Death of woke — the left must reclaim universalism to defeat the far right

For roughly a decade, between 2013 and 2023, wokeness was one of the great forces animating Western culture and politics.

Most progressives could not – or would not – admit it. But they embraced it. Institutions changed their language, corporations rewrote codes of conduct, universities reshaped themselves around its tenets, and politicians recited its vocabulary.

The origins of woke

The word itself has a reasonable enough origin. “Woke” surfaced out of black America as a description of being vigilant towards racism and aware of structural inequalities. It spread through progressive politics before being latched on to by the right as a term of abuse and ridicule, much as “political correctness” had been a generation earlier. Right-wing populists now apply it so promiscuously that almost anything they dislike qualifies.

Yet that does not mean the phenomenon was illusory.

Essentially, wokeness sought to identify and correct inequalities affecting minority racial groups, women, LGBTQI+ people and other marginalised groups. It placed particular emphasis on structural discrimination; the idea that unfairness could persist for generations without conscious bigotry because institutions, conventions and inherited norms themselves reproduce inequality.

This was all broadly correct. The killing of George Floyd in 2020, following cases like Trayvon Martin’s death in 2012, became symbolic of the enduring racial divide in the US. The civil rights revolution might have transformed America, but it had not abolished social or economic injustice.

The problem was what came next.

As Yascha Mounk argued in The Identity Trap, parts of the movement departed sharply from the universalism of the civil rights tradition – in many cases, running completely contrary to it. Martin Luther King Jr’s promise had been one of integration, much like Mandela; the goal should be a society in which race matters progressively less, not more. The intellectual currents that came to dominate the discourse of the 2010s moved in the opposite direction.

These once fringe currents drew on the post-structuralism of Michel Foucault, an intellectual tradition obsessed with power and adamant that institutions can never be neutral. This was more Biko than Madiba. A movement to quash racism shifted from transcending identity to organising everything around racism.

How woke sabotaged the left

What woke was not, was liberalism, and neither was it socialism. This distinction matters because the populist far right has been incredibly successful at erasing it. In the Trumpian lexicon, anyone to the left of him and his Maga faithful can be simultaneously described as liberal, socialist and woke. A vote for anyone wanting to impose higher taxes on billionaires is one step closer to your daughter having to share a bathroom with a man. Criticising Israel becomes equivalent to Black Lives Matter.

This may be crude propaganda, but the truth for progressives is that in many cases it is not incorrect.

For much of the past decade, the progressive left allowed cultural radicalism to seep into its veins, becoming more conspicuous than any discussion on economic policy. 

An authoritarian ecosystem of academics, journalists, techies and activists operated like unelected HR apparatchiks with a mob of sensitive nerds in tow. Language changed at an extraordinary speed as yesterday’s terminology became today’s offence; Latinx one year, Latine the next. Pronouns appeared in email signatures and LinkedIn profiles. Arguments over cultural appropriation made fancy dress decisions perilous. Minor infractions rapidly became social media spectacles, with the eventual punishment being the inevitable: “cancelled”.

The result was a bizarre kind of progressive puritanism. People who wanted to “defund the police” became remarkably adept at policing speech. Institutions that preached tolerance became increasingly intolerant.

Worst of all, this was politically disastrous. It gift-wrapped Maga limitless ammunition with which to caricature the entire political spectrum to the left of Donald J Trump. More importantly, it undermined the proposition that universalist economic policies could appeal across race, region and class. 

Woke in effect made politics binary: you can either have identity politics, or you’re stuck with fascism.

Wokeness was no coincidence

But why? Woke was convenient for capitalism because it replaced the old leftist language concerned with ownership, wages and exploitation with an elaborate taxonomy of prejudice and exclusion. It was the ultimate neoliberal strawman. A company could conduct diversity seminars while screwing employees. A bank could festoon itself in rainbow colours while making fortunes from inequality. Woke made late-stage capitalist neoliberalism palatable. 

That helps explain the desperate plight of the American left. The Democratic Socialists of America, for example, combines economic populism with policy lunacy such as abolishing policing, race-based reparations and abandoning visa caps.

Some socialist politicians sensibly emphasise sensible economics while speaking rather less about the latter. Zohran Mamdani is an example of one of these; lead with living costs, housing, transport and economic power. But in a presidential election, even a distant association with the blue hair brigade would be a gift for Republicans: ignore the tax-the-rich proposal, which will poll well and focus on one soundbite regarding cancelling the police.

Why we need a left cleansed of woke

In this gilded age of billionaires, the plutocrats are fortunate in their enemies. A politician who could combine economically redistributive policies with cultural conservatism would be formidable.

Many voters are desperate for restraint of corporate power and AI omniscience without being schooled on the latest vocabulary of academic identity politics. They may favour higher taxes on billionaires while also wanting effective policing and controlled borders. These positions are not contradictory.

There is one final and even more critical reason why some political entrepreneur needs to do this, and fast. By arguing that woke “politicised” climate change, the Trumpian right effectively buried the Paris Accords. Now the earth is burning, and anyone not funded by the oil and gas lobby is powerless to stop it because they are branded as woke.

That is an environmental, social, economic and political catastrophe. The earth wants, and needs, someone to stop this. Time is running out. There is nothing woke about that. DM