The revolution came so suddenly that even its agents were left reeling.
Woke is over. The old guardrails have been smashed to smithereens. The world is turning Trumpy.
Parties that were considered indecent until five minutes ago are winning elections across Europe. Senior Americans give straight-arm salutes. DEI officers are being laid off en masse.
We have moved, with no intervening phase, from a world in which a professor of Chinese can be suspended because he uses a Mandarin expression that sounds a bit like the n-word to one where it is OK to ask whether Rishi Sunak, as “a brown Hindu”, can be English.
Now the seventh seal has been broken.
Ash Sarkar – Ash Sarkar, for heaven’s sake – has declared that identity politics went too far. The gamine Communist has written a book which, among other things, pokes fun at the self-absorption of wokesters.
She recalls a conference in Liverpool at which Roger Hallam of Extinction Rebellion was roundly condemned as a racist for using the c-word, prompting someone to demand that “we dismantle all our movements that aren’t majority people of colour”. As she drily notes, that is not an obviously winning strategy in a nation which is 85 per cent white.
Such observations might sound unremarkable. But Sarkar was among the most acerbic of our tricoteuses when the Woke Terror was at its height, arguing that “the presence of white people automatically means the presence of racism”, and being especially vituperative about ethnic-minority Tories. She dismissed the amiable Munira Mirza, for example, as a “racial gatekeeper” giving cover to white supremacy.
Some of the people who suffered during the purges are understandably suspicious about Sarkar’s conversion, calling her a hypocrite or worse.
But I am inclined to take her at her word.
She is not the first Marxist to walk this road. Her Novara colleague Aaron Bastani has been on a similar journey over the past couple of years. Indeed, when Living Marxism collapsed in 2001, its best writers went on to create the rebarbatively libertarian publication Spiked. Joy shall be in heaven over one sinner that repenteth, and all that.
I always found Sarkar’s wokery – including on free speech and deplatforming – incongruous. She seemed too clever, too playful, too self-aware to believe in such rot. The interesting question, for me, is not why she has disowned identity politics, but how she ever came to spout its slogans in the first place.
The answer owes a great deal to fashion. Accelerating through the twenty-first century, especially after 2015, wokery took on a meme-like force. It did not seek to persuade; indeed, it came with a built-in defence against reasoned criticism, namely “you don’t get to have an opinion about this, white man”. It aimed, rather, to flatten all opposition with its sense of inevitability.
Fashion can be dangerous when it assumes an ideological form. For me, the enduring image of the Great Awokening was a crowd of white BLM protesters in 2020 screaming at a woman who was sitting at an outdoor restaurant table in DC, furious because she was carrying on with her dinner rather than joining their protest. Looking at the hate-filled expressions behind their facemasks, I saw that blinding self-righteousness that drives every ruinous ideology, that sense that history is moving, and that those who refuse to get on board are not so much opponents as detritus.
A combination of fashion and self-righteousness can make people believe any manner of rubbish. In the mid-1970s, paedophiles tried to come out on the back of gay lib. Because emancipation was a super-trendy cause, all sorts of otherwise level-headed people initially went along with them, including the National Council for Civil Liberties, which employed the future Labour MPs Harriet Harman and Patricia Hewitt. I mention the episode, not to slight the two women – on the contrary, both have had big and benign impacts on Labour politics – but to show how hard it is for well-meaning young people to reject a fashionable idea.
You might argue that wokery is hardly paedophilia, and that hounding academics from their jobs for using the wrong word, however unpleasant, is not on the same scale as abusing children. Then again, it was identity politics made police and local authority workers stand by while children were sexually abused rather than risk being called racist.
Even while those horrors were unfolding, the woke never lost their sense of self-righteousness. Twitter pile-ons resembled that photograph of the BML brutes in Washington, the bullies convinced that their sadism and viciousness proved their compassion.
Elon Musk’s takeover of that platform is arguably the single biggest driver of the recent revolution. Twitter encouraged woke preference falsification. Centrists and liberal Lefties felt they had to declare their support for deplatforming, decolonisation and equity because everyone else was doing so – which, of course, created the idea that these ideas were popular. Now X is winding the ratchet the other way.
The trouble is that the new trends show every sign of being as intolerant, self-pitying and collectivist as the old. The woke Left is being displaced, not by a return to individualism and colour-blindness, but by what Konstantin Kisin calls “the woke Right”.
People are still categorised by group, but the goodies and baddies are switched around. A new set of words is off-limits. It’s now fine to say manpower or midwife, but not birthgiver or Latinx.
The old conservative ideal, that the government should do as little as possible, has been replaced with the idea that the power of the state should be mobilised against people you dislike. Several US states, for example, passed legislation to prohibit businesses from requiring facemasks on their own premises.
We see, too, the same cult-like willingness to believe absurdities when a new party line is declared. The readiness of Trump’s acolytes, both in the US and Britain, to argue that Ukraine is a worse dictatorship than Russia, or that Canada is somehow the aggressor on trade, is every bit as striking as the willingness of wokies to argue that sex is an artificial and mutable social construct.
What of us small-government types, those of us who believe that free speech, free contract, free association and free markets raised the human race to a pinnacle of wealth and happiness? Ours was a good old song, but its echoes are already fading. Ah, well, it was nice while it lasted.