What is now called “woke” started with the social engineering obsession of the “democratic managerial state” and the threat it represented to traditional social relations.

Chronicles began as a recognizably Boomer publication. As an early contributor to the magazine, I noticed that its founders, Rockford College President John Howard as publisher and the Polish émigré writer Leopold Tyrmand as editor, held what were establishment conservative views for the late 1970s and early 1980s. They were exceedingly high on Ronald Reagan, whom they regarded as the great champion of our “ way of life” against our pervasive Communist foes. 

Opposing world Communism led by the Kremlin and defending the American free market, which by then combined capitalism and an already existing welfare state, were constant themes in early Chronicles writings and speeches. Although I had problems with the cut-and-dry nature of these positions, as a professor at nearby Rockford College surrounded by conventional academic leftists, I appreciated the willingness of the Rockford Institute and its leaders to recognize the dubious character of what Reagan designated as the “evil empire.”

Back then, the Rockford Institute maintained exemplary relations with the Heritage Institute, Philadelphia Society, and other fixtures of Washington conservatism. Some of our contributors occasionally wrote for National Review, and some held leadership positions in establishment conservative organizations. Despite efforts by the Rockford Institute to identify itself with the American heartland, its links to the East Coast conservative policy community were too obvious to be denied. At least in its early days, the Rockford Institute resembled an outpost of that influential guide to requisite conservative thinking. 

All that changed irreversibly in the late 1980s, when what The New Republic magazine designated as “the conservative wars” broke out. This turn of events, in which Chronicles’ editors were deeply embroiled, resulted in our growing and finally immutable isolation from the conservative establishment. While the media-savvy victors in this confrontation, which continued for several years, became the voice of the authorized opposition, Chronicles grew into the main source of independent, non-prescribed opinion on the right. In this role, its editors and contributors made bold arguments that an increasingly predictable conservative mainstream ignored or avoided. 

While the neoconservatives became the dominant force in the mainstream movement of the 1980s, Chronicles took a very different path. It engaged in an intensive investigation of why the U.S. had strayed into becoming a polity profoundly different from what the founders of our country could have imagined or wished.

The main focus for some of us was the size and reach of the managerial state, which ruled over us in an increasingly arbitrary manner. We began exploring how this transformed state acquired its moral authority as well as its unsupervised power. While addressing those questions, we unavoidably trampled on some already obligatory sensitivities by taking a critical view of the civil rights revolution. Something, we assumed, had gone drastically wrong with our constitutional republic. What’s more, this deformation was becoming more and more acute, and it was centered on a governmentally led war against “prejudice” and “discrimination.” 

A widening crusade against racism, legally and socially recognized gender distinctions, and finally gender itself had come to characterize this post-constitutional regime, both here and in other Western countries. American government, together with its media allies and academic priesthood, had set out to redeem us from our anti-egalitarian past. This redeemer bureaucracy and its judicial enablers were combatting, or so we were told, the allegedly false consciousness produced by a reactionary past. As soon became painfully clear, these projects “victimized” most heavily those who held the lowest victim card, namely white straight male Christians.

Well-insulated public administrators assumed the major role in resocializing its vulnerable subjects. Public administration was no longer there (assuming it ever was) to carry out limited, constitutionally stipulated tasks. By the mid-1960s, with the passage of landmark congressional legislation, government bureaucrats were authorized to investigate our inner thoughts. This was supposedly necessary in the battle against “prejudice,” a task that was thought to require the monitoring of an ever-widening range of human associations.

Please note that we at Chronicles never argued that our “system” had merely gone astray in consigning power to a proliferating officialdom. Rather, what we observed was what Samuel Francis characterized as a “regime change.” Our present regime, which had evolved from the Progressive Era down to Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society, had taken a portentous turn toward the unbounded left.

From the 1960s onward, this dispensation identified “democracy” with saving us from “prejudice” and “discrimination.” Similar developments occurred simultaneously in Western governments that lived in our shadow. In Western Europe and throughout the Anglosphere, governments began promoting intrusive agendas directed against unacceptable social and cultural attitudes. All these “democracies” are now mobilized against a ubiquitous evil variously identified with racism, colonialism, sexism, homophobia, and transphobia.

Fascism has usually been the catch-all epithet, which embraces all the aforementioned evils. And managing them has involved extensive antifascist supervision. Any deviation from the government’s instructions on how we should comport ourselves or address each other could lead, or so we are warned, to Nazilike outbursts of hate. The practice of likening Trump and his voters to Nazis follows a long-established pattern of considering those whom our elites have not resocialized as mentally ill or unspeakably evil.

President Biden’s reference to the unreconstructed as “human garbage” and Hillary Clinton’s rant against “the Deplorables” encapsulates this now-dominant attitude. Both the dehumanization of the unredeemed and the psychologization of political dissent are invoked to justify this governmentally promoted mind control. Significantly, much of this problem never registered among authorized conservatives until quite recently. For decades, if memory serves, our conservative establishment viewed therapeutic politics as a minor annoyance, as our democracy was supposedly working to overcome the prejudice and inequality left from a less enlightened past. Further, this issue would have had in all probability little purchase among those from whom our conservative magnates were raising big bucks.

