Both the Reformation and woke take an academic idea and use it to de-legitimate the targeted power structure
HAVE WE BEEN HERE BEFORE? Now, in 2022, with war abroad and woke at home, we contemplate the bitter dissolution of the hopes of the late twentieth century. Five hundred years ago, in 1521, Martin Luther’s appearance at the Diet of Worms signalled the death of the brave new world promised by the Year of Jubilee in 1500. There was even, in the Dutch scholar Erasmus, a Fukuyama-like figure who had formulated the hopes in their most extravagant form. Is history repeating? Or only alliterating?
When Pope Alexander VI proclaimed the Year of Jubilee there was good reason to believe its promise. The city of Rome itself was arising from its medieval squalor. The Roman empire
