There is a story that professional ideamongers like to tell about political history that gives pride of place to their own work. It’s a story that usually begins with some small tribe of writers or intellectuals who come up with a set of theories that describe the world in a new way. This fall, I’ve been co-teaching a course at Yale University, the Crisis of Liberalism, which looks for the roots of today’s disturbances in long-running debates about the liberal order. And one of my thoughts is that both of them break, in different ways, with the familiar narrative about intellectuals and democracy I’ve just sketched. With wokeness, you have a movement in which the intelligentsia really matters but democratic politics much less so.

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Persons: Reagan, Clinton’s, George W, Myron Magnet, Marvin Olasky, Barack Obama’s, I’ve, we’ve, progressivism, Obama Organizations: New, The Washington Monthly, The New, Yale University, American Locations: The New Republic