{"id":187378,"date":"2026-05-12T12:45:15","date_gmt":"2026-05-12T20:45:15","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/?p=187378"},"modified":"2026-05-12T12:49:10","modified_gmt":"2026-05-12T20:49:10","slug":"marx-was-not-woke","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/?p=187378","title":{"rendered":"‘Marx was not Woke’"},"content":{"rendered":"

In April, 2023, Paul Gottfried reviewed in Chronicles magazine<\/a> the 2022 Yoram Hazony book Conservatism: A Rediscovery<\/a>: <\/p>\n

Marx was not in the least concerned with nonbinary oppression, raging homophobia, or the inherently evil nature of being white. This father of \u201cscientific socialism\u201d focused on socioeconomic antagonisms expressing themselves as class conflict…
\nUnlike Marxism, moreover, the woke left has long ceased paying homage to science and rationality. The left is driven by hate against traditional Americans with fixed gender roles, communal hierarchies, and some form of inherited religious faith. Truth, for the woke left, is determined and redefined by those in power. Woke beliefs have no necessary connection to what is empirically provable, since from the woke perspective, Western science and empirical demonstration are tainted by white, masculine, racist prejudice. Communism in Europe, at least in practice, never showed the frenzied nihilistic energy that seems endemic to the woke left. From tearing down statues to abolishing genders to inciting mob violence against white Americans to throwing open borders for invasion by Third World migrants, the woke left seems far more socially and culturally destructive than most past Communist governments.
\nThe end goal of wokeism is universal equality, which is to be brought about through a universal state. It opposes particularity, at least in the Western white world, and works to obliterate anything that is specifically Western. Indeed, wokeism offers the example of a thoroughly unhinged left that Communist governments and parties, as well as the Cold War in the West, all kept in check. Wokeism privileges those with deviant sexual appetites, anti-Christian and antiwhite fixations, and repugnance for bourgeois institutions, groups whom the Communists quite properly kept from rising in their parties and governments. The Communists held generally traditional moral views even if they practiced tyranny.
\nUnfortunately, the post-war conservative movement became so obsessed with \u201cfighting Communism\u201d that it failed to notice the far more dangerous enemy gathering its forces domestically. And by the end phase of the Cold War in the 1980s, neoconservatives were frequently making the charge that Communist regimes discriminated against homosexuals…
\nThe liberalism that the woke left cancelled was a greatly weakened form of the liberal persuasion, the exponents of which had already ceased to argue very convincingly for open discussion. For decades, that attenuated liberalism excluded the right, except for a moderate centrist version of it that would not upset leftist gatekeepers. The parameters of allowable discussion on many issues had become more and more restricted before a late modern form of liberalism gave up the ghost entirely. By then, universities were already being ideologically controlled while both government and the media had prepared the way for this postliberal age.
\nLiberalism in its last stages did not suffer from an indiscriminate tolerance, a condition that thinkers as diverse as Joseph Schumpeter and Carl Schmitt viewed as liberalism\u2019s great weakness…
\nAt some point in the last 20 years, the very ideal of open discussion and debate fell into disrepute both in institutions of higher learning and in the media. What had become a shrunken, denatured liberalism was abandoned for a successor ideology: wokeism. Further, there may be no way back to what has been resoundingly repudiated and what took generations to collapse. Only an equally determined collectivism can effectively resist those who have ended the liberal era, or what became the pale imitation of one.\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Gottfried sees that procedural liberalism cannot defeat a coalition organized around moral solidarity and institutional power.
\nThe Marxism frame Hazony offers works as coalition glue for the right. It names a familiar enemy from an old fight conservatives know how to wage. But it obscures more than it illuminates. The oppressor\/oppressed binary is not uniquely Marxist. Marx adapted an older biblical pattern. Today’s woke coalition uses the same coalitional move any successful coalition uses: name a victim class, name an oppressor class, claim moral authority on behalf of the first. The Marx frame flatters conservatives more than it illuminates the opponent.
\nWoke power is not primarily ideological. It is institutional and material. Universities, HR departments, foundations, professional associations, credentialing bodies, corporate compliance systems, media gatekeeping. These are where the power lives. The ideas serve as the password into the network, not as the engine.
\nMAGA is a populist alliance held together by shared enemies, not shared ends. Its constituents disagree on most positive questions. Catholic integralists want one thing, evangelical Protestants want another, secular nationalists a third, post-religious vitalists a fourth, the new tech-right a fifth. The coalition supplies enough cohesion to disrupt but not to govern coherently. It has weak cadre formation, no equivalent credentialing pipeline, no durable bureaucratic penetration. It depends on Trump’s charisma and grievance media.
\nNational conservatism, the Hazony project, tries to supply intellectual scaffolding for what is otherwise a mood. The conferences happen. The journals publish. But the audience is mostly the same several thousand people. The mass base of MAGA does not read Hazony and won’t adopt his categories if asked. Voters do not pull the lever for inherited tradition. They pull it because their towns are dying, their wages are flat, their kids are estranged, and the people who run things hold them in contempt. This is not a collective. NatCon is intellectuals without a mass base. MAGA is a mass without intellectuals. They do not fit together.
\nMAGA can disrupt. It can elect a president who breaks norms and rattles bureaucracies. It cannot build the parallel institutional architecture that might match the depth of the progressive managerial system. Building that takes generations of disciplined effort, alternative credentialing systems, alternative funding bases, alternative status markers, alternative marriage and family patterns. MAGA, compared to its enemies, lacks human capital.
\nAnti-woke movements cannot maintain collective focus without infringing on personal liberties. These rights are a coalition vocabulary more than a neutral standard. Every coalition polices its members. Liberalism policed its members through professional norms, peer review, and reputational gatekeeping that looked neutral because the police were the priests. A right coalition vigorous enough to displace the current ruling coalition will police its members too. It will look ugly, because all such policing looks ugly to the people getting policed. The choice is which coalition coerces and on behalf of which norms<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In April, 2023, Paul Gottfried reviewed in Chronicles magazine the 2022 Yoram Hazony book Conservatism: A Rediscovery: Marx was not in the least concerned with nonbinary oppression, raging homophobia, or the inherently evil nature of being white. This father of … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[201,29610,42849],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-187378","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-conservatives","category-paul-gottfried","category-yoram-hazony"],"aioseo_notices":[],"aioseo_head":"\n\t\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t