In June 2024, Federal Communications Commissioner Brendan Carr, posted to X, assessing the to-date results of the Broadband Equity Access and Deployment (BEAD) Program after 949 days and $42 billion:

Zero People connected
Zero Shovels worth of dirt turned
✔ DEI requirements set
✔ Green agenda written in

This was the latest in a litany of outrages. Take the revelation that $50 million of the Inflation Reduction Act’s “Environmental justice” funding went to a pro-Palestinian protest group, as well as another $50 million to anti-border security groups. US defense manufacturers may soon be required to disclose and reduce the greenhouse gas emissions “connected to the production and use of US government airplanes, ships, tanks, and other military equipment.” Solar-paneled tanks may await us.

The days of dividing neatly between culture war distractions and more significant, economic and political issues have long passed. Did they ever exist? How did we get here? And how should the right respond to the left’s whole-of-society environmental and social agenda?

In The Third Awokening, Eric Kaufmann, a Canadian-born academic who teaches at the University of Buckingham in the United Kingdom, contributes to a growing literature responding to this question. This includes Richard Hanania’s The Origins of Woke and Christopher Rufo’s America’s Cultural Revolution. The former attributed wokeness to civil rights law, and the latter focused on the intellectual origins of critical race theory. Hananiah gave us the law, Rufo the prophets.

Kaufmann argues that left-liberalism and its racism taboo are to blame for wokeness. Whereas Rufo focused on radical intellectuals, Kaufmann takes a different tack, examining the “liberal mainstream whose ethics revolve around the care/harm and equity moral foundations.” In his view, left-liberalism “coalesced in America in the early 1900s as a pro-European immigrant, anti-WASP majority orientation.” For Kaufmann, the defining features of this modern liberalism are “harm reduction” and egalitarianism, especially as applied to racial minorities.

As it gained power, “the pluralist left-liberalism of mid-century intellectuals subsequently overreached, from the mid-1960s to become woke cultural socialism.” This is a provocative thesis. It turns out that “modern liberals, not radicals, are largely responsible for our cultural malaise.” And Kaufmann offers the solution: his “12-point plan for rolling back progressive extremism.”

His actual scope is narrower than this subtitle suggests. “Progressive extremism,” indeed even the ambiguous category of wokeness, would seem to include the “degrowth” movement, the Just Stop Oil protesters who shut down traffic and spray-paint Stonehenge, and mandates that transgender athletes compete against biological females. Kaufmann, though, focuses mainly on race.

In Kaufmann’s telling, the first “awokening” was the sexual revolution in the 1960s, and the second was the period of increased immigration and multiculturalism that began in the 1980s. The third awokening concerns “cultural socialism,” which he defines as “using administrative, discursive and state power to engineer equal results between, and prevent emotional harm to, historically disadvantaged identity groups.”

Though a social scientist, not a political theorist, Kaufmann attributes large practical effects to ideas. As mentioned above, he blames left-liberalism’s obsessive focus on harm and equality for falling prey to wokeness. And yet, Kaufman’s own political theory is not so far removed from this conception of left-liberalism. He calls for a “rule-utilitarian approach” and cites John Stuart Mill’s warnings about the “danger that nongovernmental social pressure plays in stifling freedom.” Elsewhere he advocates for “Hobbesian-Millian liberal principles.”

The author does not explain why rebooted Millian liberalism would resist progressive extremism better than “left-liberalism” did the first time around. One of Mill’s most famous ideas is his “harm principle,” the notion that the only just use of power is the prevention of harm. Moreover, he argued for natural equality between males and females, then a radical idea and still a controversial one. If Kaufmann is correct and the liberal focus on harm and equality is to blame for wokeness, Mill is a strange alternative. In fact, Kaufmann’s depiction of left-liberalism begins to resemble Mill’s theories applied to race.

The “core” of Kaufmann’s political theory is “a cultural version of the equity-efficiency tradeoff.” Equity and social justice are worthy aims, in his telling, but they must be balanced against other values such as growth and efficiency. This involves much scientific management: “the good society is one that takes exclusion and inequality seriously, adopting reforms that increase the good. Those who do not fit the norm should be tolerated and assisted. Disparate outcomes should be addressed through moderate redistribution, if possible.” 

This may grant too much. If equal rights are respected, and the economy is growing, why object to unequal outcomes?

Indeed, as Friedrich Hayek contended in The Mirage of Social Justice, a system of liberty and equal rights is at inherently odds with one aimed at equal outcomes (today called “equity”). Hence we must choose between a bottom-up system of free markets and equal rights, or a centrally-planned economy that pursues social justice and equal outcomes from the top down. Hayek concluded that “the phrase ‘social justice’ is … a dishonest insinuation that one ought to agree to a demand of some special interest which can give no real reason for it.”

Kaufmann, however, seems to think some moderate amount of social justice planning is consistent with classical liberalism. Despite being himself far more accommodating than Hayek towards “equity,” he reserves some of his sharpest criticism for “woke-friendly, small government conservatives,” who “view market-based solutions as the answer to every problem.” At his most vitriolic, Kaufmann alleges that “the left is assisted … by useful idiots on the establishment market-liberal right,” who are obsessed with “Reagan, Thatcher and Hayek.”

