How Woke Won: The Elitist Movement That Threatens Democracy, Tolerance and Reason: 1 (None)

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The obsessive focus on language leaves advocates of woke politics open to the accusation that their project is superficial and performative rather than concerned with bringing about material changes to the quality of people’s lives. According to King, the white elite sought to challenge nascent populism because ‘the leaders of this movement began awakening the poor white masses and the former negro slaves to the fact that they were being fleeced by the emerging Bourbon interests’. To be woke is to see gender as multiple and fluid and to employ a complex vocabulary that begins with trans- and cis-gender and branches out into nonbinary, agender, pangender, genderqueer, demigirl and so on.

US congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez complains: ‘“Woke” is a term pundits are now using as a derogatory euphemism for civil rights and justice. After all, what counts as woke and what it means to be woke, change more frequently than the meaning of the word itself. It assumes that some are too ignorant, and others too vulnerable, for people to be allowed to control their own lives and shape their nation. Teachers are offered advice on ‘keeping your classroom woke’ and the Guardian gives readers dating tips on how to find ‘Mr Woke’.Even those who agree with woke values in general can’t quite decide whether or not woke is a good thing to be. The white elite sought to challenge nascent populism because: ‘The leaders of this movement began awakening the poor white masses and the former Negro slaves to the fact that they were being fleeced by the emerging Bourbon interests.

This has happened not off the strength of woke ideology alone, but because such institutions have long since abandoned their founding principles.Everyone on the planet has their own, unique, ‘lived experience’ so it is not useful for forming generalities. Woke thinking provides those who run national institutions with a moral mission and a sense of purpose. Woke activists are obsessed with race and gender identity to the exclusion of almost all other issues. Woke captures something in our political and cultural zeitgeist and, as such, its usage has become ubiquitous. They are concerned about the inflationary rhetoric that brands those not completely on board with woke thinking ‘homophobes’, ‘transphobes’ or ‘fascists’.

Both meanings were used in black dialect and were brought to the attention of the wider American public with a 1962 New York Times article by African American novelist William Melvin Kelley. Speech codes, ‘Implicit Association Tests’ and HR Departments strip the individual employee of his or her subjectivity. They have moved from the fringes of political life to the mainstream and now influence the actions of public institutions, national governments and private businesses. Decades later, ‘woke’ would not only come to be taken on board by white hipsters but, at the very same time, exposing and condemning appropriation – be it cultural or linguistic – would itself become a woke action.Workers are divided ‘according to identity, overriding social class and empowering employers to act as neutral, therapeutic arbiters in workplace conflicts’. Nor is it enough for people not to be racist – they must, in the words of Ibram X Kendi, be actively anti-racist. Complaints that this view may rehabilitate racial thinking and racist practices such as segregation can be safely ignored: it’s far more important for the woke set that race is discussed using the correct language. Woke politics aims at social justice through the foregrounding of identity politics: at its core is an insistence on categorising people according to immutable characteristics such as race or sex, before dividing and ranking according to assumed hierarchies of oppression. Worse, it breathes new life back into racial thinking and emphasises differences between people that were only recently overcome.