Rafael Castro is a Yale- and Hebrew University-educated independent political analyst. An Italian Noahide, Rafael can be reached at rafaelcastro78@gmail.com
Wokes present themselves as social justice activists against hierarchy, privilege, exclusion and inherited social power. Their moral vocabulary is built around the protection of minorities, the recognition of structural disadvantages and the exposure of invisible forms of domination.
Yet when one looks at the social composition of the most committed woke activists, a problematic picture emerges. The movement is not led by the poorest or most socially excluded sections of society. Its most articulate representatives are disproportionately young, highly educated, culturally sophisticated and concentrated in universities, NGOs, journalism, the public sector, culture and the professions. In the United States, the progressive Left is disproportionately white and unusually likely to identify as LGBTQ. In Britain, progressive activists are far more likely than the general population to possess university and postgraduate degrees.
All this suggests that contemporary woke politics is less a revolt of the dispossessed against elites than a struggle within the educated classes over who is entitled to higher status and social prestige.
The essential feature of this struggle is that wokeism does not abolish hierarchy so much as attempt to redefine the standards by which hierarchy is constructed. Traditionally, societies distributed status through a combination of family position, religious authority, wealth, scholarship, courage, service, professional competence and inherited custom. Modern liberal societies added entrepreneurship, technical expertise, educational attainment and economic productivity. Contemporary intersectional progressivism, however, prioritizes an ideological form of prestige, one based on moral awareness, fluency in the language of oppression, public identification with marginalized groups, sensitivity to symbolic harm and the ability to expose inequalities that others allegedly fail to perceive.
Under such a system, a person of otherwise modest achievement may nevertheless acquire considerable moral authority and social prestige if he or she possesses the right ideological vocabulary and occupies the right institutional setting. This creates a new form of status competition, one in which moral performance can become as important as professional competence, wealth creation, religious authority or practical accomplishment.
A Familiar Historical Pattern
This phenomenon is not entirely new. Many of the most influential revolutionaries of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries were not peasants, laborers or members of the lowest social strata. They frequently came from prosperous, highly educated, aristocratic or professionally established families and turned against the social order that had formed them.
Friedrich Engels is perhaps the most obvious example. He was the son of a wealthy textile manufacturer and was introduced to business because his father expected him to participate in the family enterprise. Yet he became one of the central theorists of revolutionary socialism and used his wealth, generated by capitalism, to sustain Karl Marx and support the intellectual project that sought capitalism's overthrow.
Mikhail Bakunin, one of the founding figures of revolutionary anarchism, was born into the Russian aristocracy, trained as an officer and initially belonged to the very social world that he would later denounce. Alexander Herzen, another foundational figure in Russian revolutionary thought, was raised in great wealth as the son of an aristocratic landowner.
Karl Marx himself came from a comfortable professional family, received an elite university education and earned a doctorate before becoming the most influential theorist of revolutionary anti-capitalism. Alexandra Kollontai, later a leading Bolshevik and radical critic of traditional marriage and family structures, was the daughter of an Imperial Russian general and grew up in privileged circumstances. Rosa Luxemburg came from an educated Jewish merchant family and became one of the most important revolutionary Marxists of her generation.
The sources of their alienation varied. For some it arose from class contradiction, for others from ethnic or religious marginality, gender restrictions, family conflict or frustration with inherited expectations. What recurs across many cases is not destitution but a combination of proximity to privilege and estrangement from it. People raised within elite or semi-elite environments often possess the education, confidence and institutional knowledge needed to challenge those environments effectively.
Contemporary woke activism appears to reproduce part of this pattern in a different form. Its characteristic activist is often not an outsider to elite Western culture but someone who has been trained within it, understands its codes and institutions, and nevertheless feels insufficiently rewarded by its traditional structures of prestige. Such people may possess excellent education, cultural sophistication and considerable social confidence, while lacking wealth, professional prestige, family stability or economic security traditionally associated with elite credentials.
This helps explain why the sociology of progressive activism deserves closer attention.
Cultural Capital and Status Insecurity
Research on progressive political subcultures points toward a striking combination of educational privilege and material insecurity. In the United States, highly progressive political groups are disproportionately educated and white, while also showing unusually high levels of LGBTQ identification. In Britain, progressive activists are much more likely than the general population to hold university degrees and are heavily represented in charities, public institutions and other sectors where cultural capital is particularly valuable.
At the same time, many members of these groups possess relatively little accumulated wealth, face high housing costs and student debt, and report frustration with their financial position or future prospects. This combination creates what might be called status inconsistency: people have acquired the language, credentials and expectations of elite membership without necessarily achieving the material security or institutional authority that they anticipated.
