The Woke Apocalypse is Upon Us! (Or Do I Have To Admit It's Getting Better All The Time?)

A few months ago I happened to listen to two podcasts back-to-back that took sharply different slants on the culture wars, or how incredibly woke things are going to get. Peter Boghossian, interviewed by Melissa Chen and Angel Eduardo on the FAIR Perspectives podcast, deplored “institutional rot” and argued that “legacy institutions” (media, academia) cannot be saved from wokeness. On The Fifth Column, however, Kmele Foster, John McWhorter, and Glenn Loury, had a more optimistic perspective, seeing many signs that illiberal tendencies in liberal institutions were being successfully opposed, that a tide had turned (my phrasing, not theirs).

My feeling, and this is something I’ve been thinking since mid 2021, is that The Fifth Column is right and the cultural trend that we sometimes call “woke” has begun to lose its grip.

I realize that my readers have now immediately split into hostile camps screaming “Talking about woke is just fascist propaganda!” or “Are you kidding? Wokeness already runs Citibank and all of Poughkeepsie!” Hush screaming people. I got on Twitter back in 2020 because anxiety about this woke thing was making me over-the-top peevish and I don’t like that feeling so I’ve been looking for a road to tranquility ever since. Now that I see the I-95 exit to Sanity coming up on my left, all your shouting ain’t gonna stop me!

Before I make my case, I have to spend some time trying to explain what exactly I mean by “woke” or “wokeness.” (Which is annoying because however you define woke, you will face disparaging bellows of disagreement.)

What is Woke?

“Woke” dates back to at least the 1930s. In the era of lynching, “stay woke” was an admonition black Americans passed on to one another to stay alert to racist dangers.

Be aware of and alert to how racism is systemic and pervasive and suffuses American life. Wake up from the slumber of ignorance and passive acceptance.
Charles Blow, New York Times, Nov 2021

Woke, however, has evolved and is now often used as a catch-all for social justice and identity politics.

On the left, to be “woke” means to identify as a staunch social justice advocate who’s abreast of contemporary political concerns
— Aja Romano, Vox, Oct 2020

Despite Romano’s confident pronouncement, what exactly “woke” is remains hard to pin down. The various culture warrior tribes argue about its meaning while overusing and abusing it. There are even those who deny there is any such thing as woke, which is boss-level gaslighting.

Freddy deBoer wrote about this naming nonsense in, “Please Just Fucking Tell Me What Term I Am Allowed to Use for the Sweeping Social and Political Changes You Demand.” Overuse has perhaps made woke a silly label but we gotta say something. As Freddy says, please give us a different word and we’ll happily use that!¹

So what is this thing we call woke? David French, a writer at The Atlantic and The Dispatch offered: “left-wing institutional intolerance and illiberalism regarding race, sex, and religion,” which is good but maybe a bit too concise.

Freddy offers this dense description:

[A] political movement … which combines several schools of academic progressivism such as intersectionality, trans-inclusionary feminism, and anti-racism with a focus on interpersonal relations as the primary site of political activity, resistance towards economic class as a political lens, and a belief in the essentially immutable prevalence of bigotry, all expressed through an abstruse vocabulary that signals adherence to this movement and its social culture.

In 2021, John McWhorter went a few steps further and wrote a whole book (Woke Racism) arguing that wokeness is actually a religion. “I do not mean that these people’s ideology is ‘like’ a religion. I seek no rhetorical snap in this comparison. I mean that it actually is a religion.” He describes the woke statement of faith as:

Battling power relations and their discriminatory effects must be the central focus of all human endeavor, be it intellectual, moral, civic, or artistic. Those who resist this focus, or even evidence insufficient adherence to it, must be sharply condemned, deprived of influence, and ostracized.

I like McWhorter but despite scenes like the one above (and in 2020 there were lots of scenes of white people apologizing for their collective racism), I don’t see wokeness (or social justice politics, or third-wave antiracism, all labels McWhorter also uses) as a religion, although it certainly can have a religious feel.

I’d call woke a messy (and oft misused) label for a left-wing ideology that sees society as deeply defined by people's membership in certain identities—race, gender identity, sexual orientation—and believes ongoing oppression of some identities must be fought with a religious fervor. It’s the fervor, the assumption that anyone opposing their ideas is a hateful bigot, that gives wokeness its disturbing air of sanctimony, and separates it most sharply from old-time liberals like myself. Its most dedicated adherents are absolutely sure that they are fighting for a better world and resistance cannot be tolerated. This is what makes them so censorious and why McWhorter calls them, “The Elect.”

