Adrian Wooldridge: It's too soon to say wokeism is dead

It is easy to conclude that the woke revolution met its Waterloo on Nov. 5. The Republicans ran the most unwoke man in America for the presidency and were amply rewarded for it.

A post-election analysis by the polling company Blueprint discovered that the top reason why swing voters eventually supported former President Donald Trump over Vice President Kamala Harris was culture (+28) followed by inflation (+23). Trump lieutenants, such as his Vice President-elect JD Vance and his nominee for secretary of state, Marco Rubio, regard the destruction of the “woke regime” as a top priority.

The Democratic establishment is already blaming the woke wing of the party for the loss. James Carville, Bill Clinton’s legendary campaign director, has blamed the loss squarely on the party’s failure to distance itself from “woke era” politics. MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough, the former Republican congressman and now host of “Morning Joe,” has blamed “white elitists” and their obsession with symbolic politics. “What on earth is Latinx? No Latino person uses the word Latinx, but people spouted this because they felt they had to.”

Europeans are taking careful note of this. Middle-of-the-road conservatives such as the new leader of Britain’s Tories, Kemi Badenoch, will no doubt intensify their war on woke while more hard-right figures such as Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni will go into overdrive. And center-left parties will flee from cultural issues even more rapidly than they will flee from photo opportunities with Kamala Harris: Keir Starmer has already declared that Britain won’t be paying reparations for slavery to former colonies.

But was Nov. 5 really Waterloo? Or is it merely a skirmish in a drawn-out campaign? Is a single election enough to put an end to a cultural movement? Or is it an opportunity for reassessment and regrouping? There are three strong reasons for thinking that the Great Awokening will survive the current setback.

The first is that the wokery has reshaped — and in some cases captured — a broad range of powerful institutions such as academia, the mainstream media, public corporations and the public sector.

The essence of wokery is a focus on the role of race (and by extension gender, sexual orientation and colonialism) in the division of power and economic gains and a belief that past injustices were so searing that they justify reverse discrimination and the policing of speech. (Conservatives would replace the word “focus” with “obsession” and worry that guilt blinds the left to the West’s many achievements).

The Economist argues that a plethora of indicators (such as the decline of media mentions of phrases such as “white privilege") suggest that we have passed “peak woke.” But this is to mistake effervescence for essence; the essence is that major institutions have been comprehensively reordered over the past decade or more to give a much higher profile to woke concerns.

Universities are central institutions because they control entry into most well-paying jobs. But it’s hard to see how Trump’s election will change the fact that, particularly in America’s most elite temples of learning, wokery has tenure. Academics have shifted significantly to the left in recent years: A survey by the Harvard Crimson, a student newspaper, found that only 1% of academics call themselves conservative. Universities have also institutionalized progressivism by the creation of specialized subjects (Black Studies or Women’s Studies) and by the creation of a growing class of academic administrators who tend to be even more progressive than academics.

Corporations can’t treat public opinion with the disdain of tenured academics. Many companies such as Walt Disney Co. and Anheuser-Busch InBev SA/NV’s Budweiser have retreated from public statements after being badly burned in the culture wars. John Authers of this parish points out that corporate commitment to ESG had been waning long before Trump’s election in part because of poor returns. But these tactical retreats shouldn’t distract our attention from the fact that the corporate landscape has been changed.

Almost all big companies have ironclad commitments to DEI (diversity, equality and inclusion). Some 48% of S&P 500 Index companies tied bosses’ remuneration to diversity targets in 2023, according to the pay consultancy Farient Advisors, and the share of job advertisements that mention the word “diversity” continues to grow. Management consultancies have imbibed so deeply of the wokery potion that, in its current web page, McKinsey features an article on “how leaders can tap the power of vulnerability.”

The second is that wokery thrives in opposition. What better proof is there that Americans need to be re-educated than the fact that they reelected Trump to the White House? And what better feeling is there than the feeling that you are part of a righteous minority? The New York Times took a significant step to the progressive left during Trump’s first administration in part because the most uncompromisingly anti-Trump articles did so well. The Guardian, which made a point of assuring its staff on the night of the election that it had therapists available, has already promised to “redouble our efforts to hold the president-elect and those who surround him to account.”

The most important reason is generational: Younger people are on average much more woke than older ones. Polls not only show that younger voters are more likely to vote for Democrats than Republicans by significant margins, perhaps not a surprising verdict.

They also show that they endorse hardline progressive positions. A Harvard-Harris poll finds that nearly half of U.S. Zoomers support Hamas over Israel. A Skeptic Research Center survey finds that a similar share believe “the Israeli government advocates for white supremacy” (the share of older people who agree with such propositions is in the low single digits).

This enthusiasm for hardline positions isn’t confined to the U.S.: Eric Kaufmann, a sociologist at Britain’s Buckingham University, notes that British 18-25 year olds split evenly on whether Harry Potter author J.K. Rowling (who thinks that a biological male is not a woman) should be dropped by her publisher while fewer than 5% of those over 50 do. “Progressive illiberalism may be less fashionable in the boardrooms of 2024 than it was in 2020,” says Kaufmann, “but its writ is likely to run through them in 2044.”

We should expect a few strategic retreats in response to Trump’s re-election. More universities will declare “institutional neutrality.” CEOs will memory hole their more hysterical comments about “intersectionality.” “Latinx” will be consigned, unmourned, to a lexicographical graveyard. But the woke resistance will be as loud as ever in Harvard Yard and Sproul Plaza. When it comes to reshaping culture, a single victory, however famous, is not the end of the war.

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This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.

Adrian Wooldridge is the global business columnist for Bloomberg Opinion. A former writer at the Economist, he is author of “The Aristocracy of Talent: How Meritocracy Made the Modern World.”

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