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How Woke Blew Itself Up
How did we get here? To the point where a Republican president is rolling back 70 years of race preferences in the public square and our Democratic friends are going ballistic (to compete, no doubt, with Elon’s rockets)?
The fact is, as Gregory Conti and Aaron Sibarium write in “How ‘Woke’ Radicalized the GOP” in Compact, there used to be a bipartisan consensus on race preferences:
For several decades, there was a sort of gentleman’s agreement that affirmative action could continue so long as it remained subtle and illegible, with enough obfuscation and doublespeak that employers could claim plausible deniability in the event of a lawsuit.
Come on. It wasn’t all a “gentleman’s agreement”. There was always The Race Card hanging over your head, and don’t you forget it.
One way or another Trump One did it. Not because Trump immediately rolled back all the affirmative action and under-the-table quotas, but because Trump radicalized the left.
The last second of the old regime was May 30, 2020, five days after the crucifixion of St. George Floyd, when Kay C. James, president of the conservative Heritage Foundation wrote
“How many more black people must die,” she asked, “until America admits that racism is still a problem in this country?”
Not any more.
[T]he radicalization of the right is best understood as a reaction to the left, which underwent its own transformation over the course of Trump’s first term and, with even greater force, in the aftermath of Floyd’s death… as wokeness hardened into a governing program, conquering institutions and impinging on ordinary life in a way that old-school political correctness never had.
Let’s say the Woke Era lasted from 2014 to 2024.
Wokeness did not just change the character of liberal institutions or disrupt the pre-woke status quo; it kickstarted a conservative revolution that made a return to that status quo impossible, redrawing the lines of the culture war in ways that leave less room for ceasefire and détente.
The fact is that the first Trump administration was copacetic with a bunch of leftist victim agendas from race to sex to LGBT. That all changed after 2020.
With St. Floyd and Nikole Hannah-Jones and her “1619 Project” and transgenders going bonkers over men in sports and the women’s restroom, the world changed.
And let’s face it, the change has nothing to do with a cunning Trump strategy to roll back the last 70 years. I’d say that, reacting to Trump, the left jumped the shark and now if they play the Race Card it’s not nuclear any more. And the absurd behavior of trans activists has finally got women from J.K Rowling on down to complain. Then there is immigration and deportation, and so on.
The fact is that Republican politicians know that the rules have changed. It’s not just the old Eric Hoffer line that every mass movement ends up as a racket. It is more that political movements just don’t know when or where to stop. And then they run into Stein’s Law: if something cannot go on forever, it will stop.
There’s another notion: did you know that the average Chinese dynasty lasted for about 70 years?
I suppose we will really know if the world has changed after the mid-terms. If the Democrats and their devoted activists can’t scare the American people away from Trump on Tuesday, November 3, 2026, then the world has really changed.
| Tue, 06 Oct 2026 23:50:25 GMT |
My Theory of Education
Back in the day, kids learned all the skills and lessons of life from their parents, and from other adults and other kids in the troop or village or clan.
If you were a girl, you learned everything you needed in life from your mother and maybe the skilled seamstresses and weavers nearby.
But then, experts agreed, that wasn’t enough. Young people needed to learn stuff that their parents or neighbors couldn’t teach them.
Grok says that:
Formal schooling began as training for scribes, not as education for everyone. Learning itself is far older: families, apprenticeships, and oral tradition taught skills long before anyone sat in a classroom. What was new was an institution whose job was to teach reading, writing, and the knowledge needed to run a state.
It all got started in Mesopotamia in about 3,000 BC.
Students copied signs, word lists, math, model letters and contracts, then literary texts. Graduates became the administrators of the first complex states.
Modern compulsory schooling started in Prussia in 1717 under Frederick William IV and then Frederick the Great.
That model—graded classes, trained teachers, a set curriculum, attendance enforced by the state—spread through Europe and the United States in the nineteenth century and became the template for modern public education.
As far as I know, I learned to read and write at a private “nursery school” in England, starting at age 4. But my mother read books to me and my sister from an early age, in particular the railway books immortalized as Thomas the Tank Engine. It’s possible I learned rudimentary reading before I went to school.
I suppose that in the early modern period, rich kids were schooled by “governesses” and “tutors,” and lower class kids in “dame schools.” It was about what parents could afford. Those that could afford it sent their kids to private schools. In England the “public schools” were set up by medieval guilds. I went to Oundle School that was set up by the Worshipful Company of Grocers by 1556. Then there was religion. The Irish in the US set up the Catholic school system because the public school system set up by Horace Mann was New England Protestant and Unitarian.
