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It goes deeper than that. It all started with the socialist movement. That had the same sort of goal- radically change the culture of society by convincing people to voluntarily join them. And it made more sense, at least politically- get the 99% of workers to join up and take the wealth from the 1% of rich capital owners. Should be easy to win that vote in a democracy right? Except that the 1% weren't stupid, so they sent in strikebreakers and police to break up the labor movement. And the workers weren't stupid either, so most of them didn't want to risk joining this radical revolutionary movement to overturn society, especially when most of them were too uneducated to understand wtf the socialists were saying.
So the socialist leaders hit on a new tactic. Start with students and intellectuals at universities, who can be easily persuaded by radical arguments and are relatively free from police oversight. From there, you create a revolutiony vanguard, which can be used to gradually take over all the key institutions of society. Then you enact all the reforms you want, and the people can then be re-educated to appreciate the good you've done, without putting it to a vote, since a fair vote would never be allowed by the capitalist elites.
(edit- I wrote "socialist" in this post, when it probably should have been communist. For me as a modern day American those terms are pretty much interchangeable, but I think to the leftists of the past there was a huge split between the two groups, and it was really the communists pushing the radical left, while they saw the democratic socialists as squishy sellouts to capitalism)
For women it's a bit harder, since they only make up 50% of the population, but the basic idea is the same. Racial and sexual groups at ~10% might seem even harder, but it's still the same process. You don't put it to an election because "human rights are too important to be voted on," and because you'd lose. Instead, first identify an oppressed group, then create an intellectual movement to save them, then push your intellectual group through the elite institutions until you have power without an open election. You'll be proven correct in retrospect, as civil rights, women's rights, and gay marriage are now broadly popular even though they weren't when they were first instituted.
Trans is the latest and most extreme, since they're only like 1% of the population. But I guess it doesn't matter. If anything, to a certain sort of intellectual, that makes the moral crusade even more appealing. And all of these groups share a similar worldview that their ultimate goals can only truly be accomplished by ending capitalism.
I agree with some broad strokes about what you just said, but I would put it differently.
I think the most important thing about woke identity politics, is that it isn't fundamentally incompatible with the hierarchies of representative democracy and capitalism. Every group has its talented tenth, and letting a few of the people in charge be black, or women or trans people doesn't fundamentally, radically alter the power structures of capitalist, liberal democratic society.
This is the reason woke identity politics is allowed to exist in the United States. More dangerous or radical forms of identity politics or anti-hierarchical thinking are dismantled if they get too much steam. We know now that the FBI systematically dismantled black nationalist, white supremacist, feminist, environmentalist and other groups from the 1950's to the 1970's. I think that this created a selection pressure for decentralized, "headless" advocacy groups that were harder to dismantle, but which also struggled more to actually organize and make changes to society. Occupy Wall Street is probably the prototypical example of such a decentralized group that accomplishes nothing substantial, but BLM and other forms of woke advocacy certainly qualify.
There is no woke pope. There's no head to cut off. Sure, there are a handful of influential authors, but they could be thrown under the bus tomorrow and the movement would still continue because it is not dependent on a single head to function. It is a distributed entity, selected for by generations of federal infiltration of extremist groups, until it became something the government couldn't tame or control, but which the government also didn't need to tame or control, since its lack of organization leaves it fairly unable to permanently enact widespread legal changes. (Witness the cities that reduced funding to police in the immediate aftermath of George Floyd, and then quickly reversed course as soon as the public stopped paying attention.)
I agree it's a different sort of heirarchy. That doesn't make it necessarily incompatible, though. The military, the business world, and the church all have their own weird internal hierarchies that aren't democratic or capitalist, but they still manage to fit into our overall society.
I'd argue that the 50s-70s were simply a different time. The FBI was much more powerful then, a legacy from the war against gangsters in prohibition and spies in WW2. Leftist groups were much weaker. Eventually the Leftist groups won out, and the FBI lost. There might not be one singular "woke pope," but there are plenty of powerful "woke cardinals" advocating for it openly. Just look at all the college professors who openly advocate for communism or other leftist causes- they'd never be allowed to get away with that by the 1950s FBI.
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