by Ben Shapiro
If this sounds cultish, that’s because it is. “Social justice” has indeed become a cult. As Helen Pluckrose and James Lindsay, both liberal scholars, write:
Social Justice Theorists have created a new religion, a tradition of faith that is actively hostile to reason, falsification, disconfirmation, and disagreement of any kind. Indeed, the whole postmodernist project now seems, in retrospect, like an unwitting attempt to have deconstructed the old metanarratives of Western thought—science and reason along with religion and capitalist economic systems—to make room for a wholly new religion, a post-modern faith based on a dead God, which sees mysterious worldly forces in systems of power and privilege and which sanctifies victimhood. This, increasingly, is the fundamentalist religion of the nominally secular left.25
The religion of wokeism requires more than adherence. It requires fluency in the wokabulary. This isn’t an attribute unique to wokeness—all religions contain elements of signaling, the use of unique signifiers to identify members of the group. Social groups often rely on signifiers in order to create solidarity, thus forming bonds across larger numbers of people: religious Jews wear yarmulkes, for example, not only to symbolize fealty to something higher, but in order to signal to other religious Jews a level of commitment to the religion. As evolutionary anthropologists Richard Sosis and Candace Alcorta write, this sort of activity is true even in the animal kingdom: “Ritual signals, by allowing clear communication of intent, were seen as promoting coordination and reducing the costs of agonistic encounters, thus laying the foundation for the development and stability of social groups.” In order to deter those trying to imitate group signals in order to gain improper social entry, groups often require sacrifice—signaling that becomes costly to fake. The most effective signaling includes an aspect of the sacred: “The ability of religious ritual to elicit emotions makes it difficult for nonbelievers to imitate and renders it a powerful tool for social appraisal.”26
This is what the wokabulary is all about. It is not about convincing others. It is about demonstration of belief in the cult. As Lasch writes:
The culture wars that have convulsed America since the sixties are best understood as a form of class warfare, in which an enlightened elite (as it thinks of itself) seeks not so much to impose its values on the majority (a majority perceived as incorrigibly racist, sexist, provincial, and xenophobic), much less to persuade the majority by means of rational public debate, as to create parallel or “alternative” institutions in which it will no longer be necessary to confront the unenlightened at all.27
Membership in the New Ruling Class comes with clear cultural signifiers—it is easy to tell whether someone is an initiate into the New Ruling Class. Do they use pronouns in their public bio to show solidarity with the transgender agenda, nodding gravely at patent linguistic abominations like ze/hir, ze/zem, ey/em, per/pers—ridiculous terms meant to obscure rather than enlighten? Do they use the word Latinx rather than Latinos in order to show sensitivity to Latinas, despite the gendered nature of Spanish? Do they talk about “institutional” or “systemic” or “cultural” discrimination? Do they attach modifiers to words like justice—“Environmental justice,” “racial justice,” “economic justice,” “social justice”—modifiers that actually undercut the nature of individual justice in favor of communalism? Do they worry about “microaggressions” or “trigger warnings”? Do they use terms like “my truth” rather than “my opinion”? Do they “call out” those who ask for data by castigating them for “erasure” or “destruction of identity,” or dismiss their beliefs by referencing their opponents’ alleged “privilege”? Do they talk about “structures of power,” or suggest that terms like “Western civilization” are inherently bigoted? Do they speak of the “patriarchy” or “heteronormativity” or “cisnormativity”?
It’s a complex language. Adherence requires constant attention to the changing dictionary of norms. What was absolutely inoffensive yesterday can become deeply offensive today, without warning—and ignorance is no defense. There is no set system for changing the wokabulary—changes can emerge, fully formed, nearly instantaneously.
The wokabulary is facially absurd. Two decades ago, New York University mathematician Alan Sokal published a gobbledygook word salad of deconstructionism in a postmodern academic journal. Its title: “Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity.” In 2018, scholars James Lindsay, Helen Pluckrose, and Peter Boghossian repeated the feat, but on a far larger scale. The left-liberal scholars submitted a series of hilariously farcical articles to prestigious academic journals—and a bevy of those articles were accepted. Of the twenty papers submitted, seven were accepted and four were published. Only six were rejected outright.28 Gender, Place, and Culture published a paper titled, “Human Reaction to Rape Culture and Queer Performativity at Urban Dog Parks in Portland, Oregon.” The journal Fat Studies published a paper titled, “Who Are They to Judge? Overcoming Anthropometry and a Framework for Fat Bodybuilding.” Sex Roles approved a paper titled, “An Ethnography of Breastaurant Masculinity: Themes of Objectification, Sexual Conquest, Male Control, and Masculine Toughness in a Sexually Objectifying Restaurant.”
The content of these papers was no less absurd. One of the articles argued against “western astronomy,” since that field of inquiry was allegedly rooted in bigotry; instead, the authors suggested “[o]ther means superior to the natural sciences . . . to extract alternative knowledges about stars,” which would include such wonders as “modern feminist analysis” of “mythological narratives” about stars and perhaps “feminist interpretative dance (especially with regard to the movements of the stars and their astrological significance).” Another accepted paper took on the important topic of whether masturbation while thinking about someone makes you a sexual abuser, since the object hasn’t given her consent.29 Yet another paper discussed whether transphobia and homophobia from straight males could be overcome through “receptive penetrative sex toy use.” One paper was a rewrite of a section of Mein Kampf using women’s studies terminology.
