In his new book “The Woke Supremacy,” author Evan Sayet exposes the totalitarianism that drives the modern Left, laying bare the intellectually vacuous ideology that drives them to seek the Kingdom of Heaven on earth no matter the cost.
According to Sayet, the foundation of “wokeness” is utopia: an imaginary world that every socialist philosopher, dictator, and artist has dreamed of since the Communist Manifesto. He singles out John Lennon’s 1971 song “Imagine” as the anthem of a generation that disregarded standards of morality to implement what they believe is the “true and only heaven,” in the words of historian and social critic Christopher Lasch.
Sayet maintains that the Baby Boomer generation, offered unprecedented peace and prosperity because of their parents’ sacrifices, exhibited and glorified the sort of narcissistic infantilism that Sayet traces to 18th-century Genevan philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau and his idea of the “noble savage.” Rousseau’s thought repudiated Christianity’s doctrine of original sin to posit that man is born morally perfect but corrupted by his own institutions.
The fruit of Rousseau’s thought has manifested, Sayet argues, with the 20th century’s dueling philosophies of nationalism and socialism. After World War II leveled Nazi Germany, he says, the world was left with the communist Soviet Union’s globalist ambitions and the competing nationalist ideals of the United States, which maintained enormous power but didn’t seek conquest.
The remnants of the Soviet mind nevertheless continue among those who seek to establish their power globally, Sayet maintains, and such ambitions manifest most plainly in the behavior of the Left, which sees the State as a god. In their pursuit of a heavenly kingdom, he says, the woke are willing to disregard traditional standards of morality to achieve their destined aim of absolute power.
The woke’s new morality, Sayet explains, is an illogical self-contradiction. They value indiscriminateness above all else, while discriminating against those who fail to exhibit it. The highest good, according to the woke, is the maintenance of their own power. They resort to the nihilistic destruction of truth and words to assert their supremacy.
“The nationalism of people like President Donald Trump is a hitch in the globalist agenda,” Sayet writes, because it affirms the national division that has been in place since the Tower of Babel. Nationalism, though demonized, “is the only real-world bulwark against the crimes and atrocities that the Socialist system requires and – no matter the many and varied ideologies that have embraced it – it has never yet once failed to bring.”
Nationalism has proved itself to be the only thing that stands between freedom and the horrors of socialism, Sayet argues. The globalist, authoritarian, and totalitarian practices required to bring about the things socialists promise render the present culture war as “just the latest, and perhaps last, battle in the war between two diametrically opposed and mutually exclusive systems of governance.”