...Joshua Mitchell, who is on the faculty at Georgetown University, has done us all a great service in writing this careful reflection.
American Awakening is not without flaws, but it certainly deserves an attentive read from anyone concerned about the malady that has stricken much of our cultural elite.
Mitchell is commendably clear in defining identity politics. It is a fumbling effort in a de-Christianizing society to find a replacement for Christianity. The basic Christian categories, transgression and innocence, still compel us, though fewer Americans than at any point in the recent past now profess belief in the Christian account of how they can be resolved. The question of what we should do after realizing the incompleteness of earthly justice has long fixed our attention in the West. But we are apparently in the process of losing the traditional religious vocabulary we applied to that question for many centuries.
Wokeist identity politics presents itself as a substitute. It borrows some of the moral scaffolding of Christianity while jettisoning its most essential element. This is the supernatural victory of the Christ that enables the resolving of all transgression and the cleansing of guilt. With that solution gone, the woke are left to bicker endlessly about who is and who is not on the side of Good. They gleefully contemplate the ever-harsher punishments that must be ladled out to transgressors by the righteous. Heteronormative white men become the scapegoat who must answer for all moral crimes. Practitioners of the woke faith seek to demonstrate their elect status in the hierarchy of victims. They do this through the often fabricated evidence of their oppression and the boundless vindictiveness of their desire for the scourging of sinners.
...The liberal political theory on which the book’s argument relies is a formidable intellectual accomplishment. A conservative reader will however have questions. What if the revolution that produced the liberal individual is also the beginning of the process that dissolves the very possibility of moral order? What if liberal democracy is unsustainable over the long term? Was the competent liberal citizen ever more than a vanishing rarity, even in the most successful liberal societies?...