Woke Up This Morning

With the Fake Culture War Blues Again

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It’s always a good idea to recognise the strengths of your political opponents, and there are two things that the new populist right does very well, which go a long way to explain its political successes in the last few years. The first is lying. Unencumbered by any moral scruples or concern with even the most elementary notions of truth that make it possible for a democracy to function, its representatives feel able to say anything, regardless of whether it bears any connection to reality.

The second - closely related to the first - is the right’s ability to make its intended constituencies feel like victims, to the point when they believe that they are being subjected to vast conspiracies that threaten their very existence.

Both these talents converge seamlessly in the right’s ongoing obsession with ‘woke’, ‘wokeism’ and ‘wokeness.’ Nowadays, in the English-speaking world at least, you would have to go into a cave with a blindfold and ear plugs on to avoid coming across one of these terms at least once a week.

Where there used to be reds under beds, there is now rampant wokey pokery operating in every sphere of society, trashing our history and identity, dismantling our institutions and most cherished beliefs, insinuating itself into the minds of the unwary like the alien seed pods from Invasion of the Body Snatchers.

Woke lefty lawyers; woke civil servants; woke schools and teachers; woke weathermen; the woke National Trust; the woke Labour Party; woke Costa Coffee shops - it’s everywhere.

Even the elite royal bank Coutts is now woke. And so is the US women’s football team, according to Donald Trump, which is why it lost. And the Bannau Brycheiniog National Park Authority is also woke because it changed the name of the park to Welsh. Last week, the Daily Mail - an authority on all things wokeist - published its ‘Woke List 2023’ of the ‘Britons who are most high-profile in their awakedness to perceived injustices in society.’

That ‘perceived’ is the crucial word here, and the list was not intended as a badge of honour. Its luminaries include the Archbishop of Canterbury, Gary Lineker, the Director-General of the National Trust, the Chief Librarian of the British Library, the ‘ungrateful, woke brat’ Emma Watson, Michael Sheen, the ex-Chief Executive of NatWest Group, and the Assistant Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police.

Traitors, bastards, and useful idiots, the lot of them. And the Comintern can eat its Stalinist heart out, because this is what it really means to take over a society by stealth.

Political Correctness

At first sight, all this wokeus pocus recalls the concept of ‘political correctness’ which first emerged in the seventies and eighties as an in-joke amongst the left, and went on to become an insult used by the right to ridicule the left and the causes and issues associated with it.

To say that such and such a person or institution was ‘politically correct’ automatically suggested inauthenticity, a lack of seriousness, and an obsession with marginal issues. To be ‘politically correct’ meant that you didn’t really believe in any of the causes you espoused; you were merely trying to live up to some fatuous leftist nostrums in order to make yourself feel good and look good.

Even worse, you were trying to make other people look bad, by imposing limits on free speech on the everyday good folk who just wanted to watch the Black and White Minstrel Show and exclaim ‘what a pair of knockers!’ without having to feel guilty about it.

Accusations of political correctness invariably tended to crop up in the context of discussions about racism, sexism, the discrimination of minorities, and so on, and were often used in tabloidspeak in reference to ‘loony left’ city councils and the ‘political correctness gone mad’ stories that abounded in the era of municipal socialism.

These were the days when the Murdoch papers gleefully churned out stories about bans on black bin liners, about primary school kids forced to sing baa baa green sheep, and everybody had a larf at the Citizen Smiths and the do good zealots with their wacky lefty schemes. The term also became a standard element of mainstream discourse, always with the same nudge-wink, shake-your-head pitying irony, and often accompanied by attempts to praise those few free thinkers, like Alan Clark or Jim Davidson, who were supposedly brave enough to break the ‘rules’.

Of course, there is no reason why the left can’t be mocked. Leftists aren’t immune to intolerance, holier-than-thou pomposity, hyper-orthodoxies, dogma, and authoritarianism. But these accusations of ‘political correctness’ were not seeking to make the left behave better, but to discredit the causes that it stood for.

