Now the De-Awokening

IT’S OFTEN GOOD ideas that become bad doctrines. The ancestry of wokeness, too, can be traced to racial sensitivity— being awake to social injustices kept alive by power and privileges. The word itself may have come to mean the most righteous cultural norm, but the sentiment it militarised was once shared by decent folks who didn’t need an ideological fatwa to behave.

Everything changed after the death of George Floyd in 2020 in a street theatre of brutalisation and racial insensitivity. What was born in the wake of his “martyrdom” was a doctrine of outrage, which swelled in American cities as millions marched and looted—and it spread across institutions—media and academia particularly—as a retrospective correctness which required a strict behavioural code. There was a time when to get “cancelled” was to relive the Soviet-era midnight ticket to the gulag. A time when the incompatibility of truth and fact mattered only to those who dared—and lost the right to dare.

Wokeness may be vague in its definition—varying according to the degree of its adherents’ consciousness—but it has taken in its scriptural expanse all the concerns of identity politics. It recognises the boxes to which identity politics has placed and indexed social groups. Justice, in the book of woke, is a cultural struggle against power, which itself is a reminder to the living of how history is the cumulative text of lies and denials.

It spared nothing and turned even biology into a dispute: what really matters is not the sex you are born with but how it evolves as a social construct. The sheer ferocity of transgender politics did not allow a conversation, but strict obeyance of its certainties. It could not tolerate old-fashioned feminists; maybe the term feminism itself was insensitively gender-specific. JK Rowling, the Harry Potter author, knows what it takes to question the certainties and dare to respect biology. She survived because she was JK Rowling; anti-woke warriors in polemics such as Jordan Peterson and Douglas Murray, too, survive because they argue better than the zealots, who don’t argue. They just repeat the commandments, as zealots always do.

The backlash was inevitable as progressive pieties within liberalism sought to expand its battlefields. Donald Trump’s repudiation of DEI—diversity, equity, inclusion—is not a surprise as it comes from someone who placed himself at the vanguard of what he calls a revolution of common sense. Restoring male supremacy in the US defence forces is very much in accordance with the presidential view of two-sex normality. Wokeness never had the official approval of political leadership even if it enjoyed endorsement from the liberal order in power. The war on wokeness is a historic event because it is led by the world’s most powerful office.

It brings the culture war back to rightwing politics. Traditionally, it is the war the right tends to lose. It wins with ease the war in the marketplace. Trump, the old man in a frenetic rush to restore greatness, wants to win both wars. In the culture war, he has a resourceful ammunition supplier in someone like Elon Musk at home. And abroad, he has comrades like Argentinean President Javier Milei who subscribes to his campaign against the “mental virus” of wokeism.

Is the new culture war all about the restoration of normality after a reckless run of armed social sensitivity? Does the normalisation of social behaviour mean legitimising the insensitivity of the majority, cosy in its inherited social privileges? Culture wars, at their desperate moments, tap into divisions to moralise as well as to demonise. The ferocity with which Trump wages his anti-woke war will certainly create an underclass of misfits in MAGA land, which in turn will make the future struggles for cultural and social rights mainstream. A self-proclaimed unifier who detaches the idea of social justice from rewritten national histories and the possibilities of science vis-à-vis human bodies must be prepared to live with new resentments—new cultural ghettos. What Trump can’t fight forever will have to be taken up by the inheritors of Trumpism. He may have just bequeathed the longest culture war to post-Trumpian conservatives.

Right now, as he plays the slayer of all pieties, the losers won’t accept their folly of letting ideology determine the limits of public and private lives, professional and social lives. When liberalism lost its struggle for political power and went to the extremes to win cultural power by channelling its entire ideological resources into identity, it sanctified a new order of the righteous. It took a Trump, with the urgency of a rapid-fire vigilante, to turn politics into a folktale of good and better.

Harry PotterideologyJavier Mileiof George Floydpost-Trumpianrightwing politicsWokeism