The hoax worked because Lindsay, Pluckrose, and Boghossian were fluent in the wokabulary: they understood that simply by characterizing every problem as a critique of societal victimization, they owned the skeleton key to academia. The professors themselves explained, “Scholarship based less upon finding truth and more upon attending to social grievances has become firmly established, if not fully dominant” in many areas of higher education.30
It is this language—the wokabulary—that universities now teach. Outside of the sciences, universities no longer exist in order to train you for a job. They exist to grant you a credential and usher you into the broader world of the New Ruling Class via your new bilingualism in the wokabulary. David Randall of the National Association of Scholars notes that over the last twenty years a new generation of academics and administrators has taken power, seeking to “transform higher education itself into an engine of progressive political advocacy, subjecting students to courses that are nothing more than practical training in progressive activism.” So dominant is the wokeism that in many major university departments, not a single conservative can be identified on the staff. Professors leverage social justice into their curricula, into their research, into their writings; administrators use their power to push social justice in all aspects of both academic and social life, from residential life to public events.
To that end, the New Ruling Class in charge of our universities aims at maximizing the budgets allocated to social justice–oriented courses; overall, colleges spend tens of billions of dollars on such pursuits.31 One of the not-accidental by-products of wokeism is the dramatic increase in college budgets directed toward useless fields—diversity studies directed not toward broadening minds but narrowing them. As Heather Mac Donald writes in The Diversity Delusion, “Entire fields have sprung up around race, ethnicity, sex, and gender identity. . . . A vast administrative apparatus—the diversity bu
reaucracy—promotes the notion that to be a college student from an ever-growing number of victim groups is to experience daily bigotry from your professors and peers.” Even departments supposedly disassociated from social justice activism are often rife with it. Wokeism completely dominates our institutions of higher education.32
HOW UNIVERSITIES WERE RENORMALIZED
The universities represented the first line of attack for cultural radicals. In the 1960s, a liberal consensus still prevailed, a belief in the freedoms guaranteed by the Constitution, as well as a commitment to the very notion of truth-seeking itself. By the end of the 1960s, that consensus had completely collapsed on campus. The renormalization of the universities occurred because that liberal consensus was hollow—because enlightenment ideals of open inquiry and the pursuit of truth are not self-evident, and die when disconnected from their cultural roots.
The soft underbelly for Enlightenment liberals lay in an inability to rebut what Robert Bellah termed “expressive individualism.” Expressive individualism is the basic idea that the goal of life and government ought to be ensuring the ability of individuals to explore their own perception of the good life, and to express it as they see fit.33 Enlightenment liberalism was still unconsciously connected to old ideas about reason and virtue. By contrast, expressive individualism obliterated all such limits. If you found meaning in avoiding responsibility for others, including children, that was part and parcel of liberty; if you found meaning in defining yourself in a way directly contrary to reality or decency, that was simply liberty, too.
What’s more, according to philosopher Charles Taylor, expressive individualism requires the approval of others. As O. Carter Snead of the University of Notre Dame relates, Taylor “identified a new category of harm that emerges in a culture of expressive individualism, namely, the failure to receive, accept, and appreciate the expression of others’ inner depths. . . . To fail to recognize the expression of other selves is a violation and a harm to them.” We must all cheer for others’ ideas, decisions, and proclamations, no matter how bad, how perverse, or how untrue.34
The critique provided by deconstructionism was, at heart, merely a radical version of expressive individualism. Where Enlightenment liberalism had taken for granted certain ideas about human rights, the value of objective truth, and the ability for human beings to understand the world around them—ideas borrowed from Judeo-Christianity—and then built on those ideas by questioning long-held but unproven axioms about science and power, deconstructionism bathed everything in the acid of questioning, hence “deconstructing” everything. The postmodernists made the case that all knowledge was the result of preexisting narratives that had to be questioned, and that none of those narratives could rebut any other narratives. Postmodernism could be used to tear down any attempt to establish truth—even scientific facts could be rebutted by critiquing the way we define truth based on our cultural context.
Postmodernism carved the heart out of the liberal project. Enlightenment liberalism pushed reason and logic to the center of discourse; postmodernism dismissed reason and logic as just, like, your opinion, man.
The resulting hollowness spelled disaster for the universities, where postmodernism had become heavily influential. Colleges were ripe for the picking. Instead of dedicating themselves to teaching the long-held truths of Western civilization, they dedicated themselves to “thinking critically”—which, in practice, meant critiquing Western civilization while asking “who are we to judge?” about other cultures. While pure deconstructionism, however, would have pointed out the frailty of all cultural structures, the deconstructionism adopted in American universities applied only to the West. To apply deconstructionism to others would violate the tenets of expressive individualism. Identity groups quickly took advantage of this weakness, suggesting that membership in a victimized group lent special knowledge and status to their critiques of the prevailing ideological systems. And those in charge of the universities—crippled by their inability to rebut criticisms of Western systems of inquiry and knowledge, and too “nice” to use the tools of deconstructionism against other cultures—simply collapsed.35
In practical terms, the universities imploded because in the name of the Cordiality Principle, those who should have fought back did not; because in the name of liberalism, those who should not have tolerated illiberalism did; because the radicals were simply intransigent, and built coalitions large enough to hold institutions hostage. The authoritarian leftists took over the university because they successfully renormalized the institutions themselves.