In practical terms, the woke are the people who are always complaining about the patriarchy, white privilege, and deciding who needs to be canceled next for selling tacos while white or using an “okay” gesture while driving. Sometimes they are especially silly, as when Vox decided that knitting had a white supremacy problem.

Finally, the woke tend to ignore class issues, the defining focus of the old left. This is why men like Adolph Reed, a black Marxist professor, dismiss woke-style anti-racism as a solution. “To make Jeff Bezos and his stockholders as rich as they are, Amazon needs to underpay its workers. It doesn’t need to care the slightest bit what color they are.”

The epitome of woke is Saira Rao, a Twitter activist and one-time congressional candidate who regularly produces nuggets of wisdom attacking white people. (She’s also married to Shiv Govindan, a wealthy businessman, which is perhaps why she never seems to mention wealth privilege.)

saira rao @sairasameerarao

When white folks say they wish everyone would “just come together” and “get along,” they are actually telling Black, Indigenous and brown folks to shut up, accept their racism and perhaps throw in a please and thank you.

Rao runs events where white women pay for the privilege of having Rao and a black colleague (Regina Jackson) come to dinner and berate them for their racism (Race2Dinner). She also has a book blaming white women for everything. (White Women: Everything You Already Know About Your Own Racism and How to Do Better).

But while the woke can be ridiculous, they still matter because they have outsize influence in academia and the media. Woke activists attempt to silence or frame important debates in ways that are harmful for America. It’s especially bad that they seem to believe that disagreeing with them is completely unacceptable and spend great effort trying to shut down contrary viewpoints.

Much of this is a matter of degree. What’s the difference between offering healthy disagreement and trying to shout down any debate? I think the distinction is generally clear, but there are plenty of fuzzily grey areas.

And if you don’t think all this is a problem, just listen to President Obama:

I think where we get into trouble sometimes is where we try to suggest that some groups are more – because they historically have been victimized more – that somehow they have a status that’s different than other people and we’re going around scolding folks if they don’t use exactly the right phrase. Or that identity politics becomes the principle lens through which we view our various political challenges. And to me, I think, that, for a lot of average folks, ends up feeling as if: you’re not speaking to me and my concerns, or for that matter, my kid’s concerns and their future. It feels as if I’m being excluded from that conversation rather than brought into a conversation.
— Barack Obama, Pod Save America, October 14, 2022

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A few caveats

First, part of why wokeness (or social justice activism or identity politics or etc.) has been so successful is that it is rooted in something true: Bigotry is bad! Racism is bad, homophobia is bad, sexism is bad. It’s good to oppose these things. That is why so many good people have joined this way of looking at the world. The problem with identity politics is not their laudable goals but that their methods are often bad and that they regularly exaggerate the extent of the problem. Bigotry still exists but we’re not as awful as these activists say. We’ve improved, a lot, and that’s good! That doesn’t mean, of course, that there isn’t more we could and should be doing. From some angles, I’m sure I could be seen as woke, and I’m fine with that.

Second, not everything you hate is wokeness. As David French points out, some bad faith pundits on the right use “woke” to basically mean, “any thought even one inch to my left.” These people will use the supposed threat of wokeness to attack anything they don’t like, from abortion to gay marriage to support for Ukraine.

Third, wokeness isn’t a single coherent thing. It’s shorthand for a social movement, a set of linked trends, a way of looking at the world, that has evolved over the last decade or so (and has roots going back to the 1970s). There is no woke bible and plenty of people who I’d call woke would reject that label for themselves. While a generally shared ideology has evolved, the woke don’t all embrace precisely the same views. Someone might be more woke on race but less so on trans issues. Only a small minority qualify as steely-eyed true believers (although this minority can sometimes dominate the conversation with their stridency). Those who see wokeness as some kind of tightly organized leftist conspiracy have been smoking too much Colorado weed.

Fourth, like all trends, wokeness has a limited shelf-life, and my feeling is that the expiration date, at least of the more extreme variety of wokeness, has come wheeling into view.

It’s the end of the world as we know it.

Back in 2020, like many, I was a bit freaked out by the seeming dominance of this new worldview. What unnerved me was how everyone I knew, everyone in my progressive world, from friends on Facebook to New York Times editorials, seemed to be saying the same thing in the same way. The subtext was “be with us or else.” Resistance was futile.

