William Watson: The Tories should embrace the woke backlash

financialpost.com:

Out here in the far reaches of the American empire, it’s always gratifying and more than a little thrilling when people in the imperial capital take notice of us. Last week, the New York Times’ Ross Douthat wrote about wokeness in the Anglosphere and though he started with how James Bond has gone woke in the latest Bond novel (“On His Majesty’s Secret Service,” written not by Ian Fleming, who died in 1964, but by one Charlie Higson), the subject of woke Canada entered soon enough.

Douthat’s main thesis is that “forms of progressivism that originated in the United States, under specific American conditions, can seem more potent among our English-speaking friends and neighbours than they do in America itself.” And he quotes unnamed conservatives in Canada as expressing pessimism about their ability to thwart woke ideas even if returned to power in the next federal election. (Sean Speer may have been one of them, since his introduction of Douthat at last April’s Civitas conference hints at that).

I recently had the opportunity to introduce and moderate a discussion with <a href=«https://twitter.com/DouthatNYT?ref_src=» https:>@DouthatNYT

. Here's an excerpt from my opening remarks.
----------------------
Our next speaker personifies the cognition and depth of the conservative intellectual tradition at its best. Ross Douthat, the…

As we columnists are prone to do, Douthat offers three essentially unprovable explanations for why wokeness seems to have gone farther in the United Kingdom, Canada and elsewhere in the Anglosphere than in its spawning grounds in the U.S. (though whether it really has would also be hard to prove).

First is that as a way of demonstrating their sophistication, provincial governors always take things