As a delegitimizing strategy, it was quite effective. It encouraged the kind of cynicism that the right thrives on, and it also encouraged the mockery of very real social injustices and forms of discrimination, which still persist today. Traces of this past can still be found in the contemporary right’s obsession with ‘woke’, but whereas political correctness was depicted as a ridiculously overzealous response to ‘perceived’ social injustices, ‘wokeism’ is imagined as something far more sinister and dangerous.

Consider some of the books that have been written about it in the last few years:

How Woke Won: The Elitist Movement that Threatens Democracy, Tolerance, and Reason; Woke Racism: How a New Religion Has Betrayed Black America; Woke Antisemitism: How a Progressive Ideology Harms Jews; Woke Culture: Working to Destory Our Nation; We Speak for Outselves: How Woke Culture Prohibits Progress.

You get the idea. In 2021 the Sun published a piece on how ‘“political correctness on steroids” and woke-weaning betrays and brainwashes children’.’ One of its interviewees was a History professor who compared student policy on ‘microaggressions’ to the Inquisition. Another retired headteacher insisted that ‘every area of school life is determined by wokeism. There is no dissent. It’s like religious, totalitarian fanaticism.’

Reading such pieces, you can’t help wanting to send some of these interviewees to a country where there really is ‘religious, totalitarian fanaticism’ in order to re-acquaint themselves with reality, but reality is not the point here.

In May this year, wokeness appeared in many of the speeches at the London ‘National Conservative’ conference. For flat-out idiocy, it was hard to beat the Tory backbencher Danny Kruger’s shrill warning about ‘The weird medley of transgressive ideas that is now threatening the basis of civilisation in the West.’

This medley doesn’t come much weirder than Kruger’s evocation of ‘a new ideology, a new religion – a mix of Marxisim and narcissism and paganism, self-worship and nature-worship all wrapped up in revolution.’ Nevertheless, he insisted,

they are wrong and they are a lethal threat. Because to build their new Jerusalem – their pagan city on a hill – first the old one must be destroyed. Everything must be undermined. Dismantled. Swept away.

Everything must conform at last to the imagining of John Lennon: No countries. No families. No religions (except this one). Nothing to live or die for. No history, just a bland progressive present.

So… Jerusalem is pagan now? And never mind that Lennon sang ‘Nothing to kill or die for’ - a very different message - because this is the heady brew that makes new conservatives heads swim, and whatever they’re snorting in the HoC these days must be stronger than we realize.

This was one of the first occasions anyone has heard anything from Kruger, which on the evidence, can only be a good thing. But talking like this can get you invitations to some very rightwing places you wouldn’t otherwise get to. This is why perennial Tory mediocrity Oliver Dowden took off to Washington in February last year to lecture the palaeoconservative Heritage Foundation on the ‘painful woke psychodrama sweeping the West.’

The Heritage Foundation doesn’t need much convincing. After all, this is a thinktank that has always been adept at pushing very hard right messages into the American mainstream, and its website teems with articles on wokeus pocus and wokery, such as the following explanation of its origins:

The term does come from black slang, and according to Vox (the authority on all things woke), it meant “the notion that staying ‘woke’ and alert to the deceptions of other people was a basic survival tactic.”

Then white leftists, feeling guilty about crimes they never committed, borrowed the term (or “culturally appropriated” it, if you believe the woke nonsense) to denote a consciousness of the supposed social injustice that is part of the very tapestry of the oppressive nature of American society.

Or some such. The initiates into the woke cult are intravenously fed this propaganda about a systemically racist and oppressive America to provoke them into dismantling society and the entire system.

At a time when the left can barely win an election anywhere in the world, it may be comforting to imagine that the ‘woke cult’ is capable of achieving such momentous outcomes. One of the recurring threads in anti-wokeism, is the idea that the left - a word which pretty well refers to anyone across the broadest of leftist-liberal spectrums - has abandoned its efforts to take formal political power in favour of ‘cultural activism’ and the ‘long march through the institutions’ strategy advocated by Gramsci, Rudi Dutschke and Hans Magnus Enzenberger.

