There is a scene in Luca Guadagnino’s misfiring campus drama After the Hunt in which a cantankerous philosophy professor, played by Julia Roberts, bullies a student who nervously suggests that her language is insensitive. “Should I build a world for you that has all the edges rounded out?” she snaps. “Pad your chosen cell with niceties and fucking trigger warnings?” My reaction when the film came out in late 2025 was: who cares? It felt like satire from another era – technically recent yet culturally distant.
I was similarly nonplussed by Summer of Our Discontent, the prominent cultural critic Thomas Chatterton Williams’s five-years-late assault on the alleged excesses of Black Lives Matter, and the shopworn provocations of Ricky Gervais’s Netflix special Mortality. No doubt these projects seemed more worthwhile during the Biden years, when the extremely broad and vague phenomenon known as “woke” was being framed by great swathes of the commentariat as an urgent threat to liberal values such as free speech and rational inquiry. But in the cold, hard light of President Trump’s second term, they look entirely redundant.
It seems absurd to lambast “snowflake” students when Trump is strong-arming universities; Critical Race Theory when he openly promotes white nationalism; leftwing hostility to free speech when he targets everyone from student protesters to talkshow hosts; politically correct language-policing when words such as “equity” and “oppression” have been scrubbed from government websites; or Black Lives Matter when ICE is murdering people in the street.
It is therefore hard to shake the suspicion that anti-woke writers have been chasing the wrong quarry. “It seems obvious,” wrote the liberal-turned-reactionary David Rieff in 2024, “that we are entering full-speed a world whose good intentions will destroy what is good about this civilisation without improving the many things that are cruel and monstrous about it.” But does it seem obvious that good intentions are the biggest threat? Or is the real danger a politics of cruelty, resentment and impunity? Since Zohran Mamdani won the New York mayoralty last November, there has been talk online of “Woke 2.0” or “Dark Woke”: a counterattack against Trump’s shredding of essential rights and behavioural norms. Perhaps woke was not so scary after all.
It is strange, now, to recall that woke used to have positive connotations. A fairly niche Black slang term from the 1960s, denoting political awakening and vigilance to injustice, it went mainstream via Erykah Badu’s 2008 song Master Teacher and a Twitter hashtag (#staywoke) during the birth of Black Lives Matter in 2014. In that sense, Martin Luther King, the abolitionists and the Suffragettes were all woke. By 2019, though, the word had been irrevocably hijacked by critics of the progressive left. It became a giant bucket into which they could throw buzzphrases from “trigger warning” to “white privilege”, and microaggressions to #MeToo. Woke, now a noun as well as an adjective, became synonymous with a variety of political activity that had emerged on campuses and in online spaces, though it was not so much an ideology as a sensibility: in the view of its critics, stridently sanctimonious, hypersensitive, pedantic, intolerant of dissent, quick to condemn and slow to forgive.
The comedian and late-night host Bill Maher defined “woke” as “the left gone too far”. But who decides what is too far? If “woke” means the parts of the progressive left that somebody personally finds annoying or hateful, then that could encompass all of it. On the right, the word sprawled like an oil spill. It took in cancel culture, trans rights, postmodernism, drag brunches, content warnings, pronouns, electric cars, cycling, wind power, diverse casting, TV historians, the National Trust, Disney, King Charles, the pope (both current and previous), the BBC, the EU, the UN, DEI, ADHD, and Greggs vegan sausage rolls. Responding to the redesign of UK banknotes after public consultation earlier this month, Nigel Farage tweeted: “The Bank of England is replacing Winston Churchill with a picture of a beaver on the bank notes. This is the definition of woke.” Well, it’s certainly one definition.
The rapid mutation of woke spawned new linguistic monstrosities like “wokerati”, “wokery” and “wokeism”, which recast the progressive worldview as a sinister, monolithic ideology (hilarious to anyone familiar with the left’s addiction to factional splintering) in a kind of low-level conspiracy theory. In 2020, the humorously named Common Sense Group of Tory MPs, which included future Reform defectors Lee Anderson and Jonathan Gullis, declared its opposition to “cultural Marxist dogma, colloquially known as the ‘woke agenda’”. Last year, before he too switched to Reform, Danny Kruger called woke “a combination of ancient paganism, Christian heresies and the cult of modernism, all mashed up into a deeply mistaken and deeply dangerous ideology of power that is hostile to the essential objects of our affections and our loyalties: families, communities and nations … It must be banished from public life.” Spicy stuff. And yet woke and anti-woke aren’t really new concepts at all.
