving a car, radical environmentalists tell us, is an “addiction,” not a real choice.

Eric Kaufmann, a political scientist at the University of London and author of the book “Whiteshift” (and who pointed me to Ellis’s book), argued by email that a key element in the struggle of progressive groups “is the elevation of emotion and the personal over reason, generalizable data and process.”

Read the whole thing. It’s a good column. The best quote is from Steven Pinker, who says that the entire crisis is built on the woke Left’s belief that progress comes from Good defeating Evil (as opposed to problem-solving), and its false assumption about equality: that the only reason for unequal results is bigotry. Pinker calls this “an algorithm for infinite recrimination because of an iron law of social science: nothing ever mirrors the demographic statistics of a nation.”

Edsall goes on to talk about how, when people of color rise to positions of leadership, but struggle to succeed in them, the only reason (from the woke perspective) for this has to be institutional racism that hasn’t yet been identified and eliminated. No Social Justice Warrior can ever entertain the idea that that particular minority simply might not be very good at his or her job. I once worked in a professional environment in which a BIPOC was given a plum job far above their experience, and who failed spectacularly.

Everyone in the office was expected to avert their eyes from the humiliating disaster of this person’s professional flame-out. Plus, the rest of us had to take on extra work — this person’s work — to give this person “the chance to succeed.” Most of the people I worked with were liberals, but they had earned their positions by hard work and experience, and did not appreciate being compelled to do not only their own work, but somebody else’s, in service to a false philosophy of egalitarianism. When the BIPOC employee eventually burned out, I felt bad for this person, who was young, because they might have succeeded in time, by working themself through the ranks, like everybody else, if the (all-white) upper management hadn’t insisted that only a BIPOC should be hired for that job, and this person was promoted far beyond their ability to do the job — only because of the color of their skin.

This particular issue caused a lot of internal grumbling on the team, eventually among the white liberals, who eventually could not ignore the evidence of their own eyes. But this appointment was part of a broader push within the organization to elevate BIPOCs and other minorities, regardless of the quality of their work. I remember arguing with someone in the office (a white person) who supported this move, and who said, in all sincerity, that “diversity is a component of quality.” No it’s not! A crap piece of writing does not somehow become good because the person who wrote it is a BIPOC, gay, or female. But this is the corrupt principle behind the “decolonizing” of college courses and libraries.

George Orwell, in Animal Farm, understood well the dynamic at work in these situations. When reality fails to conform to ideological principles, then the ideologue has to find a scapegoat to blame:

If a window was broken or a drain was blocked up, someone was certain to say that Snowball had come in the night and done it, and when the key of the store-shed was lost, the whole farm was convinced that Snowball had thrown it down the well. Curiously enough, they went on believing this even after the mislaid key was found under a sack of meal.

“White supremacy,” “whiteness,” and “institutional racism” are the Snowballs of soft totalitarianism.

So, it’s a very good thing that these maniacs are eating each other alive. This is the time for the Right to get its act together and fight back hard, on every front, against these lunatics. It’s not going to be easy, given that they have captured every institution. But their ideology is incapable of dealing with reality, and produces nothing but failure, resentment, and conflict. This is what they are doing to our country. Joe Biden’s vision, rather than being a sensible center-left governing plan, has elevated identity politics to the first rank. There is no way to keep a country as diverse as America together if its leadership is guided by this kind of insanity.

Here’s the thing: it is not enough to defeat them politically. We have to build up something positive to replace wokeness.

Yesterday, after I wrote the blog post about Viktor Orban as “defender of the normies,” I ran into a friend who has done academic work on the Czech philosopher Jan Patočka, and wanted to talk to me about doing a book on Patočka for a non-academic audience. The only thing I know about Patočka is that he was a courageous anti-communist dissident intellectual persecuted by the Communist regime. That, and a phrase of Patočka’s that I first encountered in reading Roger Scruton: “the solidarity of the shattered” (or “of the shaken,” depending on your translator). Here is an explanation of the concept:

“When Jan Patocka wrote about Charter 77, he used the term ‘solidarity of the shaken’. He was thinking of those who dared resist impersonal power and to confront it with the only thing at their disposal, their own humanity.”

