Marxism, the classic ideology of the left, sees all human history as a sequence of conflicts between classes. According to Karl Marx, the sequence does not end until the proletariat overthrow capitalism.
Today’s woke ideology is a bastardization of classical Marxism. In her White Album’s essays of the 1970s, Joan Didion aptly described what the woke movement would adopt: “the notion that, in the absence of a cooperative proletariat, a revolutionary class might simply be invented, made up, ‘named’ and so brought into existence.”
The woke movement substitutes amorphous “identity groups” for Marx’s rigid “classes,” while retaining Marxism’s belief in universal conflict. And the woke movement’s rationale for violence is also the same as its Marxist forebears: the oppressed are justified in every form of their resistance.
As their violence has been thus justified, so it has been unleashed nationwide and on every conceivable issue.