During the 1960s, many activists and thinkers on the left transcended Marxism’s fixation on class struggle to consider other axes of injustice: race, gender, sexuality. Culture became as lively a battleground as economics – in the words of second-wave feminist Carol Hanisch, “the personal is political”. These identity-based liberation movements inspired attempts to stigmatise them. In 1980s Britain they were the “loony left”. By the early 1990s, Republican politicians were declaring a “culture war” against “political correctness”.
The Epstein files reveal woke-bashing was weaponised by powerful men to avoid accountability for sexual offences
Like woke, political correctness was a US obsession that rapidly colonised the UK. Like woke, the term simultaneously described the most extreme, illiberal sectors of the progressive left and the progressive left as a whole. The anti-PC backlash had its own sensationalised anecdotes, foggy platitudes, and melodramatic analogies implying civilisational doom. PC was routinely compared to Maoism, McCarthyism and religious fundamentalism – an authoritarian, if not totalitarian, ideology incompatible with liberal democracy. Political correctness attracted attention for the same reason that “dog bites man” isn’t a news story but “man bites dog” is. It was expected that the right would attempt to curb free speech and censor “bad” art, but not the left. While the twist felt fresh, journalists made the mistake of confusing novelty with importance.
When what we now call woke once again began animating journalists around 2014; the backlash reiterated its predecessor beat for beat, only faster and louder. Put simply, political correctness plus social media equals woke. Many of its worst qualities, therefore, stem from how people behave on the internet. The left has always had its share of kooks, fanatics, bullies and scolds. Traditionally, they were confined to tormenting fellow leftists. But once those hectoring, humourless voices were amplified online, they created the impression that the systemic pursuit of social justice had degenerated into the shrill policing of individual behaviour in pursuit of clicks and likes.
We can all recall occasions when hair-trigger “wokeness” produced unjust outcomes. Following the killing of George Floyd in May 2020, the psychologically explosive combination of Trump, Covid-19 and Black Lives Matter generated – in some instances – a neurotic failure to keep things in perspective. Four institutions including Tate Britain postponed a retrospective of Philip Guston out of fear that his explicitly anti-racist parodies of the Ku Klux Klan might cause offence. The New York Times and Hulu both dropped the popular food writer Alison Roman after she criticised two powerful entrepreneurs who happened to be Asian-American. Jeanine Cummins was viciously denounced for publishing American Dirt, a novel about Mexican migrants, because she was not herself a Mexican migrant.
None of these responses was proportionate or productive. In the end, the Guston exhibition was a hit, Roman launched her own successful outlet and American Dirt sold more than 4m copies. The question now is whether such overreactions really amounted to a five-alarm fire for liberalism.
Before Trump’s comeback threw it into disarray, the anti-woke movement had three distinct battalions. Conservative cultural warriors, of course, used it as a flimsy cloak for the usual racism, misogyny (woke was portrayed as an effete and feminising force) and fear of change in general. The leftwing critique was essentially Marxist, namely that identity politics erodes class solidarity (the catch being that Marxism has never been able to resolve questions of identity and prejudice).
Between the two were the so-called “reactionary centrists”, a term coined by climate activist Aaron Huertas to describe “someone who says they’re politically neutral, but who usually punches left while sympathising with the right”. Their heads said that far-right authoritarianism was very bad but their hearts said that young people who shouted at them online were worse. These self-proclaimed moderates (often just conservatives in denial) were essentially radicalised by irritation. As this shtick appeals to an older, wealthier audience – the kind of people who say “I didn’t leave the left, the left left me” – it empowered startup publications like Yascha Mounk’s Persuasion and Bari Weiss’s The Free Press. (Last year, the conservative billionaire David Ellison bought The Free Press for $150m (£115m) and made Weiss editor-in-chief of CBS News.)
