As I’ve worked to surgically remove critical social theories from my theology, I’ve noticed a pattern. Initially it was just that the most likely folks to be the most aggressively “woke” people tended to be in two categories. The activist class; young radicals and quasi radicals living in gentrifying neighborhoods. Many many of them still receiving assistance of some sort from their parents, and weirdly, upper middle class white women with post graduate degrees. Those of us who have gained some wisdom into middle age often roll our eyes at activists. The theatrics, the melodrama. But its something all together different when the HR director, or the principal at your kids school, is constantly bombarding you with increasingly hostile instagram posts about privilege, seemingly glomming onto every possible victimhood category via memes and insta stories.
After the murder of George Floyd though - something had seemingly changed. It wasn’t just those groups, but our oligarchs, the Bill Gateses of the world, the BlackRocks, Twitter and Facebook. Mega Corps and Wall Street titan sponsored Pride parades, bailing out rioters for racial justice or something, struck me as odd. This movement is decidedly marxist, I kept thinking. Yet seemingly every major corporation was involved, sending marketing emails admitting their complicity in white supremacy, or updating us on all the things they are doing for pride week, er, month now I guess.
Suddenly it dawned on me. I thought back in history, to post civil war reconstruction. How exactly did we get here? In that period of time, poor sharecropper whites and recently freed slaves had a lot of overlap in economic interest. And they far outnumbered the plantation aristocracy. In fact, many historians note that among poor whites and blacks in the period leading up the civil war, there was much interaction, economically and socially, as poor whites were, while not enslaved, essentially cut off from the broader economic system. Many integrated revolts were planned, but were put down by the aristocracy.
Why woke capitalism? In a word…. Trump. Well, probably not Trump as a person but Trump as an idea. Trump, while fabulously wealthy, is how a working class man imagines himself with money. He attacked corporate interests and globalism for destroying medium and small towns over the last 30 years and promised to fight back. He didn’t play language games - he said things directly (many of them completely untrue, but that’s also beside the point). Trump went after the military industrial complex and its desire for endless wars (and war profiteering) - wars that had destroyed the lives and livelihoods of working class people all across the country, white and black. And he pushed back on the chamber of commerce and oligarch ideas that unrestricted migration hurts people here at the bottom first. Many latinos saw this and pulled the lever for trump in huge numbers in 2020.
So how does corporate/elite/oligarchic/globalist America react? Right wing populism, which has seemingly taken the reins of at least the electorate of the Republican Party, is not something that the corporatist class desires. Its not Mitt Romneyism, or Bushism. Its Main Street over Wall Street. Its mining over coding. Its traditional values over, in their perspective, whatever this weird PC culture was becoming. Its wearing “deplorable” as a badge of honor.
The Left, then, has now become the party of capital. So corporations, whether intentionally or not, now had to hop on the ideological wagon of a side, it wasn’t going to choose the uncouth, unwashed masses. Its going to choose, the wealthy, educated, elite. And bonus, the wealthy educated elite were running full speed into the arms of their new religion, critical social theories.
In the world in which we now live, class isn’t solely economic anymore. It still is, but it also isn’t. Capitalism, for its many flaws, does allow for broad access to technology and goods that once were exclusively the domain of the upper classes. Your smart phone may be a little older, or not quite as fast as Zuckerberg’s, but that’s a whole lot different from him having revolutionary technology that you would never be able to afford. Additionally, the growth in post grad degrees in liberal arts has created an abundance of bourgeois folks, living in cracker boxes in the cool cities, spending every cent they have and getting no where fast. Its the perfect environment for a new self righteous religion to break out. Overgrown children who have little idea what it means to suffer, who have gotten nearly everything they wanted until now when there just aren’t enough managerial positions for all the Gender Studies majors, psych majors, English majors, etc. They were promised a big, rewarding career if they got their degree…. in anything. Now - its the urban bourgeois hunger games. And just at the right time, a religious language was presented to them to give them that same self righteousness they once had. They are educated enough to read and understand complex postmodern theories, and to bludgeon those plebs below them. The ones that eat at Applebees (rolls eyes, gross), drive pick up trucks (destroying the environment), go hunting or fishing, still go to church (religious bigots) and actually believe in Jesus. The ones that get married and have kids early (THE PATRIARCHY), who work in trades with their hands, whose wives stay home with the kids (those poor oppressed women!)
