Sleepwalking into wokeness: how we got here - john o'sullivan

America and the West are now in the penultimate stage of a revolution defined by wokeness.

What we call partisanship is essentially the effect of the late but growing realization of the revolutions opponents that they face a major threat to their interests, convictions, and ways of life.

It is not the wokerati, but their likely victims who are waking up.

What they see is how a large number of social trends that may have posed little danger separately--mass migration made more divisive by multiculturalism; the rise of identity politics; the imposition of bureaucratic diversity; the collapse of Christianity and traditional religious restraints; the sexual revolution; the weakening of the family; radical gender theory and the rising hostility between the sexes; terrorism and its gradual accommodation by democratic governments and institutions; the smothering of national sovereignty by global governance; the rise of anti-national elites in Western societies; the post-communist crises of conservatism; the extraordinary recent resurrection of socialism as a social panacea among the young; the economic consequences of environmentalism--all have coalesced into a brewing social revolution that leaves most ordinary people feeling dispossessed in their countries and losing the future.

In this series of essays written over the course of a storied career, John OSullivan, a former adviser to British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher and editor of National Review shows how this revolution has emerged and how this revolution can be resisted.