The Immoral Hierarchy: Inside Woke Power Structures

Eric Kaufmann (author of The Third Awokening) speaks with a kind of steady restraint that makes the underlying argument land harder, because nothing in his delivery strains for effect and nothing needs to be rescued by rhetoric. “I’ve always been a skeptic of the cultural left… I haven’t really changed.”

He works through a long arc that begins with Anglo-American identity and moves toward a present in which a cultural left has shaped the language, expectations, and institutional behavior of much of the West. The transition does not occur in a single break, and he does not describe it that way. It accumulates in stages. “There was a different set of ideas… [falsely presenting] the new and different (as) “valuable”, the old and traditional (as) “stifling”.” What begins as an aesthetic critique in bohemian circles matures into a political program and then becomes embedded in administrative structures that outlast any one generation.

Canada provides an early and useful example, because the change is recent enough to be observed without abstraction. I pressed him on whether this amounted to a kind of cultural self-erasure, and he resisted that framing with precision. “I don’t see this as so much psychological… I see this as a competing idea.” That answer shifts the emphasis from motive to mechanism, and once one adopts that lens, the pattern becomes easier to recognize across different countries and contexts.

At one point, I offered a small Soviet joke, unevenly delivered but still serviceable, about generosity that exists only in theory. “If I had two boats, I’d give you one… but when it comes to chickens, no, because I actually have two chickens.” The structure held, and Kaufmann expanded it into something more general. “When they are in the out… all their dreams are romantic… when they take the reins of power, they’re brutal.” The observation carries a historical weight that does not depend on partisan framing, because it describes what happens when ideals encounter constraint.

We moved to Britain, where the same dynamics appear in sharper relief, particularly around immigration and political influence. He emphasized that the key variable is not a simple population share. “It’s not so much (Muslims’) numbers per se as the(ir) mobilizing capacity.” Groups that organize effectively exert influence disproportionate to their size, and that fact reshapes electoral politics and public discourse in ways that demographic summaries fail to capture.

The conversation turned toward contradictions, and I raised an example from the National Basketball Association, where Jaden Ivey expressed a religious objection and found himself on the wrong side of an institution that otherwise celebrates expression. I framed it bluntly. “You can have any point of view as long as it agrees with the predominant one.” Kaufmann did not push back. He formalized it. “It’s like a pack of cards… some people have higher value cards.” In that system, identity determines leverage, and leverage determines the boundaries of acceptable speech.

I extended the analogy by contrasting this with the logic of trade, where both sides can improve through exchange. “When two NBA teams trade, both teams often get better… but rights don’t work that way.” The point was that rights, unlike goods, do not expand through exchange. Kaufmann refined rather than rejected the idea. “Certain rights are more intrusive than others.” Some claims require accommodation that displaces others, and the system does not pretend otherwise.

At the center of his framework sits a description that is simple but difficult to ignore. “It’s all about emotion… minorities good, majority bad.” He follows it with a more precise articulation. “It’s not a rational… logical principle… It’s emotional points.” The language of points captures a hierarchy that lacks formal coherence but maintains internal order through ranking and priority.

Empathy, which is often presented as the moral core of this system, operates unevenly. “Empathy is very much partial.” I put it in more direct terms in the moment. “It feels like power jujitsu, where weakness becomes leverage, and the system rewards it.” He did not dispute that formulation, and instead integrated it into his description of a hierarchy governed by emotional weighting rather than a universal principle.

When the subject shifted to class, he resisted the standard economic framing. “Most of it is not actually captured by economic class.” He pointed instead to education and psychological disposition, to whether a person experiences rapid change as opportunity or as loss. That distinction cuts across income and complicates any attempt to map current alignments onto older class-based models.

Universities, in his account, function as engines that generate and distribute these ideas. “What starts on campus increasingly doesn’t stay there,” I questioned whether campuses should simply be bypassed. Still, he emphasized their upstream influence, noting that the language of media and policy often originates in academic settings before diffusing outward.

There remains, however, a pressure from outside institutions that can alter internal behavior. “A lot of faculty… actually kind of don’t mind it.” That remark suggests that conformity may be less stable than it appears, and that shifts can occur when incentives change, even if public expressions lag behind private views.

The exchange closes without resolution, but with a clearer outline of the terrain. Kaufmann does not overstate his case, nor does he retreat from it. “It has no guardrails… it can go to an extreme incrementally over decades.” That sentence captures the pace of the change he describes, steady enough to normalize itself and gradual enough to avoid immediate correction.

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