Passing Fad or Permanent Trend?

The spread of wokism to all corners of society, with a concomitant tendency to restrict speech, fire heretics, and establish orthodoxy, is clearly a reality, but the question is, will it burn out, or is it a more permanent trend? In my optimistic moments, I see the comparisons to previous witch hunts (such as the McCarthy era) where, in the short term, decent people were cowed into silence by the powers that be, but in the long term, public opinion turned and the leaders of the witch hunts went from enjoying unchallenged power to being historical villains (Sewell, McCarthy). The opinion cascade peaked and reversed with a well-placed “have you no decency, sir?” in a public forum. But the differences make me think we are watching not a fad that will burn out, but a general move into a new medievalism. First, wokism isn’t just a hysterical reaction to a perceived new threat (communism), but an entirely new worldview. McCarthyism operated within an overriding Judeo-Christian worldview while Wokism is itself a new overriding worldview. Second, the spread of wokism has been long in developing. Whereas the red scare emerged quickly after World War II, the wokist perception of “oppression embedded in systems” has been growing and expanding for at least a generation. It’s not a sudden overreaction to a perceived threat, but a longstanding, long building worldview that didn’t flame into existence suddenly and so probably won’t flame out of existence suddenly. Third, the elites, by and large, were never on board with McCarthyism. It had the support of the masses, many politicians, and some cultural elites (e.g., the Hollywood studio heads), but it had significant opposition—virtually all academics, novelists, and journalists were vocally anti-McCarthy from the beginning. There is no such opposition today. Wokism dominates media, Hollywood, and academia with almost no concerted cultural pushback. Where are the Arthur Millers writing Broadway plays denouncing the cowardice and conformism? The religious elements of wokism and its takeover of virtually the entire elite culture make me believe that it’s a new revolutionary force, establishing orthodoxy much as Catholicism did at the time of Constantine, or Protestantism did at the time of Luther. The historical metaphors to 500AD seem more apropos than the metaphors to 1950AD.