It seems to be almost a law of human nature that it is easier for people to agree on a negative program—on the hatred of an enemy, on the envy of those better off—than on any positive task. The contrast between “we” and “they,” the common fight against those outside the group, seems to be an essential ingredient in any creed which will solidly knit together a group for common action. It is consequently always employed by those who seek, not merely support of a policy, but the unreserved allegiance of huge masses. From their point of view it has the advantage of leaving them greater freedom of action than almost any positive program.

Eighty years later, Hayek’s observation is still accurate: the worst still get on top by emphasizing their negative program. Where do we see this phenomenon these days? Chances are, you immediately thought of the group about which this is true. Did you think of the Woke Academy or the Evangelical Church? Hayek’s description is, after all, equally applicable to both. While the comparison will annoy people in both communities, as discussed below those two groups are mirror images; left and right get swapped in the mirror, but otherwise the image is the same. They need each other; if one of those groups didn’t exist, the other group would have to invent it.

The importance of this fact was driven home to me while reading Tim Alberta’s The Kingdom, the Power, and the Glory: American Evangelicals in an Age of Extremism. It is a remarkable bit of journalism, organized episodically as Alberta wanders the country going to churches, conventions, and meetings with evangelicals. Chapter by chapter, he allows ample space for assorted parties to explain themselves, what they are thinking, and what they’re trying to do. The portrait of a divided evangelical movement is gripping. If you are interested in the evangelical church, this book is a must-read.

However, the story that Alberta tells has implications that are of national importance, whether or not one is affiliated with the church. What has happened in evangelical churches across the nation bears an uncanny resemblance to the process Hayek describes when he asked why the worst elements of society rose to power in mid-twentieth-century totalitarian countries. Alberta relates an observation made by Cal Thomas, a veteran of Jerry Falwell’s Moral Majority. “One time, I actually asked one of our fundraisers, ‘Why don’t you ever send out a positive letter about what you’re doing with people’s donations?’ And he looked at me with this cynical look. He said, ‘You can’t raise money on a positive. If the goal is bringing in money, you have to scare them.’”

Alberta set out to explore why evangelicals have increasingly become associated with Christian Nationalism and Donald Trump. It is a tale of churches being destroyed by political infighting and the rise of a new set of church leaders. What is different about these new evangelicals is a question Alberta asks repeatedly. One pastor explained the difference: “America. … Too many of them worship America.” Another one related the story of being told, “I’m afraid we have to leave the church after all these decades … because you’re not interpreting the Bible in light of the Constitution.” This belief that politics trumps theology had been growing in evangelical churches for decades, but the dramatic break happened with the Covid lockdowns. Many churches followed government mandates and shut down in-person services for a time. But for churches that decided to openly defy the government rules, their central message was defiance and their congregations grew. Suddenly there were churches where the average congregant was there to hear the 15-minute political rant about the horrors of the political left rather than a 30-minute sermon about the Bible.

The stories Alberta tells are interesting, but the most important part of the book is a conversation Alberta relates with a set of prominent evangelicals who vocally oppose the Trumpian wing of evangelicalism:

We all agreed that these ideological diehards whom [David] French was describing were not a majority of the evangelical movement. There is a difference between the people who prefer the 6 p.m. hour of programming at Fox News to those of its cable rivals, and the people who marinate in right-wing misinformation all day long. That latter group, everyone estimated, was still no more than 15 or 20 percent of most church congregations they knew of. The problem is, as [Russell] Moore pointed out, “That vocal minority will always push around a timid majority. The people who care the most usually get what they want.”

It was at that moment I had an epiphany.

I am an evangelical Christian who works at a secular liberal arts college. I am thus personally acquainted with not only this new wing of evangelicals, but also with the woke academy. While the woke movement is incredibly and aggressively vocal on college campuses, it is a minority of the community. There is a very noticeable difference between the generally liberal members of the faculty and student body and the woke activists who capture all the headlines. A good estimate of the size of the latter group is 20 percent.

Looking at the American landscape, we are watching a pair of dueling religious movements consisting of a vocal minority of people using fear of their opponents as a recruitment tool. As John McWhorter documents in Woke Racism, what is happening on college campuses, the rise of what he calls “the Elect,” is not “like” a religion; it actually is a religion. “An anthropologist would see no difference between Pentecostalism and this new form of antiracism.” There is a clergy, an original sin, attempts at evangelism, an apocalyptic narrative, and ostracism of heretics. The stories in Alberta’s book have obvious parallels with this new religion on the Left. Thinking about the evangelical church, David French noted, “If [pastors in evangelical churches] had a just-as-committed twenty percent to push back on [the politicized 15 to 20 percent] the churches would be just fine. But they don’t.” The same thing is true in the academy.

