The Post-Woke World
Looking ahead to life in the late 2020s
Any discussion of woke is bound to frustrate because the two ideological camps, right and left, can barely agree on what it is, how long it’s existed, or how dominant it remains. Like pornography, most seem to know woke when they see it. After that, there’s a good deal of dissembling, and an honest account of the last decade is rarely possible. But it’s a topic worth dissecting, even now. Is woke dead? Yes, mostly. More importantly, what is it? Was it? Loosely, I’ve defined it as social justice politics: the primacy of identity over class. Standpoint ideology is triumphant. I am X, therefore I am right. Woke is, understandably, conceived of as a phenomenon of the left. A liberal who wants to rectify the problem of racism will propose “woke” solutions—adjust language or procedure to achieve a desired outcome. Anti-woke is the reaction to this, the rejection of such language or procedure. The struggle dates back decades, to fights over “political correctness” in the 1980s and 1990s. For our purposes here, that era will be left alone.
Instead, we will focus on Woke 1.0 and what the cultural critic Mo Diggs has called Red Woke, or right-wing woke—the backlash to 1.0, the new identity politics conservative and MAGA forces have embraced. Right now, we live in something like a culture cold war, where neither side, absent the machinery of the government that conservatives now control, can dominate the other. Woke cancellation attempts, the sort that reached their apogee in the late 2010s and 2020, are no more. Woke 1.0 was withering by the time Donald Trump was running for president in 2023 and 2024 and died, definitively, when he won. He did not need to win for Woke 1.0 to die—the excesses of the George Floyd/pandemic summer and the collapse of old Twitter, along with the natural passage of time, had weakened woke—but it became obvious, come 2025, the last vestiges of woke would not survive the assault from the federal government, whether it was the swift dismantling of DEI, the bullying of college administrations, or mass layoffs triggered by DOGE. Rather than foster a culture of free speech and free expression, conservatives simply embraced Red Woke, taking all the pathologies of the regime they hated and applying it to their own causes. They became the language cops, with even larger truncheons. Red Woke’s apotheosis is the defense of Israel. Like the old woke power players, conservatives and Zionist centrists like Bari Weiss decry the language of protest chants, stifle speech on college campuses, and treat the pro-Israel Jew like a precious, exalted minority who cannot be exposed to any adverse phraseology or criticism. Despite their efforts, the pro-Palestine, anti-Israel movement is larger than ever. If a right-wing counterculture existed in the Biden years, embodied by the MAGA-curious Dimes Square subversives, the counterculture has returned to the left, since Trump is in power and hated by large swaths of the country. Trump’s relentless defense of Israel has made pro-Palestine politics decidedly cool among the young, the way, in 1969 or so, you were on the youth vanguard if you were against the Vietnam War. The Trump administration can continue to strangle speech on college campuses, but this is a war they will not win, in the same way the Larry Ellison TikTok takeover can’t just convince a bunch of twenty-two-year-olds to start loving Israel. 1984 was a fine novel but it didn’t really understand the future. Our era may have an Orwellian flavor, but the discourse is too free and messy for any one government to dictate reality, as hard as it might try.
What does this all mean? What’s in store for the culture in 2027 and beyond? Are we about to, finally, get off the woke/anti-woke carousel?
