The Liberal Answer to Cancel Culture – Manhattan Institute

Cultural socialism and its accompanying religion of woke are geared toward engineering equal outcomes and emotional harm protection for historically disadvantaged race, gender, and sexual identity groups. This ideology has been tearing through Western culture at a breakneck pace.

Are we in the midst of an insignificant culture war between pointy-headed obsessives? No. As the classical liberal authors of two new books painfully explain, woke ideology threatens the freedoms we hold dear. More than this, it represents an attack on equal rights, truth-based institutions, and social cohesion that hampers our response to material issues such as health, social mobility, and crime.

Since Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidts 2015articleand 2018 bookThe Coddling of the American Mind, important new literature has sought to understand where this cultural tornado came from, where its going, and what to do about it. I recentlyreviewedtwo books for this publication by conservative Millennials Chris Rufo and Richard Hanania. Rufo fingered post-1960s cultural Marxism and its long march through the institutions as pivotal while Hanania pointed to the unintended evolution of civil rights law as the powerhouse behind the rise of woke. Though their diagnoses are different, both advocated using elected government to curtail the power of activist bureaucracies.

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Eric Kaufmannis professor of politics at Birkbeck College, University of London and an adjunct fellow of the Manhattan Institute.

Photo by Douglas Rissing/iStock

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The Liberal Answer to Cancel Culture - Manhattan Institute