https://www.spiked-online.com/2025/05/28/the-post-woke-world/
This is an excerpt from The End of Woke: How the Culture War Went Too Far and What to Expect from the Counter-Revolution.
It was an extraordinary scene. Donald Trump, recently re-elected as president of the United States, found himself surrounded by women and girls in the East Room of the White House. The date was 5 February 2025, and Trump was signing an executive order entitled ‘Keeping Men Out of Women’s Sports’. As the US president took to his desk and prepared his pen, he invited his all-female audience to draw closer. ‘Secret service is worried about them?’, he joked. ‘If we have to worry about them we have big problems.’ There was laughter, applause, a hubbub of palpable relief that an egregious social injustice was on the cusp of being corrected. Photographers captured the moment in a flurry of snapping shutters. Would this be the image that marked the beginning of our post-woke era, the first phase of sobering up for a once drunken world?
The significance of this event could not be dismissed as a mere publicity stunt. Here was one of the most controversial Republican presidents in history, a man who had been accused repeatedly of misogyny, nevertheless enacting the most pro-feminist directive since Richard Nixon signed Title IX of the Education Amendments in June 1972, a measure that prohibited sex-based discrimination in federally funded educational institutions.
The culture war of our times has often been misinterpreted as a conflict between left and right. But, as I shall argue, these designations are hangovers from the French Revolution, ill-suited to today’s complex ideological skirmishes.
The sudden rise in the early 2010s of critical social justice ideology – that sprawling, complex and disparate movement known colloquially as ‘woke’ – has meant that the terms ‘left’ and ‘right’ have lost much of their utility. Definitions of ‘woke’ are as varied as can be imagined, but it is best understood as a cultural revolution that seeks equity according to group identity by authoritarian means. Yet for all its institutional clout, this ideology has never enjoyed popular support. Estimates by More in Common, a nonprofit organisation committed to the promotion of social cohesion, suggest that, at its height, the woke movement was endorsed by approximately eight per cent of the population of both the US and the UK. As such, its power could only ever be sustained through misdirection and imposition.
We now find ourselves entering a new phase of the culture war, one in which the woke ideology is being tamed and will soon relinquish its chokehold on the Western world. The death rattles have become so audible that they can no longer be gainsaid. Major companies such as McDonald’s, Walmart, Ford, Amazon, Google and Meta have scaled back their diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) policies. Black Lives Matter is now a largely discredited movement. Leftist politicians, such as Democratic representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and former US secretary of transportation Pete Buttigieg, have quietly removed the pronouns from their social-media profiles. Multiple sporting bodies have barred men who identify as women from competing in female categories. Gay-rights groups are rejecting the forced teaming with divisive LGBTQIA+ campaigns. The UK Supreme Court has ruled that ‘sex’ means ‘biological sex’ for the purposes of equality law, meaning that men who identify as women have no legal right to enter women-only spaces – the Telegraph ran with the frontpage headline, ‘Trans women are not women’.