Columnists including Thomas Chatterton Williams, Matt Yglesias and Pamela Paul in the US, or Matthew Syed, Ian Leslie and Hannah Barnes in the UK, routinely denounced woke in the name of defending liberal values. This position depended on a false equivalence that was blind to power imbalances: the extremism of students on the left was given equal weight to the extremism of governments of the right; trans activists were as influential as anti-trans legislators and newspapers. These pundits kept it up even after Trump’s first election victory, even after January 6. If anything, they escalated.
Centrists need to ask themselves if truffling out low-stakes campus controversies was the best use of their time when fascism was hurtling down the tracks
When Kamala Harris lost the 2024 election, anti-woke writers claimed that her obsession with identity issues had propelled Trump back into the White House, even though she barely mentioned them on the campaign trail. In January 2025, Justin Webb, a presenter on Radio 4’s Today, made this case in a justly derided Times column headlined “Beyond the bluster, Trump may be making America normal again”. The Democrats, he argued, were seen as the real “extremists”. Reactionary centrists seek to make the right (who must be understood) appear more moderate and the left (who must be blamed) more radical.
In reality, they were useful idiots for Trumpian social conservatism, complicit in generating the moral panic that the right then weaponised to demolish trans rights or dismantle the USAid foreign aid programme at the cost of hundreds of thousands of lives. Dismissing rational warnings as hysterical “groupthink”, they deluded themselves into thinking that the populist right would abolish just the right amount of woke (“left gone too far”) and restore equilibrium.
We are in a different era now. It is clear that most “cancelled” celebrities are doing fine. In fact, the Epstein files reveal that woke-bashing was weaponised by powerful men to avoid accountability for sexual offences. We can see that institutions and corporations, far from being “captured” by progressives, were opportunistically following the prevailing wind and perfectly happy to drop DEI or Pride the minute the weather changed: dozens of companies including Meta, Paramount, McDonald’s and Walmart swiftly axed their diversity commitments. We know that the anti-woke weren’t just ambivalent about awkward new jargon like Bipoc or Latinx. “I feel liberated,” one Wall Street banker told the Financial Times shortly before Trump’s inauguration. “We can say ‘retard’ and ‘pussy’ without the fear of getting cancelled.”
How do supposedly “heterodox” thinkers and writers reckon with this abrupt cultural U-turn? Some who have been shouting about free speech for the last decade have fallen as silent as monks, proving that their concern was a partisan sham all along. Williams, meanwhile, argued that Trump’s second act represented not an anti-woke backlash but the “woke right”, which “places identity grievance, ethnic consciousness, and tribal striving at the center of its behavior and thought”. But could that not be said about, say, the Ku Klux Klan? To imply that the right learned these bad habits from the left is a feeble attempt to wave away a catastrophic miscalculation about the real enemies of Enlightenment ideals.
Two recent books, Piers Morgan’s Woke Is Dead and Andrew Doyle’s The End of Woke, claim to dance on woke’s grave but their gloating titles are premature. Trump’s wretched approval rating, currently hovering around minus 15, suggests that his second victory was not, after all, a mass repudiation of progressive values. In the UK, there is still time to prevent a reactionary unravelling at the hands of Nigel Farage and an increasingly deranged rightwing media.
What Woke 2.0 might look like is up for grabs. Without sacrificing core principles or minority groups, I would suggest an acceptance that progress is fragile and a sharper focus on meaningful battles rather than footling skirmishes with celebrities. A clearer theory of the value and limits of free speech. Short shrift for narcissists and grifters who use progressive politics as an excuse to behave badly. A less online mentality and a better sense of humour. An alternative word would be good.
But centrists, too, need to confront reality and ask themselves if truffling out low-stakes campus controversies and bad tweets was the best use of their time when fascism was hurtling down the tracks. What unites the woke and the repentant anti-woke is an urgent need to get their priorities straight and identify the correct enemies. With fundamental values such as decency, solidarity and justice under savage attack, they can’t afford to make the same mistaxkes again.
Dorian Lynskey co-hosts the politics podcast Origin Story (and previously co-presented Remainiacs). His 2019 book The Ministry of Truth: A Biography of George Orwell’s 1984 was longlisted for both the Baillie Gifford and Orwell Prize. He is the Nerve’s theatre critic.
Images show “anti-woke” figures Donald Trump (W), Nigel Farage (O), Lee Anderson (K) and Piers Morgan (E).