This text constitutes the “good sheets” of the book to be published on May 17 by Albin Michel: Is Wokism a form of totalitarianism?
"Totalitarianism, once in power, invariably replaces all true talents, whatever their sympathies, with those fanatics and imbeciles whose lack of intelligence and creative spirit remains the best guarantee of their loyalty," diagnosed Hannah Arendt in a famous work. This implacable observation (at least concerning Stalinism, because Nazism knew how to surround itself with real talents) applies to the situation created by Wokeism, with one difference: "power." Because this movement does not have the status of a state power, unlike the "totalitarian systems" on which the philosopher had built her analysis: fascism, on the right, and Soviet communism, on the left (the misdeeds of Maoism were not yet known at the time the book was written). However, before the establishment of a political "regime", endowed with state powers, there are mentalities, tendencies, states of mind which facilitate its advent.
This is why the analogy with totalitarianism, and particularly Soviet totalitarianism, is perfectly legitimate as long as we extend the notion of totalitarianism beyond the strict exercise of an established power. The Islamologist Gilles Kepel proposed the notion of "atmospheric jihadism" to describe the strategies of Islamization of Western societies by the partisans of a political Islam: in a similar way, we can speak of an "atmospheric totalitarianism" with regard to this attenuated, diffuse, cultural form of totalitarianism that is a totalitarianism without a State - the very thing that wokism constitutes today.
Analogy, I wrote: it is a safe bet that the supporters of the Woke will be quick to reject any comparison with totalitarianism, arguing that "one cannot compare" the two. But the notion of analogy in no way means the identity in all points of the two terms of the comparison; and the comparison in the heuristic sense highlights not only the resemblances but also the differences. It would obviously be stupid to claim to assimilate wokeism to fascism, Nazism or Stalinism, so obvious are the differences with regard to the question of power. But they should not prevent us from alerting ourselves to the similarities, which are obvious if we keep in mind the genesis and history of the different totalitarianisms.
A first similarity lies in the reversibility of good and evil: what initially appeared virtuous – for example the egalitarian ideal of the French Revolution or the communist ideal of the October Revolution – gradually transforms into a factor of oppression, without this change being perceived, so strong is the adherence to the ideal, and so much does it play the role of a screen placed over disturbing realities, in particular the attack on freedoms and the seizure of power by a caste of leaders arrogating to themselves the right of life and death over their fellow citizens. As Sergiu Klainermann notes, drawing on his Romanian experience, about the wokeness that has penetrated into American mathematics departments: “What began as a perfectly reasonable intention to combat discrimination on the basis of race, gender, and ethnicity, in order to create more social cohesion, more tolerance, and more justice, has produced the exact opposite of what was intended – that is, more division, less tolerance, and less justice. So instead of a more perfect union, we now have a society that is rapidly losing faith in its most fundamental unifying institutions.”
A second similarity with historical totalitarianisms stems directly from the previous one, in that the persistence of belief in the ideal engenders a remarkable capacity for denial in the face of its obvious excesses. This was the case with the refusal to open one's eyes to the Terror in post-revolutionary France, or to the arbitrary executions, mass deportations or organized famine in the Soviet Union, or to the destruction of a millennia-old culture and the Maoist re-education camps - because how can one admit, without losing all one's illusions, that a revolutionary utopia could have turned into a regime of massacre of its very principles? Refusal, denial or - worse still - silence on a problem that one is careful not to recognize, out of fear or in defense of one's own interests. It will not be an insult to today's academics to ignore what Lysenkoism was, eighty years ago, in the history of biology, with the pretension of the Soviet authorities to impose an ideologically oriented and totally falsified conception of scientific truth. It seems, however, that we are not immune to a resurgence of this type of aberration if we are to believe certain gross attacks on academic freedom by the pretension to impose ideological dogmas in lecture halls. The current state of wokism unfortunately proves George Orwell right when he said that "intellectuals are much more inclined to totalitarianism than ordinary people."
