Woke is not going away any time soon. So Don’t Get Your Hope Up!

Those who declare that wokism is on the way out distract us from grasping the challenge that this phenomenon represents!

Since the recent election of Donald Trump to the American Presidency many people have naturally expressed the hope that his decisive victory might mean that that the influence of the woke movement will soon be over.

Numerous commentators have expressed this sentiment and are busy assuring their readers and supporters that woke moment has passed. Writing in this vein, James Marriott of The Times asserted that ‘Woke is waning’ and asks ‘was it ever more than a fad?[i]. Michel Guerrin of Le Monde communicated a similar view when he asserted that ‘'Trump's return could signal the end of an identity-based approach to culture and society'[ii].

Even before Trump’s election sections of the media were busy arguing that the woke moment has passed and speculated about its imminent decline. Back in September 2024, The Economist published a statistical analysis that concluded that ‘woke opinions and practices are on the decline’. It asserted that ‘America is becoming less “woke”’[iii]. A moth earlier a commentator in The Times wrote of the ‘end of woke’ and the ‘trouble’ this development spelled ‘for the right’[iv],

Variations on theme of ‘the end of woke is nigh’ did not have to wait for the election of Trump. Panda La Terrier assured the readers of The Spectator in February 2023, that ‘Gen Z is turning against woke culture’. This commentator added ‘We made it into a cultural revolution – and traumatised ourselves’[v]. A couple of years earlier Peter Franklin categorically asserted in UnHerd that the ‘end of woke is nigh’![vi] Franklin asked, ‘Do you remember political correctness?’ as if it a phenomenon from the distant past.

It is evident that Culture Wars minimalism has been around for many years. In fact the impulse to wish away woke has a long history. In its different forms- Identity Politics, Political Correctness – what today is called wokism has been constantly subjected to premature obituaries.

The tendency to minimize the power and influence of identity driven political and cultural movement has been widespread since the 1970s. The historic failure to grasp the ever-growing influence of identity politics was in part due to the inability of traditional political categories to make sense of this phenomenon. One reason why the conflict over values did not appear to excite the imagination of the political analyst was because the cultural revolt struck deepest in the pre-political sphere. As far as they were concerned this was not politics. They also constantly underestimated the influence of the politicization of identity over the cultural elites and amongst the younger generations.

Looking back over the experience of the past 50 years, it is striking just how often commentators failed to grasp the depth of the Cultural Revolution unfolding in front of their eyes. One is struck by the frequency with which experts and commentators portrayed identity politics in the past tense and prophesised its imminent demise.

The authors of the first book to refer to identity politics (in 1973) claimed that ‘identity politics swallowed itself’[vii]. Writing in 1995, Ross Posnock, a Professor of Literature, wrote that ‘after twenty-five years of identity politics’ a ‘renascent cosmopolitanism is currently gaining ground on the left; indeed, belief that the prestige of identity politics is fading in the academy is fast becoming the received wisdom’.[viii]

‘After identity, politics: the return of universalism’ is the title of an essay in New Literary History, in 2000.[ix] Eight years later, Linda Nicholson, in her study of the history of identity, observed that ‘identity politics seems now to be largely dead, or at minimum, no longer able to command the kind of public attention that it did from the late 1960s through the late 1980s’.[x] In 2015, Andrew Hartman, in his book A War for the Soul of America: A History of the Culture Wars, concluded that, ‘The logic of the culture wars has been exhausted. In the wake of the Brexit Referendum and the 2016 election of Donald Trump, the British journalist Janet Daley declared that ‘Identity politics is dead’[xi].

Culture War Denialism

Culture War minimalism represent a naïve misunderstanding of the issue at stake. What is far greater problem is the tendency towards Culture War denialism.

Many media commentators sympathetic to the cause of identity politics insist there is no such thing as a free-speech crisis and that cancel culture is a myth. For example, a recently published long essay titled ‘How Cancel Culture Panics Ate the World’ contends that Cancel Culture is best understood as a moral panic. The author Samuel P. Catlin even hints that ‘cancel culture panic is only the P.C. panic rebooted for the Twitter era’[xii]. Apparently both P.C. and Cancel Culture are myths invented by mean spirited and anxious fantasists.

Catlin concludes by observing that this moral panic ‘persuades us to feel angry at or fearful of or smugly superior to the student, inevitably blue of hair, who wants to “cancel” the dining hall at her college for misrepresenting a sandwich. In our fervor, we forget to ask’ whether ‘that is really what happened’. As far as Catlin is concerned everything is Ok on campuses and the real problem are the naysayers who are out to get the students.

Along with Catlin’s rhetoric of moral panics other denialists assert thatthe culture war is the invention of groups of bitter, out-of-touch white reactionaries who fear the loss of their privilege.

The principal premise of the denialist outlook is that campaigns against heteronormativity, whiteness, ‘trans-exclusionary radical feminists’, cultural appropriation and so on are just struggles for social justice. Even though these campaigns target – sometimes violently – many of society’s long-established cultural norms, apparently, they do not add up to a culture war. Instead, this crusade against Western culture is celebrated with hooray words like ‘inclusion’ and ‘diversity’. It is those on the other side – those who want to preserve the values of their community and who resist woke campaigners’ attempts to take control of language – who are accused of waging a culture war.

Culture war denialism is an attempt to normalise and legitimise the crusade against the historical gains of Western Civilisation. At the same time, the culture war denialists try to frame the desire to defend the norms and customs of the enlightened, modern democratic society as a dangerous threat to the wellbeing and identity of certain vulnerable individuals and groups.

Either consciously or unconsciously the outcome of culture war denialism is to normalize the accomplishment of the woke crusade. In this respect the insidious impact of this crusade is overlooked and everything from rtrans ideology to decolonising western civilization is rendered normal.

Most Culture War minimalist understand that wokism is a threat to the conduct of civilized society but their naiveite leads them to underestimate the powerful influence it exerts on everyday life. Those who are tempted to imagine that this threat is over need to understand that woke ideals still dominate our schools and that generation after generation of young people are influenced by these sentiments. As long as the indoctrination of the young continues wokism is not going to disappear.

So ignore the culture war denialists – we really are in the midst of an existential struggle over the future of society.

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[i] https://www.thetimes.com/comment/columnists/article/woke-is-waning-was-it-ever-more-than-a-fad-3lvhr33c9

[ii] https://www.lemonde.fr/en/opinion/article/2024/11/08/trump-s-return-could-signal-the-end-of-an-identity-based-approach-to-culture-and-society_6732158_23.html

[iii] https://www.economist.com/briefing/2024/09/19/america-is-becoming-less-woke

[iv] https://www.thetimes.com/comment/columnists/article/the-end-of-woke-spells-trouble-for-the-right-zmcxpdw6g

[v] https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/why-gen-z-is-turning-against-woke-culture/

[vi] https://unherd.com/2021/05/the-end-of-woke-is-nigh/

[vii] R.P. Wolff and T. Gitlin (1973) Revisited: Prospects for American Politics, New York: Knopf, p.17

[viii] R. Posnock (1995) ‘Before and after identity politics’, Raritan, 15(1), 95 – 115, at 99.

[ix] E. Lott (2000) ‘After identity, politics: the return of universalism’, New Literary History, 31(4), 665 – 680.

[x] See L. Nicholson (2008) Identity Before Identity Politics, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, p.4. 719

[xi] https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2016/11/26/identity-politics-dead-lefts-entire-electoral-strategy/%20

[xii] https://newrepublic.com/article/188316/cancel-culture-panics-ate-world