In the past month, I have read or heard many obituaries for “wokeness”. In the Times, Lionel Shriver declared that “Donald Trump’s emphatic victory is a woke watershed” and that “progressive lunacy” faced extinction. In the Mail, Leo McKinstry wrote that “wokery is in retreat. The creed has lost its ugly potency”.
The hip lifestyle magazine Dazed asked: “Is being “woke” now considered cringe?” Well, according to the president-elect himself: “Woke is bullshit”.
I beg to differ, however. These overheated claims are wrong in fact (what people call “wokery” is not doomed) and in principle (nor should it be). Woke isn’t dead. It’s just pining for the fjords.
As it happens, I initially avoided using the word, which has a very specific origin in African-American vernacular; signifying an awakened, sensitised awareness of racial injustice. But words routinely change their meaning, and “wokery” has become a near-universal shorthand for a much broader range of beliefs, behaviour and policy.
Four years ago, I published a book which advanced the proposition that the rising social justice movements – #MeToo, Black Lives Matter, and environmental groups such as Extinction Rebellion – represented a new and unignorable force in progressive politics and were a “necessary wake-up call” for liberals as well as conservatives.
What was then mostly called “identity politics”, I suggested, was as an overdue reproach to cosy centrism; that individualism, meritocracy and universalism remained unattained ideals rather than (as was often claimed) descriptive terms; and that the core values of liberalism were hard to impress upon groups still suffering from historic injustice, daily indignity and, in some cases, threat to life and limb.
But I also argued that these new movements had become too distracted by essentially procedural rows about who could speak about what; by “de-platforming”, speech codes, “cancel culture” and purity tests. There was too much performance – rallies, social media frenzy, land acknowledgements, and collective indignation – and not enough action.
As Barack Obama warned in 2019: “If I tweet or hashtag about how you didn’t do something right or used the wrong verb, then I can sit back and feel pretty good about myself because ‘Man did you see how woke I was? I called you out!’… If all you’re doing is casting stones, you are probably not going to get that far.”
Now more than ever, this gap between virtue-signalling and tangible achievement really matters. Four years ago, I did not believe for a moment that Trump and MAGA were finished and said as much. A grand coalition of “identity-conscious progressives”, I believed, was badly needed to fight the still-rising populist right. And I stand by that now.
Of course, it would be idle to deny that a lot has gone wrong with “wokery”. Trans activists persecuted feminists for saying that biological sex was real and, in some cases, drove them from employment. Last April, the final report of the Cass Review revealed the shocking extent to which ideology had eclipsed medical science – to the detriment of children’s safety and the clinical needs of young trans people.
What the political scientist Yascha Mounk in his fine book The Identity Trap (2023) called “the short march through the institutions” led all too often to a cult-like illiberalism on campuses, a terrible lack of creative courage in publishing houses and a tick-box “diversity” culture in corporations, which paid consultants millions to “woke-wash” their public image without making serious systemic change to their working practices.
All of this, alas, has been a considerable boon to MAGA and its counterpart movements all over the world. It is no accident that, according to research since November 5, one of the Republican nominee’s most effective slogans was also one of his ugliest: “Kamala Harris is for they/them. President Trump is for you”.
To complicate matters, a mirror-image “woke right” has arisen at the opposite end of the ideological spectrum. Well analysed by conservatives unwilling to ditch classical liberalism such as Konstantin Kisin, Seth Dillon and Kevin DeYoung, this nasty new strain of right wing ideas borrows the woke left’s language of victimhood and power structures but applies it almost exclusively to white Christian men. For Tucker Carlson, Candace Owens, and Stephen Wolfe, the root of systemic oppression is (variously) the Deep State, Big Pharma, the CIA, secularism and Zionism.
This demented variant on wokeness has only encouraged the view that the whole phenomenon has passed its sell-by date, was no more than a generational fad, and should be treated as a deranged aberration in the history of political culture that is now firmly in the rear-view mirror.
To which I say: not so fast.
Certainly, the so-called woke right is a menace we could all do without. If Carlson, Owens, Wolfe and their hard right comrades recede into oblivion, the world would be a better place.
But there is still much that is good and worth building upon in the social justice movements that arose between 2017 and 2021. For a start: ask yourself whether racism, sexism and other forms of bigotry have been significantly reduced since then, and whether conventional liberalism has offered sufficient solutions to the structural problems faced by people of colour, women, those in the LGBTQ+ community and others who routinely face injustice because of their immutable characteristics or their opinions.
A few statistics to inform your answer: in the year ending March 31, 2023, there were 24.5 stop and searches for every 1,000 Black people, compared to 5.9 for whites. Black and Asian people are still more likely than white offenders to be imprisoned and receive longer sentences. White property ownership rates are more than twice those of Black Caribbean people and more than three times those of Black African Britons. The unemployment rate for Black people in the UK is 8% compared to 3.3% for whites.
Then look at the state of sexual equality. Only 5.4% of reported rapes proceed to prosecution. In April 2024, the gender pay gap was still 7%.
