Refusing the “Great Refusal”
6th September 2023
To paraphrase Karl Marx, a specter is haunting the United States and the Western world more broadly: the specter of woke despotism. Most disturbingly, its epicenter is in the United States, a land once gloriously immune from the ideological and totalitarian temptations that so haunted and deformed European politics in the 20th century. As Christopher Rufo demonstrates in his indispensable new book, America’s Cultural Revolution, the woke revolution has been gaining traction for a very long time and is now on the cusp of “controlling everything,” from our universities and corporations to the prestige media to the increasingly censorious network of “social media” that stands in for civic discourse in the United States today.