The Managerial Ideology
A Machiavellian Theory of Woke as Elite Consolidation
Over the past several years, the flags that long represented nationhood across the West - the Union Jack, the Stars and Stripes, the Tricolour - were increasingly seen alongside a new banner. It could be found in front of embassies, over town halls, and projected onto cathedrals and corporate headquarters: the intersectional pride flag.
Flags have symbolic power. And while this flag is ostensibly about tolerance and inclusion, a different logic operates beneath the surface: one that speaks of moral inversion and power consolidation. Its presence marks the transfer of moral legitimacy, the arrival of a new ruling ideology, and the entrenchment of a new regime.
Where the old flags pointed to identities that were rooted, inherited, and bounded, the new flag points to ones that are liminal, hybrid, and fluid. These identities are the foundation of the new system, and their flag replaces the old banners because the system it represents has replaced what came before: not through persuasion or organic growth, but by institutional capture, moral coercion, and demographic transformation.
This is part of a process typically described as the rise of woke. There have been many attempts to explain this phenomenon, but there remains little agreement about what ‘woke’ actually is, why it emerged, or how to respond to it. If we examine it through a Machiavellian or realist lens, however, woke emerges not as a spontaneous moral awakening, but as the ideological superstructure of an ascendant managerial elite.
Thinkers in the Machiavellian tradition argue that ideologies do not guide power - they justify it. They arise after the fact to cloak changing distributions of status and control in moral language. From this perspective, the Reformation (for example) was not just a spiritual awakening: it was a rationalization of the bourgeoisie’s rise against the universal church. Enlightenment liberalism, meanwhile, broadly served to justify the ascent of the commercial class against the aristocracy.1 So, with woke: cui bono - whose interests does it serve?
Vilfredo Pareto, a polymath whose insights strongly influenced political realism, observed that social theories comprise residues and derivations. The residues are manifestations of sentiments, and reflect the deep, unspoken impulses that drive behaviour - such as the instinctive will to preserve one’s own security, group dominance, or territorial expansion. Derivations are the surface rationalizations that disguise these instinctive drives beneath appeals to morality, fairness, or universal benevolence. Pareto observed that every ruling class advances its interests through a complex lattice of derivations that present their actions as serving the public good, while in practice they fortify their own position.
Since the 1990s, Western societies have been transformed by demographic change. Although the non-white share of Western populations had been growing steadily for decades after the Second World War, the 1990s marked the final collapse of traditional taboos against racial intermarriage. What had once been seen by traditional standards as questionable or undesirable came increasingly to be celebrated, incentivized, and cast as a moral good.
This cultural reversal coincided with a sharp acceleration in non-white immigration, which surged across the West from the late 1990s onward. The result was a rapid and seemingly permanent increase in the unassimilated immigrant and mixed-race populations of nearly every Western nation.
It is often said that demographics are destiny. Once significant racial mixing occurs within a population, the demographic trajectory becomes irreversible. Within just two generations, returning genetically to the original ancestral group becomes practically impossible.2 Even deliberate attempts by later generations to ‘marry back’ into the native population cannot restore the original lineage. This conclusion follows inevitably - not from moral reasoning, but from mathematical logic.
For Western elites, demographic transformation represented both a symbolic shift and a strategic opportunity. It was rationalized and sanctified through a new ideology - multiculturalism.3 This was presented as a logical extension of liberal rationalism: the belief that social life should be governed by neutral principles, procedural justice, and abstract equality. Indeed, in some ways multiculturalism was the logical culmination of an ideology that had long pathologized in-group preference and delegitimized ancestral identity. By suppressing traditional language rooted in attachment, loyalty, and exclusion, liberal rationalism had already stripped native populations of their immunity to a doctrine that presented demographic upheaval as a form of moral progress.