Why don’t people stand up and oppose this vocal minority? McWhorter provides the obvious explanation. If you dissent from the vocal minority on a college campus, you are certain to be publicly called a racist. Nobody in an academic community wants to be called a racist. So, silence wins out. Flip to the evangelical church and the same phenomenon exists. Dissent from the vocal minority and your faith in Jesus Christ will be instantly and publicly questioned. You will be called a heretic or an apostate. Nobody attending an evangelical church wants to be labeled a non-Christian. Silence wins out.

Alberta asked what it would take to get 20 percent of the people in evangelical churches to push back against the politicized wing of the church. None of the people with whom he was talking had any idea how to do this. McWhorter looks at the Academy and is even less optimistic. His first observation when looking at the future is, “There is no discussion to be had.” There is no point in talking with the Elect. To try to convince them to modify their views is the equivalent of trying to convince an evangelical Christian to abandon Christ.

The politicized evangelicals and the woke academics are both convinced as a matter of deep faith that their beliefs are correct. How then does one engage in these communities in a productive fashion? The epiphany I had when reading Alberta’s book: any attempt to criticize either one of these movements is doomed to failure. These two groups are already spending large amounts of money and political capital to demonize the other side. As Hayek noted, the worst get on top because they are very good at promoting fear and hatred. If you are an evangelical who sets out to criticize the politicized wing of evangelicals, your voice will be instantly lost or co-opted in the cacophony of criticisms from the woke left. Criticize the woke left and you will suddenly find yourself lumped in with Trump supporters or worse. Any criticism of one side is simply feeding its hatred and fear of the other.

Do you really want to get into these rhetorical wars? As Alberta insightfully notes:

Having spent a lifetime immersed inside this world, it was unclear to me what—or, more realistically, who—might help to bring American evangelicalism back from the brink. … The situation seemed almost hopeless. It was an unfair fight for the soul of American Christianity. On one side were decorated veterans of the culture wars, archconservative Christians who live for conflict. Meanwhile, their more “moderate” counterparts—in temperament, not theology—are inherently reluctant to enter the fray. (Those who believe that their struggle is not against flesh and blood, I had learned, were the least likely to struggle against flesh and blood.)

The same thing is true in the academy. Imagine you believe that the reason universities exist is to encourage the dispassionate search for Truth and Beauty. Do you want to spend your time engaged in the messy and comparatively unimportant Battle of the Day? Isn’t it better to retreat to your office and think about more important and beautiful things?

What if it is correct that there is no way to persuade those who have joined the warring parties to abandon their army? If you are in neither camp—and remember if so, you are in the majority of the population—then what can be done? A negative assault on one of the sides does not diminish its power at all; both sides want and need opposition to increase their power and influence.

If it is impossible to persuade people to quit the battlefield, then the challenge before us is how to stop people from joining the fight in the first place. Messages of fear and hatred are powerful influencers. The challenge for the rest of us is articulating why it is better not to go down one of those paths. The true believers on both sides of this war will always be better at the negative messages; that is why the worst get on top. What then is the positive message which will sway people to avoid the cheap dopamine hit from accepting the messages of fear and apocalypse?

This positive message is missing in the current political landscape. The hardest thing about finding a way to articulate this message is that it will necessarily involve subordinating the political issues of the moment to larger concerns. If there is a battle for the country’s soul going on, then it is crucial to convince people to return political debates to their proper place as being of second order in crafting a good life. It is crucial to remember that what unites us as fellow citizens of the country is more important than what divides us. The positive vision of a country united is a difficult vision to sell, but there is no alternative if we are going to avoid having the ranks of the warring camps become a majority of the population.

What then to do? This positive message needs a new articulation. To develop that message, those who are unhappy with the 20 percent on their end of the political spectrum need to find ways to work with people in the other party who are also alienated from the vocal minority on their side. As long as the political landscape looks the way it does, finding common ground is more important than figuring out the optimal number of tanks and schools to be built. The starting place is to keep in mind the wise words of Stealers Wheel:

Clowns to the left of me
Jokers to the right
Here I am
Stuck in the middle with you

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As Mark Pulliam notes in “Slouching Toward Totalitarianism,” the rise of wokeness as a powerful political force has been extraordinarily rapid, “almost overnight.” In a few short years it moved from something living in assorted university departments to a thing being promoted by the public library in Pulliam’s small town in Tennessee. There are no less than three best-selling, widely discussed books pushing the agenda: Ta-Nehisi Coates’s Between the World and Me, Robin DiAngelo’s White Fragility, and Ibram X. Kendi’s How to be an Antiracist. Indeed, it is hard to think of any other books on any topic in social policy that have commanded the attention these three books have received in the last few years. How did this happen?

