1945 was Peak Woke
A. Montagnard
The 20th century was the world’s most democratic century, and consequently its most degraded. Communism, decolonisation and total-war conscription killed millions — creating deep demographic crises which strangle Europe’s prosperity to this day. The totalitarian dominance of Television caused our haute-kultur to backslide from Greek-Latin-Sanskrit entrance exams to Gogglebox Britain, propagating harmful left-wing mind-viruses which are only recently, slowly exiting the nation’s polluted bloodstream.
As Mr Lobe would remind you, before the World Wars, you could live without noticing the state beyond the post-office and policeman. Critically, this century of democide established the “cheerful alliance of the State and the underworld” which we are presently in battle against. Before the 1980s, the state was stronger. Afterwards, the underworld. Bolshevism gave way to Epsteinism, as Opus Dei took up the slack from Franco’s former Falangist allies. Across countries and ideologies, we saw a move from “mass politics modernism to opaque religious networks pulling the strings of a global market economy”.
***
What have conservatives conserved and what have progressives progressed? Respectively, the “dignity of life and the dignity of labour,” both excoriated in Friedrich Nietzsche’s The Greek State. Twin downgoing belief structures against man’s self-directed development of his own beauty, strength and intelligence. No state focused on preserving these meaningless entitlements will survive the 21st century. And these social-democratic prejudices were locked in by the settlement of 1945.
Movement Conservatism as an ideological system is the delusion that our regime is not intractably hostile to higher things. In systematised form, it has been one of the Greatest Generation’s timid bequests. Bob Whitaker, the eccentric Republican operator who mentored Sam Francis and compiled the New Right Papers, summarised America’s postwar political dichotomy thusly:
“The reason {the Greatest Generation} called themselves dogfaces was because that was what basic training was about in WW2. It was aimed at beating every bit of resistance, thought, anything but obedience out of a man. They say the military makes a man out of you. If the military made a man out of you then military training had failed. Military training was aimed, quite specifically, at making a dog out of you.”
“After four years of obedience training, 50% of the Greatest Generation took advantage of the G.I. bill to go to college. Here were a bunch of people already trained to obey and worship authority. They then began to obey and worship professors. The professors taught them what we call leftism. The rule of the world by intellectuals. Every pipsqueak professor thought they’d be one of those intellectuals, planning the economy, rehabilitating criminals and pulling guilt-payments out of white people to the coloured world. Rule by people like Lenin and Trotsky, neither of whom ever did a day’s work in their lives.
“Then there was the Right. The Right worships anything in uniform. They want more money for the military, to run around beating their chests in their little paper hats. And so, the Greatest Generation broke into two groups, one of which worshipped anything in uniform, the other of which worshipped professors.”
The main problem with the Greatest Generation was their trust in government. Shaken by the nuclear threat, the First World War and the Depression, in Hobsbawm’s words, people “lived and thought in terms of world war, even when the guns were silent and the bombs were not exploding.” This had the effect of empowering a hostile state, controlled by an ever-more-deracinated elite.
***
In the 19th century, world-straddling colonial empires enabled the unprecedented mobility of capital and ideas. Privateers like Clive and Rhodes opened up new frontiers for European civilisation with their private fiefdoms. By the 1940s, this open-world was demolished and divided between Roosevelt’s America and Stalin’s Russia. Lingering economic growth in the United States, thanks to the destruction of Europe’s economies in war, and the technological innovations of 1914-45 was a short-term source of world stability. Outside of America, the myth of a “good war” was contrived to cope with Europe’s obvious decline; Whites fell from a third of the world’s population to a sixth. Eurofederalism itself, superseding old rival empires was an expression of the continent’s constrained ambitions.
“Everything which had given Western civilisation confidence in itself: the primacy of the individual, the possibility of moral action according to conscience, the improvement of human nature, the freedom of the will and heroism on the battlefield seemed to be over. It was regarded by those steeped in the Western canon, irrespective of ideology, as an apocalyptic moment. Only a God could save us.
Nowhere was this transformation more pertinently felt than Britain, which had gone from being the richest nation in Europe irrespective of being an ailing global superpower, to a barracks-room, command economy effectively vassalized to the United States.”
The point of the superficially groyperous Operation GLADIO was to shore up boring Christian Democracies. The Nordic stay-behind-units were organised by the Catholic, liberal future CIA director William Colby, who entered politics sympathising with the second Spanish Republic.
The world of the fifties may have been more racially homogeneous and socially conservative for normies, but any real sense of elite asceticism had already collapsed by the 1920s. By the time President Kennedy took office, the upper classes were thoroughly egalitarian in posture and increasingly libertine in taste. It was this legacy of “flappers and philosophers,” fused with the Baby Boomers’ petty egalitarian fixations and the constitutional cowardice of the Greatest Generation, which was radicalised in the 1960s. The hippies, often the children of prominent elites, were pushing at an open door.