Accordingly, from the 1990s onward, multiculturalism became the dominant ideological framework across the West. It appeared neutral, benevolent, and inclusive. Yet, from a Machiavellian or realist perspective, it was far from neutral. It functioned instrumentally, sanctifying unassimilated minorities, migrants, and mixed-race individuals by implicitly identifying them as the future of Western nations. Their empowerment - socially, politically, and institutionally - was justified at the expense of native majorities.
These groups undoubtedly benefited from multiculturalism, but they were not its primary architects. Nor did they possess sufficient political or institutional leverage to establish it as a new paradigm for Western civilization. The task of authoring, enforcing, and entrenching multiculturalism as state dogma fell to another group entirely: the managerial regime.
The managerial regime is the bureaucratic, credentialed, and increasingly transnational class that governs Western societies. Its members occupy permanent, unelected positions, but feel little loyalty to Western nations, cultures, or peoples. The authority of this class comes not from the explicit consent of the governed, but from the strategic manipulation of media narratives, the control of information systems, and bureaucratic and legal mechanisms designed to suppress dissent. It spans the civil service, corporate management, finance, technology, academia, the media, and key parts of the military, the mainstream church, and the trade union bureaucracy. It does not rely on eliciting loyalty, governing instead through surveillance, regulation, and linguistic control.
Multiculturalism therefore served the concrete interests of two distinct but aligned forces, operating within a patron-client relationship:
The growing demographic bloc of unassimilated immigrants, minorities, and mixed-race individuals, who sought recognition, protection, and access to institutions within societies they did not build (the client);
The managerial elite, whose power depends upon dissolving organic social attachments and managing fragmented populations unable to organize effective resistance (the patron).
A third group - discussed below - consisted of downwardly-mobile white graduates, who derived personal status and moral validation from adherence to the new orthodoxy.
Multiculturalism therefore served a dual purpose, as a vehicle of upward mobility and recognition for client groups, and a mechanism of social control for the managerial regime. It acted as ideological justification for demographic transformation, elevating liminal identities while delegitimizing the ancestral identities of the West’s majority populations. By weakening the cohesion and group solidarity of these native majorities, multiculturalism neutralized their potential as opposition to managerial rule. Accordingly, it complemented the anathematization of strong, affective expressions of majority identity, whether framed in ethnic, national, or religious terms. It meant Western countries could no longer be coded in public discourse as either white or Christian.
By displacing organic sources of belonging such as family, faith, and tradition, multiculturalism fostered clientelism, discouraging assimilation and making minorities and newcomers increasingly dependent on the regime for recognition, advancement, and protection. In effect, it generated social fragmentation while selling elite mediation as the indispensable solution, securing the role of the managerial class as ultimate arbiter of the new demographic order.
Immigrants, minorities, and mixed-race individuals took on central symbolic roles within the new regime. Their very existence was presented as a living refutation of traditional or nationalist narratives. Under the mantra of ‘diversity,’ the erasure of majority identity was equated with moral progress and the end of racism.
In Machiavellian terms, the logic is clear. Multiculturalism served the interests of this new coalition - liminal clients and their elite patrons - just as earlier ideologies had served beneficiaries in other times. By empowering liminal identities as regime clients, multiculturalism provided moral justification and institutional pathways for newcomers and their descendants, while weakening the cohesion of native majorities. In doing so, it allowed the managerial elite to consolidate authority by presenting themselves as indispensable guides through the demographic and cultural conflicts that their own policies helped produce.
Multiculturalism effectively unified the interests of three distinct groups:
The managerial, bureaucratic-technocratic elite;
Client groups (immigrants, minorities, liminal identities) who derived status and material benefits from elite patronage;
Ideological enablers (typically downwardly-mobile whites embedded in academia, media, and NGOs).
If these groups are abstracted from the social equation, what remains of Western societies is simply the shrinking mass of the traditional population. This ‘core’ or ‘host’ population then emerges as the universal subject of exploitation across the West. Predominantly native, often middle or working class, and still retaining residual loyalties to older forms of nationhood, faith, and organic order, this group’s economic productivity funds the regime, while their demographic inertia is used to justify mass migration. Their defensive political instincts are pathologized as reactionary or extremist. They bear the brunt of taxation, experience cultural and demographic displacement, and face growing surveillance and censorship.
