Is the woke madness beginning to ebb?

Has the English-speaking world hit peak woke? Consider these surprising developments:

• A Virginia county will restore Confederates’ names to schools. Stonewall Jackson High School became Mountain View High School in 2020. In 2025 it will become Stonewall Jackson High School again.
• The President of Harvard University, Claudine Gay, a champion of diversity, equity and inclusion, was forced to resign. Her successor is walking back on her policies.
• A Finnish study has linked “wokeness” to anxiety, depression, and unhappiness.
• This week it was reported that toolmaker giant Stanley Black and Decker has quietly backpedalled on its DEI policies.

Just two years ago, news like this was inconceivable. A tsunami of wokeness was inundating society.

According to research commissioned by The Economist, though, we’re a bit late to the party – wokeness peaked about 2021 and 2022 and has been declining since then. Come to think of it, when was the last time you read about a politician taking the knee or heard of someone attending a seminar on white fragility?

To conservative addicts of the Babylon Bee, YouTube and Twitter, this might sound bonkers. Every day brings new absurdities on their social media feeds – drag queen story hours, trans-friendly Olympics, AOC, diversity hires, intersectional perspectives in science and so on.

However, The Economist examined metrics of wokeness in public opinion, the media, universities and business. In all of them, wokeness is declining, although it is still higher than in 2015, before the election of Donald Trump.

• Public opinion. The percentage of people who believe that race is the most important issue in America today has fallen from about 20 percent after the killing of George Floyd in 2020 to 3 or 4 percent today. The number of people who believed that white people enjoy privileges that black people do not peaked in 2020.
• Media. In 2020 the term “white privilege” it featured about 2.5 times for every million words in the New York Times, but by 2023 it had dropped to just 0.4 mentions for every million words.
• Universities. The Economist tracked 154 woke terms like “intersectional”, “whiteness”, and “oppression” in academic journals and found that their apogee was in 2022. Cancel culture seems to be declining.
• Business. The number of people employed in DEI administration is falling as companies realise that wokeness is not necessarily profitable. The abject failure of promoting Bud Light with a transgender activist sent alarm bells ringing across corporate America.

Philosopher Musa al-Gharbi studies woke indicators as part of his research. He wrote last year that: “It’s been ten straight years of heightened unrest among knowledge economy professionals and within knowledge economy institutions and knowledge economy hubs. However, it seems like the wave is now beginning to crest.”

Part of the difficulty of detecting a decline in wokeness is that there is no agreement on what wokeness is. Progressives claim that they aren’t woke; they are simply fighting for social justice. Conservatives like Florida governor Ron DeSantis deride every obnoxious cultural issue as “woke”.

“Wokery isn’t a stable ideological system,” writes the pseudonymous academic Eugyppius on his Substack blog. “It is instead the mere ideological expression of a revolutionary process.” It is a toxic stew of social justice activism, decrepit Marxist theorizing, expressive individualism, anarchism, and political opportunism.

Like the Emperor’s new clothes, people are beginning to open their eyes to some of the absurdities of woke campaigns. Even the woke-est of the woke mainstream media, the New York Times, is beginning to acknowledge that the high tide of wokeness is receding.  Earlier this year columnist Michelle Goldberg wrote an elegiac obituary entitled: “Wokeness Is Dying. We Might Miss It”. She saw the writing on the wall months ago.

Business and politics have helped to accelerate the fading fortunes of woke folk.

Many corporations no longer believe that they have to bend the knee to woke pieties. Google, for instance, appeared to be in thrall to its woke employees. But in April it fired 50 employees who were protesting against its links to Israel.

The much-ballyhooed notion of a corporate commitment to social responsibility is evaporating. “It’s always on the margins,” Kenneth Pucker, of the Fletcher Business School at Tufts University, told Business Insider, “because the main goal of executives — the real responsibility, the way the structure of the system is organized, the way incentives work, the way the rules govern — is money making.”

And October 7 drove a wedge between political progressives and cultural progressives. After protests against Israel erupted, it wasn’t so cool anymore to be woke. Donning a keffiyeh was no longer just a symbol of solidarity with an oppressed minority. It expressed support for vile, ultra-violent Islamic fanaticism and rabid antisemitism. As Jason L. Riley pointed out in the Wall Street Journal, “Many who rushed to support Black Lives Matter following the death of George Floyd—professional sports leagues, Fortune 500 companies, placard-waving suburbanites—now seem shocked at how BLM reacted to the Oct. 7 terror attack in Israel. Yet nothing could have been more predictable.”

It’s too early to toll the bells for woke’s funeral. After all, there are plenty of people who are still obsessed with pronouns. As Ruy Teixeira, a highly regarded political scientist and commentator, has pointed out, the woke ethos remains active in bureaucracies even if it is fading amongst ordinary voters. A generation of university students has been indoctrinated with the post-modernist dogmas in which wokeness flourishes. After graduation they take this philosophy to their jobs. Teixeira wrote in 2022 in The Economist:

Wokeness is stubbornly entrenched in these institutions, and it is there that it will make its stand. Millions of people have jobs, money, positions and influence that are now bound up with wokeness, and they will not give it up easily. The world they inhabit is more insulated from the views of ordinary people than those of social discourse and political competition.

But given the downward trend of wokeness, perhaps it’s time to speculate about what comes next. Could it be an even more destructive movement? The fundamental problem we face is that society is trying to promote human dignity without a sound understanding of what a human being is. When a belief in God underpinned social institutions, people could agree on basic principles. But without a Creator, human beings and human happiness become just social constructs which change with every breeze. The 21st century has already brought lots of unpleasant surprises. There could be more to come.

What do you think? Is wokeness on the skids?

AUTHOR

Michael Cook

Michael Cook is editor of Mercator

EDITORS NOTE: This Mercator column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.