To take but one example, the 1964 Berkeley Free Speech Movement (FSM), now championed as a glorious American moment of liberty, was actually a mere pretense designed at gaining power and control. As author Roger Kimball notes, the controversy began when students began using a strip of university-owned land for political purposes. The university objected, pointing out that the students had plenty of areas designated for such activity. Nonetheless, the students rallied to the call—and that call went far beyond time and place restrictions on political activity. One 1965 FSM pamphlet pointed out that “politics and education are inseparable,” and that the university should not be geared toward “passing along the morality of the middle class, nor the morality of the white man, nor even the morality of the potpourri we call ‘western society.’”36
During the same period, Harvard students seized buildings; Columbia students held a dean hostage and occupied the president’s office. At Cornell, armed students took professors hostage, invaded college buildings, and forced the faculty to reverse its own penalties placed on offending students. The president of the university then proceeded to call the incident “one of the most positive forces ever set in motion in the history of Cornell.” Professors with spines, including Walter Berns and Allan Bloom, resigned. Later, one of the ringleaders of the entire affair, Tom Jones, would be appointed to the Cornell board of trustees. Bloom wrote that students now knew that “pompous teachers who catechized them about academic freedom could, with a little shove, be made into dancing bears.”37
The students knew it. Shelby Steele, who would later become conservative, recalls attending college in the late 1960s, leading black students into the president’s office with a list of demands. As Steele narrates, “with all the militant authority I could muster, I allowed the ashes from my lit cigarette to fall in little grey cylinders onto the president’s plush carpet. This was the effrontery, the insolence, that was expected in our new commitment to militancy.” Steele fully expected the college president, Dr. Joseph McCabe, to chastise him. But, says Steele, it simply didn’t happen:
I could see that it was all becoming too much for him. . . . There was no precedent for this sort of assault on authority, no administrative manual on how to handle it. I saw something like real anger come over his face, and he grabbed the arms of his chair as if to spring himself up. . . . But his arms never delivered him from his seat. I will never know what thought held him back. I remember only that his look turned suddenly inward as if he were remembering something profound, something that made it impossible for him to rise up. Then it was clear that the cigarette would be overlooked. . . . In that instant we witnessed his transformation from a figure of implacable authority to a negotiator empathetic with the cause of those who challenged him—from a traditional to a modern college president.
As Steele states, it was McCabe’s understanding of the evils of racism that allowed such outrageous behavior by students. His own “vacuum of moral authority,” springing from knowledge of American sins, stopped him cold.38 Authoritarian leftists, relying on an anti-conventionalism that castigated traditional liberalism as morally deficient, silenced McCabe, as they did most college administrators.
Liberalism’s separation from its values-laden roots left it unable to defend itself. The dance of renormalization had occurred. First, they silenced those in power. Then they forced them to publicly repent. Then they cast them aside. That’s the authoritar
ian Left’s process in every country and in every era.
THE PURGE
The universities have now become factories for wokeism. There are few or no conservatives in the faculty and staff of most top universities; a 2020 Harvard Crimson survey found that 41.3 percent of the faculty members identified as liberal, and another 38.4 percent as very liberal; moderates constituted just 18.9 percent of the faculty, and 1.46 percent said they were conservative.39 A similar Yale Daily News survey of faculty in 2017 found that 75 percent of faculty respondents identified as liberal or very liberal; only 7 percent said they were conservative, with just 2 percent labeling themselves “very conservative.” In the humanities, the percentages were even more skewed, with 90 percent calling themselves liberal; overall, 90 percent of all faculty said they opposed Trump.40 One liberal Yale professor told The Wall Street Journal, “Universities are moving away from the search for truth” and toward “social justice.”41
Overall, for over 2,000 college professors spanning thirty-one states and the District of Columbia who donated to political candidates from 2015 to 2018, contributions to Democrats outpaced those to Republicans by a 95:1 ratio.42 Another study published in Econ Journal Watch in 2016 found that of the 7,243 professors registered to vote at forty leading universities, Democrats outnumbered Republicans 3,623 to 314.43 The Carnegie Foundation surveyed professors about their political affiliations in 1969, and found 27 percent were conservative; by 1999, just 12 percent were. Samuel Abrams of the Higher Education Research Institute suggested that since 1984, the ratio of liberals to conservatives on college faculty has increased 350 percent. By one study, just 2 percent of political science professors were estimated to be conservative; just 4 percent of philosophy professors; just 7 percent of history professors; and just 3 percent of literature professors.44 These are political identification numbers that would make Fidel Castro blush in envy.