Chronicles already fell out with this powerful establishment in the 1980s when its writers failed to praise sufficiently the “Reagan Revolution.” To their detriment, the editors questioned whether Reagan’s presidency changed the trajectory of the growing government. By then, the editors noticed the therapeutic administrative state had become a runaway train. Although Chronicles editors certainly mentioned both foreign threats and the need for military security, they were more concerned with the mounting assault on our freedom and privacy coming from America’s own public administration. The Reagan government even refused to carry out its campaign promise to dismantle the Department of Education. That bloated, ideologically driven agency quickly rose from its creation under President Carter to become a major vehicle of woke ideology. 

As Chronicles editors reached these conclusions, it was already clear that their collaborators would not be found in the deeply conformist conservative establishment. They therefore looked for other, more accessible friends and found them among unconventional associates: paleolibertarians in the Ludwig von Mises Institute and exponents of Critical Theory in the Telos circle. Despite their radically different theoretical starting points, both groups seemed equally aware of the social engineering obsession of the “democratic” managerial state and the threat it represented to traditional social relations. Groups with which Chronicles staff started holding conferences, which soon embraced the European New Right, all shared their assumptions about the ominous changes that were occurring in Western governments.

These groups all viewed this transformation as a continuum, the origins of which went back well into the 20th century. In most cases, the antidiscrimination regime began by targeting at least initially just causes, like institutionalized racial segregation in the American South or neo-Nazi violence in Europe. The regime then exploited these grievances to seize almost unlimited power to control our behavior and assault traditional social attitudes.

Chronicles editors, however, did have disagreements about how therapeutic administrators understood their right to power. My colleague Sam Francis considered our social engineering custodians to be driven primarily by the will to power and the desire for material acquisition. James Burnham, Hobbes, and Machiavelli were all thinkers who influenced Sam as he was formulating this view. 

Although I didn’t entirely disagree with this perception, it seemed to me that Sam underestimated the irrational, pseudo-religious thinking of our managerial elite. Unlike him, I found my own thoughts about this subject moving toward world-transformational myths, something that Eric Voegelin famously traced back to ancient Gnosticism, and to the inescapable progress of modern egalitarian politics. Sam would respond to my objection, saying that those seeking or trying to hold on to power typically fall back on fashionable superstitions. “But it’s really about power,” Sam would end his rejoinder.

It dawned on me after rethinking our positions that Sam and I didn’t disagree fundamentally about the sources of modern ideology. He assumed, like me, that the masses of people drank the managerial elite’s ideological Kool-Aid, but he also believed that those who handed out the dixie cups abstained from the beverage. They were less inclined toward the irrational and mythic and mostly looking after their own interests. In my view, both groups shared the same vision, which reflected both myth and an obsession with overcoming the past. Although elites were not always consistent in living out their convictions, I couldn’t bring myself to think they were just pretending to believe in the madness that they inflicted on the rest of us.

Despite these intramural debates, most of the thinkers in Chronicles’ circle began to look at government social engineering with alarm many decades ago. In this concern we were largely isolated on the right. Those who ran the conservative movement accused our side of raising “insensitive” questions. By the time that establishment got around to our concerns, the evils in question were long baked into the system. When the conservative movement talking heads finally began denouncing the fruits of this evil, like hiring quotas and diversity, equity, and inclusion quota, it did so without calling for the necessary solution: namely, the total dismantling of those government agencies that have fashioned our antidiscrimination regime. Chronicles had the misfortune of calling attention prematurely and inopportunely to the catastrophic institutionalization of what has recently been called “woke,” the effects of which continue to bedevil us.

It is hard to finish this exercise down memory lane without recalling a screed against Senate Minority Leader Trent Lott that the late conservative commentator Charles Krauthammer produced in December 2003. Krauthammer demanded that Lott step down from his post as Senate Minority Leader because Lott had praised the statesmanship of South Carolina Senator Strom Thurmond at a gathering held on Thurmond’s hundredth birthday. According to Krauthammer, Lott, by honoring a one-time Dixiecrat, was turning his back on the greatest moral event in Krauthammer’s life: the civil rights movement. Indeed, Lott “had given evidence of historical blindness that is utterly disqualifying for national office.” Krauthammer, whose concern with overcoming American racism also led him to call for changing the name of the Washington Redskins, considered Lott too morally obtuse to hold his high political position.

Krauthammer stance was classic movement conservatism: he was policing his own side by the standards of the left. Krauthammer’s contemptuous reference to “historical blindness” may lead one to think critically about the civil rights revolution that he praised. Those who refuse to see a connection between earlier attempts to control racial and gender relations and the antidiscrimination regime under which we now live are guilty of their own blindness. They failed to oppose or even notice the transformative historical development that was taking place on their watch, in which government remedies against white and male “privileges” have led to a host of irremovable abuses.