Diversity, inclusion and equity—put them all together, they spell DIE, and death to much that is best in American life they bode.

The “woke” own the culture of the declining West.

That is why the West is declining.

Excellent writer of achingly sad stories and super-perceptive critic, Joseph Epstein writes at the Wall Street Journal:

The extent of the woke victory is perhaps best demonstrated by the long list of cultural institutions they have captured and now control. Two of the country’s important newspapers, the New York Times and the Washington Post, are unashamedly woke. The New Yorker and the Atlantic have ceased to be general-interest magazines and are now specific-interest publications—that interest being the spread of woke ideas. The major television networks early fell in line without a fight.

Universities, in their humanities and social-sciences divisions, are not merely devoted to the propagation of woke ideas but initiate most of them. In turning away from the ideals of authority and objectivity in favor of clearly partisan views, these institutions have lost their former prestige yet are apparently sustained by the confidence that preaching woke doctrine is a higher calling.

Under the deep division in the country, certain prizes—Pulitzers, MacArthur grants, honorary degrees—go almost exclusively to people whose views are woke. (Presidential medals—in the humanities, in the arts, for freedom—are dictated by whether the president in office is woke or not.) Under political correctness, one of the main planks in the woke platform, freedom in the arts is vastly curtailed owing to strictures against what is known as “appropriation” which disapproves of whites writing about blacks, men about women, heterosexuals about homosexuals. Under woke culture, art is vastly inhibited; humor, because so much of comedy is politically incorrect, largely excluded.

All this might be deleterious enough, but woke culture adds to the nightmare by punishing its opponents through disgrace and cancellation, the latter often affecting not only reputation but income. To suggest that surgery and hormone treatment in connection with transgendering may bring biological penalties, or that riotous looting has any connection at all with the Black Lives Matter organization, or that the anti-Israel movements on campus are a form of thinly veiled anti-Semitism, or that defunding the police will above all hurt black and Latino communities—all this under the reign of woke culture is beyond the pale, and disqualifies anyone who dares to suggest any of it.

The unwoke are left outside the prevailing culture. But what form might resistance to the dominant regime take? A small number of magazines continue to exist outside the woke culture, among them Commentary, First Things, the Claremont Review of Books. The [Wall Street] Journal does too, and ought to be supported. Those journalists and intellectuals who haven’t gone woke need to be encouraged and reminded that they are not alone. Argument and humor must be regularly deployed against the absurdity of woke language and slogans.  Diversity, inclusion and equity—put them all together, they spell DIE, and death to much that is best in American life they bode.

Those of us who sense that the greatness of the U.S. is dwindling feel that a good part of the reason is the defeat of traditional values and their replacement by woke ones. Identity politics may be the rule in the Democratic Party, but its origin is in woke culture, which accounts for why the country is filled with so many angry people, for whom no evidence of progress lessens the intensity of their grievances.

Although the culture war would appear to be over, to surrender to the dreariness of woke culture—which tramples on art, is without intellectual authority, allows no humor, and is vindictive toward those who oppose it—is unthinkable. So praise the Lord and pass the ammunition; it’s back to the trenches, for there isn’t any choice. The culture war must continue.

Yes. Only, instead of ‘the Lord” we praise Western civilization (enriched by its accretion of cultural appropriations); the patriarchy, capitalism, the Enlightenment, logic, reason, the American Republic as founded by the Framers of the Constitution, the US Constitution itself; the bourgeoisie from which class almost every great innovator has arisen, and all the innovations that have made us prosperous, comfortable, healthy, strong, informed, entertained, amused … And undefeatable?