2024: the year we regain our sanity?
For better or worse, this will be a year of consequence.
Throughout 2023 a creeping feeling began to develop. A change in the zeitgeist seems to be in the air. People are becoming less anxious about voicing mainstream, reasonable points of view that conflict with prevailing elite dogma. Topics that have been verboten in polite society for years or decades are coming back with a bang.
In much of the West, but particularly the Anglosphere, the adherents of the cancerous ideology that has come to be known as ‘woke’ appear to be losing their iron grip on the prevailing cultural narrative. Admittedly, this is not the first time this has been suggested - most notably, covid was supposed to destroy woke, yet 2020 was perhaps the year of greatest woke excess.
Be that as it may, the enormous cultural power wielded by the radical ‘woke’ left has been predicated on the tacit support of their more mainstream fellow travellers, allowing them to gain outsized influence within cultural institutions in both the public and private sectors. However, it does look like the tide may be turning; greater awareness of what certain ideological tenets mean in practice, the loss of powerful tools to bully and intimidate, and perhaps most important of all, the shocking (but not surprising) response to the atrocities of October 7th in Israel have put the illiberal left on the back foot.
What is ‘woke’?
The term ‘woke’ has come to be useful by virtue of its sticking power and the fact that people have a general sense of what it means, even if they cannot easily define it. The ideology it describes has been variously called ‘regressive leftism’, ‘neo-marxism’, ‘extreme political correctness’ and other things that, while good descriptors, did not resonate outside of the narrow group of people interested in such matters. It is possible to give a definition, however.
Woke can be best understood as a set of beliefs, with two underlying assumptions:
Truth is determined by language (postmodernism)
Society can be understood as hierarchy of competing interest groups, assigned a level of ‘privilege’ by their secondary characteristics such as ethnicity or sex, with those higher up oppressing those beneath them (intersectionality)
This is still far from a simple definition, and there is more that could be said, which is why the term ‘woke’ is so useful as a shorthand. The specifics of the ideology change with the times, but always at the core there is a disdain for reason, strength, and the West.
The adherents of such a worldview would generally prefer to be called ‘progressives’ (towards what, I wonder). In fact, ‘woke’ itself used to be used by those who held this worldview, or at least wished to placate those who did. It is only in the last few years that it has taken on its current, pejorative meaning.
In the last 10 years or so, this ideology has come to dominate within our ruling class, though remains deeply unpopular with the public (see Matt Goodwin for excellent discussion on this). If you think this is hyperbolic, ask yourself why every major institution has a DEI department and ESG mission (formalisations of the woke worldview), or why the phenomenon of ‘cancel culture’ was able to become so prevalent.
However, in 2023 the foundations of the woke cultural hegemony, namely public ignorance, mainstream liberal-left acceptance and the related institutional power have taken a beating.
Change in the air
Elon Musk finalised his takeover of Twitter in October 2022, but the consequences of what this would mean for the the cultural narrative were not immediately clear. Twitter had been the primary tool by which activists bullied and cajoled institutions and individuals to suppress any viewpoint they found disagreeable, specifically anyone with influence not on board with the latest update to the pantheon of beliefs. This is to say nothing of the alleged collusion between government entities and social media companies to engage in politically biased censorship.
Now that this toy has been taken away from them, it feels like a weight has been lifted. You rarely hear of people being ‘canceled’ anymore due to holding mainstream views. In fact, the opposite seems to be true, as the ‘Bud Light’ fiasco demonstrated.
There have been other good signs in recent months. The radical left favour illegal immigration for its subversive potential. In Europe, the immigration debate is back on the table after decades of people having their reasonable concerns pushed to the fringes (more on this in my previous post). In the US, UK and other places, people are becoming increasingly aware of the dangers that radical gender ideology pose to the young, women and gay people.
Anecdotally, one tends to hear far more ‘un-woke’ opinions expressed openly in social life. That is to say, mainstream and uncontroversial viewpoints, shared by the majority of people, that this time last year might have been whispered.