Intersectional politics offers a powerful way of resolving this tension because it changes the criteria by which prestige is allocated. If social standing is determined primarily by wealth, entrepreneurship, professional indispensability, family formation, technical competence or organizational authority, many members of the educated activist class remain mediocre underachievers in the social hierarchy. If prestige is instead awarded according to moral sophistication, knowledge of oppression, ideological fluency and public commitment to marginalized groups, their relative position and social status is immediately boosted.
This does not require conscious cynicism. People can sincerely believe in equality, anti-racism or compassion for migrants while also participating in institutions in which those beliefs generate professional and social prestige. Sincere conviction and self-interest are not mutually exclusive. Psychological research on moral grandstanding is useful here because it shows that moral discourse can function not only as a means of persuasion but also as a way of acquiring prestige and social recognition. This is not unique to progressives, and similar mechanisms also operate in conservative environments. The fundamental question is what kind of status a particular culture rewards.
In progressive institutions, moral sensitivity, whether genuine or performative, and ideological alignment presented as intellectual sophistication have become the most highly valued forms of social capital.
Equality Before the Law and the Politics of Power
The consequences of this worldview become particularly visible in progressive attitudes toward law and punishment.
The classical liberal ideal of the rule of law requires that legal standards apply as impersonally as possible. The identity, class, race or political status of an offender should not determine the basic standard by which conduct is judged. In practice, no legal system achieves perfect neutrality, but the principle remains central: similar conduct should be treated similarly regardless of the social position of the person involved.
Intersectional politics introduces a competing concern. It asks not only what an individual has done, but also where that individual stands within structures of social power. Once that question becomes morally decisive, identical acts may be interpreted differently according to the perceived position of the offender.
This is visible in contemporary criminal-justice debates. When criminality is associated with poor or minority communities, progressive rhetoric emphasizes poverty, racism, trauma, addiction, unequal schooling, lack of opportunity and discriminatory policing. These factors are treated as relevant to understanding culpability and punishment. This helps explain support for bail reform, reduced incarceration, greater use of parole and diversion, prosecutorial discretion and, among the more progressive wing, proposals to reduce and annul police funding.
Yet when the perpetrator is a corporation, landlord, police officer, wealthy tax evader, banker or powerful employer, structural position is interpreted differently. Privilege and power no longer mitigate responsibility. They become reasons for heightened scrutiny. The powerful are presumed to possess greater freedom of action, better information and greater capacity to avoid wrongdoing, and therefore to deserve strict punishment.
There is a coherent moral theory behind this distinction. Progressives often believe that enforcement imposed on disadvantaged groups can reproduce existing inequalities, whereas strict punishment against powerful actors can correct those inequalities. From their perspective, this is not hypocrisy but substantive justice.
The difficulty is that the principle erodes equality before the law. Once social position becomes a major determinant of whether society emphasizes agency or circumstance, the same legal system begins to operate according to different moral assumptions for different categories of people.
Illegal Immigration and Selective Legitimacy
Illegal immigration exposes this tension especially clearly because it raises the question of whether democratically enacted laws retain moral authority when they burden groups defined as vulnerable.
A person who enters or remains in a country without legal authorization is violating immigration law. Yet among contemporary progressives, enforcement itself is treated as morally suspect when the person subject to enforcement is understood as economically vulnerable, racially marginalized or fleeing difficult circumstances. Sanctuary policies, resistance to deportation, opposition to cooperation with immigration authorities and proposals to decriminalize unauthorized entry all reflect the view that formal illegality does not settle the moral question.
There can be legitimate humanitarian reasons for this position. Not every violation deserves the harshest available sanction, and unjust laws have existed throughout history. Yet the asymmetry becomes more visible when one compares immigration enforcement with progressive attitudes toward regulation of corporations, employers, taxation or environmental law.
When immigration laws constrain vulnerable individuals, selective non-enforcement can be praised as humane. When regulatory or financial laws constrain corporations and wealthy individuals, selective non-enforcement is condemned as corruption, privilege or institutional failure.
The underlying distinction is not between law and lawlessness, but between laws seen as reinforcing power and laws seen as restraining it. The danger is a shift from asking, “What did this individual do?" to asking, “Who is this individual?"
Meritocracy and Competing Sources of Authority
The same logic appears in progressive skepticism toward meritocracy.
Meritocracy is inevitably imperfect. Family background, inherited wealth, social networks, luck and unequal schooling all affect life outcomes. Nevertheless, meritocratic societies rest on the assumption that competence, achievement, effort and contribution should matter when allocating positions and rewards.
