How woke went broke

But there is a growing consensus that the worst vagaries of that era may be over. Leftist commentator Ash Sarkar argues in her new book Minority Rule: Adventures in the Culture War that the left (including herself) may have gone too far on identity politics and culture war issues.

Piers Morgan has a book due in October making a similar argument from a different perspective: Woke Is Dead: How Common Sense Triumphed in an Age of Total Madness. And in the USA, where these issues took up far more time and oxygen than they ever did here, Donald Trump’s administration could not be making it clearer that a certain version of wokeness is not just dead, but being buried at a crossroads with a stake in its heart.

The reality, though, is that the most puritanical and extreme phase of wokeness/cancel culture burned brightly, but peaked years ago – if it were not well past its peak now, no one remotely adjacent to the left, let alone Sarkar herself, would dare to say so.

It should not now be difficult to say that, for a time, the political left and mainstream, in response to deep and serious issues such as US police violence and structural racism in that country, reacted in extremely silly and puritanical ways.

As tempting as it is to recast such movements as a plea to have a conversation about racism, to be a little kinder and more understanding and to challenge ourselves, at their peak these movements were not about that. The admission is necessary, if for no other reason than to notice how brief that period really was, and how the right wing “backlash” to it is larger, more dangerous, and more sweeping than peak woke itself ever was.

In theory, wokeness is distinct from the Black Lives Matter movement, which in turn is distinct from cancel culture, from the gender debate, and so on. Each has roots in different academic traditions, different inciting incidents. But for most people, the everyday experience of these movements simply melded into one.

The peak coincided with a string of high-profile cancellations, some of them long overdue and much deserved and some simply bizarre.

In February 2021, The New York Times made the questionable but defensible decision to get rid of Donald McNeil Jr after 45 years at the paper, because he had used America’s vilest (and most charged) racial epithet during a discussion on whether it was ever permissible to use the word.

Slate then in turn parted company with its podcast host Mike Pesca for simply questioning the firing during a Slack discussion, during which at no point did he use the slur (or even directly refer to it). His colleagues argued that the simple fact of him saying it should not necessarily be an automatic firing offence. Meanwhile, Slate had used the word in articles nine times in 2020 and three times in 2021 – not all written by black writers.

For a time, significant airtime was given to the idea that only writers from particular ethnic groups should write about those groups, with some even challenging whether any interracial relationship (or even friendship) could be unproblematic. It seemed that the search for social justice was leading people towards voluntary segregation. “Defund the police” was adopted as a slogan, with some in the movement condemning critics for taking the term literally, even as others insisted the slogan was very much literal.

There are books covering the excesses of the time, and they do not need to be relitigated here, other than to note the chancers who jumped on the issue with solutions that conveniently boosted their own incomes. 

For a time Robin DiAngelo’s egregious White Fragility book was an international bestseller – a nice earner for a white woman after a race relations crisis, while bizarre “Race To Dinner” experiences, offered by the activists Saira Rao and Regina Jackson, played on the guilt of white women in bizarre ways.

All of these examples, notably, are American: most of the inciting incidents of the great awakening were American, and most of its excesses stayed there. The most famous UK incident sparked by Black Lives Matter is probably when Edward Colston’s statue was thrown into Bristol harbour.

Given that the city’s authorities were paralysed for years over the question of what to do with the statue of the notorious slaver, and that the statue didn’t go back up but was instead displayed as part of an exhibition on protest in a nearby museum, this act has aged pretty well. 

But, for a while, the mood in the UK was strange. Keir Starmer might get occasional flak in 2025 for taking the knee in a photo with Angela Rayner in his office, but he attracted significant flak at the time for referring to BLM as a “moment” rather than a “movement” – a simple and true statement that has since been vindicated. He eventually had to apologise.

All of these examples are from 2020 or 2021, for the simple reason that all of these social justice issues peaked back then. There was a time when everyone was either enthusiastically jumping on to these causes, or else keeping their heads down to avoid being called out or cancelled – but it didn’t last long.

The Democratic primary of 2020 happened at peak woke – and stances taken at that time plagued Kamala Harris through 2024’s presidential race. But the party selected the least woke candidate in the race, Joe Biden, and the country elected him at the general election, over Trump, a rival much more engaged in culture warring. 

America’s great corporations made great promises on “diversity, equity and inclusion” (DEI), wokeness, and made a show of reshaping their businesses after the reckoning. But they did not even come close to reshaping capitalism. They wore the cause as a fashion, and discarded it as the seasons changed.

The social justice side of the culture wars won at best tepid and reluctant endorsement from institutional power – the Democrats half-heartedly embraced the movement, and Labour just as gingerly showed some solidarity over here. 

Corporations sounded receptive to the movements because it was good for business. But wokeness never got the institutional backing that movements need to become real institutional forces in business.

The same cannot be said of the reactionary side of the culture wars, which have not so much been embraced by the Republican Party as they have engulfed it. The party of big business and small government that believes in the USA as the leader of the free world, has been replaced with a party obsessed with “owning the libs”.

Donald Trump’s war on wokeness is totalitarian in its obsession. He is willing to cut vital medical research if it uses the wrong word, and to cut lifesaving aid programmes across the world if a 20-year-old idiot who impressed Elon Musk thinks it might look woke. Trump was willing to fire the eminently qualified chair of the joint chiefs of staff – the most senior general in the US military, and a former fighter pilot – because he once talked about being a black man in the military. He was replaced with a less qualified white man.

All of this is vile, and much of it is dangerous. But it is also deeply self-defeating. They have misunderstood the reason BLM/wokeness/cancel culture was rejected by large parts of mainstream America. It was not because most Americans love overt racism, or hate gay or trans people. It was because when they saw theories like those of Ibram X Kendi, that everything must be either anti-racist or racist with nothing in between, they were (for good or ill) repelled.

Most people want most of their lives to be apolitical, insofar as that is possible. Wokeness became totalitarian, and said every act must be political and any attempt to reject or deny this was itself political. From the moment it did this, it was on to a loser.

Trump’s reactionary movement is making the exact same mistake, and using the same totalitarian impulse to engage in much more blatant cruelty from a position of much more obvious power. When people see their friends being fired from government jobs because of a misguided war on woke, most will not cheer it on. The audience for deliberate cruelty against minorities is still, hopefully, far smaller than Trump’s coterie imagine.

The reactionary side of the culture war is in the ascendancy, and is more powerful than the social justice faction ever was, even at its peak. But fundamentally, the MAGA-ites fail to grasp that most people want to Make America Normal Again and that they don’t want to worry endlessly about these culture war issues.

In their excesses, they sow the seeds of their own destruction. But such downfalls do not always come quickly, let alone easily. The harm that may be inflicted in the meantime is almost incalculable. A focus on that is far more important than relitigating the worst excesses of the social justice movement.