In a few weeks, on Monday January 20th, Donald Trump will be inaugurated the 47th President of the United States. The winners on that day will be the “ordinary” Americans and the losers the college educated elite. This is the lesson of two books reviewed here by James Bradshaw: Patrick Ruffini’s Party of the People and Musa al-Gharbi’s We Have Never Been Woke. Both of these books point to the growing polarisation between the more liberal college educated elites and the more conservative non-graduates. For the former Wokeism serves almost as a shibboleth; the liberal elites are much like what were once termed “champagne socialists” (or in Ireland “smoked salmon socialists”) – vocally challenging the status quo but privately enjoying many privileges on the backs of those they supposedly champion. This class suffered a crushing blow in the defeat of Kamala Harris last November, and this raises the question whether or not Wokeism is on the ropes.
However it also raises the perhaps more important question of, as James Bradshaw puts it, “what it is about a modern university education which makes graduates so much more left-wing than the population writ large, what it is that narrows the mind rather than broadening it.” This is the question asked in John M. Ellis’ The Breakdown of Higher Education reviewed here by Dr Catherine Kavanagh. The key point here appears to be that the crisis in the universities (and therefore of Western societies at large) is a crisis of truth. As Catherine Kavanagh writes, “The anti-discourse discourse promoted by Foucault and Derrida in the wake of the dominance of the Frankfurt School within the American system inevitably confuses students and leaves them utterly cynical about any kind of truth-claims.”
Interestingly this echoes an observation by René Girard, quoted in Michael Kirke’s In Passing column, in which Girard points out that the humanistic aspirations of the “people [who] see themselves as super-Christians, but [who] are heirs of the predecessors of Marx” was founded on “a disrespect of truth” …. All the excesses of the modern world are distortions of Christian truth.” The ultimate solution to the two great crises of our age – Wokeism and radical Islam – can only be through a return to Christianity. Our hope – we are reminded in this Jubilee Year – is based on “God’s love [which] has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit who has been given to us” (Rom 5:5).