As Rachel Lu notes in “Diagnosing the Woke,” it is not the case that the rise of wokeness is due to sensible, cogent arguments that are persuasive to reasonable people. Lu writes, “Even if one is willing to go a certain distance with the activists in agreeing (say) that historical injustices have a meaningful causal relationship to contemporary inequalities, progressive thinking on these topics still seems bizarrely unbalanced… They actually seem to believe that Americans, or whites, or men, are uniquely and irredeemable guilty, for reasons written into the whole fabric of our society.” The correction is not to go and sin no more, but rather to engage in perpetual obeisance to the gods of wokeness. How did this happen?

The Rise of Wokeness

The puzzling thing about wokeness is not that it is fashionable among a small subset of the Campus Left. One should never be surprised by what is fashionable among college faculty and students. The curious question is how these ideas broke out of the academic asylum and met acquiescence among a large group of people who should have known better. 

The answer is found in a book which should have never fallen off the radar: Arthur Koestler’s Darkness at Noon. First published in 1941, it was—along with 1984—one of the great books about totalitarianism written in the 1940s. Widely praised when it was published, the book was enormously influential in fostering the consensus view of post-war anti-communism. In 1998, Modern Library published a list of the 100 best English novels of the 20th century; Darkness at Noon was ranked eighth, five places above 1984. 

The plot of the novel itself is fairly simple. The story begins with the imprisonment of Nicholas Rubashov, one of the heroes of the communist revolution in a country which is clearly the Soviet Union. Decades after the revolution, Number 1 (read: Stalin) has assumed power. Rubashov is imprisoned on the absurdly false charges of plotting to kill Number 1. The entire novel takes place in prison, as Rubashov is interrogated and eventually comes to voluntarily confess at a public trial to crimes he did not commit. He is then shot.

The novel explores the philosophical puzzle of why Rubashov would join with what has obviously become a murderous cult run by a totalitarian who is solely interested in amassing enough power to stamp his will upon the whole country. Rubashov, a devoted communist to the end, abandons his principles and bit by bit comes to accede to demands of the new generation who are seeking scapegoats and ritualistic confessions of guilt.

What is the nature of the new generation? One of the Party officials interrogating Rubashov explains:

There are only two conceptions of human ethics, and they are at opposite poles. One of them is Christian and humane, declares the individual to be sacrosanct, and asserts that the rules of arithmetic are not to be applied to human units. The other starts from the basic principle that a collective aim justifies all means, and not only allows, but demands, that the individual should in every way be subordinated and sacrificed to the community—which may dispose of it as an experimentation rabbit or a sacrificial lamb.

The individual does not matter. The group matters. What is good for the group is by definition good, regardless of whether it is good for the individual. As the interrogators make abundantly clear, no individual has the right to stand in the way of the group. The Party represents the group, and thus no individual has the right to oppose the Party.

Such an approach would have an obvious problem persuading people outside the Party. But, with the perfect purity of knowing they are right, the Party feels no need to explain themselves or their actions. “Experience teaches…that the masses must be given for all difficult and complicated processes a simple, easily grasped explanation.” But, you ask, are the simple explanations actually True? Can good policy really be reduced to a bunch of slogans easily printed in a variety of colors on a lawn sign? In asking this, you display your ignorance about the nature of Truth. As Rubashov’s interrogator explains, “Truth is what is useful to humanity, falsehood is what is harmful.”

Stated so clearly, it would be natural to think that an old political hand like Rubashov would never agree to participate in such a transparently mendacious enterprise, whose sole end would be to give power to people who are not only perfectly convinced they are always right, but who have no compunction about using dishonest means to achieve their ends. Rubashov is faced with a choice. Either try to adapt to the Party’s ever-changing notions of right and wrong, good and evil, or acknowledge himself to be an enemy of the Party he helped to create. 

How does Rubashov reason himself into siding with the Party about his own guilt for a thing he never actually did? And more importantly for us, how does Rubashov’s transformation mirror what has happened in recent times? The woke, with the same sense of moral purity as The Party, with the same set of beliefs about the importance of the group over the individual, were a small faction a few years back. They now command national attention. How did this happen?

Revolutionary Reasoning

For Rubashov, it was a three step process. First, Rubashov came to realize the failure of the project he had set out to accomplish. 