In the year ending March 2024, an estimated 1.6 million women experienced domestic abuse. Almost eight years since the New York Times investigation into Harvey Weinstein triggered the worldwide #MeToo movement, 80% of women who experience workplace sexual harassment still do not report it. The allegations made against celebrities such as Gregg Wallace, Russell Brand, Jermaine Jenas and, last week, by the British actor Kate Beckinsale show how little has really changed since 2017.
In the year 2023-24, 22,839 sexual orientation hate crimes and 4,780 transgender hate crimes were reported by the police in England and Wales. Social media platforms, and especially X, remain a bin fire of death and rape threats against women and minorities. It is intellectually contemptible and morally outrageous to claim that all these social pathologies are a thing of the past, simply because Trump and his admirers say they are.
The opportunity remains to embrace and harness the original energy of the social justice movements and – crucially – to use the alchemy of politics to turn it into granular policy. In a famous intervention in June 2020 on the BBC’s Today programme, after the murder of George Floyd, David Lammy, who was shadow justice secretary at the time, spelt out the approach that was required then and is required today.
“I made 35 specific recommendations in the Lammy review [into the treatment of ethnic minority individuals in the criminal justice system],” he said. “Implement them. There are 110 recommendations in the Angiolini review into deaths in police custody. Implement them.
“There are 30 recommendations in the Home Office review into the Windrush scandal. Implement them. There are 26 in Baroness McGregor-Smith’s review into workplace discrimination. Implement them”.
These words should be framed on the wall of every office in Westminster and Whitehall. They could be applied with profit to the grooming gangs scandal – which, contrary to Elon Musk’s appalling posts on X attacking Keir Starmer and Jess Phillips, has been investigated many times, not least by Professor Alexis Jay, whose independent inquiry into child sexual abuse reported in October 2022.
Last year, Jay declared herself “very, very frustrated” by the Conservative government’s inaction and emphasised that “there’s no need to spend more time on acquiring intelligence, consultations etc on these matters – we just have to get on and do it”. After so many years of Tory neglect what is required now is not another inquiry, but the implementation of the many reports that Starmer’s government has inherited.
Indeed, this unpleasant storm of performative outrage by the nativist right should prompt a moment of intense reflection among progressives. At present, centre left governments are stuck in a rut of technocracy and what Martin Luther King called “the tranquilizing drug of gradualism”.
Precisely when urgency and audacity are most needed, we see the uninspiring centrism of Starmer, Olaf Scholz, Emmanuel Macron, Justin Trudeau and Kamala Harris hitting the buffers. All are at different stages of the electoral cycle, but the direction of travel is bleakly evident.
In this country, the body politic desperately needs a shot of adrenaline. Labour’s narrative should not be one of steady incrementalism – “fix the foundations”, “smash the gangs”, stroll towards “milestones” – but of dynamic pluralist patriotism, a free exchange of ideas and a liberalism that is confident enough to address its failures.
It should be rooted in the needs of the 21st century rather than the grey residue of the postwar consensus; bold enough to take a compassionate, well-resourced and economically literate approach to immigration; to the case for rejoining (as a start) the EU single market; to the complexities of multi-ethnic, multi-faith community relations.
It should state explicitly that pluralism requires constant negotiation between groups, communities and beliefs; not restrictions upon speech, but more speech. It should be relentless in its protection of freedom of worship and in its crackdown upon incitement to violence – as, to be fair, Starmer was during the August riots – and no less clear that it is completely unacceptable for a teacher from Batley Grammar School in West Yorkshire still to be in hiding four years after his lessons infuriated a group of Muslim parents.
Not all reform involves trade-offs, as it is now orthodox to claim (for a deep analysis, check out Robert Wright’s seminal book, Nonzero). Fighting racial injustice does not mean that a government can or should ignore the white working class. Radical action to stop violence against women does not require mental health authorities to ignore the fact that suicide is the single biggest killer of men under 45.
We owe one another a progressivism that approaches racial and sexual justice not through the prism of social media or the banalities of corporate social responsibility but by measurable, decisive action. I would like an audited update from the Cabinet Office of Lammy’s 2020 demand for the implementation of existing reviews.
We also need much more radical action on workplace harassment and evidence from each sector – not least the creative industries – that they are getting their respective houses in order. The Department of Justice and CPS need to explain why rape prosecution and conviction rates remain so low and take whatever measures are needed to address the problem – including rapid investment in the desperately overstretched court system and prison estates.
A generation has arisen that feels it has no stake in liberal democracy and sees it as an outmoded political software. The uprisings of 2017-21 were an early manifestation of that dismay and, whatever wrong turnings those movements may have taken, the message at their core remains true. It should focus minds that, despairing of the liberal-left, so many young people are now drawn by the shiny allure of techno-populism and the strongmen of the right.
Call this, as I do, identity-conscious progressivism. Call it woke-plus. Call it whatever you like. But – above all – acknowledge the urgency of the task. Time to get busy.
Identity, Ignorance and Innovation: Why the Old Politics is Useless and What to do About It by Matthew d’Ancona is published by Hodder and Stoughton