Of course, that wasn’t really true. In fact, even before 2020, as I watched wokeness on the rise, I was aware of counter-currents. I followed writers like Meghan Daum and Thomas Chatterton Williams who were critical of this increasingly illiberal interpretation of social justice. Daum’s The Problem With Everything and Williams’ Self-Portrait in Black and White both came out in 2019 and while not explicitly anti-woke, they were very critical of the kind of thinking that had become popular in lefty institutions. I’ve also been a big fan of Katie Herzog, who in 2020 joined Jesse Singal in creating Blocked and Reported, a podcast on Internet madness, which started taking shots at lefty insanity.

When George Floyd was murdered the woke heat ratcheted up to 11. The understandable anger at watching the video of his death, combined with the general claustrophobia of the COVID lockdowns, led to a mass moral panic. Issue a statement, put a block box on Instagram, and don’t you dare say anything nice about the cops. David Shor (Civis Analytics), James Bennet (New York Times), Stan Wischnowski (Philadelphia Inquirer), and many others, fired or forced to resign. It made a contrarian like me worry about the safety of my own untenured position.

And then things started to shift.

On July 7, 2020, Harper’s Magazine published a letter taking a stand against the apparent monoculture. (“A Letter on Justice and Open Debate”).

censoriousness is also spreading more widely in our culture: an intolerance of opposing views, a vogue for public shaming and ostracism, and the tendency to dissolve complex policy issues in a blinding moral certainty. We uphold the value of robust and even caustic counter-speech from all quarters.

The “Harper’s Letter” received pushback, including a counter-letter, but it also received widespread praise, from biggish names and relative nobodies. Angel Eduardo, an awesome guy I first “met” on Twitter and later in person, penned the beautiful “I’m a Nobody. The Harper’s Letter was for Me” in Areo magazine.

Its detractors completely missed the point. The signatories are doing this on behalf of those of us who aren’t immune from cancellation. They’re doing it for people like me, who have way more to lose.

Next came the Substack Revolution. Writers like Yascha Mounck, Matt Taibbi, and Matty Yglesias, all lefty voices, departed mainstream publications and started writing columns that went against the woke narratives. I was also reading the bravely heterodox Cathy Young, first at Arc Digital, now at The Bulwark. I found open-minded voices on the right, like David French and Jonah Goldberg at The Dispatch. And as I walked around town, I could be listening to The Fifth Column (Kmele Foster, Matt Welch, Michael Moynihan), the Unspeakable Podcast (Meghan Daum), and Fair Perspectives (Melissa Chen and Angel Eduardo). Things that I thought could only be whispered were now being shouted everywhere.

More recently, I’ve noticed a shift in mainstream media. The New York Times used to be my liberal bible. Every morning I’d stagger out of bed and slurp soggy raisin bran while reading what the Times had to say. After Trump’s election, however, and especially during the tumult of 2020, I’d felt the Grey Lady² had become more knee-jerk and ideological. That seemed to shift again in 2021. They published more articles that weren’t quite in lockstep with woke narratives. I have no inside source at the Times, but I had a feeling that the adults in the room were pushing back on more activist writers.

Ben Smith, a former Times writer, now editor-in-chief at Semafor, confirms some of this in interviews with Times staffers. The woke insurgents seemed to have lost support and influence, management has retaken the reins.

Choire Sicha, the former Style Section editor who was among the progressive insurgents, told me simply that “everyone’s sort of given up.”

The Times hiring John McWhorter, the man who’d just penned Woke Racism was a major shift. McWhorter wrote about all sorts of things (including linguistics and music), but his was another voice going against the so-called “moral clarity” that had been advocated by Times writer Wesley Loury in his 2020 opinion piece, A Reckoning Over Objectivity, Led by Black Journalists. I prefer objectivity—or at least an attempt to achieve it—over moral clarity.

McWhorter wasn’t the only familiar byline at the Times. I saw Jesse Singal hired to write a review of Helen Joyce’s new book on transgender issues, Trans. Zaid Jilani, a smart writer I follow on Twitter, had his very favorable review of McWhorter’s book (John McWhorter Argues That Antiracism Has Become a Religion of the Left) published by the Times. More recently Meghan Daum interviewed a conservative therapist in an opinion piece. All three writers, although clearly of the left, were not popular in woke circles. To see their bylines at the Times was to see a cultural shift in the making. Again, I felt the Times, still very liberal, was tacking back towards the center-left.

Then in March of this year, the Times published “America Has a Free Speech Problem.”