This dynamic constitutes the sociological foundation of anarcho-tyranny. This is when the state adopts a tyrannical posture toward the core population, and paternalistic indulgence to liminal and client groups, whose disruptive presence and privileged status serves to demoralize the majority and undermine its social cohesion. And it explains why traditional left-right distinctions feel increasingly meaningless to many people. In a system structured around exploiting the core population for the benefit of a hostile managerial regime and its dependent clients, conventional politics no longer reflect the fundamental axis of conflict.
The ensuing tension is frequently perceived to be racial, and indeed often maps along racial lines. But the deeper cleavage is civilizational: between those loyal to the metaphysical and cultural order of the West, and those employed in its deconstruction. Historically (and even to some extent today), some individuals from minority, mixed-race, and immigrant backgrounds assimilated into the traditional majority through intermarriage, cultural adoption, or mixed ancestry. But this organic assimilation directly threatens managerial interests, because it reinforces cohesion within the traditional population, and undermines the regime’s strategy of using liminal groups as wedges to fragment solidarity.
For the managerial regime, multiculturalism provides a way to sabotage assimilation. This explains the intensity with which its acolytes denounce members of liminal groups who identify with traditional populations as traitors, ‘Uncle Toms’, ‘white supremacists’, etc. It is the bigotry of despotism, directed against those who want to belong and not to serve.4
Multiculturalism remained the dominant ideology of Western societies until the mid-2010s. Around 2016, however, something changed. A new, more militant form of multiculturalism emerged: the phenomenon we now know as ‘woke.’
The origins of woke are commonly traced to critical theories that were developed within academia. It is sometimes portrayed as a moral awakening - or alternatively, as either an extension or corruption of liberal values. Instead, it should be understood as a defensive ideological consolidation. The ruling coalition (liminal identity groups and their managerial patrons) embraced woke as a strategic reaction to fortify their position precisely when it had become simultaneously ascendant and vulnerable. Woke embodied a definitive ideological hardening, which transformed multiculturalism into a rigid, explicitly authoritarian moral framework, designed not merely to advance, but to defend a fragile new class structure against insurgent native resistance.
In retrospect, 2016 was an inflection point in Western history. Years of growing frustration over mass immigration, cultural dispossession, and the erosion of national identity culminated in two seismic events: the Brexit vote in the UK, and the election of Donald Trump in the US. These embodied the first major mass resistance from native Western populations against globalism, demographic replacement, and cultural subordination.
These events triggered existential anxiety for the managerial regime and its clients. It became clear that the core population retained substantial numbers and latent political power, that democratic processes might enable their resurgence, and that the ideological high ground needed immediate fortification. Managerial elites therefore pivoted decisively to woke ideology as a reactionary move, initiating a moral panic intended to embed their ideological regime as a permanent revolution. Their aim was pre-emptive suppression of native resurgence - crushing dissent from the only quarter capable of challenging their ascendancy.
Multiculturalism was ostensibly concerned with integration, tolerance, and minority legitimation, casting liminal and mixed-race individuals as symbols of openness and moral progress. By contrast, woke was explicitly about consolidation and control. It functioned as the ideological shock troop of the managerial regime, constituting a form of psychological warfare directed specifically against the core population. Its ultimate purpose was to ensure that no restoration of ancestral identity or organic order could ever again take root.
Woke ideology was broadly embraced by elites from the regime’s client groups. Having gained institutional power and moral primacy in public life - and sensing that their newly secured status might be vulnerable - they pivoted from demanding recognition to asserting dominance, often employing aggressive institutional and rhetorical tactics. For them, woke was never about idealism or justice. It was a class reflex prompted by confidence in recent gains and a profound fear of reversal.
