The Audacity of Woke

The revolution will be accessorized.

In a somewhat surreal moment at the Country Music Awards last week, co-host Kelsea Ballerini joined with several drag performers to belt out a campy version of her single, “If You Go Down (I’m Goin’ Down Too),” a protest anthem taking aim at Tennessee laws crafted to prevent both child mutilation and the potential arrested development and bone loss often caused by hormone therapy for “transitioning” youth considered too young to consent to such procedures. The performance was of course steeped in Queerness, both in the pretend “oppression” of performers literally center stage at a televised awards show, and in the academic sense, where drag serves as a kind of postmodern Harlequin dance to usher pre-initiates into Queer theory more broadly. Choreographed to confront its audience, the unspoken subtext of the number was that it’s time for you to pick a side — and you had better be careful which side you pick.

The whole spectacle was, in fact, an offensive. A show of power. The precise moment when the tyranny of the Elect, the permanent victim class, flexed its collective muscles and informed viewers, with a glittery hostility camouflaged as kitsch, that any march through the institutions must and will be a march through all institutions. The country music scene is not immune. Nothing is. Because for the revolution to succeed, cultural hegemony must police its framework. And cultural hegemony brooks no dissent.

This was a brazen show of strength: Think “Shock and Awe,” only with lots of bedazzling.

But then this was merely the denouement to a week in which the left, confronted with what they suspect is a troubling manifesto from a “trans man” who gunned down six people in a Christian elementary school, decided — in a moment of choosing — to lay its agenda bare. They picked their side, from the President and his fellow travelers to the schools to the corporate marketers. And the side they picked was the side of a school shooter who became for them an emblem of their cultural movement: cast as a victim of “hateful” traditional religious values, a tragic figure broken by her desire to “be seen,” Audrey Hale was sainted, her death a kind of religious redemption play. The narrative coalesced around her supposed suffering because the left was never going to surrender its stranglehold on politicized victim hood. That’s where all the power is.

This defiance of norms wasn’t completely unexpected, of course: after all, over the last seven years or so we’ve seen veneers of civil comradery peeled back, or else worn so thin as to become transparent. A public pause to mouth the platitudes of togetherness is no longer required in a society so clearly divided along ideological lines. Indeed, such niceties are ridiculed as a sign of weakness or in-authenticity. “Where was your Christian god that day?” the left sneered. “Guess your church can’t protect you, after all.” In glib taunts that displayed their misunderstanding of God’s earthly role in traditional religions, they laid their ideology raw before the bodies of three 9-year-olds were even cold. And that ideology — like the martyr it created when it embraced the killing of Christians as a blasé bump on the road to their Utopia — now wants to be seen. The Devil, as it were, wants his due. And he wants it publicly. There can be no other explanation for the progressive urge to celebrate the “visibility” of a vicious activist cult, or to claim “transgender Americans shape our Nation’s soul,” especially in the immediate wake of the slaughter of Christians by a trans person in what was likely a federal hate crime. Their ostentatious obeisance to these damaged people was a liturgy performed with rapturous audacity on the American stage. It, too, was meant to “be seen.”

Whether it’s a country music drag act, a trans-identified light beer, or a march for willing subjugation and a surrender of natural rights to the State, the memetics of cultural Marxism are performative — phony Maoist struggle sessions delivered in swarms to project strength and to dispirit opponents by displaying the inevitability of the mob and its power. It’s a cultural troll. It’s their way of telling you that they are in charge, and that you are helpless. You will conform. You must. What else is there?

It was in response to this attempted coup against western liberal culture — that is, against the Enlightenment and all it represents historically and foundationally to our country — that I’ve written what I believe to be a clarion call for the individualist; but it, too, was something of a performative: it proclaimed, but it didn’t explain. So I’ll try to flesh it out briefly.

We must reject the premises of the cultural Marxist because cultural Marxism itself cannot live peaceably with federal republicanism or individual autonomy. In fact, it demands the opposite: all things are constrained by the State and its desires. The rule must be universal. Governing individuals is like herding cats; whereas ruling over a collective molded by both State pressures (law, force) and social forces (shame, shunning) is a far more gratifying task, because the molding, if done correctly and well, creates a populace that reflects back the will of the State to itself. The State is now God, and its citizens, made in the State’s image, are its supplicants.

The whole of the cultural Marxist project is to create and maintain cultural hegemony — that sameness we saw in the Maoists, who wore identical uniforms and kept their haircuts the same; the sameness we see in our own social justice Red Guard, with their ubiquitous cotton candy hair and redundant tribal piercings — so that there can be no deviation from the new standards, built atop the rubble of old traditions the Marxist seeks to destroy. To create the New Man, you must kill off the Olds. To arrive at Year Zero, you must erase all those years that came before it. To save the culture, you must first destroy it completely.

Cultural Marxism is dystopia peddling utopia through grievance narratives and rank emotionalism. It grants the self-styled dispossessed enormous power over those it casts as oppressors, which is itself determined by an intersectional calculus among ranked victim groups. Yet, this power is temporary. Because what its authors seek, ultimately, is entirely authoritarian. The useful idiots will ultimately be replaced by the ministerial elite, who will step in to guide the filthies during The Great Reset. With policed conformity. Sustainability. Asceticsim. Sameness. Every thought you think, every word you utter, every move you make, must be approved by the State. And you’ll beg them for all of it.

Today, the Useful Idiots enjoy wielding power; but what they never seem to recognize is that once they’ve ground down all opposition and extirpated all difference — once they’ve rooted out every supposed intolerance they can conjure — there are no more battles to fight, no more ideas to be born, and no more purpose left to life. To speak in language they may understand, their project reduces us to the means of production, slaves to the most successful of the power mad, those earthly deities who delight in our serfdom, providing us safety and sustenance in exchange for conformity and a surrender of self to some greater good that they determine. Enlightened feudalism, let’s call it. And we’re the ones tilling their fields.

But that’s the endgame we haven’t quite reached — one most of those who’ve embraced the cultural Marxist paradigm, having been indoctrinated into it and currently strutting about as its proud, clownish initiates, can’t see coming. Their identity politics — and the power their supposed oppression yields — appeals to their egos. They are blinded by the narcissism of “being seen,” and by the thrill of having cultural control, if only for the moment. They revel in their bullying.

Which brings us to the current moment. At the tip of the cultural Marxist spear today is the trans cult, just as a year ago it was the racialist cult. Their presence is smothering in cultural spaces, by design. The political left, academia, big tech, and the corporate world, have all taken up the trans cause for the same reasons they took up the cause of BLM before it: to gather power, destroy norms, attack traditions, and create the conditions of tribalism that must exist before the collective comes together, of necessity, out of the ruins of everyone’s cancellation. The last man standing is the New Man, devoid of any potential to create cultural friction. He is the perfect servant to a benevolent master.

Where we once were able to conceive of fascism — or Statist authoritarianism — as an iron boot forever pressing on our necks, today it’s a Christian Louboutin red-bottomed pump, worn by a dude in a lace dress and zebra thong, we imagine stomping on our faces forever. Only we’re compelled to dig the kink.

The revolution will be accessorized. And you’ll learn to like it. Or else.