Origins and History of Woke

>> Interviewer: So my understanding is this is the last class you have of the policy boot camp, so please don't all stare out the window counting down the clock. I remember back in grade school, the last class, the last day of school, I always felt bad for the professor as to what was going on, but.

Victor, great to see you. I hope you had a nice ride up to Palo Alto from the Central Valley. If you're not familiar with Victor's background. Victor is a multi generation Californian who has a family farm in the Central Valley. And I think coming up here is always something of a culture shock, no?

>> Victor Davis Hanson: Yes, it is. It's a different century than Palo Alto, but it's a good cross section of driving across California and you can see the decline in infrastructure and trash on the side of the road, or you go to a public facility, homeless. So you can see as you get closer to this area, it starts to increase the viability.

It used to take me 20 years ago, 3 hours, and now it can take four or five and sometimes six or seven, depending on the construction.

>> Interviewer: At what point do you see the Teslas?

>> Victor Davis Hanson: Yeah. And a high speed rail, of course, dissects my route, and it's $15 billion and not 1ft of track, but a lot of delays.

It's something like stone. It looks like Stonehenge. Just a bunch of overpasses. Nothing after 15 years. Not one step, 1ft, literally, of track, yes.

>> Interviewer: Victor and I write a lot about California and I think we've both written God knows how many columns on high speed rail over the last ten years.

Let's talk a little woke Victor. The year is 1938, and the blues musician Lead Belly records a song called Scott's Bow. Did any of you know who Lead Belly is? Any of you know who Kurt Cobain is?

>> Interviewer: Good, we got some nirvana people out here. Kurt Cobain was inspired in part by Lead Belly.

He was a Mississippi musician, a guitarist. I think Cobain spent ridiculous amounts of money buying his guitars when he was still with us. Cobain's been gone about 30 years now, but in 1938, Led belly writes a song called Scott's Borough Boys. Victor. It's a song that's dedicated to nine black males who were accused of raping two white women, one of whom later admitted that the whole thing was a hoax.

And in his notes, he writes, and I quote, I advise everybody be a little careful. Best stay woke, keep their eyes open. Fast forward now to the year 2012. Victor. Hashtag emerges on X or Twitter or whatever the heck we call it these days, X I guess the hashtag is staywoke.

And this is in the aftermath of the shooting of Trayvon Martin in Florida. We now move forward to the year 2017. Woke has actually shown up in dictionary form Marianne Webster defines it, and I quote, aware of and actively attentive to important facts and issues, especially issues of racial and social justice.

Now, we're in the middle of a presidential campaign season right now. Republicans are having the first debate next week. I'm sure the word woke is going to get tossed around right now. Ron DeSantis has made it a core part of his candidate identity. Vivek Ramaswamy laments, quote, the woke industrial complex in America.

Nikki Haley calls wokeness, and I quote, a virus more dangerous than any pandemic, hands down. So, Victor, you have a dictionary to write. How do you define woke?

>> Victor Davis Hanson: I think it even precedes Lead Belly, it's a direct evocation to the 19th century revival, the Protestant, the great awakening.

And it was the idea that people woke up to Christ in our secular, atheistic or agnostic society. You wake up suddenly and you realize the way the world supposedly is. So what is it? And it seems to me that it's the old bromide from antiquity that we're going to have a quality result society that mandates parity on the back end and that requires level of government or state control, interference in a person's own life for a noble purpose of making us more or less equal in correcting injustices.

Where it's different from Marxist doctrine is it has substituted race for class. And it really started with Barack Obama. We had this word diversity, but it was not really in common currency. And we race in this country. There had been, every group had experienced discrimination by the majority of population, but it was largely a black white dilemma going back to slavery and Jim Crow.

But Barack Obama redefined diversity as everybody who is not purportedly white. And that brought the population that was nonwhite or oppressed to 30% of the population rather than just twelve. And then he did something quite differently. This was the foundations of woke. He separated oppression by class for race.

So he said that class is not really the barometer. If you're in East Palestine, Ohio, and you have nothing, you're still an oppressor because you're white. If you're in Bakersfield, California, I was there not too long ago. And you see people who, there hasn't been one person in their entire family that's ever gone to college, but they're oppressors by the nature of their skin color.

So then race becomes the barometer. And that's very helpful for the Marxist interpretation because it's immutable, whereas Marxism always failed in the United States because of class mobility. Some of your parents are very wealthy, you may not be wealthy, some of your parents are very poor, you may be upper middle class or wealthy.

And so that fluidity meant it was very hard to get a static, permanent underclass. But when you introduce race into it, and unlike gender, you say you can't construct your race, it's permanent, and therefore you're a permanent victim, then it's a much more powerful idea that we have to use the state to make a quality of result primarily, but not exclusively on race.

And then you get these idiosyncratic, strange things. That's why I think the strange case of woke. So we're supposed to believe that LeBron James is a victim. He's a multi billionaire. And every once in a while, Barack Obama ventures out from his Colorado mansion or his Martha's vineyard mansion or his new Oahu mansion to lecture us on our illiberalities because he's a victim.

Whereas in the old days, under the old paradigms, while because of a history of racism, people who were not white might have had a larger percentage that were poor, that's no longer necessarily true. If you look at 17 ethnic groups have higher incomes than so called whites do, and that, Indian Americans, Japanese Americans, Arab Americans, Nigerian Americans.

So it was really a substitution of race for class, and it was very effective. And so now we're sort of polarized and we're trying to make everybody equal. And we do that in a variety of ways. We do it with admissions, we do it with hiring, we do it with exposure on culture.

