A timeline for Theory and Woke

I have for years wanted to understand and explain the soft-left liberal mindset which has become increasingly bossy and dominant since the 1960s. I didn’t enjoy it 60 years ago, when it was the domain of various Hampstead journalists I met as a young man. I like it a lot less now that it is dominant in most people brought up in university “humanities”.

This week I saw good explanations for the mid-2010s take-off of the hegemony  of Theory and Woke’s bossy liberalism. This has felt like the missing piece.

So, to retrace:

I began with Let’s End Totalitarian Liberalism which anatomised the Woke disdainful loathing of the “right”.

I then looked at the assaults from without and within: an account of how bad state actors enjoy exploiting our soft-left liberals.

I finally worked up Critical Theory: A Push-back which interrogated Theory and its allies. Theory is intellectually thin, but it is a perfect fit with a self-inflicted gullibility which the cults of vapid social activism  and Positive Psychology have induced. In short, a hard but quite weak Theory suited the tender, narrow, puritan minds of the Woke.

And now to the new material.

Last week, I read US writers who have prepared a convincing timeline for the processes by which all these trends were accelerated and attained critical mass in around 2014 in American universities and beyond. My starting point was a piece by Phillip W Magness (sometimes Phil Magness) posted at the Institute of Economic Affairs’ “Insider” (free) Substack: The Year the World Went Woke, 16 December 2024.

Magnus also discusses the fascinating case of Christopher Rufo, not least from a piece by Benjamin Wallace-Wells,  “How a Conservative Activist Invented the Conflict Over Critical Race Theory“. (The NY piece, 18 June 2021, was hostile to Rufo, but seemed to me to make his case for him.)

Magnus’ IEA piece was substantiated by Magnus and his co-author David Waugh in “The Hyperpoliticization of Higher Ed: Trends in Faculty Political Ideology, 1969–Present“, posted at the Independent Institute. They use the easily accessible Google Ngrams database and UCLA’s Higher Education Research Institute (HERI) survey of university faculty to underpin their case.

I only add that I found it additionally useful to seach Ngrams for terms such as “Michel Foucault”, “critical theory”, “post-colonialism” and “liberationism” to see the 1960s as the launchpad for the precursors to Critical Theory.

I am also inclined to think that the financial failures of 2008, the linked anti-globalisation and Occupy movements of the 2010s, and the unfolding of the West’s Middle Eastern and Eurasian adventures were radicalising forces. Any normally leftish young person could now distrust established elites and assume Neoliberalism was Public Enemy Number One.

All in all we seem  now to have a decent history of how the academic “humanities” edged away from fact-based inquiry and interrogation and toward left-liberal activism underpinned by Theory and its allies. The fad will pass, presumably. Culture has always progressed by the appetite for revisionism, in which we can put some faith.

I presume we will not revert to Victorian or Edwardian certainties, which were pretty shaky anyway. I half believe that the rise of AI will produce a profound appetite for grown-ups of character: people who can re-build a primacy of stalwart decency and inquiry. We won’t lose such insights as Theory Etc have, but we should accept that our Western societies have lost and have to re-discover some valuable mores.