This is a diseased century. We diagnosed the disease and its causes with microscopic exactness, but wherever we applied the healing knife a new sore appeared. Our will was hard and pure, we should have been loved by the people. But they hate us. Why are we so odious and detested?

Rubashov’s generation had a vision, but the masses did not accept the vision. The masses proved stubborn, constantly clinging to their traditions and their individuality. 

This is dispiriting to be sure. Imagine a group of people who, when young, were filled with such excitement and fervor that they really imagined they were leading a popular renaissance, and all things would be made new. Then imagine the shock of realizing that the people did not share that vision. Imagine if the people, the working classes themselves, were to bypass the opportunity to vote for a woman who embodies the dream and instead elect a loathsome man who mercilessly mocks the dream. There is no way for these once-hopeful revolutionaries to avoid the question: “Why are we so odious and detested?”

The second step in Rubashov’s transformation is realizing the logic of his beliefs. For years, he had measured things by their results. History is progressive; history is marching toward the newer world of his dreams. For years, Rubashov had believed he was on the right side of history, but having come to the crushing conclusion that the masses did not follow, he realizes his error: “For us the question of subjective good faith is of no interest. He who is in the wrong must pay; he who is in the right will be absolved. That’s the law of historical credit; it was our law.” After such knowledge, what is left? You either believe in yourself or you don’t. Number 1 still has faith in himself; he is still absolutely convinced of the rightness of his cause. Rubashov? “The fact is: I no longer believe in my infallibility. That is why I am lost.”

Again imagine a group of people who are no longer convinced that the policies and programs they fought to implement for decades are persuading the masses to join them in their cause. Imagine that less than a decade before, a perfect embodiment of all their hopes and dreams was elected President, declaring, “We’re on the right side of history.” Imagine after years of battles, after the election of Barack Obama and the nomination of Hillary Clinton, the masses elect a man who expresses such disdain for all their work. Belief in their infallibility would inevitably collapse. It would not take long to notice, however, that there are others who do not despair. There are others out there who have absolute faith in their own infallibility, absolute certainty that they will win. The woke have the faith of the Party in themselves, a faith that is “tough, slow, sullen and unshakable.”

The third and final step for Rubashov comes when he squarely faces the difference between himself and the new Party, embodied in Gletkin, his interrogator. “Gletkin was a repellent creature, but he represented the new generation; the old had to come to terms with it or be crushed; there was no other alternative.” In one of the most psychologically revealing passages in the book, Rubashov breaks.

How old might this Gletkin be? Thirty-six or seven, at the most; he must have taken part in the Civil War as a youth and seen the outbreak of the Revolution as a mere boy. That was the generation which had started to think after the flood. It had no traditions, and no memories to bind it to the old, vanished world. It was a generation born without [an] umbilical cord….And yet it had right on its side. One must tear that umbilical cord, deny the last tie which bound one to the vain conceptions of honour and the hypocritical decency of the old world. Honour was to serve without vanity, without sparing oneself, and until the last consequence.

After such knowledge, confession and execution are inevitable.

Once again, imagine a generation who has lost belief in their infallibility, faced with a new, younger, and more vigorous generation firmly convinced of their cause. What choice does one have? Come to terms with it or be crushed. Having fought so hard to achieve positions of power and influence, it would take a great deal of courage to stand firm and be crushed. The “vain conceptions of honor and the hypocritical decency of the old world” are tossed aside, and the generation born with no umbilical cord to the past rises.

Here, in a book written in 1941, we have the script of the last four years. As William Voegeli put it in his recent article in the Claremont Review of Books, we now have the “Weak leading the Woke.” The biggest question for the next few months is how much power the weak will transfer to the woke. The Rubashovs among us are the leaders of the Democratic Party, the presidents of the leading universities, the heads of the major media outlets, and the CEOs and upper management of large firms, both in the tech industry and elsewhere. Looking at all those individuals, you find many who used to believe that honor and decency were important. But, in 2016, their own faith that their political and cultural dreams would win, that they were on the right side of history, was shattered. Now, these pillars of society confess their sins in public show trials (“We must do better”) and one by one accede to the demands of the woke, lest they find their careers shot in the back of the head while walking down the halls of power.

Is there hope? Koestler’s book is not an optimistic one. “He who accepts a dictatorship must accept civil war as a means. He [who] recoils from civil war must give up opposition and accept the dictatorship.” Let us hope that Koestler is wrong about that. Hope, however, may not be enough. The challenge of our age is not merely to resist the woke, but for those who recoil from both civil war and dictatorship to find a peaceful, orderly means of resistance. 

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