It’s the year that woke broke, a victim of its own excess

Suddenly, one day, “woke” was over. From November 6 to 7 this year, in the aftermath of the US presidential election, the pretence disappeared. Of course, there are hold-outs – some people can’t admit to themselves that they were wrong. But even in the fashion-chasing Hollywood Hills, my sources report hearing the words “woke bullshit”. The atmosphere has changed, and most people just seem relieved.

I’m not personally a fan of the word “woke”, but I admit it’s evocative. It was originally coined by the Black community in the United States to refer to awareness of social and political issues. Lately, it has become a catch-all for a performatively virtuous type of politics, more often used as a slur.

Credit: Getty Images/iStockphoto

Donald Trump’s second term as US president wasn’t the reason woke finally died. It has been crumbling slowly for years, collapsing under the weight of its own humourless hypocrisies. There has been, as British historian Niall Ferguson wrote recently, a “vibe shift”. Trump is merely a punctuation mark in history.

For a while, I have noticed in my day-to-day life that people are turning away from woke. For as long as I’ve been writing in these pages, I’ve deployed a gag when my perceived philosophical misalignment with the general political leaning of the masthead is raised. I identify myself as the diversity hire. It usually goes down well, makes people laugh and builds a rapport. Those readers don’t resile from being left-leaning, and tend to be curious and open-minded types, open to argument. We laugh and then chat amicably about matters on which we diverge.

In the past year or so, though, something has changed. Before I can deliver my gag, people sidle up to say that they increasingly find themselves in agreement with what I’ve written. I haven’t softened and they haven’t hardened. But the world has moved around us.

In 2021, evolutionary biologist and prolific blogger and writer Colin Wright created a cartoon which illustrated the shift. It depicts stick figures on a political scale, from left to right. In 2008, a figure labelled “me” occupies a position just left of the centre mark. By 2012, the scale shows “my fellow liberal” dashing off further left. And by 2021, the scale has been extended. The figure at the left-hand side, now labelled “woke ‘progressive’”, is calling the “me” figure a bigot. With the scale expanded by the additional distance on the left, a surprised-looking “me” suddenly finds himself to the right of the centre mark in politics.

Illustration: Colin WrightCredit:

The cartoon went viral in 2022 after Elon Musk – who also used to be a liberal, in the US sense of left-leaning, or Democrat – retweeted it. Wright later wrote in The Wall Street Journal that “something has happened over the past decade to make many liberals feel politically homeless”. He concluded that this sense “contributes to our increasing inability to have reasonable, compassionate discussions on issues of great importance”.

Wright, who is an evolutionary biologist, explained that he had found himself ostracised and labelled as transphobic by progressive colleagues for “simple truths, supported by both science and common sense” that “male and female are real biological categories defined by reproductive anatomy”.

I have heard a growing number of personal stories along these lines from readers. The common theme is a sense that a small group of zealots has appointed itself the arbiter of truth. But the “truth” that they enforce is a fiction based on fashion rather than a scientific or simply observational view of the world. That makes many people uneasy, whether or not they can articulate why.

Gender and sex often feature in the confessions I hear. Just about everyone I speak to believes people should be free to be who they want to be. I agree. But some women and lesbians feel they have been robbed of their identity in the push to recognise that “transwomen are women”. Both men and women worry that children are being railroaded into taking puberty blockers, or at least being allowed to make decisions with consequences they are not mature enough to appreciate. Pronouns lurk in meetings, job interviews and at family gatherings, waiting to entrap the distracted.

There is also a sense that many well-meaning initiatives have been hijacked and debased by groups who now use them to pursue their own interests. Companies and brands piled into cause-marketing to appeal to a values-driven consumer. Lingerie, soap and even beer brands have pushed their idea of “acceptance” by filling their ads with a trendy idea of diversity. One soap brand has been particularly active in putting out gimmicks such as shower wash bottles in different body shapes. It’s also created virtual characters for online gamers with various ethnic characteristics, bodies and disabilities. Its commitment is only skin-deep – if that. Of course, any genuinely values-driven consumers run a mile to distance themselves from phony niceness.

It’s perhaps not a coincidence that trust in corporations fell as they embraced performative goodness. Too often the outward appearance of virtue turned out to mask poor business practices. Over time, people have learnt that where there is woke-washing, there is often incompetence, or even malfeasance.

Environmental, social and governance (ESG) reporting reached a righteous climax before the degree to which the beloved boardroom initialism had been hollowed out was revealed. Or worse, it was perhaps always just an empty gesture, or “virtue signal”.

Another initialism, diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI), has also had its day. Even with massive vested interests embedded in companies and institutions defending it, it’s become evident that you can’t think about sex or race all the time at work without evincing a creepy obsession with people’s sex and race.

Visiting Australia at the end of last year, just after the Voice referendum, British journalist and editor Fraser Nelson observed that we’d just held “the world’s first referendum on identity politics” – and identity politics was rejected. “Yes” voters might still not like to hear this, but the reasons people gave for voting no show that many objected to the idea that different standards and laws should separate the citizens of one country.

In the aftermath of the vote, Australians have felt freer to express their misgivings over gesture politics in Indigenous affairs. Writing in this masthead this week, Jacinta Nampijinpa Price argued that the Welcome to Country has become so ubiquitous that it no longer has meaning. She proposed that it should be used only at events of national significance. The reader response was largely positive.

So, 2024 is the year that woke broke, a victim of its own excesses. Now that the correction has come, we must embrace the moment to speak truth, not fill the void with a new unfreedom.

Parnell Palme McGuinness is managing director at campaigns firm Agenda C. She has done work for the Liberal Party and the German Greens.