To Kaufmann, these “woke-friendly,” libertarian-leaning elites are a major obstacle to rolling back progressive extremism. A section of the book is even titled “The Libertarian Problem.” His case, though, is weakened, by lumping pre-2016 Republican politicians in with libertarians and limited government conservatives. At one point he refers to George W. Bush as “fiscally conservative”—despite the out-of-control spending and ballooning deficits that defined his presidency. If Bush’s record as a fiscal conservative is any indication, his failure to halt progressive extremism may have had more to do with competence than ideology.

Moreover, Kaufmann overlooks the long history of libertarians opposing progressive racial policy. Milton Friedman’s opposition to the 1964 Civil Rights Act is well documented. The University of Chicago economist opposed racial discrimination on the basis that markets, not government, should take the lead in opposing bigotry. More recently, Reason Foundation co-filed an amicus brief in support of the plaintiffs suing Harvard over affirmative action. George Mason law professor David Bernstein has argued against anti-discrimination laws, affirmative action, and even racial classification itself (the latter of which were cited in Justice Gorsuch’s concurrence in SFFA v. Harvard).

To Kaufmann, libertarians and limited government conservatives are too hesitant to wield government power against “intermediate institutions.” And yet, he argues that “the decentralization of lawmaking from legislatures to administrative bodies is what drove the woke juggernaut.” If the fundamental problem is delegating legislative authority to administrative bodies, might an original understanding of the US Constitution provide answers? For example, with the advent of the Major Questions Doctrine, and the Supreme Court’s recent overruling of Chevron deference in Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo, the time is ripe for Congress to take back legislative authority from administrative bodies. And would that not go far to address the problem Kaufmann is concerned about?

So it might seem, but Kaufmann’s understanding of constitutional law differs strongly from the originalist perspective: “the judiciary has a duty to interpret the law in line with the main thrust of public opinion, except where these conflict with fundamental rights.” Elsewhere he calls for “balancing” the “Madisonian” tradition with the Hobbesian one. Exactly how Kaufmann thinks America trade-off against its constitutional tradition is unclear.

To be sure, Kaufmann rejects the post-liberal politics of Patrick Deneen and Sohrab Ahmari. And he faults Governor Ron DeSantis for going “too far” by “abolishing tenure, banishing CRT, and gender studies at university.” The author’s view of classical liberalism nonetheless is characterized more by rational planning than by ordered liberty. In his words, “government regulation, not market competition, is therefore vital to taming the power of woke.” This accords with liberal principles, he argues.

To Kaufmann, anti-woke government regulation is “about defending the liberty of citizens from institutions and private threats more than from executive government.” After all, government is “accountable and transparent in a way that institutions are not.” Exceptions may spring to mind.

Kaufmann is most at home working through public opinion polling. The evidence he assembles is impressive. He argues persuasively—and against common perception—that “religiosity … does not predict resistance to wokeness among individuals.” Rather, Christian faith is “only a bulwark against cultural socialism insofar as it inclines individuals to be conservative.” He similarly dismisses the claim that intensive, “helicopter” parenting is to blame for the “Great Awokening,” noting that “those who said they always had to be driven around by an adult were actually more supportive of free speech.”

When it comes to politics, Kaufmann suggests popular support for conservative positions makes wokeness a wedge issue. But that depends on its salience. Will voters really prioritize Critical Race Theory over immigration, or entitlements? Kaufmann argues that with the right leadership they will, but his faith in popular mobilization has limits. He lambasts “free-market conservatives” for focusing on school choice, noting that “most (parents) care mainly about their children getting ahead, and are only dimly aware of the noxious ideas being imparted.”

But herein lies a dilemma. If voters care enough about these issues to swing elections, why wouldn’t they care about their own kids learning them at school?

Turning to the role of corporations, Kaufmann seems to contradict himself. Reviewing the evidence, he concludes on page 245 that “social media use does not seem to affect beliefs per se, whether in mine or others’ research,” and suggests that “what children hear in school may actually be the bigger influence.” But when he gets to policy, he comes out in favor of common carrier status for Big Tech in part because “the attitudes of young people are arguably more shaped by social media than schools” (page 367). He provides no citation for the latter claim, and does not mention his prior rebuttal of it.

Kaufmann also breaks with many conservatives and libertarians on the question of racial classification. Where many, such as Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch, support eliminating the collection of “ethnic data,” Kaufmann recommends America keep its racial classification systems but “ensure the most equitable group representation consistent with liberalism.” But if figures such as Gorsuch or David Bernstein are correct, and racial classifications are “arbitrary and irrational,” isn’t it more consistent with liberalism to reject them outright? And to stop basing policies on them, in any direction?

There can be no doubt that “progressive extremism” has transformed American politics, that many of its core tenets are unpopular, and that this presents a significant political opportunity. Kaufmann’s unique argument is that left-liberalism is primarily to blame for wokeness, and that an expansive policy agenda inspired by the theories of John Stuart Mill and Thomas Hobbes is the answer—if only libertarians and free market conservatives would get out of the way.

While he is correct in much of his diagnosis of what ails the body politick, Kaufmann’s prescription would be much stronger if he hewed more closely to a more traditional, and therefore more radical, classical liberalism. Central planning can never address the roots of progressive extremism—only a recovery of constitutional order, and a flourishing civil society can.