Woke should not be understood according to its ostensible claims, but by its instrumental function as a tool of power. It operates through ideological inversion: minorities become majorities (symbolically and institutionally), victimhood becomes moral authority, tradition becomes oppression, and normativity becomes violence. These inversions are not merely symbolic gestures - they are strategic mechanisms designed to delegitimize the core population’s attachment to its own traditions and identity. Opposition is never engaged through debate, but branded as hatred, coded as fascism or ‘white supremacy,’ and banished from public discourse. The goal is not persuasion, but the systematic dehumanization and suppression of resistance.
The managerial class also enjoys subsidiary benefits, in the form of ever-expanding bureaucracies - DEI regimes, HR departments, and ESG compliance structures - and endless moral training and ideological indoctrination, supplied by elites and their clients. This provides innumerable opportunities for patronage and further strengthens managerial control across media, technology, academia, and law.
Minority, mixed-race, and immigrant populations supply moral legitimacy through personal and historical narratives of marginalization, suffering, and discrimination. The managerial class provides ideological infrastructure and enforcement. Together they constitute a symbiotic patron–client regime, with woke ideology as the lingua franca: a justification code that distributes privilege, suppresses dissent, and regulates social status.
Woke, then, emerges as the ideological form of a new pan-Western ruling coalition. It serves to justify the authority of the new elite by morally delegitimizing the core population, and prevents the return of coherent national narratives or traditional identities. It is not an organic evolution or grassroots movement of Western society, but the ideological superstructure of new elite formation, born from a historically unique convergence of demographic change, technological control, and cultural inversion.
Beneath the managerial class and its growing client bloc of liminal groups, there is also a critical third component: the young, educated, downwardly-mobile white population. This group - which might have potentially been receptive to populism or class revolt - has instead been co-opted as a quasi-religious auxiliary to the regime, responsible for moral enforcement and ideological policing.
The 2008 financial crisis was a key catalyst in this process. It precipitated an economic downturn which blighted the prospects of an entire generation: the Millennials. Economic frustration and class anxiety led directly to a wave of radical sentiment in the early 2010s, manifesting in movements like Occupy Wall Street and significant support for anti-capitalist political figures such as Bernie Sanders in the US and Jeremy Corbyn in the UK.
Crucially, these movements were not initially about identity politics. They were authentic expressions of economic despair and anti-oligarchic revolt, which briefly threatened to reorient Western politics around material inequality rather than identity. In Britain, it mobilized entire friendship groups of previously apolitical, white Millennial graduates who joined the Labour Party specifically to support Jeremy Corbyn’s candidacy.
This hinted at the potential for a class-based realignment of Western politics. Whatever the wider consequences may have been, it undoubtedly posed a threat to the incumbent managerial regime. This was intolerable to media and political elites, who moved swiftly to neutralize the danger through identity politics. Media campaigns rapidly amplified sectional grievances around race and gender, aiming to fracture potential class solidarity. This strategy proved highly effective, and many young, disaffected whites were redirected toward a new avenue of status. This was not through rebellion against the elite, but through allegiance to it - on the condition they renounced ancestral identity and embraced performative ‘allyship’. Radical economic demands were absorbed, diluted, and transformed into symbolic rituals of equity such as diversity audits, privilege training, and public moral posturing.
In effect, woke transmuted an entire generation of potential rebels into ideological enforcers for managerial interests. Instead of challenging oligarchy, they became its moral guardians, tasked with policing cultural norms, enforcing compliance, and engaging in performative self-redemption.
This neutralized the radical potential of credentialed yet economically insecure young whites - precisely those who might otherwise have spearheaded populist resistance. Woke offered them belonging within an elite-coded moral universe, providing easy pathways to social status through virtue signalling, activism, and ritual denunciation of working-class whites (now stigmatized as racist, backward, and dangerous). Psychologically rewarding, socially prestigious, and intellectually unthreatening, woke was the perfect substitute for genuine rebellion, and it transformed potential dissenters into loyal auxiliaries of managerial power.
