Why woke will never truly die

When the newly re-elected US president Donald Trump began his drive to dismantle all manifestations of modern identity politics in the arms of state back in January, many concluded that this signalled the ‘end of woke’. News that he had created an advisory group, the Department of Government Efficiency, to enact swinging cuts to the US government, was followed by a flurry of comment articles proclaiming that hyper-liberal ideology was finished. Although this mood of exhilaration has now subsided, there remains a feeling that woke is over.

Andrew Doyle is too seasoned a veteran of the culture war to be swept away in such a wave of unbridled optimism. As author of Free Speech and Why it Matters, (2021) and The New Puritans: How the Religion of Social Justice Captured the Western World (2022), he knows full well the power and allure of an ideology that captured so many institutions worldwide. It was unlikely to go quietly or quickly, and certainly not by the mere fiat of a president. As Doyle reminds us, wokery (or wokeism, a consensus on the abstract noun has yet to be established) remains so powerful, and was able to propagate dangerous absurdities, because it duped people into believing that it was simply about ‘fairness’ and ‘being nice’. It was allowed to become so brutal and intolerant because it could tar its opponents as ‘nasty’ – as racists, bigots and ‘phobes’.

Rather than follow the blind and sometimes desperate optimism of those who say that’s all over and everything’s now better, Doyle’s latest book, The End of Woke, expresses a tentative hope that this just might be the case. Perhaps too tentatively. ‘During the woke era, the gender wars became the key means by which power was exerted and the authoritarian impulse unleashed’, he writes in the past tense. Then, in the present tense, he writes: ‘Now that woke is dying… we are moving into a new phase of the culture war.’ Eventually, Doyle shifts to the subjunctive mood when he says: ‘With any luck, the end of woke will mean that books will no longer be treated with suspicion.’ A less assured writer than Doyle might have appended a question mark to the book’s title.

Whether woke is at an end, the author cannot tell us for sure. Developments since the book’s publication suggest it isn’t. The hounding of television chef John Torode for supposed racist remarks which he made years ago, or the sending home of a schoolgirl for wearing a Union Jack dress on ‘diversity day’, remind us that the spirit of censure and intolerance is very much still here.

As these two incidents indicate, woke certainly lives on in matters related to race, ethnicity and multiculturalism. Where attitudes and governmental policies have shifted noticeably, even in the past 12 months, is on issues pertaining to trans and gender. And it is on this issue that Doyle writes with the greatest authority and persuasiveness.

The Cass Review of April last year not only put a stop to the reckless medicalisation of children. It also heralded the beginning of the end of what Doyle has neatly dubbed the ‘woke supremacy’ in the area of gender. This is noticeable even when it comes to trivial matters, such as preferred pronouns on email signatures or social-media bios, which have largely disappeared. And Doyle is spot on to observe, as an increasing proportion of the populace has also come to see, how the gay-rights movement as embodied in the first Pride march of 1970 has changed beyond recognition: hijacked and debased by opportunists, woke capitalists and the bandwagon-jumping herd. ‘Pride has transformed from an important act of resistance into a month-long orgy of corporate veneration and virtue-signalling, teeming with heterosexuals desperate to slink their way into an oppressed group with the help of gender ideology’, he writes.

Doyle hesitates to declare with finality the end of woke, perhaps because he is too familiar with the beast he has been grappling with ever since he became a chronicler of it via his alter ego, Titania McGrath. It was through this faux social-justice warrior, in the late 2010s, that he initially came to expose the irrationality of wokery. And she makes a welcome re-appearance here. Doyle reminds us how she first explained how gender identity simply is ‘the immutable yet totally fluid feeling that one is male or female or neither or both based on conceptions of masculinity or femininity that are natural and innate but also social constructions that don’t actually exist’. Only now, very recently, and thanks to the likes of Doyle, have many come to see through the flawed logic of much wokery.

One suspects Doyle isn’t convinced that woke is over, because he appreciates the eternal instincts that brought it about in the first place. He recognises what causes human beings to act in such a belligerent, censorial and cruel way when they descend into tribal thinking and fall under the spell of perfectionist idealism. It’s because, in a theme he returns to, people have always behaved like this, and he sees no reason why we will ever change our ways. It’s no accident that the names of Plato and Thomas Hobbes re-emerge throughout. Plato because the ancient Greek embodied that timeless urge to create a perfect society, by force if need be. Hobbes because he warned us that without the constraints of civilisation, we will remain slaves to our savage, animal predispositions.

While Doyle protests that he seeks to defend the good name and honest spirit of ‘liberalism’, one that was once embodied by John Stuart Mill, one can’t help but suspect that there looms within him the mind and soul of a conservative. He is resigned to the imperfect follies of man: ‘The authoritarian impulse is the default condition of humankind, the true “state of nature”, and that civilisation is the armour we construct against our basic instincts.’ His warning about the ‘woke right’ as an emergent, reactionary and equally strong force is less convincing. However intolerant the Very Online right-wingers may be, I can’t envisage them ever capturing institutions of education, health and government to such a comparable degree.

Is woke over? Probably not. Not yet, at least. Even if it is, we must be on guard for its reappearance in a different form. The naïve belief that humanity can be perfected, and done so by means of force if need be, will never be extinguished.

Patrick West is a spiked columnist. His latest book, Get Over Yourself: Nietzsche For Our Times, is published by Societas.