With this observation Václav Havel refers to an essential idea developed in one of the final works of the Czech philosopher, Jan Patočka, Heretical Essays in the Philosophy of History, in which Patočka analyses the meaning of war in the twentieth century. It is precisely in this text that Patočka introduces the idea of “solidarity of the shaken”, meaning with it a particular bond that originates between people who have experienced a strong disturbance of the certainties, big and small, that hold their lives in place.

The “shaken” is an individual whose everyday assurances have been overturned by a deeply shocking experience, which allows them to change their perspective on life. From Patočka’s point of view, the shaken are “those who are capable of understanding what life and death are all about, and so what history is about”[2], as they have regained the true meaning of their own life through the experience of an actual danger. By rediscovering the meaning of their death, human beings can also understand what life really is, i.e. something that cannot be restricted to ordinary every day experience, or limited to mere facts.

“The solidarity of the shaken is built up in persecution and uncertainty: that is its front line, quiet, without fanfare or sensation even there where this aspect of the ruling Force seeks to seize it.”

These words remind us of the meaning of the dissident action engendered by Charter 77, as its signatories themselves defined it. Indeed, Havel and Patočka have highlighted the concept of a pure solidarity, experienced in a disturbing moment, which has guided them to a deep sense of sharing and loyalty. They have consciously chosen to leave the safe ground of everydayness in order to live a dangerous experience which allows them to create a new kind of commonality. Czechoslovakian dissidents were shaken persons, living a life exposed to danger and “problematicity”. Havel, Patočka and all the signatories of Charter 77 followed the direction of an ethical, critical and essential choice, which created a strong solidarity despite the differences existing between these people.

I am eager for a populist conservative leader who can help those shattered or shaken by the malign use of woke power, to build an alliance to drive them out of power, and to replace them with a more just order. Reading this about Patočka helps me to understand better what the Czech dissident Kamila Bendova meant when she explained to me why it was necessary (and easy) for her and her late husband, Vaclav Benda, to collaborate closely with all the hippie atheists in the Charter 77 movement, even though the Bendas were political and religious conservatives. She told me that when you are faced with totalitarianism, the rarest quality to find in others is courage. Havel and the hippies had it; most Christians, despite sharing religious convictions with the Catholic Bendas, did not. The Bendas leaned into solidarity of the shaken with the hippies who had been persecuted for their beliefs — one of their number was even a Trotskyist! — rather than the superficial solidarity with fellow Christians who kept their heads down for the sake of safety.

Similarly, we religious and social conservatives should form coalitions with brave anti-woke gay public intellectuals like Bari Weiss and Douglas Murray, rather than impose our own purity tests. All of us who have been shaken by conflict with wokeness in power must recognize that we share that in common. Whatever our differences — and they are meaningful differences — we are united in our opposition to these unjust and insane totalitarians. We can and must work out a new way of cooperating and living together with our differences, based on our shared experience of injustice at the hands of woke ideology.

The work remains to be done. One of the common criticisms heard after last autumn’s National Conservatism conference in Orlando was that the only thing holding us together was a shared loathing of wokeness. That’s a fair criticism, but that only means that we have creative and constructive labor ahead of us. We know what we don’t want — but what do we want? The refusal of a coercive, moralistic, radical egalitarian ideology — wokeness — is a good basis on which to discuss and negotiate among ourselves. And — crucially — witnessing the purity clashes destroying woke institutions now is a clear sign to us on the Right that we need to avoid the same. Though I hold moral views far to the Right of many people, I don’t want to live in a right-wing version of Wokeistan.

Douglas Murray’s remarks earlier this year, asking what it is about the Right that makes it so unattractive, are worth pondering. I am religious, and Murray, who is gay, is not. Our views on homosexuality are irreconcilable. But I know that my views are unpopular today; as a matter of practical politics, I would be willing to enter into a compromise in which we have a public order that makes a place for gay people, including civil partnerships, in exchange for robust religious liberty — including the right of religious institutions to be left alone by LGBT crusaders. I am not willing to allow the perfect to become the enemy of the good enough for now. What makes me still a classical liberal, however weak, is my hatred of bullies and the mob; I am in favor, deep down, of the right to be left alone.

