As Douthat proceeds in his project of operationally defining and explaining what the American left today is about, he also says that "all of this [analysis] is necessarily a cultural and psychological project." In addition, he says, "Yes, economic policy matters, but material arrangements are downstream of culture and psychology."
Now, my favorite scholar is the American Jesuit Renaissance specialist and pioneering media ecology theorist Walter J. Ong (1912-2003; Ph.D. in English, Harvard University, 1955). His mature work from the early 1950s onward tends to emphasize culture and psychology.
Ong may have favored certain economic policy matters in his private life, but he did not discuss economic policy in his 400 or so distinct publications (not counting translations or reprintings as distinct publications).
For a bibliography of Ong's publications, see Thomas M. Walsh's "Walter J. Ong, S.J.: A Bibliography 1929-2006" in the anthology Language, culture, and Identity: The Legacy of Walter J. Ong, S.J., edited by Sara van den Berg and Thomas M. Walsh (Hampton Press, 2011, pp. 185-245).
In any event, what happens if we consider Douthat's "What It Means to Be Woke" in the larger framework of Ong's mature work from the early 1950s onward? In other words, can we align what Douthat refers to as the American left today and the American right today with Ong's conceptualizations? Yes, we can.
Briefly, we can align the American right today, which tends to hearken back to and idealize the 1950s, with what Ong refers to as the print culture that emerged in Western culture after the Gutenberg printing press emerged in Europe in the mid-1450s.
Ong's pioneering study of print culture in Western culture is his massively researched book Ramus, Method, and the Decay of Dialogue: From the Art of Discourse to the Art of Reason [in the Age of Reason] (Harvard University Press, 1958). In it, Ong traces the history of the verbal arts of logic (also known as dialectic) and rhetoric from ancient times down to Peter Ramus (1515-1572) was a French Renaissance logician and educational reformer and Protestant martyr.
I discuss Ong's massively researched 1958 book RMDD in my somewhat lengthy OEN article "Walter J. Ong's Philosophical Thought" (dated September 20, 2020):
Now, briefly, we can also align the American left today, especially as Douthat describes its orientation to culture and psychology, with what Ong refers to as our secondary oral culture in Western culture - or secondary orality, for short - that has been emerging since the critical mass of media that accentuate sound emerged most notably in the 1960s onward.
Taking hints from Ong, I discuss this in my essay "Secondary Orality and Consciousness Today" in the anthology Media, Consciousness, and Culture: Explorations of Walter Ong's Thought, edited by Bruce E. Gronbeck, Thomas J. Farrell, and Paul A. Soukup (Sage Publications, 1991, pp. 194-209).
Now, I have already outlined certain contours of Ong's thought. Next, I want to call your attention to what Ong himself refers to as his thesis about cultural arrangements - including, of course, the two relatively recent cultural arrangements that I have already referred to here: (1) print culture and (2) secondary oral culture. However, when we consider the broad historical seep of Western culture, we need to refer to (1) primary oral culture; (2) ancient and medieval manuscript (or chirographic) culture; (3) modern typographic (or print) culture; and (4) our contemporary secondary oral culture.
In Ong's "Preface" to his 1977 book Interfaces of the Word: Studies in the Evolution of Consciousness and Culture (Cornell University Press, pp. 9-13), he says the following in the first sentence: "The present volume carries forward work in two earlier volumes by the same author, The Presence of the Word (1967) and Rhetoric Romance, and Technology (1971)." He then discusses these two earlier volumes.
Then he says, "The thesis of these two earlier works is sweeping, but it is not reductionist, as reviewers and commentators, so far as I know, have all generously recognized: the works do not maintain that the evolution from primary orality through writing and print to an electronic culture, which produces secondary orality, causes or explain everything in human culture and consciousness. Rather, the thesis is relationist: major developments, and very likely even all major developments, in culture and consciousness are related, often in unexpected intimacy, to the evolution of the word from primary orality to its present state. But the relationships are varied and complex, with cause and effect often difficult to distinguish" (pp. 9-10).
Thus, Ong himself claims (1) that his thesis is "sweeping" but (2) that the shifts do not "cause or explain everything in human culture and consciousness" and (3) that the shifts are related to "major developments, and very likely even all major developments, in culture and consciousness."
Major cultural developments include the rise of modern science, the rise of modern capitalism, the rise of representative democracy, the rise of the Industrial Revolution, and the rise of the Romantic Movement in philosophy, literature, and the arts.
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