One of the country's most influential public intellectuals asks: What if the roots of the culture war lie not in the culture itself, but laws and regulations enacted decades ago that few are aware of today?

In a nation nearly evenly split between conservatives and liberals, the left dominates nearly all major institutions, including universities, the government, and corporate America. Hanania argues that this is as much a legal requirement as it is an issue of one side triumphing in the marketplace of ideas. Culture has its own independent force, but the state has since the 1960s been putting its thumb on the scale.

The product of more than a decade of research and thought about American politics and culture, The Origins of Woke explains where wokeness came from and ultimately what to do about it. Ideas like the belief that standardized tests are racist if groups don't perform equally on them are not simply intellectual fads, but mandatory dogmas that institutions are required to believe in. Even the ways in which we classify ourselves has been shaped by an activist state—this is why Americans talk about laws and initiatives to address discrimination against "Hispanics" and "Asian American-Pacific Islanders" rather than Middle Easterners, white ethnics, or people from specific Latin American countries.

For those angry about wokeness and what it has done to American institutions, the book offers concrete suggestions regarding policies that can move us back to being a country that emphasizes merit, individual liberty, and color-blind governance.