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 US 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.

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.

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”.