Way back in the 1940s, Adorno and his pals were funded by the CIA to identify the “Hitler Particles” undergirding the commonsense beliefs of western right-wingers. This directly inspired 2016 “Cultural Marxism” — it took until 2025 for these denouncements to lose their moral force. Elsewhere in the academy, philosophers constructed convoluted, false genealogies of “liberalism run rampant” to distract from the erection of the world prison.
“Psychoanalysis taught that the Liberal subject was hopelessly conditioned by forces beyond its control, Anthropology taught that symbolic architectures of respective cultures trumped Pure Reason, critical theory reduced the individual intent of authors to fixed systems of communitarian signs. Whether you hate individuals or love them, it is a minimal concession to intellectual honesty to see that the whole gist of the postwar period was overthrowing ‘19th century individualism’ and its various metonyms.”
James Watson’s recent passing reminds us of the long history of cancel culture. So does BAP’s superb addendum to Jacob Savage’s Compact article. The world was not a great place for our people before 2012. The first victims of Woke’s Willing Executioners were not female athletes or black conservatives, but Cowlingites and Hereditarians. As Mikka once said, calling wokeness the “successor ideology” is designed to frame leftism as “a revolutionary force rather than a desperate reaction by the hardliners.”
***
The idea of the 1950s as a Norman Rockwell utopia was backstopped by the emergence of television. Thanks to the Hayes Code and the limited blacklisting of outright communists for their penetration of wartime governments, the boob-tube presented a Frank-Capra vision of America as more conservative than it actually was. From Sayyid Qutb’s remembrances to the novels of James Ellroy or the story of Marylin Monroe being strung up by the studio system, the seediness of the 1950s should now be well-established. I don’t raise this, as an irony-leftist would, to downplay the decline since — my point is that the foundation for future depravities was *priced in*.
T.V. had other pernicious effects. Norman Stone identified it as “a mighty engine of egalitarianism, which simplifies and coarsens to the point of caricature the worst features of what Montesquieu called the general spirit of a people.” The “idiot box” established an entirely new “national consensus” in place of the openly partisan newspapers of the 1830s. The people most nostalgic for this monochrome media environment today are ironically IDW types like Bari Weiss, appealing to the memory of Cronkite.
With a hypnotic effect on Baby Boomers which still persists, the networks would go on to remove a reformist President for a scandal people can hardly explain, they would promote a one-sided view of the Civil Rights Revolution and help sink the war effort in Vietnam. By the seventies, Vice President Agnew called out T.V. channels that interfered with Nixon’s “right to communicate directly with the people who elected him,” as well as the public’s right to “form their own opinions about a Presidential address without having the President’s words and thoughts characterized through the prejudices of hostile critics before they can even be digested.” Internet platforms like X or Rumble rescued President Trump from Nixon’s fate.
Replacement migration, in the East and West blocs, was justified on the basis of war casualties and the common planks of their new public morality. The 1965 Immigration Act was not passed by long-haired hippies but signed by the Greatest Generation. American birthrates and cities began to decline because the boys sent off to destroy European towns began to be replaced in domestic industries by women and minorities. The legal and social entitlements extended to these substitutes can be directly traced to contemporary “wokeness.” None of the subsequent trade-offs or atrocities were televised, as we would have to wait for the advent of the internet and specifically social media to get the truth out about these things. It was a time of widespread ignorance.
***
Far from being a conservative time, this was the generation of forced racial-integration, gun-control and the Keynesian welfare state. Europe abandoned the Empire under the guise of a managed “conflict” with the Soviet Union, in which America inevitably patronized the anti-Soviet Left.
The key thing to understand about the intellectual culture of the 1950s is that everyone believed that Communism was working. Even the anti-communists. A few believed that its methods were morally wrong, but all recognised that the coerced disappearance of races and classes was both inevitable and desirable. The Great Depression inaugurated a zeal for economic planning, reflected in Harold MacMillan’s comments that the USSR would “soon outmatch capitalist society in the race for material wealth.” The CIA failed to anticipate its collapse, in large part because it marginalised analysts like Warren Nutter for correctly underestimating their economic performance[1]. Hence Whittaker Chamber’s pessimism – he famously said that defecting to the right was leaving the winning side for the losing side in history.
The Cold War began with American blunders — the loss of Eastern Europe and northern Asia. The Chinese Communist Party seized control of the mainland as its opponents suffered under an American arms embargo. The State of Israel burst onto the Middle Eastern scene, supplied with Robert Maxwell’s Czech weaponry, and was recognised against the advice of capitalist oilmen or career civil servants like George Kennan or SecDef Forrestal.
Public trust in the government and media interference frustrated Red Hunters’ quest for transparency, allowing for fast-talking blue-bloods like Alger Hiss to escape meaningful public scrutiny. Joseph McCarthy’s career ended when he stepped on the toes of the U.S. Military — the same military which had just ceded Eurasia to Bolshevism, and participated in a war which killed 85 million people. It was much the same story with the Cambridge Five across the pond.
