Wokeness finds new life south of the border

Mexico City, Mexico — “Now,” Elon Musk responded this week on the social media site he bought two years ago and renamed X. What was this an answer to? This post by the evolutionary biologist Gad Saad:

“What is it going to take for the West to wake up? When will the West reclaim its heritage, culture, values, freedoms, and liberties? When will the West rediscover its spine and testicles?”

In the United States, the rapid changes we see all around us are increasingly being cast in this civilizational context. And this is right. 

Slashing agencies such as the U.S. Agency for International Development matters not just because the so-called fourth branch of government, the permanent bureaucracy, wielded power that it was not constitutionally authorized to have. 

More importantly, the work of these agencies often ran counter to the philosophical basis of the American Constitution, the entire corpus of Western Civilization. 

Wokeism, the ideology that infiltrated the permanent bureaucracy and increasingly gave it ideological ballast, is, if anything, an insurrection against the West. Woke, a term borrowed from black American slang, means being acutely awake to what its supporters believe to be the systemic oppression of the marginalized by society’s winners.

That is why Musk, whom President Donald Trump appointed to lead the Department of Government Efficiency, posts about how he also sees his role as saving Western civilization. DOGE is not a department but an effort outside of the government itself, and it’s charged with slashing this bureaucracy. 

The oppressor versus the oppressed paradigm is a way of looking at all human experience directly from Karl Marx’s Communist Manifesto. Very early on, it reads:

“The history of all hitherto existing society⁽²⁾ is the history of class struggles. Freeman and slave, patrician and plebeian, lord and serf, guild-master⁽³⁾ and journeyman, in a word, oppressor and oppressed, stood in constant opposition to one another, carried on an uninterrupted, now hidden, now open fight.”

Countries, or governments elected by their citizens, decide which side they’re on based on whether they see themselves as oppressed or oppressors. 

Mexico, under President Claudia Sheinbaum, is running in the opposite direction from Trump’s America. Mexico’s state ideology has long prioritized the role of indigenous communities while minimizing the obvious role of Spain, whose 1519 invasion of the Aztec empire started the colonization process that began the country. Sheinbaum has put this push on steroids.

It’s like Trump’s anti-woke crusade in reverse.

Sheinbaum, elected last year, began her first full year in office by declaring 2025 the Year of the Indigenous Woman. Late last year, she signed decrees extending rights to indigenous groups, the opposite of what Trump and Musk are doing here in America, which is to make clear that there are no group privileges but individual rights protected by the Constitution that the government will defend. Sheinbaum’s decrees were, of course, translated into 57 indigenous languages.

And in one of her most quixotic missions — though, of course, Sheinbaum would bridle at the use of the name of Spain’s literary hero par excellence — the Mexican president spent her first few days in office embroiled in a self-defeating diplomatic scrape with Spain, whom she demands apologize for its “genocide” of indigenous people.

“Spaniards have to recognize these atrocities,” she said again in February. She did not invite King Felipe VI to her inauguration last year. Spain’s government, currently controlled by the Spanish Socialist Workers’ Party, would normally side with Sheinbaum but called her actions “unacceptable.”

Sheinbaum’s mother and four grandparents were born in Europe. That does not stop her from constantly using the trappings of indigenism — indeed, it may encourage it.

I got a little taste of this when I went to Mass last Sunday at the Mexico City Metropolitan Cathedral. Upon emerging from church I saw some ruins below glass panels on the floor. I asked an Air Force officer what it was, and he said, “That is our temple.” I asked which temple, and he said, “Our Aztec temple.”

I suddenly remembered that the Spaniards had built the Zocalo Plaza upon which the cathedral sits above the Aztec capital of Tenochtitlan. And sure enough, the officer volunteered at that point, “the Spaniards destroyed our stuff and built their stuff on top.”

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I peered below and made out a human skull among the ruins, a grim reminder of the Aztec’s penchant for human sacrifice.

Time will tell which of these neighbors on the North American continent is embarking on the right course.

Mike Gonzalez is the Angeles T. Arredondo senior fellow on E Pluribus Unum at the Heritage Foundation and the author of NextGen Marxism: What It Is and How to Combat It. Heritage is listed for identification purposes only. The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not reflect any institutional position for Heritage or its board of trustees.