Mounk provides an account to date of the origins, consequences, and limitations of so-called "wokeness." He shows how postmodernism, postcolonialism, and critical race theory forged the "identity synthesis" that conquered many college campuses by 2010. He lays out how a relatively marginal set of ideas came to gain tremendous influence in business, media, and government by 2020.
We have ascended far above the artisanal screen-shotting of invoices and stand in the presence of a genuine master of ideological niche marketing ... In Mounk’s own philosophy of 'universalism,' a warmed-over version of the consensus politics of the 1950s and 1960s, even more insipid than the original, which helped make the hyper-polarized, illiberal, violent, ideology-poisoned country we inhabit today.
The most comprehensive and reasonable story of this shift that has yet been attempted. Erudite and up to date, Mounk integrates ideas from philosophy, political theory, political science and psychology, along with the views of a range of commentators ... Mounk eschews pithy phrases and definitions for a fuller examination of an evolving phenomenon ... Mounk has told the story of the Great Awokening better than any other writer who has attempted to make sense of it.
Mounk is better at explaining how we came to be in the mess we’re in. A liberal constitutionalist, he’s a man of the 'universalist left,' which is the way that the left in the West used to be until the fall of the Berlin Wall ... There is, alas, a milquetoast quality to Mr. Mounk’s worries about the woke takeover of America’s academe ... Mr. Mounk never says so outright, but you can’t help concluding that he would have been happy if wokeism had been less unkempt, less absolutist and Manichaean, more gentle and more sweetly reasonable.