The success of multiculturalism - and its later, more militant incarnation as woke - points to something profound about the deeper conditions that allow ideological capture. These ideologies did not triumph solely because of strategic elite maneuvers or demographic transformations; rather, they succeeded because Western societies had lost their fundamental linguistic and emotional defenses.
To fully understand why woke took root so aggressively, we must recognize the crucial role played by attachment-based language: a form of speech and thought centered around loyalty, kinship, memory, and obligation. This functions as a sociological immune system, providing instinctive defence against subversion of social stability. And when that immune system is disabled, societies become uniquely vulnerable to capture.
Over many years, Western liberal rationalism systematically suppressed and displaced this protective linguistic structure. Far from being neutral, liberalism functioned as a slow-acting solvent, gradually dissolving the very bonds and attachments that made Western liberty meaningful and sustainable. Ultimately, in the hands of the new elite, liberalism became a weapon of managerial power, and its suppression of attachment-based language turned into a civilizational extinction mechanism. Despite purporting to uphold abstract logic and universal moral imperatives, liberal rationalism ended up delivering new affective commitments in the form of replacement ideologies like multiculturalism and woke.
If traditional attachment-based language had retained a robust presence in the West, woke ideology’s core claims (fifty genders, the patriarchy, white privilege, etc) would have been instinctively rejected: not countered by argument, but immediately dismissed with ridicule, disgust, or quiet contempt. Indeed, this is precisely what blunted a previous wave of political correctness in the 1990s, which was halted not by intellectual debate, but because traditional language and moral intuitions still carried immunological weight.
Some commentators interpret this earlier refusal to engage with politically-correct nonsense as a sign of weakness or complacency. In truth, the capacity to deflect ideological attacks without engaging them was a sign of strength.
Some might object that managerial elites do promote affective attachment - at least among certain client groups, particularly ethnic minorities. And at an individual level, some woke activists are sincerely invested in these identities. But at the regime level, the use of attachment is entirely strategic. Identities are not authentically embraced, but deliberately deployed, used as battering rams to fracture the group cohesion of the West’s historical majorities, who represent the only serious obstacle to complete managerial dominance.
The regime does not identify with its mascots. It does not share their fate. Its obligations towards these groups are temporary, instrumental, and conditional. The attachment it displays is purely performative, lasting only so long as it serves the interests of managerial rule. Client groups can therefore be discarded or redefined at will, whenever strategic priorities shift.
Consider women. For decades, promoting female autonomy served as a means to weaken traditional male authority, family structures, and cultural norms. Yet, when transsexual identities emerged as a more potent ideological wedge, women’s interests were abruptly sidelined. Their identity - previously useful - became inconvenient, so their attachment to it was destabilized. The managerial regime simply redefined what it meant to be a woman, dissolving the concept as a coherent category in thought and society. In doing so, it delegitimized women’s attachment to their previous organic identity - exactly as it had done previously with the West’s traditional ethnic and national identities.
The native majorities of the West differ fundamentally from the regime’s client groups because they represent a potential threat to managerial control. This is due not to what they demand, but what they remember. Their identity is rooted in historical continuity, shared memory, and implicit solidarity - qualities inherently resistant to bureaucratic mediation. For this reason, managerial elites actively suppress their traditional attachments, and seek to replace them with ersatz identities that pose no challenge to their power.
This dynamic explains how the regime can celebrate ‘diversity’ while systematically eroding authentic cultural distinctiveness, or preach ‘compassion’ while ruthlessly enforcing ideological conformity. Its true loyalty is never to a consistent moral vision, but always to the maintenance and expansion of managerial authority.
