I’m not sure I’m familiar with that particular notion. I do think that there are socially popular ideas that are destructive, and that some of those have a way of taking root on the left, but tend to think that there isn’t a grand theme to them. There’s just a certain amount of the madness of crowds involved. When one attributes it to an overarching ideology, that may sometimes be right but is often wrong.
So, for example: a good friend of mine has spent her entire career in legal aid for the poor in a major American city. Instead of taking her Ivy League degree and superb grades and federal clerkship and cashing in at a tort litigation firm where she probably would by now have made tens of millions of dollars, she took a modest salary. She did important, ground-breaking work both in litigation and in legislative advocacy that has changed the lives of countless people for the better; and those countless people are disproportionately likely to be members of racial and ethnic groups that have been traditionally discriminated against.
Well, the notion began to take hold among her staff that white people need to shut up and listen to black people, no matter what the merits of the point under discussion might be. They started up a reading group, reading and discussing some very odd ideas. They concluded that things like expecting people to spell words correctly, use good grammar, and show up to work on time were, to put it bluntly, racist. And if she had anything to say about that, even saying it was basically out of order. Pointing to her work in the aid of disadvantaged people, and pointing out how important it is for people in legal practice to be at work on time and spell things correctly led to accusations of her having a “white savior complex.”
She’s brilliant. Her work has been not merely excellent, but noteworthy and far-reaching. She’s given up all manner of earthly riches for this life. And she takes all of this bullshit in stride, still does the important work, and deals with whatever logistical and social difficulties these things cause her, without a lot of complaint. But I can hardly think that these sorts of ideas are anything but destructive, and I can hardly think that they encourage other talented people to put their shoulders to the wheel and take massive pay cuts in order to remedy societal injustice, when those who do are liable to be considered basically just a milder version of the cause of those problems themselves.
Honestly, when she told me this stuff it shocked me. I had heard strange tales of this sort from Fox News and the like, but always distrusted the source too much to take them seriously. Having this sort of story come from someone like her shook me up in a big way.
This stuff gets over-simplified too much, and there’s too much nattering about how “wokeism” is causing problems. I’m not a fan of that line of discussion, in part because definitions of what “woke” mean vary from person to person, and usually encompass both things I think are praiseworthy and things I think are not.
So while I wouldn’t call these things anything like “cultural Marxism” or “Bolshevism,” terms which I think are quite bizarre and have very little to do with the issues, I suspect that those vague and capacious terms do probably encompass some things which people ought, indeed, to complain about. But it might be good to complain about them in more measured tones, and with more nuance, than is often done.