Incidents like these, or the biographies of arbitrageurs like Robert Maxwell or Armand Hammer hint that the Cold War was largely fake. Absent the agency of indigenous anti-communists, America was always ambivalent about working with, in Truman’s words, “armed minorities” of any ideology. From the beginning, it took Japanese intrigues in Korea to spur the “free world” into action. The Queensberry Rules set down at Nuremberg transformed military engagements into no-win police actions. This is what created the conditions for the defense contractor grifting witnessed in Vietnam and GWOT, as well as the rehearsed responses of the domestic left.
Cultural laggards like the American South or Australia eventually bent towards the egalitarian mean. The Boer Republic, Pinochet’s Chile and Taiwan’s military government went down alongside the Soviet Union which justified their rigidity. In general, the outright collapse of the USSR/Yugoslavia owed more to buccaneers like Kohl and Tuđman than it did to Yanks like Baker and Bush.
Obsessing over NATO’s fight to allow George Soros access to Hungary neglects more consequential defeats for the right throughout the 20th century:
The partition of Europe, and its marginalisation via decolonisation
Secessionist civic nationalism in Britain’s former dominions
The expulsion of German labour, but not capital from Eastern Europe
The destruction of American cities and the transformation of her elite
Most significantly, the United States inherited the international obligations of the British Empire. The delusions about America’s nature post-Roosevelt which took hold of the British establishment meant that by war’s end, “British power had “quietly vanished... like a ship-of-the-line going down unperceived in the smoke and confusion of battle.”[2] This was the direct cause of Antipodean malaise, particularly close to my heart.
I have not read any of David Irving’s books, but find it significant that his father was a naval officer tasked with fuelling the Soviet Union’s westward march on Central Europe with lend-lease through the Arctic. So was Peter Hitchens’s. Here is Irving’s description of Attlee’s Britain, venerated by Britpoppers too young to remember it:
“Unlike the Americans, we English suffered great deprivations ... we went through childhood with no toys. We had no kind of childhood at all. We were living on an island that was crowded with other people’s armies.”
The winners of the Second World War were the superpowers of the 1980s and the cultural titans of today: Japan and the United States. Relatedly, the revisionist states who appeal most often to the anti-fascist, anti-colonial moral imperatives of the late 1940s in 2025 are Israel, the People’s Republic of China and the Russian Federation. Putin’s dodgy mates are united in milking ancient genocides to brutalise innocents and to undermine our liberal values. None of this can last.
***
The traditional goal of the American Right was to destroy the New Deal, but somewhere along the way, that understanding was lost. The point was always to repeal the 20th century. Since the 1990s, “with the inspiration of the death of the Soviet Union before us, we now know that it can be done.”
It was about 50 years between WW2 and the end of the USSR. It has been 50 years since the passage of Civil Rights laws to the present day. We are as distant from fascism’s purpose and context as the signers of the Port Huron statement were from Stalinism. It is not endorsing Nazism to say that our reaction against it suffocated alternative policy choices like those pursued by the East Asian tigers, who entered the twenty-first century having avoided deindustrialisation and multiculturalism.
Alfred Sherman believed in Margaret Thatcher because she was Britain’s first postwar leader who did not personally experience the Second World War as an adult participant. She regarded the postwar consensus “not as the foundations on which to build but as inherited problems to be tackled.” Britain’s dismal leaders did not recognise that, with the loss of empire, “five years of total war had impoverished Britain and left little largesse to distribute.”
When we focus on the pre- and post-World War II eras, nearly all major policy innovations — from the rise of neoliberalism to the 1970s emphasis on human rights — have been superficial adjustments to a fundamentally broken system. Thatcher rightly demolished the postwar economic consensus as a necessary act of modernization. We must do the same to the rest of it. American global overextension, two-tier civil-rights-laws, the therapeutic welfare state, replacement migration policies, and the European Union were built in a superstitious almost mythical response to the problems of 80 years ago. They are obsolete and no longer fit for purpose. The substance of Curtis Yarvin’s Pancakian speech in Brazil to the Mission Party conference, like Solzhenitsyn’s at Harvard, was that moving away from the bipolar and unipolar moments, both evil empires no longer police your ability to fix your own problems.
The point of this essay was not to suggest that Meritocracy was anywhere close to being realised in the 19th century. The point is that the New Right of the 1980s saw its project as a generational overturning of postwar shibboleths; that their project remains incomplete. Trump’s “prime minister”, Stephen Miller, recently described our decline as the “whole period that happened after World War II, where the west began apologising and grovelling and begging and engaging in these mass reparation schemes”. It is time to get with the program.
[1] Public Goods, Redistribution and Rent Seeking, Gordon Tullock. His “Open Secrets of American Foreign Policy” is also worth studying
[2] The Decline of British Power, Correlli Barnett