This accounts for the manic, performative, and ritualistic nature of elite discourse, increasingly reminiscent of propaganda cycles in late-stage Communist regimes. The constant linguistic shifts, rapid promotion and abandonment of various causes, and selectively applied outrage are not meant to establish consistent moral order, but to destabilize it. These campaigns do not reflect sincere conviction. Rather, affect itself has become a tool of control - weaponized against internal enemies and artificially generated to manipulate mass sentiment, all in aid of bolstering the regime.
This explains why the regime’s emotional investments feel uncanny from the outside. They are not organic. They are not real. They are propaganda: choreographed performances, engineered for instrumental ends.
The parallel with duplicitous Communist regimes also hints at the Thermidorian trajectory of woke ideology. Like previous revolutionary movements, it has passed through recognizable historical stages, ultimately becoming reactionary:
• Initial idealism (‘we just want equality’)
• Institutional capture (quotas, reparations, land acknowledgements)
• Fear-driven repression (cancel culture, censorship, surveillance)
• Rigid orthodoxy (where deviation is punished, including among the faithful)
Its brittle, punitive tone betrays a deep underlying anxiety. This stems from the knowledge that opposition has not been totally extinguished - because the demographic transformation of Western populations has not yet become entirely irreversible.
Woke is the militant form of multiculturalism, post-2016. It is the regime’s emergency ideology, and its febrile intensity reveals that the regime knows its victory remains incomplete. Born in the confidence of early gains, woke hardened into authoritarian orthodoxy when it became clear that the native population, though demoralized and atomized, was not fully conquered.
Viewed through a Machiavellian lens, woke has a straightforward purpose: to defend the legitimacy of a newly ascendant elite, suppress the possibility of native resurgence, and consolidate managerial control over a fragmented and disoriented society.
The process is visible in retrospect.
Multiculturalism acted as the ideological lubricant for demographic transformation, legitimizing the rise of liminal populations while dissolving ancestral identities.
The final collapse of taboos against interbreeding between natives and non-natives, combined with mass migration, created a mechanism for irreversible demographic change - potentially heralding a permanent genetic and cultural reordering of Western societies.
This transformation was sanctified through the doctrine of anti-racism, which served as the moral enforcement arm of the new regime. In-group preference was pathologized; dissent was treated as blasphemy.
Woke marked the militant phase of elite consolidation. Born from the post-2016 panic, its purpose was to pre-empt populist rebellion, discipline the native population, and stabilize managerial dominance.
The radical economic demands of the early-to-mid 2010s were neutralized by substituting identity-based grievances and moral performance. A generation of downwardly-mobile whites was ideologically co-opted, awarded status by renouncing ancestral loyalties and being transformed into the regime’s moral vanguard.
This framework explains not only why woke emerged - and when - but why it took its specific, authoritarian, and socially brittle form.
It also clarifies the task ahead. Woke is not a phase. It is the operating system of a new hegemonic coalition - one that intends to rule in perpetuity. It cannot be defeated through argument, because at its core, it is not about intellectual conviction. It is fundamentally about power: a strategic mechanism of class protection, demographic consolidation, and institutional control.
The precondition for resisting woke is to reject its moral frame. The goal is not persuasion within its terms, but learning to speak with a different voice, and invoke different myths - rooted in tradition, historical continuity, and ancestral loyalty - that lie beyond the regime’s symbolic order.
In short: don’t argue with woke.
Only power can check power. We need counter-elites and parallel institutions, guided by a language that is older, stronger, and resistant to ideological inversion.
Complex historical phenomena are not solely reducible to expressions of material interests. But in order to understand why some movements are successful, and others are not, we have to understand the social forces they represent.
For example, if an individual with 50% native ancestry partners outside the ancestral population, their offspring will have just 25% native ancestry. Each subsequent generation further reduces ancestral heritage exponentially, and it quickly approaches statistical insignificance.
My next essay will explain why the managerial regime pivoted to multiculturalism - and why this happened when it did.
Of course, such language also serves a counter-entropic purpose for ethnic partisans, who use it to discourage group members from defecting to other identities.