The relevance of Durkheim’s arguments about the collective consciousness to our current moment is that wokeness and Trumpist populism alike are promoted and sustained—chiefly through social media—by a collective consciousness that meets Durkheim’s definition of a religion. Moreover, both movements have a stronger, more decisively religious character than the belief in “the dignity of the human person” that in Durkheim’s time had become “a sort of religion,” a common but vague faith. We perceive that through their rituals of inclusion and exclusion, and especially through their remarkably similar ways of punishing dissent and expelling heretics.
Alan Jacobs