But why send kids to school instead of to work? In the old days, most kids went to work. Grok:
In agrarian societies that was often on the family farm; in early industrial cities it was mills, mines, street trades, and domestic service.
But why send kids to school instead of to work? Return on investment.
As factories, offices, and technical trades spread, the return to literacy, numeracy, and general cognitive skill rose, while the relative value of a 10-year-old’s manual output fell.
…
Education is human-capital investment. A year of schooling, in a wide range of countries and eras, raises later earnings on the order of roughly 8–10 percent, with larger gains where baseline schooling is low. Those gains compound: literate workers learn new tasks faster, make fewer costly errors, and can move into jobs that did not exist when they were children.
Presumably that 8-10 percent earnings gain assumes a school that actually teaches kids useful stuff.
It’s interesting to me that schools have always seemed to have a single-teacher many-students model. Obviously that is partly affordability, and partly discipline. In my day, textbooks were owned by the school and were recycled for reuse by the next year’s students. Today, especially in college, textbooks are a revenue stream for academics.
Today we have home schools and micro schools. And it’s interesting that if you go to a Barnes & Noble bookstore they have a whole section devoted to homeschooling. Are micro schools and homeschooling competitive with government schools?
But now we come to the inflection point. From The Wall Street Journal:
AI tutoring outperforms in-class active learning.
According to Grok that comes from “Kestin, Miller, Klales, Milbourne, and Ponti, “AI tutoring outperforms in-class active learning: an RCT introducing a novel research-based design in an authentic educational setting,” Scientific Reports 15, 17458 (3 June 2025).”
Look, I know enough about technological revolutions to know that, at this stage of the AI revolution, we don’t have a clue what is coming.
But obviously, if researchers are telling us that “AI tutoring outperforms in-class active learning” then the only thing we know is that “we ain’t seen nothing yet.”
In the last year I have started using Grok to either confirm what I already knew or research a subject for me. In this piece I did both. I did not know, for instance, that education is needed for any children not growing up to work on the family farm, and there is a return on investment in schooling (except for the kind of in-city government school where Nikole Hannah-Jones sent her daughter).
Was I cheating? Or is this just the Way We Do Things?
Anyway, it is clear that all teachers, pre-K thru grad school, should be researching the experience of the buggy-whip makers after the invention of the automobile.
| Mon, 05 Oct 2026 22:43:03 GMT |
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Christopher Chantrill
He runs usgovernmentspending.com, the go-to resource for government finance data, and is a frequent contributor to the American Thinker. He lives in Seattle, Washington. Click for more.
“I love this guy.” — Steve Ballmer
A Commoner Manifesto
Commoners have nothing to lose but their shame
Do politicians know what they are doing, or just do what they know?
Everything should be made as simple as possible, but no simpler. — attr. to Einstein
The simplest way to understand human society is as Three Layers such as Nobles, Yeomen, and Serfs.
My take on Three Layers is my Three Peoples Theory of Creatives, Responsibles, and Subordinates.
I believe that we moderns live in Three Worlds: the War World of politics, the Market World of the economy, and the Life World of family and neighborhood.
And the trouble with politics is that it reduces human society to a war against the enemy, as determined by Nazi jurist Carl Schmitt.
The world that we all live in today is the one created by the German Turn in philosophy, psychology, science, and meaning.
But our modern elite, the educated elite, has taken, I believe, a Wrong Turn and has imposed a cultural Great Reaction on the world, a lurch back to the primitive. This manifests in the elite’s conceited Activism Culture and its patronage of Subordinate people as its Little Darlings.
The principal reason for the elite’s Wrong Turn has been that it does not understand and does not want to understand how the Three Peoples’ Religions are necessarily different.
The root of the educated elite’s Wrong Turn is its conceit that it knows what the world needs. I think there is a better way; I call it “A Good Life Better than the Left”.
ABC of Politics – Activism Culture – “Anatomy of Revolution” – Allyism – Critical Theory – Downstream-ism – Dutch Finance – German Turn – Good Life – Great Reaction – Little Darlings – Perfect Plan – Women in the Public Square – Ruling Class – Three Layers – Three Peoples – Three Peoples Religion – Tribalism – Two Cultures – Wrong Turn
Today’s topic:
