FIGHTING NOTHING WITH NOTHING:

In our political culture, there is no issue quite like wokeness. The conversation it provokes tends to be about everything and nothing at the same time. It is central to our politics because Republican resistance to it is perhaps the single greatest force binding the American Right together. And while the mass messaging of Democratic politicians tends to focus more on health care and jobs, in institutions that the Left con­trols, like academia, it punishes opposition to wokeness more stringently than any other heresy.

At the same time, the conversation is, in a sense, not actually about anything. CPAC can hold entire conferences on the theme of "cancel culture" without producing any real policy suggestions. Although at the state level, politicians will occasionally address narrow issues, like whether to ban the teaching of critical race theory in public schools, there is no concrete anti-wokeness agenda that conservatives hope Republicans will implement the next time they return to power in Washington.

While voices on both left and right have argued that the United States is going through a cultural revolution more extensive than anything we have seen since the 1960s, it remains a kind of background noise to our political culture. Into this debate steps Vivek Ramaswamy with Woke, Inc., a book that combines features of an autobiography, a work on policy, and a cultural critique.

As a practicing Hindu, a son of immigrants, and a successful biotech founder--but also a conservative--his is a uniquely American story. And it is an endearing one, written by an author who is widely rumored to have a future in politics, with the kind of résumé and background that Republican strategists dream about. Indeed, as the party suffers a long-term brain drain among both its leaders and its voters that has only accelerated since 2016, intelligent conservatives should hope Ramaswamy has a future in their party. Unfortunately, however, when Ramaswamy puts forward policy suggestions for responding to our cultural drift toward identity politics and more stringent forms of speech restriction, he re­veals the larger shortcomings of the anti-wokeness movement. [...]

For a work that centers around the problems with wokeness, Woke, Inc. tells us surprisingly little about why wokeness is bad. Yes, the author is concerned that it distracts and divides us, and that conservatives feel put upon by the ideological conformity demanded by major corporations. But one way out of that division is for the opponents of wokeness to simply give up. If two sides are fighting a war, the most natural path to peace is for the weaker side to lay down its arms, not for the one that's winning to surrender. From the book, one never understands why that isn't an option.

In some cases, Ramaswamy himself uses racial disparities as a justification for his own preferred policies. While he says he rejects theories of "systemic racism," he argues for national service during the summer on the grounds that minorities fall further behind when they're out of school. There are a few problems with this argument, most notably that it is unclear how most forms of national service would close any gap. (It is also unclear that kids doing worse on tests in the short run has much to do with real intellectual achievement anyway, since it is quite obvious that the function of schooling is mostly some combination of daycare and signalling.)

Putting that aside, once you justify a policy as necessary to close gaps, you beg the question of why you are not doing more to achieve equality. The fact of the matter is that liberals are not imagining differ­ences in test scores, income, and incarceration rates between racial groups. There is no evidence that government can realistically close these gaps, though it can force a more balanced distribution of jobs through affirmative action. If anti-wokeness is to mean anything, it must oppose such policies, and that is difficult to do while portraying the anti‑woke agenda as the one that will eliminate statistical disparities.

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