October 7th
Tragically, the greatest accelerator of the woke left’s declining grip on power may be the terrorist atrocities of October 7th. The reason being that it exposed their hateful worldview in no uncertain terms to those who may otherwise have been sympathetic, or at least ambivalent towards them. The woke tend to cloak their nastiness in the language of kindness and tolerance, but the mask has slipped too far this time. Let me explain.
You might expect those who claim to be interested in promoting the wellbeing of the downtrodden would find some sympathy with a people to whom history has not been especially kind, and against whom one of the worst terrorist atrocities in living memory was recently committed.
Hamas would slaughter every single Israeli man, woman and child if they could (and do not hide it), while the IDF takes extreme precaution to minimise civilian casualties - a difficult task when your enemy hides among the civilian population and counts on collateral damage for their propaganda.
Yet, after October 7th, the bodies of the murdered innocents were still warm when the woke were on the streets alongside the islamists in their tens of thousands, chanting antisemitic slogans.
This would strike most people as a contradiction, yet it is anything but. In the woke paradigm, moral worth sits in inverse relation to one’s position on the privilege / oppression hierarchy described above.
From this warped perspective, Israeli Jews are ‘colonisers’ aligned with the hated West, and anyone attacking them from ‘below’ is fully legitimate. When the only thing that matters is ‘power’, almost anything goes as long as it is flowing in the right direction. Mass murder, rape and kidnapping is fully conscionable if Hamas is a ‘resistance movement’, rather than a violent theocratic terror organisation. When the Israelis respond with limited force, this is naturally considered ‘genocide’.
It is within this worldview that such apparent contradictions as ‘Queers for Palestine’ can arise. Despite what Hamas would do with such people if they were unfortunate enough to find themselves in Gaza, the notion of solidarity with the ‘oppressed’ makes this viewpoint fully consistent with the rest of the ideology. That is to say nothing of the long and ignoble tradition of antisemitism in many ‘mainstream’ left-wing political movements. A discussion for another time.
The woke have been able to portray themselves as those who are simply ‘kind’, ‘compassionate’, and ‘caring’. Perhaps they even believe it. It had generally been accepted among the mainstream liberal left that these types, though they might take things a little far on occasion, had their hearts in the right place. This false notion, is in great part what allowed so many ‘woke’ causes to gain traction in recent years.
The October 7th massacre has been an eye opener to many. Whatever their political persuasion, most people have at least some degree of common sense and decency. The radical left, in shouting their support for obvious evil perpetrated by Hamas may have finally overplayed their hand.
A chain reaction?
The chief bastion of ‘woke’ culture was and is the academy, the place where it all started. Following October 7th, the presidents of a number of Ivy League universities were hauled before the US Congress to provide testimony around accusations of antisemitism on college campuses.
Despite spending the last decade suppressing any viewpoint that might offend an increasingly radical faculty or student body, these academic leaders are suddenly very interested in freedom of expression. Harvard’s President Gay even refused to concede that calls for genocide against Jews might constitute a violation of their rules against bullying and harassment. The fact that there was a congressional hearing in the first place is a sign that the woke stranglehold on our institutions is weakening.
Despite managing to cling on for months after several other heads rolled, President Gay has also been removed from her position following accusations of academic plagiarism. The consequences of this for academic and other institutions are not yet clear, but conservative activists like Christopher Rufo (who exposed the accusations and led the charge against Harvard) have been buoyed by their victory and will double down on their efforts.
Does this mean that the DEI stranglehold has been broken? Probably not, but it is a serious blow.
What’s next?
It is safe to say that any prediction will ultimately serve as cause for embarrassment down the line. The woke are on a losing streak, but liberal-minded people should not become complacent.
With the upcoming US election a number of things could change. If Trump can stay out of prison, it is entirely possible that he wins the presidency. The unwillingness of a significant element of the losing side to accept the result was a key feature of both of the last two general elections. If the result is close (highly likely), this could even more serious trouble for American democracy. Elections in Europe (and especially the UK) will also make interesting watching in 2024.
On the other hand, a resurgent identitarian right has the potential to undo all of the aforementioned progress, and hand the radical left the moral high-ground. See the ‘Christian Nationalist’ movement in the US, or any ethnocentric European populist party.
Only time will tell. Whatever happens, 2024 will be a year of consequence.