And what they’ll try to tell you, that they care about the marginalized because they use all the up to date language. They don’t have any problematic opinions and they just seeth at the dumb rubes that vote against their own interests instead of for compassion and goodness and antiracism. Don’t they all know that white supremacy is behind every structure and system in the world and that people can’t be free until we deconstruct it? We’ve got to get rid of churches (unless they preach the woke gospel) or corporations (same). Despite many of them not living along the border, they have a religious certitude that there shouldn’t be any enforcement of immigration law. They cheer when a small town court clerk refuses to sign a certificate for gay marriage and loses her job. Or when someone doesn’t trust the government or medical system (quite possibly for good reason) dies from covid unvaccinated. And they make damn sure that any person of color is only considered in good standing if they share all these ideas from their metaphysical understanding of white supremacy to letting natal males use the women’s restroom in their school.
And see - as someone who is only 2 generations away from poor farmers/share croppers, who grew up going to his grandparents in rural Mississippi, who lived in Memphis where, despite the general racism, things were probably more integrated in daily life than most places in the country, and who lived in the inner city in Nashville for nearly 14 years trying to live out some semblance of radical hospitality, if you even tried to begin to explain some of this ideology to those folks, the salt of the earth people living in a trailer on some land in rural tishimingo county, or to the grandmother and grandfather in the inner city trying to raise their grand babies cause their kid got hooked on drugs, or the union guys of all creeds and colors working hard in factories in the midwest…. it would take years for them to understand all this nonsense if ever. They are common sense people. And common sense says a man is a man and a woman is a woman. Common sense says how can I be responsible for, or apologize for, sins committed by people generations before me just because of my skin color? Common sense says the police could do a better job, but we don’t need to get rid of them. And here’s the biggest thing, common sense says these elites hate me. They don’t give a damn at all about what’s going on in Youngstown OH, or the West Virginia Mountains, or Itta Bena Mississippi. And honestly, I think they would be right in that assumption.
So I’ve said a lot to come to this point. These ideas are luxury beliefs for bougie urban liberals who are so detached from the world that most of the country lives in. And so the corporations feed them more and more identity propaganda, and tries to feed it to all these different “Communities” based on skin color and sexual preference so that they can’t even fathom why Trump in 2020 increased his share of black voters, hispanic voters, asian voters. They can’t understand why parents are upset about trans women in the girls locker room. They can’t understand why we can’t talk about the past with some balance, but rather have to see the whole of America, every good institution its ever produced given the same moral standing as Nazi Germany, while winking about Che or Stalin or Mao.
Its divide and conquer, identity style. The overproduced “elite” have been nearly fully captured through their disgust/fear of the normal people with their backwards ideas. These ideas may be fine for those of means. Defund the police, gender ideology in kindergarten, deconstructing the nuclear family and traditional marriages. It can work when you have a back up plan. But this new morality has been, and continues to be a disaster to the poor. Even down to woke teachers unions sitting at home for a virus that, as bad as its been, is still mild for the vast majority, especially those vaccinated, while poor kids who all ready attended failing schools have to get a laptop and internet and stay in who knows what kind of environments to try and ‘learn”. Equity, right.
I take it back I think they’ve come up with an explanation. These people are just white supremacist, q anon, anti vaxxers who are completely transphobic, christian nationalist bigots. Kinda like the fundamentalist christian who just blames everything on the devil. When there’s only one explanation for something you never have to look into the mirror.