I am just talking about the general case, of why it is so common for scientists to be leftist. Through most of human history, societies have been dominated by fairly conservative viewpoints.

There will always be exceptions of course. But if you talk about the US I don't think the intellectual elite in the US is woke. A lot of the people speaking out against wokeness are liberal scientists and professors.

Keep in mind I am talking about scientists in this story and not what Hollywood actors or University students might think about an issue.

I cannot actually think of any prominent American intellectual which I have followed over the years which has turned woke. Nor do I think prominent democrats are woke either. Is Biden woke? I don't think so. Is Hillary woke? Is Obama?

I cannot personal stand political correctness and wokeness, but I also think it is kind of overblown. Extreme conservatism and right-wing populism seems like a larger problem to me. These things don't exist in vacuum. George W. Bush, the war on terror. Neoliberals, the tea party, Sarah Palin, National Rifle Association, the Alt Right, Trumpism. A lot of wokeism is a reaction to all of this. It is a bit like in physics. When you push with a force on a wall, it pushes back at you with a force of the same magnitute in the opposite direction.

Far more leftist countries don't have American style wokeism. That is a hint that wokism exist in part due to the surge of the American alt-right.

The US is not a unqiue case. Latin American countries tend to struggle with extreme conservatism. One can just look at what abortion laws look like in some of these countries. This also cause a counter reaction, producing radical leftists.

HIstory has always been like that. Just look at the bloody Russian revolution and the extremism of the Bolsjeviks, Lenin, Stalin etc. None of that happened in a vaccum. It happened in a deeply conservative, unfair and oppressed societies. Stuff like that simply doesn't happen in more egalitarian and liberal societies.

Once one allows problems to fester for too long without fixing them, the counter reaction can get extreme.