And ultimately, whether we like it or not, it's at war with meritocracy, because meritocracy is blind, supposedly. Not that it always is that way in practicality, but ultimately it's going to take a toll because it substitutes something, and that something is not necessarily merit. I'll just finish with.

I was in Libya, 2006 and seven, and I was wondering why every time I got there, there was a big pothole. I don't mean a pothole you get stuck in. I mean, the whole car was submerged in it, and we would get out with the driver and pick it out.

And so I said to him, why do you? You're the fifth largest exporter of oil in the world, the chief ingredient of asphalt. Why do you, can't you fix it? And the driver turned to me and he said, we hire our first cousins. And what he meant was, the basis by which we hire is not on a civil service meritocratic system.

It's a tribal consideration. And we don't want to, I don't think we want to get to this because we're the only multiracial democracy that works. Nobody's ever tried it before. Brazil is the only contemporary one, and maybe India, that are multiracial, multiethnic democracies, and they're not working nearly as well as we do.

So this idea that American can be defined by anybody's looks and then defined by a cohesion of ideas, that you're an American because you have a common ground, you believe in the constitution, you believe in these traditions and customs and self improvement, self critique, that's what makes what we're doing.

So this is a very reactionary, pre civilizational idea that we're going to go back and start judging people by their superficial appearance. That should be incidental, not essential to who we are. But when you make tribalism essentialism, then history is going to say, if you go down that road, you're going to share a lot of things with the stasis at Corcyra and through cities history.

You're going to see a lot of things that went on in the Balkans over a thousand years. You're going to see things that went on in Rwanda and Iraq. So be warned.

>> Interviewer: So before woke came along, Victor, there was the phrase politically correct PC for short, in which you would say something to say, victor, that's not PC.

So what happened to PC? Did woke replace PC or is woke just a variation of PC?

>> Victor Davis Hanson: Well, as I said, it was different than PC because it had this zealousness attached to it that comes back from, as I said, the 19th century great awakening. So it was not just a rational decision to become woke, it was an emotional, it was a frenzied reaction.

It was something that was far more furious and powerful than just checking the boxes on political correctness and then political correctness. It had things like gender and environmentalism. You're politically incorrect when you talk about your climate denials. But woke was focused more on race than any type of ideology that we've seen in a long time.

It was the idea that you were permanently identified by your superficial appearances and you cannot change that. And therefore that will be the barometer of success or failure in this country. And we're going to start talking to people in collectives. So yes, there may be individual exceptions, but we can use, if we say white, we can say white rage, white supremacy, white privilege, and we mean all white people, or we wouldn't collectivize it.

And that's something that has a bad history in civilization.

>> Interviewer: Next March, Disney has a film coming out. It's a remake of Snow White. It's actually a live action version, not a cartoon. It stars Rachel Zegler, who you might recognize. She was in the west side story remake.

She's been doing a lot of interviews, and whenever she does an interview, she tends to cause trouble that Disney probably doesn't want. She has branded the prince in the story a stalker. And she said the following about Snow White's story. Quote, she's not going to be saved by the prince, and she's not going to be dreaming about true love.

She's dreaming about becoming the leader she knows she can be and the leader that her late father told her she could be if she was fearless, fair, brave, and true. Now, does that make Snow White woke?

>> Victor Davis Hanson: Well, again, you can't look at woke in the present without a historical context.

So we have precedents for what they're doing, taking classics, literature, or music or statuary or art and recalibrating them for contemporary political purposes. And in Rome, great statues of Roman empire, of emperors would be there. And then they called it Damnatio memoriae. When he became unpopular, you could save money by erasing his face and just putting the next emperor's face on the old emperor's body.

In the Soviet Union, they did it by a process called Trotskyization. So all of a sudden, Trotsky is the hero of the revolution, and then you want to get rid of him. So you hire hundreds of thousands of people to cut his picture out of every newspaper and magazine.

I lived in Greece during the dictatorship of 1973, fascist dictatorship. And they had certain ideas about going back to the byzantine morality of the 10th or 11th century. They changed the language. They used the Katharevousa dialect, almost as if we were going to speak ancient Greek. They started adding accents.

And one of the things they believed, and you couldn't show the female physique. So they had literally people who were going through magazines, and when women had bikinis, they would cross hatch between the top and the bottom with a marks a lot before they could sell it. And that's what this is right now.

When we take classics and then we recalibrate them to fit contemporary views. The problem with this is it never ends. So all these woke people think they have reached the end of history. They have moral superiority that's never been seen before. They have an intellect that is just superior to everyone and they never think that.

Well, wait a minute. Once we set this model that each generation gets to tear down statues, renamed names, why do we think it's going to be static? So it's conceivable that 50 years we might have a conservative, reactionary, nutty regime that says, I can't believe you people. In 2023, you aborted one million children.

We don't do that. I cannot believe you people. You had a million and a half homeless people. So what we're going to do is we're going to start changing names, your generation, and we're going to get rid of all references to these things that you did 50, 60 years ago that we find deplorable, and it never ends.

And so the better way to look at it with Snow White or kill a Mockingbird or a statue of James Longstreet is these are images of the past and they can be contextualized and they're reminders of good and bad, and they're tragic. Rather than to take the arrogance that we're going to look at history as melodrama and it's always going to be one bad person and one good person.

It's not shades or gradations of bad. That's what tragedy is. Good people that do bad things and bad people that can do good things. It's a very sophisticated, complex matter. And for these arrogant people of the present to say, we have enough intelligence and morality that we can pick everybody in the past and make a line that says he's exempt and he's culpable.

If you want to do that, you've got good company. You've got Hitler, you've got Stalin, you've got Mao's cultural evolution as your kindred predecessor.