Our old friend Rod Dreher is at it again. In a lengthy blog post cited in a David Brooks column, he compares wokeness to Bolshevism and worries about “soft totalitarianism.” Mind you, he understands Trump’s weaknesses, and thinks the January 6 rioters were a rabble, but clearly, something has to be done to protect decent, God-fearing Americans from the horrors of the woke menace. What might that be?
Like most of his right-wing apocalypse mongers, he doesn’t say. He doesn’t have to, because he makes a big point of telling us that he is posting from Hungary, which is obviously the New Jerusalem for the cultural right. (He probably loves Putin, as well, but he understands Moscow is a bridge too far for an American) Extreme gerrymandering, the destruction of independent media, the politicization of law enforcement and the judiciary, and so on: illiberal democracy is a small price to pay to prevent the left from setting up a Christian gulag.
I can’t speak to the quality of Dreher’s theology, but he’s a terrible historian, and his analogies are ridiculous. The Bolsheviks were a tiny group of conspirators (mostly in exile) unknown to the vast majority of Russians prior to 1917; they came to power by promising a war-weary public peace, land, and bread, and held it by being single-minded, opportunistic, and, above all, ruthless. The woke crowd is a disorganized group of intellectuals operating perfectly legally in universities and on Twitter; it has no aspirations to overthrow our system, and only seeks to change minds peacefully. Not exactly the same thing.
Oh, and there is no such thing as “soft totalitarianism.” It’s an oxymoron.