Some say there’s no such thing as wokeness. Others accept there might be such a thing but it’s just an abusive right-wing jibe at those who have a sincere commitment to social justice. Others again say wokeness does exist and that it’s a rigidly moralising form of left-wing identity politics. And there are those who believe that the word accurately describes everything irritating in modern life, from cycle lanes to health warnings on wine bottles.
Lately there have been signs that, whatever your stand on wokeness, it’s on the wane. Centre-left parties in different countries are wondering why they’ve lost the support of the working class, with many blaming an undue deference to a set of esoteric ideas about gender and race that those voters often find alienating or irrelevant.
Podcast: why 'left' and 'woke' are not the same thing - with Susan Neiman
Even in Ireland, a place in thrall to extreme wokeness if you believe the right-wing UK and US media, last year’s defeat of the family and care referendums suggested the alleged fever might indeed be breaking.
Most critics define wokeness as a postmodern form of left-wing politics that rejects traditional Enlightenment values as being imperialist, patriarchal and Eurocentric. Now, though, a new phenomenon has emerged: the “woke right” mimics many of the tactics of the “woke left” that it claims to oppose. Its emergence offers a new perspective on the original idea of wokeness: if its methods and mindset can be so easily mirrored by those with opposite political aims, then perhaps the approach itself is fundamentally flawed.
[ ‘Woke’ keeps coming up in elections but it is a meaningless insultOpens in new window ]
Like its progressive alter ego, the woke right claims that words are dangerous, and that vulnerable groups must be protected from them. Like its opponents, it deploys the language of psychotherapy to justify itself.
In Florida, under a 2022 law written using terminology that uncannily recalls words previously used to justify “safe spaces” on college campuses, schools are now banned from teaching anything about historical racism in the US that could make students “feel guilt, anguish or other forms of psychological distress”. This in a former slave state where legal segregation continued until the late 1960s.
Meanwhile, since coming to power, the Trump administration has shown more enthusiasm for enforcing language codes than the most radical cultural-studies theorist, running word searches through every official document and excising blasphemies such as “diversity” and “inclusion” wherever they occur, often with ludicrous results.
And mobilisation tactics usually associated with left-wing activism such as boycotts and cancellations have been enthusiastically taken up by protesters objecting to LGBT-friendly messaging by brands such as Bud Light and Target.
The woke right defines itself as an oppressed minority, subjugated and silenced by an elite liberal consensus. But its supposed commitment to free speech is skin-deep and its hypocrisy knows no bounds. JD Vance lectures Europeans about US tech companies’ right to free speech in their countries, while his own government runs ideologically driven checks on the social-media accounts of US visa applicants.
Unlike their left-wing counterparts, woke right-wingers don’t have the intellectual ballast of decades of unreadable doctoral theses to bolster their claims. Some of their actions, such as bringing Afrikaner farmers as refugees to the US – are simply provocations designed to troll the libs. But others take the successful activist playbook of the past 10 years and put it to their own use. And both movements share a postmodern antipathy to the idea that there can be any such a thing as empirical truth.
Rather than embracing free inquiry and institutional neutrality, both sides now use institutional power as a weapon in culture war battles. In doing so they validate the idea that might makes right, rejecting liberal democratic ideals.
[ The Irish Times view on Trump’s war on woke: an unwarranted interferenceOpens in new window ]
Some on the left will argue that drawing such parallels is unfair or downright false because progressives are motivated by admirable humanitarian goals while the reactionary right clearly is not. As a letter writer to The Irish Times put it recently, “progressive values are not censorship,” seemingly oblivious to the fact that they can be and it just depends on how they’re applied. The idea that if your ends are justified (which in itself should be open to debate) then your means will be too does not have a happy history.
One reason the ideological extreme right is in a position to instrumentalise these tactics so effectively is because the institutions it attacks had already ceded the high ground.
Consider the disastrous performances of the heads of some of America’s most prestigious universities when brought before a hostile congressional committee last year to defend themselves against accusations of tolerating anti-Semitism on their campuses.
Their wan attempts to defend the speech rights of pro-Palestinian demonstrators were fatally undermined by their colleges’ long records of failing to do the same for perspectives that had been deemed unacceptably heterodox by students and faculty alike.
An early casualty of the emergence of the woke right is likely to be the marriage of convenience that had developed in recent years between some anti-woke conservatives and anti-woke liberals concerned about the rise of intolerant groupthink in universities, the media and the wider culture.
Australian journalist Claire Lehman, for example, whose magazine Quillete was a flagship of this uneasy coalition for its dissections of the excesses of the progressive establishment, now finds herself disowned by part of it for her criticism of Trumpism. Both critiques are grounded in exactly the same principles.
At its worst, woke leftism demands conformity to an ever-evolving set of progressive values. Those who question or fall short of these values, even inadvertently, are often publicly shamed or ostracised as racists or bigots. The woke right has adopted a nearly identical posture: conservatives who do not conform to its own orthodoxies on gender and race are dismissed as traitors, RINOs (Republicans in name only) or globalist shills.
This growing trend of ideological absolutism across the spectrum undermines reasoned debate. Both the woke left and right encourage in-group loyalty and out-group hostility, fostering a culture of mutual suspicion and self-censorship. When disagreement becomes synonymous with moral failure, democracy suffers, and open discourse retreats.
