More generally, we can think of wokeness as a consensus of power under which it was common knowledge that leaders would give in to demands made by left-wing activists.
Not quite right. Demands for outright communism are still not taken seriously, and I don’t expect this to change any time soon. Wokeness is the particular fusion of the “social justice” brand of feminism and BLM, which Dem leaders embraced because it served the moral/ideological function while not fundamentally threatening hard power structures.
A very relevant Scott Alexander’s post that you didn’t mention here is New Atheism: The Godlessness That Failed, in which he claimed that New Atheism was a “failed hamartiology”:
We watched the US population elect George W Bush and act like this was a remotely reasonable thing to do. We saw people destroying the environment, leaving the poor to starve, and denying gay people their right to live as normal members of society. We saw people endorsing weird ideas and conspiracy theories, from homeopathy and creationism to the Clintons murdering their enemies. We were always vaguely aware from reading the newspapers that some of these people existed. But now we were seeing and conversing with them every day.
And so we asked ourselves: what the hell is wrong with these people?
And New Atheism had an answer: religion.
That was it. It was beautiful, it was simple, it was perfect. We were the “reality-based community”. [...]
Gradually the Blue Tribe got a little bit more self-awareness and realized this was not a great idea. Their coalition contained too many Catholic Latinos, too many Muslim Arabs, too many Baptist African-Americans. [...]
Between 2008 and 2016, two things happened. First, Barack Obama replaced George W. Bush as president. Second, Ferguson. The Blue Tribe kept posing its same identity question: “Who am I? What defines me?”, and now Black Lives Matter gave them an answer they liked better “You are the people who aren’t blinded by sexism and racism.”
Again, it was beautiful, simple, and perfect. We were “the reality-based community”. They were ignoring Reason and basing all of their opinions on blind hatred and prejudice. There was nothing confusing or unsettling at all about the situation, and we did not need to question any of our own beliefs. It was just that some people had been brainwashed by white supremacy and an all-consuming desire to protect their own privilege, and so they did. Sin began with the apple tree in Eden; conservatism began with the cotton plant in Jamestown. Language separates us from the apes; not being blinded by bigotry separates us from the Republicans.
The right wing in the West still hasn’t come up with a memetically competitive (but not suicidal) replacement for its own failed hamartiology. Nietzsche observed that God died almost a century and a half ago. Clearly, it’s not easy for conservatives to rebuild their ideology from scratch without that centerpiece. MAGA seems to be the right at its most successful currently, and as far as I can tell, it’s pretty much the “reversed stupidity” of wokeness, so your warning that “there’s no guarantee that the same forces won’t drive them equally crazy” is too coy/belated.
What this suggests is that we need liberalism 2.0: an ideological paradigm robust enough to rein in the excesses of the consensus of culture, but non-coercive enough that it can spread without sparking another culture war.
The more pessimistic among us fear that without a Thirty Years’ War-tier disaster this idea won’t be able to catch on. But, of course, an AI-driven omnicide/rapture/??? could come first… All in all, interesting times.
Of course, but neither would anything else so far discovered...