Sleepwalking into Wokeness: How we got here -Hardback

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 revolution’s 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, which may have posed little danger separately, have coalesced into a brewing social revolution. These trends include:

• 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 and 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

Together, these forces leave most ordinary people feeling dispossessed in their countries and losing control of their future.

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