Is Wokism a manifestation ‘free-floating’ nationalist sentiment that is no longer anchored to a nation?

I don’t have an argument here. Just some observations in search of an argument.

We know that nationalist sentiment accompanies the nation-state as a form of governance. Citizens are attached to the nation; it gives them an identity.

American identity has been fracturing since the 1960s. What happened in the 1960s? The civil rights movement got important legislation passed at the national level. In a sense, that was a triumph of national identity and a commitment to the ideals of the Constitution.

But it alienated the South, and who knows who else. The war in Vietnam evoked an anti-war movement, which lost Lyndon Johnson a second full term as president. The women’s movement was on the rise.

Then came the so-called culture wars, catalyzed, by of all things, the English literature curriculum. But then, as Gerald Graff has argued, the study of literature in college was conceived as a mechanism for inculcating a sense of national identity and a common cultural heritage. By the 1970s, however, college-level literary study had become a vehicle of identity diffusion and fragmentation. The center was not holding at all.

And yet, one still needs a sense of identity, an anchor in the geopolitical realm. On the (far) right, we get extreme nationalism tied to racism. And on the left, we get woke. Wokism is a weird kind of negative identity. “I don’t know who or what I am, where I’m anchored. But I know that I’m not a racist. I’m Woke.”

And just where is that, the Kingdom of Woke, and how does it act in the world?

As I said up top, it’s not really an argument, not yet. But I think it could be made into one.

But not now.