Joe Hildebrand: Radical left casts shadow in its wake
The death of woke wasn’t murder, it was suicide. It was something the lunatic left brought entirely upon itself, writes Joe Hildebrand.
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The bells of freedom are pealing: “Woke is dead!” they sing. “Cancel culture is cancelled!”
The death knell has been sounded across the political spectrum, from Donald Trump to Lionel Shriver to Waleed Aly. The world hasn’t seen such an unlikely supergroup since the Traveling Wilburys.
But one question remains: If woke is truly dead, who killed it?
The woke among us will of course point to the usual suspects: Trump, Musk, that guy from Argentina …
Everything, after all, is always someone else’s fault. Or, failing that, the system’s.
But the death of woke wasn’t murder, it was suicide. It was something that the lunatic left – as opposed to the sensible centre – brought entirely upon itself.
Perhaps first though we should examine the corpse. What is “woke”?
This is something Waleed himself struggled to define, and fair enough. Woke can be a nebulous thing.
For most normal people it is like a bad smell in the fridge or a relationship gone wrong. You’re not quite sure what’s causing it, you just know you want to get away from it.
In brief, it started as an encouragement for people to be “awake” to all the oppression they were suffering in their lives, on the assumption that they weren’t previously aware they were suffering.
This distracted attention away from genuine oppression and laid a golden yellow brick road for any lazy narcissist with a hint of grievance to travel down. Suddenly all the isms and all the phobias were everywhere.
As were the oppressors. This is a movement that coined the term “microaggression” with a straight face.
And so pretty soon everybody ended up guilty of something. It was a 21st century version of the Terror of the French Revolution: Ever escalating standards of ideological purity demanded, and ever increasing rates of execution for any who failed to comply.
The guillotine was social media. Say the wrong thing about anything and a self-appointed mob of puritans would publicly lynch you and demand your head.
And many, if not most, swiftly pulled their heads in. But it was not enough. It was never going to be.
As the online witch-hunters became ever more furious against their existing targets, while ever-spreading the net for new ones, once-were heroes of the left were crucified in the name of one cause or another.
Dave Chappelle and Ricky Gervais faced calls to be cancelled because people were offended by their jokes. JK Rowling had her books burned because she had the wrong view on transgender issues. Piers Morgan was effectively booted from TV because he dared to question the credibility of Meghan Markle.
Yes, remember that?
And that’s just a handful of incredibly influential would-be progressives that puritanical progressives tried to kill off.
And yet, awkwardly, they refused to die. Comedians like Chapelle and Gervais had the courage to reject the preapproved woke script. Authors like Rowling and Shriver doubled down on expressing their views. Journalists like Morgan and Hildebrand fought even more heroically and handsomely for freedom of speech.
Suddenly the new rules of what was and wasn’t allowed did not seem so unbreakable. But all that proved was that it could be done, not that it would be done.
The proof of the latter came in November from the groundswell of working-class middle America that swept Donald Trump to power at the last US election.
Trump won a landslide of electoral college votes and a landslide of the popular vote and Republicans won victory in the House of Representatives, the Senate and even the majority of governorships.
This was proof that his 2016 victory was no anti-democratic aberration as his opponents claimed, nor that the 2020 election had slain Trumpism forever as a chorus of experts famously crowed.
And, yet again, it stunned them. Even in the face of polls pointing squarely to the likelihood of a Trump victory, the same old upper-middle-class progressives were blindsided again.
Because it was never supposed to happen.
Because the very idea of being “progressive” is defined by the idea that you know what the future is going to be and are progressing towards it.
This is what being “on the right side of history” means – an insufferable phrase that instantly incriminates the speaker for having the hubris to believe they know the future.
And for a long time, thanks to the toxic viral reach of social media, these smug know-it-alls gaslit the world. They were so vocal and so vicious that most people were convinced this was indeed the inevitable direction of humanity and cowed into shutting up.
But Trump won on such an emphatic and undeniable scale that no amount of Monday morning quarterbacking could pretend that he hadn’t. There was simply no doubt that the vast majority of Americans were on the side of the most powerful anti-woke force on the planet.
Suddenly history itself was on the wrong side of history.
And once people saw that they were not alone but in fact part of this vast majority who rejected dictatorial groupthink, they stepped out into the sunlight.
Yet none of this needed to happen. If activists and academics had just stuck to their campus debates instead of attacking people online, there would never have been this backlash. If self-appointed censors hadn’t tried to cancel comedians, they wouldn’t have had their knuckle-dragging ideology torn apart by them. And if the elite left establishment hadn’t tried to crucify Donald Trump, he would have had no reason or momentum for his comeback.
As in every revolution, the radical left first destroys others and then destroys itself.
May it rest in peace and wake no more.
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Originally published as Joe Hildebrand: Radical left casts shadow in its wake
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