A third common point between wokism and totalitarianism is the ability to confidently state untruths, in line with the indifference to the truth that we pointed out regarding ideology. Let's give just one example so as not to overload the boat: in his pamphlet in favor of wokism, François Cusset claims that the movement "Le Printemps républicain" was "born in France from the opposition to Marriage for All". However, this movement dates from 2013, while the former was created in 2016 in reaction to the rise of Islamism, particularly following the attacks of 2015. We recognize here a typically Stalinist manipulation: stating a lie likely to smear the adversary by assimilating him to a camp (the right) considered unsavoury.
Another common process between wokeism and Stalinism is the perverse inversion, examples of which we have seen with the "perverse reversals" characteristic of ideology. Orwell had pointed out certain rhetorical tricks accusing those who criticized the Soviet regime in the name of freedom of only hiding their true nature as a "supporter of big capital". In the same vein, defenders of the autonomy of science are today accused of "playing into the hands of the extreme right", and supporters of secularism of being nothing more than "Islamophobes". Likewise, the "crusaders" of anti-wokeism, by accusing ideology Woke to impose the question of identity "against the beautiful universal", would only do so to better "hide the identity spring" of their own logic "which is, at best, Western or Eurocentric and, at worst, national and racial" (Cusset again): in short, it is the one who says it who is, universalism could only be a communitarianism and this, in the anti-woke camp, would necessarily be an extreme right-wing identitarianism.
The totalitarian mentality is also recognizable by its capacity for exaggeration: in the past all The Jews were rapacious profiteers, all Westerners were capitalists, and all intellectuals were enemies of the Cultural Revolution who had to be re-educated. Today racism would not only be the work of individuals but also of the State itself, which would make it a "systemic" principle. Moreover, as we have seen, "everything is political" (therefore everything is controllable by the guardians of the new morality), not to mention that "everything is socially constructed", therefore susceptible to being deconstructed according to the desires of some and others, in a hubris of the omnipotence of the subject that no social, biological or material reality can constrain: the child-king, alas, has become an adult (he thinks).
The faculty of exaggeration also results in the tendency towards absolutization: moderation and nuances have no place in the totalitarian mentality, which promotes an unwavering commitment to approved causes, elevated to the rank of sacralized ideals that are constantly reeled off in a catechism closed to any relativization, to any questioning. Raymond Aron already noted this in the 1950s regarding the Marxist influence at the University: "Seeking to explain the attitude of intellectuals, merciless to the failings of democracies, indulgent to the greatest crimes, provided that they are committed in the name of good doctrines, I first encountered the sacred words: left, Revolution, proletariat." Today, the sacralization of causes involves other "sacred words" ("gender", "decolonialism", "intersectionality", "racialized"), but the essence is the same.
From exaggeration to sacralization, we easily move, finally, to radicalism – this sophisticated form of stupidity – which, inevitably, fascinates: nothing stuns as much as a radical proposal, because extremism always impresses more than moderation. This is all the more obvious in the very particular “attention economy” created by social networks, where it is better to push things to extremes in order to be heard. This automatically favors positions that fall under what Max Weber called “ethics of conviction,” as opposed to “ethics of responsibility”: the former tending to strongly affirm the subject’s relationship to values, by privileging sincerity and authenticity of feeling; the latter being primarily attentive to the ends sought, the means employed, and the consequences of actions, by privileging pragmatism and rationality. By relying on victimization and indignation, wokeism can only promote statements made in accordance with the ethics of conviction, which is not an evil in itself but has a high chance of seducing weak minds, privileged recipients of the totalitarian mentality. Thus these "radical postures" are imposed in the public space which, as Taguieff also writes, "do no harm to anyone but have the advantage of giving an air of intellectual freedom to the most conformist minds."
This is how multiculturalism has slipped into identitarian communitarianism, and how it is turning into totalitarianism before our eyes. Savage censorship is imposed by micro-collectives that only authorize themselves, in contempt of the law, while all-out politicization transforms activists into legislators and judges, in the name of "everything is political" dear to fascist militias, Stalinist apparatchiks and their leftist heirs. And, as in any totalitarian atmosphere, fear reigns supreme, on American campuses as well as in the offices of French university presidents: fear of losing one's job, fear of losing face, fear above all of finding oneself in the wrong camp or - worse - of finding oneself alone.
