Anti-Wokeness: An Obituary

During Barack Obama’s presidency, several political movements arose that were to define America long after he had left the scene. The first was organized around a new view of sexual assault, enshrined in the 2011 “Dear Colleague” letter sent by the Obama administration to universities. Its assumption that typical due process protections were insufficient to the problem of sexual assault would go global with #MeToo in 2017. The next was Black Lives Matter, which erupted in Ferguson, Missouri in 2014. Its indulgence of violent unrest against what was understood to be an inherently racist system would reach a crescendo in 2020. Then came transgender rights. In the wake of Obergefell v. Hodges, the 2015 Supreme Court decision that declared a constitutional right to same-sex marriage, activist groups and Democratic politicians began to defend sex changes for minors and the participation of trans-identifying men in women’s sports as the next frontier of civil rights. Meanwhile, a no less momentous development began in strictest secrecy. On July 31, 2016, the FBI launched its “Crossfire Hurricane” investigation into suspected links between Russia and Donald Trump’s presidential campaign. This initiative signaled a new political aggressiveness from Western intelligence agencies, which would work with tech companies to suppress disfavored speech.

Critics came to refer to this combination of causes as “wokeness,” an overweening progressivism that dispensed with free speech, due process, and institutional neutrality. Importantly, wokeness was opposed not only by conservatives but by prominent liberals. Laura Kipnis of Northwestern University was subjected to a Title IX investigation after she wrote an essay criticizing the “sexual paranoia” of university campuses. Bari Weiss resigned from the New York Times in part over its handling of the Black Lives Matter protests of 2020. Andrew ­Sullivan, the most important advocate for gay marriage, became an outspoken opponent of transgender ­causes. Left-wing and liberal writers such as Glenn Greenwald and Matt ­Taibbi questioned not only the narrative of Russian collusion but the symbiosis between tech companies and intelligence agencies.

Several of these figures emerged as leading lights of “anti-wokeness.” Anti-woke intellectuals were politically heterodox, rather than progressive or conservative. They were defined not by any shared belief, but by their rejection of certain ideological imperatives. They were also proudly skeptical, looking on wokeness as a false religion. Some, such as Sam Harris, got their start in the New Atheist movement and regarded all religions as false. As a rule, anti-woke intellectuals were individualists. They criticized identity politics, tribalism, and nationalism as exemplified by Donald Trump. They were also optimistic about the possibilities for new media to circumvent sclerotic institutions and resist censorship.

Now anti-wokeness has come to an end. True, the progressive attitudes known as wokeness still enjoy great influence in leading ­institutions—not least because they often have backing in law. And several of the figures identified with anti-wokeness are more prominent than ever. (Bari Weiss has gone from being a New York Times editor to being the editor in chief of CBS News.) But as a coherent movement, anti-wokeness has ceased to exist.

The most immediate cause was the re-election of Donald Trump. Anti-wokeness had flourished among liberals who felt alienated from both parties, very much including the Republican Party of Trump’s first term. Though their opinions had once been well within the liberal mainstream, they could plausibly claim to be heterodox, even dissidents. That remained true during the presidency of Joe Biden, whose grandfatherly image belied his thoroughgoing commitment to new progressive ­causes—Title IX tribunals, transgender rights—that anti-woke liberals opposed.

But with Donald Trump’s return to the White House, anti-woke liberals could no longer be considered simple opponents of the status quo. Several had signaled some degree of sympathy for Trump, and Trump went on to win the votes of many former Democratic voters. These were the people for whom anti-woke liberals seemed to speak. Trump campaigned as a ­champion of free speech and vowed to eliminate “WOKE, SOCIALIST, and ANTI-AMERICAN Ideology” from universities. Anti-wokeness was stripped of its dissident energy. If it can no longer define itself in opposition to a hegemonic progressivism, what exactly does it stand for today?

Skepticism was one possibility. But even as anti-woke writers such as Sam Harris and John ­McWhorter critiqued wokeness by calling it a religion (and therefore presumptively bad), other anti-woke intellectuals underwent a religious turn. Ayaan Hirsi Ali, who at an event I attended in 2016 had led the crowd in an ovation for “blasphemy,” announced her conversion to Christianity in 2023. Dave Rubin, an anti-woke podcaster, has declared that he is no longer an atheist.

The New Atheists had argued that society would be better off without Christianity. But the demise of Bush-era Christian politics did not prove the prelude to an open, skeptical, and free society. On the contrary, it was succeeded by what these writers regarded as a p­unitive and dogmatic form of belief. Richard Dawkins had written of the “God delusion,” but perhaps he was deluded to imagine there could ever be a society unguided by some orthodoxy.

Kamala Harris lost to Trump in 2024 after she was unable to explain or defend her statements endorsing many of the wilder enthusiasms of the late 2010s and early 2020s. Given her defeat, it might seem that anti-woke liberalism should be in high demand in today’s Democratic Party. But it is not. Massachusetts congressman Seth Moulton was one of the few Democratic officials to speak up after the election, ­raising questions about the party’s support of transgender causes: “I have two little girls, I don’t want them getting run over on a playing field by a male or formerly male ­athlete.” A protest took place outside his Salem office, and soon enough he signed on as a cosponsor of the Trans Bill of Rights—which would legally require schools to do ­exactly what Moulton had said he didn’t want.

The middle ground anti-­woke liberals would like to inhabit—a feminism that stops short of “Believe all women,” a strong commitment to gay marriage but not to everything under the heading of transgender rights—is eroding under their feet. Sixty-four percent of independents say gay and lesbian relationships are moral, down ten points since 2021. The number of Republicans saying the same reached a peak of 56 percent in 2022 and now has tumbled to 35. As Andrew Sullivan has observed, many Americans have looked at the demands associated with the last letter in the LGBT acronym and decided they are less enthusiastic about the other three.

The anti-censorship free-speech coalition of anti-wokeness has ­also been fractured. The shattering event was Hamas’s attack on Israel on October 7, 2023. As Jacob Siegel observed in Tablet, independent media voices who had once been united in skepticism of censorship and the security state were suddenly at each other’s throats. Latent disagreements over foreign policy came to the fore. An independent media sphere that was supposed to correct the errors of legacy institutions became a breeding ground for wild conspiracy theories, many centering on Jews.

Jewish writers who objected to rising anti-Semitism were accused of engaging in tribalism and identity politics, and thereby betraying the anti-woke movement’s raison d’etre. Most of the people laying this charge were engaged in their own form of collective ­advocacy—on behalf of either “real Americans” or “the global majority.” The hope of some anti-woke writers that individuals would be able to escape any form of group identity proved a fantasy. It is strange that this aspiration is still associated with Obama’s first presidential campaign. All those who hoped Obama would allow America to enter a post-racial future should have looked more closely at his famous memoir, Dreams from My Father. Its subtitle was “A Story of Race and Inheritance.”

Though the end of anti-­wokeness was forced by events, the ultimate cause of its demise was the thin nature of anti-woke ideology. Many of the liberal principles for which anti-woke liberals fought—due process, journalistic objectivity, institutional neutrality, empirical examination of “gender-affirming” care—are vitally important. But the collapse of the anti-woke movement suggests that these things must be supported by something other than openness. If wokeness is indeed a new religion, then it may take an old religion to defeat it. If the advance of LGBT causes means the queering of all society, then we may need to privilege normality. If people are not mere individuals but members of particular communities, then we need well-ordered ­loyalties—most notably to the country we share. Anti-wokeness is not enough. It is necessary to stand for faith, family, and flag.