According to the Australian conservative Dr Kevin Donnelly, ‘Woke identity politics is a radical attempt by the cultural left to remake Western society in their image.’ Like many anti-woke ideologues, Donnelly builds this sinister ideology/conspiracy from a disparate array of sources, from the Frankfurt School, to Gramsci, Marcuse, the 1968 Paris riots, and the ‘hippy, counter-culture movement.’

Such claims are difficult to take seriously, because there is really no coherent evidence than any such unity exists, or ever really has existed between all the elements included here, even if the right likes to believe otherwise.

Why is this happening? On the one hand, anti-wokeism is a new variant on an old rightwing technique: the evocation of a fantasy conspiracy in order to discredit your opponents or anyone with a different worldview. At the same time it’s a very specific response to the rise of ‘identity politics’ and cultural politics, to ‘cancel culture’, the Black Lives Matter movement, Me Too feminism and the ongoing and often toxic debate about gender and trans rights.

There are certainly legitimate criticisms that can be made, and reservations that one can have about the way some of these ‘new’ movements conduct themselves, and whether or not some of them represent a regression from ‘universalist’ principles that define the left at its best.

But these aren’t the criticisms that the right is making. Once again, its aim is not to create a better left, but to destroy the left, through the construction of a fantasy ideology-cum-conspiracy that is not nearly as powerful or as unified as the right proclaims.

A Culture of Cruelty

All this is extremely dangerous, because antiwokeism dismisses, delegitimizes and often demonizes very real injustices and problems, in an attempt to prevent any solution to them. In doing so, it shores up the most reactionary, conservative, and often downright fascistic sections of society, to the point when even the climate emergency and clean air policies can be dismissed as just another expression of wokeness.

It’s amazing how readily anti-wokeists will pivot to Great Replacement theories and antisemitic ‘Cultural Marxism’ conspiracy theories; how the likes of Miriam Cates will be warning of ‘woke teachers’ who ‘destroy our children’s souls’ one minute and then depicting falling birth rates as a cultural threat to the UK. One minute anti-wokers will be telling you ‘women don’t have penises’, the next we’re heading towards Lebensborn.

In effect, anti-wokeism has become a weapon in a different kind of majoritarian ‘identity politics’, which is attempting to roll back liberal social gains, postpone any discussion about structural racism and sexism, and shut down debate about how to create a more just, equal and diverse society.

It’s actually a good idea - in fact an essential idea - for any society that wants to be better than it is, that its members should be aware of the injustice and oppression that society may be perpetrating, and show solidarity with those who have been victims of such injustice.

The alternative to that is grim indeed. Ron DeSantis has made it a hallmark of his sordidly opportunistic career to define Florida as a place where ‘woke comes to die.’ His anti-woke regime has reportedly lost his state billions of dollars, not because ‘the left’ has taken it over, but because corporations and investors see no future for their brands in associating themselves with reactionary bigotry.

None of this bothers the ex-Guantanamo guard. Fresh from promising to start ‘slitting throats' if he becomes president, DeSantis has now supported the use of ‘deadly force’ by special forces and border officials against drug traffickers crossing the Mexican border

Asked how these operations could distinguish between traffickers and migrants, anti-wokeism’s answer to Steve Seagal said that they should use US military operations in Iraq as an example.

In Texas, fellow anti-wokeist Governor Greg Abbott shared a fake article about country singer Garth Brooks being booed off the stage in a purported display of patriotism in response to the singer’s perceived wokeness in a non-existent town called ‘Hambriston’. In July Texas troopers employed by Abbott’s border control initiative reported that they had been instructed to deny water to migrants crossing the Rio Grande and push women and children back into the river.

These connections aren’t accidental. Because this is where anti-wokeism leads: to performative demonstrations of cruelty. To denying water to migrant children. To putting migrants on barges or sending them to Rwanda. To politicians telling asylum seekers to ‘fuck off back to France.’

In short, it makes society crueller and meaner. So best not to give into it. Better to stay woke and call out injustice when you see it. Better to lend your back, and your voice to the idea that the world is not as bad as the likes of DeSantis, Abbott, and Anderson would like it to be.

Better to feel not shame, but pride, when they call you woke, and think that you are probably doing something right.