We on the religious and social Right simply have to face the fact that on the gay question, we have lost the culture war, and that if we are going to protect our institutions, and our own religious liberty, we are going to have to reach a modus vivendi with gay conservatives and gay classical liberals who oppose us religious believers, but who don’t want to smash us. I’m not sure what that compromise would look like, but those conversations ought to be happening now (though probably not in public). Camille Paglia, who is outspokenly lesbian and atheist, once famously said that her fellow gays should be careful about attacking the Church. She points out that historically speaking, homosexuality has only flourished under conditions of advanced civilization. Like it or not, the Church is a pillar of civilization. Gays, according to Paglia, may think they are triumphing by attacking the Church, but in fact they may be undermining the conditions under which they can thrive. I would like to know more about that thesis.

Let me make this more concrete. If you haven’t watched Matt Walsh’s documentary What Is A Woman?, you really must. What makes it so brilliant is the simplicity of the concept: he simply asks leading lights of the gender ideology/trans movement to define “woman”. They can’t do it. This is a question that 99 percent of humanity had no problem answering until the day before yesterday. It’s a question that most of humanity still has no problem answering, but the power of the gender ideologues has cowed all those in professional circles into silence.

In Live Not By Lies, I quote (not by name) a physician in a major American hospital who told me that the hospital administration had ordered all the staff to give anybody who showed up wanting cross-sex hormones or surgical intervention what they wanted, no questions asked. This, even if it violated the physicians’ best judgment about what was good for that particular patient. Moreover, the doctor told me that the Human Resources department at the hospital monitored the social media feeds of all the doctors, to make sure none of them tweeted, Facebooked, or Instagrammed anything problematic. This is how far these crazies are willing to go to impose their ideology.

When you watch Walsh’s movie, you may feel shock that the rest of us have allowed such lunatics to achieve so much power. What Walsh does in that documentary is what ordinary journalists ought to have been doing years earlier, if American journalism had not been captured by ideologues. There is tremendous opportunity for politicians of the Right to build on the common-sense courage seen in Walsh’s documentary. Similarly, Mrs. DK, a semi-regular commenter here, is a Christian who talks about the solidarity of the shaken she has found with atheists and others not like her, all of whom have had their children captured by gender ideology, such that the kids have undertaken medicalized sex changes. Whatever our differences — religious, political, etc. — the threat to our children should bring us all together to stop the ideologues.

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More broadly, as we see in the Edsall piece, if we don’t stop these people while we can, any basis for us to live together peacefully as people in a diverse country will be destroyed. The vicious infighting that they have brought to the organizations they control will be made general, given their control over big social institutions. Wokeness has captured the US military. What happens when our soldiers, sailors, and airmen, Balkanized from the top, turn tribal, and then on each other? We would be facing an existential question for our nation.

So, to end: the Right has to press its advantage hard now, against the woke in disarray, to dismantle their hold on our institutions, and cast their malignant ideology out of the public square. But it also has to build on the solidarity of those shaken by wokeness, to create (or reclaim) a positive social and political order. What I personally can’t figure out is if this means a return to classical liberalism, or if it really is true that classical liberalism got us into this mess. I tend to believe that classical liberalism got us into this mess, but I also don’t know if it’s possible to rebuild a binding social settlement without a shared source of authority. In other words, I don’t know if a stable liberalism is possible without Christianity. I doubt it, but I am willing to hear arguments. It ought to be obvious that the Catholic integralist project is a total non-starter, absent conversion. A non-Catholic Christian like me could only see this as a form of tyranny. I would unquestionably prefer to live under that kind of tyranny than woke tyranny. But I wonder: is the only realistic option open to us some form of tyranny? If liberalism really is dead, what else is there?

Lots to think about. Hey, good news: I’ve been invited by Jordan Peterson onto his podcast, to discuss Live Not By Lies. I will be recording the episode later today. So glad to finally connect with Dr. Peterson.