The woke capital issue is about whether to politicize all areas of life or to maintain a line between public and private. Mike Gonzalez writes:
That all cultural institutions in America have been taken over by the Left is beyond question. The media, the academy, Hollywood—all are now in its clutches. Conservatives still cling to talk radio, just as tightly as they do to their guns and bibles, as President Obama so dismissively put it, but that is about the only redoubt of the “sense-making” institutions they still have.
This was no accident. Those who have studied the genesis of this annexation know that it was a deliberate “long march through the institutions.” That campaign was conceived in the late 1960s by the violent German activist Rudi Dutschke, a disciple of the non-violent but much more dangerous Frankfurt School academic Herbert Marcuse, who approved of Dutschke’s plan.
Today, this strategy manifests in the demand that institutions be “woke.” The term, borrowed from African-American slang for being awake, has come to mean not just any type of liberalism, but one denoted by an obsequious obsession with social issues, denunciations of “whiteness,” the insistence that the freest and most prosperous society today is hopelessly racist and in need of deep change, and the intolerant resolve to censor any deviation from any of these concepts through cancel culture. Other American institutions are teetering on the verge of a woke takeover.
[Mike Gonzalez, "The Long March Through the Corporations," March 25]
