What hold does Putin have over Trump? Apart from the rumours you’ve heard, of course. Here’s a better theory: Trump admires Putin not for threatening to launch World War III, but for actually launching Woke War I. No other world leader had taken on this new ideology. To understand Putin’s (and now Trump’s) chances of success, we need to know the history of Woke. To grasp that, we must grasp when, why and how it came into being. And that depends on how the French ideals of 1789 broke up and were transformed into something else: how Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité became Diversity, Equity and Inclusion.
Everything changes, even the lofty ideals of the French Revolution. Some of these ideals were achieved, to different degrees. But even this famous triad, Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité, had no timeless right to exist. And we have just seen it unseated by a rival triad that presents itself as equally idealistic. But are they allies or enemies? I suggest the latter.
Of course, the French Revolution had practical consequences. How many millions died in its wars, or were wounded, or impoverished, would be impossible to count. But the ideals survived: they initially seemed an ideology of immense power. Although continually reinterpreted and disputed, its three component terms became assumptions that would later be called (in overstatement) an ideology.
Already it begins to be treated as an historical phase, not as a timeless utopia
Despite French revolutionary festivals of zealous unity, LEF had eventually-fatal internal conflicts and limitations, as does DEI. Fraternité meant brotherhood, not sisterhood; revolutionaries pursued universal male suffrage, but excluded women. Égalité? Jacobins were even ambiguous about slavery. The journalist Olympe de Gouges famously protested both against the position of women, and against slavery; she died at the guillotine. So the French Revolution was refought for decades.
Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité were eventually turned into commonplaces. However much they lost their literal force, their critics still found it hard to argue against the ideological equivalent of peace and bread. Yet this triad has finally been undermined, and by new revolutionaries rather than old conservatives.
Some of these ideals of 1789 were grandiloquently depicted as the origins of present day values, indeed as the foundations of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights of 1948. By the 1990s adherents of these originally French ideals may well have thought that they had largely converted the West.
Liberté was shorthand for rejection of the restrictions of status and privilege that were soon summed up in another term, the ancien régime, meaning in English the former regime. Eighteenth century France was no more “ancient” than any other society: it was sophisticated, complex and successful — in its own terms. But from 1789 its characteristic practices were labelled, so that a new sort of very different liberty seemed possible to secure by mass action. But liberty to do what? Its critics said: to burn chateaux and guillotine the enemies of the Revolution.
Égalité was harder to achieve. It was an ideal defined against formal advantages of rank, and could be promoted by legislation. Indeed the French nobility (at least, part of it) voluntarily renounced its titles in a euphoric session of the French Constituent Assembly. But other aristocrats remained attached to their status; terms of nobility remained in use; French society never became a level playing field.
Fraternité was a celebration of the brotherhood of man that would, assumed revolutionaries, break out everywhere once all enjoyed Liberté and Égalité. This ideal was the hardest to express in legislation. French armed forces now elected their officers, and revolutionary zeal inspired remarkable military achievements. But elsewhere the ordinary conflicts between individuals survived, and Fraternité was an aspiration strangely difficult to explain to France’s neighbours.
Even in France, Fraternité was argued over, and only later secured its state-sanctioned place in this triad. Indeed all three terms were long disputed, until they finally became not actualities but truisms.
Those truisms are contradicted by the new ideology of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion. Its origins were squarely within the contrasting culture of the United States. True, DEI is presented by its enthusiasts as similarly inspiring; indeed as similar in its effects. But what are these effects? They prove to be rather different, indeed often the opposite of Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité.
Diversity now means the opposite of Liberty, which was once the freedom to do things instinctively affirmed and acted out by millions of people who feel more secure among others who share their values. As was too evident in the riots that followed the Southport murders, Diversity and social solidarity are now perceived to be at odds. Indeed mass participation in many organizations, from political parties, churches and sports teams to trade unions, is notoriously in decline: each decline is an individual symptom of a single, wider shift.
Diversity implies the approved unity of some groups only, balanced by intolerance towards the affirmations of all the others. So Diversity entails not variety, but its opposite: the restriction of variety to cover named groups, membership of which is determined by some higher authority. These groups are called “communities”. All victims are diverse, but some are more diverse, and deserving, than others: there are no quotas favouring white working class males.
Equity appeals to justice; and who can object to that? But in practice it means approved treatment for individuals who are not (thanks to Diversity) equal; it therefore means separate and unequal treatment for victims. Equity silently displaced equality as an ideal, since equality proved unattainable. Fifty years ago a target among all politicians was the abolition of poverty, a levelling up in material wealth. This has been replaced by demands for the alleviation of victimhood among carefully selected minorities.
But is it really about alleviation? Just as the abolition of poverty by the spread of wealth would have put many activists out of their jobs, so a large industry now depends on the preservation, indeed the growth, of victimhood. Into the 1960s the claim to preference depended on the technical term “poor”; now the key term is “victim”.
Inclusion seems an American echo of the French version of Fraternité, yet do the differences outweigh the similarities? Inclusion means not the French ideal of the career open to talent but (again) the favouring of minorities identified by their status. Their identity is to be preserved, not merged or included in the nation. Meritocracy contradicted Fraternité: within a previously unitary culture, meritocracy opened up distinctions between individuals rather than reconciled them. It had to be managed; and since ambition is so powerful, the official management of its challengers had to be stronger again. The migration of peoples makes Inclusion ever harder: it steadily becomes an aspiration, not an achievable goal.
Not for nothing, however, has DEI caught on: beginning as a lever against the legacies of American slavery, it became an ideology that others could exploit. It has even provoked a counter-revolution in its parent society, now led by another Napoleon. In America the tide of cultural warfare has turned. The point is not to enthuse or lament over this reversal but to understand it.
Today, DEI is still understood in its own terms. Like the Church of England, beset by allegations of child abuse, the advocates of DEI are determined to mark their own homework. Will they succeed? Or will their ideology share the pattern of all ideologies, moving from bright morning to darkening evening? As soon as DEI is understood, it ceases to seem irresistible and becomes optional.
Already it begins to be treated as an historical phase, not as a timeless utopia. Books begin to be published on the origin of Wokery, and why it failed. Multinational corporations everywhere are dropping DEI; it survives only in those homes of lost causes and impossible loyalties, the universities. Yet all ideologies destroy themselves. Perhaps Putin and Trump will find that their culture war was already won. As Hegel famously said, in what became his only memorable cliché, the Owl of Minerva spreads its wings only with the coming of the dusk.
