You’ll never guess which major European country’s scholars and political officials are attacking woke identity politics: I would have guessed Poland or Russia. Nope.

If you’d asked me to identify which major European country was seeing powerful intellectual and political forces attacking woke racial ideology and the American campuses pushing it, I would have guessed Poland or Russia. Nope, It’s a country American conservatives generally mock and resent: France. The very same France that conservatives regularly deride as “cheese-eating surrender monkeys,” picking up a line from The Simpsons that was popularized by Jonah Goldberg (who has since gone full NeverTrump).

But Norimitsu Ohnishi of The New York Times reports:

The threat is said to be existential. It fuels secessionism. Gnaws at national unity. Abets Islamism. Attacks France’s intellectual and cultural heritage.
The threat? “Certain social science theories entirely imported from the United States,’’ said President Emmanuel Macron.
French politicians, high-profile intellectuals and journalists are warning that progressive American ideas — specifically on race, gender, post-colonialism — are undermining their society. “There’s battle to wage against an intellectual matrix from American universities,’’ warned Mr. Macron’s education minister. (snip)
Mr. Macron’s education minister, Jean-Michel Blanquer, accused universities, under American influence, of being complicit with terrorists by providing the intellectual justification behind their acts.
A group of 100 prominent scholars wrote an open letter supporting the minister and decrying theories “transferred from North American campuses” in Le Monde.

If you have access to material behind the Times’ paywall, by all means, read and savor the unexpected alliance that France’s movers and shakers are implicitly forging with American conservatives. The article does include critics of the move, but leaves the definite impression that the ideas that we loathe are facing greater pushback in France than anywhere else in the advanced economies.

Why on earth would a country that in the past has been held out as an example of progressive social policies turn against wokism?

actually, this is a clever move by pragmatic French leaders and thinkers - successfully push back against noxious, anti-western ideology

*************

What they doing is pragmatic because the French see what’s heading their way and they foresee that its going to compound the already existing problems of identity politics within their country.

They realize the dangers to French culture and society and are laying a political foundation to contain the problem. They are clearly trying to identify and brand the approaching threat to raise national awareness.

In other words they are trying to get out in front of the oncoming assault of insidious wokeism and prevent it from getting a foothold.

I applaud their efforts and hope they can contain it better than we have.

> I applaud their efforts and hope they can contain it better than we have. <

Agreed. But their efforts are doomed to failure. Many studies have shown that the children of Western Muslims are - in general - more radical than their parents. So time is in the side of the Islamists.

What can the government do? They can make laws to keep radical Islam out of the public schools. But they cannot control what’s being said in the homes, and in the mosques.

Plus there’s the Internet. Many young Muslims are radicalized that way.

How will this all turn out? Civil war? A partition? Or will the snake eventually swallow the rabbit?

It is a sad irony indeed. In my discipline (I won’t add any more detail on the web, even here), the Europeans who shaped it, in this country at least, were intellectual titans and staunchly anti-tyranny.

Their work shaped the discipline until the mid-1990s.

Thereafter, it’s been all post-structuralism or whatever iteration of it that is fashionable at the moment, all the time. I won’t participate in that “culture”, but have still managed to get my research published.

The traditional outlets for such research (read: research that searches for objective Truth) have dwindled to a scant few. There are, however, glimmers of hope outside of the echo-chamber.

We are few, but we’re out here!

Why on earth would a country that in the past has been held out as an example of progressive social policies turn against wokism?

The AT article goes into more detail with an answer, but it seems to me that a lot of French citizens are like American citizens. They are people like people anywhere. They value their culture. Wokism and progressive social policies do not need to go hand-in-hand. Wokism is an American problem. It occurs when the establishment elites no longer value traditional American culture. There's a huge majority of Americans that are not woke and never will be. France has it establishment elites as well, but they certainly see no valid reason for destroying their culture when they have already firmly won the battle for socialism.

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