First law of woke is you don’t talk about woke

WOKEAPOCALYPSE 2: Progressive authoritarianism is finally being challenged but there’s still a lot of it about

The first essay in this series explained how trans ideology had, over the last decade or so, become the leading edge of “progressive” thinking in the West . That was until a number of “gender critical” women, led by the author, JK Rowling, called a halt to the absurdity of claiming that someone with a penis could be female. The Cass Review of gender services put a stop to puberty blockers being given to nine year olds, in gender clinics like the Sandyford in Glasgow. But trans ideology was only a one dimension of the so called “culture wars”, of identity politics. The battles still rage over white supremacy, patriarchy, ableism and the wider range of often conflicting identities into which society fragmented in the 2010s.

The “Age of Wokeness”, as the philosopher Dr Kathleen Stock calls it, isn’t over till it’s over. And she should know having been one of its victims. She was hounded out of her job at Sussex University after being labelled a transphobe for expressing her firm belief that sex is binary and that transwomen are not women. Following the Cass Report, the media has begun to lift the omertà on feminists like Stock. But as she says “wokeness” remains embedded in many of our corporations and public institutions.

“Thousands of organisations, says Stock, “have been left with unfair, illiberal and sometimes even illegal policies that blatantly cater to the special interests of a few: rules about how social spaces can be accessed and by whom; what data can and cannot be collected; what conversations are allowed and which are not.” She might have added that rainbow lanyards and pronouns still infest politics and the public sector and “trans awareness” is treated with reverential awe in schools, even if Stonewall has stopped claiming that two year olds can be trans.

So, just when and why did identity politics become so influential in UK political discourse? And how did the left, which used to regard class struggle as the prime focus of political organisation, become preoccupied with hierarchies of grievance based on race and gender? When did followers of Karl Marx stop talking about the falling rate of profit and the contradictions of capitalism and become advocates of what is essentially a tribal sociology: one which would regard the capitalist system as essentially sorted provided an acceptable proportion of capitalists were black, female, LGBT, disabled and neuro-divergent?

To understand the period we’ve lived through we first of all need to go back awhile - to the original culture wars in America thirty years ago.