The 1990s bestseller How the Irish Saved Civilization by Thomas Cahill asserted that Irish monks, after the fall of the Western Roman Empire, preserved essential religious and secular tracts from antiquity through the Dark Ages ensuing from Rome’s collapse. The subsequent reintroduction of these classical texts arguably “recivilized” Europe after centuries of barbarism.

The “Great Awokening” ascendant in the West (particular the United States) over the past 15 or so years can hardly be compared to Visigothic bedlam. Nevertheless, Irish monks are an instructive analogue for whether the emerging backlash against progressive cultural dominance will prove sustainable. Who today will assume the mantle from those ancient Irish clerics?

The societal madness of the last several years — which reached its apogee during the George Floyd “summer of love,” a period of riots, property damage, and widescale social disintegration not seen in America since the Vietnam protest era of the 1960s — resulted from the displacement of classically liberal values by a neo-religious progressive creed fusing critical theory, racialist identity politics, and broad-gauge collectivism. These and other leftist currents had flowed through American institutions for decades, coincident with the baby boomer generation reaching adulthood and eventually assuming operational control of the private, not-for-profit, and public sector organizations comprising American civil society.

Given this decades-long percolation, a consensus has yet to be reached as to what exactly caused woke culture to achieve hegemony in the early 2010s. While technology and social media certainly played a part, there is little dispute as to who installed the DEI bureaucracies and HR infrastructure, each with the attendant stoolies and kapos critical to its maintenance: the boomers. At their professional peak in the late 2000s and 2010s, the boomer generation combined the cultural capital, wealth, influence, and positions of authority to, if not outright steer, at very least allow American society to be pointed in the direction of authoritarian progressivism.

The backlash against wokeism began well before President Trump’s reelection in 2024, but has gathered apace since. While still early in this counterrevolution, the scope and depth of societal damage done are only now being thoughtfully examined. A recent piece by Jacob Savage in Compact details how men of the Millennial generation had opportunities that might otherwise have been available to them in prestige fields including media, the arts, and academia foreclosed due solely to possessing the wrong demographic profile. While the collapse of white male participation in these fields over the 10-year period detailed by Savage is staggering, equally jarring is how many of the young men cited actively assented to “diversity” mandates and denying one’s “privilege” without fully appreciating what that might mean for them personally. After all, they were raised by boomers.

And this is where Generation X, a small and forgotten cohort barely registering with the intelligentsia, has a ready-made opportunity to turn the cultural tide. Might we be the Irish monks of our day?

Gen X wasn’t raised by the boomers (for the most part), but by the aptly named Silent Generation. The Silents imparted pre-boomer era values: reticence, self-discipline, respect for authority, individualism, and self-reliance. Xers not only imbibed these verities of yore through familial inheritance, but later manifested them in stark reaction to the self-indulgence of the boomer generation. When the insult “OK boomer” was initially hurled by Millennials a decade ago, Xers were quick to chime in that “we’ve hated them since before you were born.”

More substantively, Generation X is the youngest generation to remember a world with some degree of privacy, before it was extinguished by invasive technology and social media. We are also the last generation to experience a world that didn’t just pay lip service to meritocracy, but actually sought to practice it. Tech entrepreneurs Elon Musk, Alex Karp, and Peter Thiel (to name but a few) are Xers all. Love them or hate them, they represent their generation well as iconoclastic visionaries, the veritable antithesis of the grey “organization men” (and women) preferred by HR departments, faculty senates, and NGO leadership.

If the Compact piece errs in any meaningful way, it is that it implicates Gen X professionals alongside boomers in suppressing the hiring of young white males, presumably out of self-interest: nodding to the ideological fashions of the day while preserving one’s own position is framed as moral cowardice.

But this analysis inverts accountability and consequence. The “political correctness” gingerly nudged forward in the late 1980s and 1990s by a rising boomer managerial class was easily laughed off by Xers, as the boomers had yet to fully wrest control of the culture from the Greatest and Silent generations. No one then could have predicted how political correctness would cancerously metastasize into DEI and the entirety of what would become the wokeification of American society.

A generation of latchkey children, forged in a blast furnace of divorce, drugs, and disease (in the form of AIDS) bracketing age 40 wasn’t about to lift its collective head out of the foxhole to defend young Millennials (largely junior boomers ideologically, until they realized how wokeism hurt them) after finally having graduated from our collective “Microserfdom.”

While that may not have been our moment, this one is. The boomer reeducation camps are slowly being shut down as boomers themselves enter retirement. Millennials have awoken (pun intended) from their DEI slumbers and rediscovered that meritocracy can be more than just a fig leaf or slogan. Gen Z is up for grabs; while hyperaware of the fraudulence of the messages they receive from institutions and the wider culture, their absolute immersion in technology can make it difficult for them to separate noise from signal.

As Generation X takes fuller command of the levers of cultural power, it can reintroduce the wide spectrum of classical liberalism — free speech, free markets, the rule of law, individual responsibility, the primacy of the nation state, and the rest — to replace the barbarism of the modern-day Visigoths currently beating a hasty retreat. Younger generations’ exposure to the woke era requires that Xers make a sustained effort to entrench liberal values, as the collectivists will mount rearguard actions to reverse any such gains — and their control of the institutions will undoubtedly prove slow to give way.

While framed here as a mostly American phenomenon (particularly the significance of generational differences), the challenge to classical liberalism as a governing philosophy is a global one. As the last redoubt of Western Civilization, the U.S. has an opportunity to demonstrate to other polities that have largely capitulated to relativism and secular ideologies suffused with religious fervor that the barbarian hordes can be repulsed.

Richard J. Shinder is the founder and managing partner of Theatine Partners, a financial consultancy.