How has this happened? In large part, it’s because the political left and the right are caught in a destructive loop of condemnation and recrimination around cancel culture. Many on the left refuse to acknowledge that cancel culture exists at all, believing that those who complain about it are offering cover for bigots to peddle hate speech. Many on the right, for all their braying about cancel culture, have embraced an even more extreme version of censoriousness as a bulwark against a rapidly changing society

The Times piece used polling to argue that Americans were afraid to speak up and that this was bad for our shared democracy. It was as if the 2022 Times editorial board was channeling 2020’s “Harper’s Letter.”

And I feel fine?

So woke is dead?

Not quite, but it ain’t what it used to be. While it’s still strong as ever in some circles—read this piece about whiteness and affinity circles on Broadway—it’s lost its illusion of dominance in others, like the New York Times. Overall, it no longer has the moral high ground. Too many folks have started to realize the emperor has no clothes.

Whether you agree depends a lot on where you live, where you work, who your friends are, and what you’ve been through. Someone working in a world where the priggish language of wokishness is still the norm is probably reading my words and laughing bitterly. They might rightly point out that I’m writing under a pseudonym because I still worry that my words might cause me too much blowback. If this censorious culture is gone, Carl, why no last name? Fair point.

Still, most people don’t live in a hyper-woke world. Yes, your corporation job may expose you to a badly thought-out DEI training exercise, but it’s not part of your day-to-day life. Some academic departments are still prioritizing woke language, but for others that isn’t part of their reality, a point Jesse Singal made about a recent trip to the University of Wyoming.

Jesse Singal @jessesingal

The faculty members I met with tended to side-eye "wokeness" (or whatever) but the idea that *that* had a particularly negative impact on their ability to do their jobs... nope. Again, this is not original and I've mentioned this before, but worth keeping in mind.

Jesse Singal @jessesingal

People just need to accept both-and thinking. It is both true that if you work in a wealthy, liberal institution "wokeness" (or w/e) can be a pernicious influence and that in other places, it's barely a whisper of a concern.

One of the key traits of woke extremism has been its attempt to silence other voices as illegitimate and even dangerous. For a while, too many folks were cowed, fearing being called a racist, or worse. With a plethora of counter-voices, and a seeming righting of the ship, especially at the Times, that’s no longer the case.

On the The Fifth Column episode that I mentioned at top, McWhorter put forward his own job at the Times as a kind of bellwether of the changing mood. Would the oh-so-liberal Times have hired someone who had published a book attacking wokeness if the thing itself hadn’t lost some of its charm? McWhorter chose his words carefully, but he argued that folks at the Times recognized that it was important to hear from a broader range of voices. They didn’t want a monoculture.

And really, no matter whether I’m right about extreme wokeness fading now, it can’t last forever. The ideology is too uptight and grim to be tenable for long. This is why David French said in July that “I think we’ve passed what you might call ‘peak woke.’”

To connect with the issues at the start of this piece, when speaking about the wave of intolerance that’s swept the academy, philanthropy, Hollywood, and much of mainstream media, I’ve told conservative friends that they have no idea how miserable it was making most of the people in those organizations. Something had to give, and the immiserated majority is going to be intimidated by the motivated minority for only so long. 

Almost nobody likes sanctimonious tattletales.³ They may be guilted into it for a while, or scared into it, or seduced by the sense of being virtuous, but resentment will always be bubbling under the surface. This is why people used to make fun of political correctness and now make fun of wokeness. "Check your privilege" used to be a powerful admonishment, now it's a punchline.

In the end, it’s all a vibe. What articles you read, what your boss is saying, who you’re dating, that’ll determine how you see what’s going down. My own world has become less stressed and perhaps that’s why I feel the thing has lost some of its mojo.⁴ Like French, I’m hearing people cracking cynical jokes about forbidden topics in a way they wouldn’t have two years ago. Some of my students are bringing up free speech concerns in a way that would warm John Stuart Mill’s heart. And sure, other people are still spouting woke rhetoric, but in more and more places it feels like a debate, not an unchallenged recitation of dogma.

The vibe has shifted.

1. I expect that “woke” will soon be so passé that this whole essay will be an embarrassing blast from the past. You know, like those 50s and 60s articles that talked about “hep cats” and dropped in the occasional “cool daddy-o.”

2. The Times was nicknamed “the Grey Lady” for its serious and sober journalism, like a stodgy old lady. Some of us codgers are still annoyed that they’ve started using color on their photos.

3. Even sanctimonious tattletales hate the other sanctimonious tattletales.

4. And if I get fired next week, I’ll take this all back and scream that the sky is falling. No, seriously, I totally will.