Intersectional politics treats persistent disparities as evidence that apparently neutral standards may conceal structural privilege. Once that idea is extended far enough, almost any standard can be redescribed as discriminatory because unequal outcomes themselves become evidence that the standard was unjust.
Professional success can be interpreted as accumulated privilege. Academic achievement can be attributed primarily to differential access. Family stability can be described as inherited social capital. Cultural competence can be reinterpreted as an exclusionary norm. The danger is not that every criticism of meritocracy is wrong, but that the concept of merit itself becomes progressively delegitimized.
This matters because meritocracy is only one of several independent sources of authority that progressive ideology challenges. Traditional family structures, religious inheritance, national history, professional expertise and market success all confer forms of legitimacy that do not depend on progressive moral certification.
A father may possess authority within a family because of his responsibilities as a father. A rabbi or priest derives authority from a religious tradition. A businessman may command respect because he created an enterprise. A judge derives authority from legal office. A scholar derives it from knowledge. A nation derives legitimacy from historical continuity and collective inheritance.
These forms of authority compete with ideological authority because they distribute prestige according to standards that activists do not control. The more they are delegitimized, the more important moral certification becomes.
The Simplest Test of Humanism
There is a practical way to distinguish genuine humanism from paternalistic politics.
Take the activist away from the university seminar, the NGO conference, the television studio and the carefully curated social environment of elite politics. Take them instead to a factory floor or a modest African or Mexican cantina, where the tables are cheap, the smell of cooking oil hangs in the air, and working people in ordinary clothes are eating after a long day.
The important question is not whether he finds the furniture elegant or the atmosphere refined. It is whether he feels genuine warmth toward the real people there.
A person who truly cares about human beings does not want them all to resemble university professors, foreign diplomats or politicians at charity galas. He does not withdraw affection when immigrants are religious, socially conservative, commercially ambitious, skeptical of progressive sexual ethics, supportive of stricter policing or hostile to illegal immigration.
The distinction becomes visible when people who claim to love “the marginalized" encounter marginalized people whose actual beliefs and lifestyles do not fit the ideological image created for them.
If someone is comfortable with the poor only as an abstraction, with migrants only as political symbols and with minorities only when they confirm progressive assumptions, then the relationship is not one of equality. It is paternalistic. The supposedly oppressed are treated less as independent human beings than as characters in someone else's moral narrative.
This is particularly important because working-class communities, immigrant groups and religious minorities often hold views that differ sharply from those of privileged progressive and woke activists. They usually value traditional families, religion, discipline, entrepreneurship, national belonging or public order. They often want more police rather than fewer. They often oppose uncontrolled immigration. They almost unanimously reject progressive understandings of gender and sexuality.
When such views are dismissed as false consciousness, internalized oppression or manipulation, the paternalistic structure becomes unmistakable. The activist is no longer listening to supposedly marginalized people but explaining to them what their real interests ought to be.
The Deeper Paradox
The deepest contradiction of wokeism is therefore not simply that some activists are hypocritical. Every political movement contains hypocrites. The more important contradiction is structural.
A movement that defines itself through opposition to hierarchy has created its own hierarchy of moral authority. A movement that criticizes privilege has generated a new privileged class of people who possess the power to define which groups are oppressed, which forms of speech are legitimate and which inequalities are morally acceptable. A movement that claims to speak for ordinary people has become socially and culturally extraordinarily alienated and remote from ordinary people, particularly when those people refuse to adopt the politics assigned to them.
This is why the historical parallels matter. Earlier revolutionary movements that unleashed unprecedented hatred and destruction were frequently led by people who had been formed within the societies they sought to transform. Contemporary progressive activists likewise operate from within the commanding heights of contemporary Western civilization: In universities, committees, and schools, their methods are bureaucratic and cultural rather than violent. They reshape curricula, professional norms, hiring practices, institutional language, criminal-justice policy and public standards of legitimacy.
What has now changed is not the existence of hierarchy and privilege but the criteria by which hierarchy and privilege are allocated and justified.
Productivity, freedom of speech, dialectical thinking and equality before the law, together with merit, inherited institutions and ordinary human attachments, are increasingly subordinated to a subtler ideological mechanism. Social identity and ideological classification then help determine whose conduct deserves support or punishment, whose voice commands respect, and whose authority or wealth is regarded with suspicion.
Such a society does not become egalitarian. It replaces hierarchies rooted in productivity, competence and achievement with a new system of moral rank, administered by unaccountable bureaucracies and HR departments. These institutions increasingly assert the authority to decide who is privileged and who is oppressed, which inequalities and prejudices are intolerable, and which may instead be excused, legitimized or even celebrated as expressions of “social justice" or “resistance to oppression."