For many on the Left, the year 2020 never ended. Credit: Getty
“Wokeness” is receding, according to the mainstream conventional wisdom. Having peaked in the plague-and-reckoning year 2020, the story goes, Left identity politics and the disciplinary practices that usually go with them have been on a downward trajectory ever since. The election of 2024 decisively affirmed the decline of woke: how could progressives continue to use terms like “Latinx” when half of Latino men pulled for Donald Trump’s GOP at the ballot box?
But the woke Left apparently hasn’t received the memo. Witness the social-media mobbing of Vivek Chibber, a professor of sociology at New York University and the editor of the socialist journal Catalyst, after he dared to historically analyse wokeness as an illiberal, authoritarian tendency.
Chibber made his comments last week on a Jacobin magazine podcast titled Confronting Capitalism: The End of Wokeness. It triggered a firestorm of angry “X” comments that ranged from mischaracterising him as a Right-wing goon to outright obscenity. Ajay Singh Chaudhary, the director of the Brooklyn Institute for Social Research, dismissed Chibber’s critique of wokeness as “tripe” and a “carbon copy” of the Right’s.
Laleh Khalili, a Mideast scholar at the University of Exeter, denounced Chibber as a “brownshirt waving a red flag.” William Clare Roberts, an assistant professor of politics at McGill University, suggested that Chibber is “no different” from liberal writers like Matt Yglesias or Jonathan Chait: “I am weary of having to treat him like he’s a serious thinker on the socialist left, much less a Marxist”. Many other commenters didn’t even bother with full sentences. Instead, they simply called Chibber a “paedophile” and the like.
So much for the vibe shift. But what did Chibber actually say that so incensed the professional Left? Perhaps it was because he dared to point out that wokeness is not popular. Or perhaps it was his definition of wokeness that rankled its acolytes: Chibber defined wokeness as a professional-class movement for social justice that excludes socialism from its political project and that is highly intolerant to boot.
A pile-up on X when a Leftist like Chibber criticises wokeness is politically significant, because it demonstrates that for much of the Left, there is no difference between the neoliberal micromanagement of diversity in the ranks of the professional class, on one hand, and the struggle to empower the American working class relative to capital, on the other. Progressives in states like California have successfully transformed the language of human resources, while neglecting problems like skyrocketing housing costs and working-class wage stagnation.
If Democrats had been successful on both the language and the wage fronts, there might be less explosive hostility to the party’s politics of hypocrisy. November’s massive shift to the GOP in the Golden State and similar blue areas reflected a silent protest against one-party rule: it is the combination of Democratic identity politics and liberal compliance with the demands of the party’s wealthiest donors that has bred resentment and nihilism among downscale Americans.
Unable and unwilling to contemplate the limits of wokeness in building mass politics, identitarian Leftists have taken out their rage against Chibber. In Chinese, there is a saying that reflects the tyrant’s wisdom when controlling a crowd: “kill a chicken to scare the monkey”. You do a symbolic murder of a critic of woke dogma in order to silence anyone else with doubts in their mind about the priorities of Left politics. The X mob can live off the pleasure of group psychology, following an imaginary woke leader by mobbing an enemy online. It is a disgusting spectacle and bodes ill for the evolution of Left liberalism.
It is critical to attack the authoritarianism at the heart of contemporary liberal politics from the Left: if the Left fails to sound its own alarm about the professional-class takeover of identity and diversity, then the Right will continue to draw upon the rage that animates working-class, non-college-educated people of all races, genders, and sexualities. They have seen liberalism deliver nothing but empty promises of inclusion when they hunger for an actual change in the political field itself. Trump sees the hypocrisy of woke elites and acts as a vehicle for catharsis.
If anything, Chibber didn’t go far enough in his critique. At a key point in the podcast, he dared to ask a question most of us don’t pose any longer: why couldn’t ethnic and gender studies be integrated into existing departments of history, sociology, English, American Studies, and the like when they first emerged in the 1960s? Why did they have to be carved out as separate disciplines? Chibber argued that this owed to “grassroots” demand for separate identity-based departments.
But this is mistaken, and any serious Left critique of the rise of identity studies — a key vector of what came to be known as woke ideas — must reckon with the granular history. In fact, the establishment of the first-ever ethnic studies departments, at the University of California, Berkeley, and San Francisco State University, was engineered by a lifetime FBI informant named Richard Aoki.
This is notable, because the upshot of Aoki’s work, and that of the wider movement he helped incept, was to defuse campus radicalism and turn would-be revolutionaries into credentialed race professionals of the kind who would soon become familiar to anyone who has faced the business end of a university diversity office or corporate HR department.
In his 2012 book, Subversives: The FBI’s War on Student Radicals and Ronald Reagan’s Rise to Power, the journalist Seth Rosenfeld used the Freedom of Information Act to extract documents from the FBI about its activities against California militant groups during the Sixties and early Seventies. In the course of his research, he discovered that Aoki, the first Asian member of the Black Panther Party, was recruited by the FBI when he was in the Army during the Fifties to inform on student radicals. Aoki, as it happens, also midwifed the Asian American Studies section of Berkeley’s ethnic-studies department, the first of its kind in the United States.
This origin story sheds a cold light on identity- and grievance-based disciplines, which were designed to emphasise “visibility” and “representation” over critically analysing and attacking capitalism itself. Other American universities would soon follow Berkeley’s path and create ethnic-studies departments to signal their commitment to progressive causes.
Thanks to identity politics, militancy and activism became institutionalised within the academy and, later, the corporation and the security apparatus. Is it possible that Aoki abandoned his early commitment to anti-Communism and had a genuine conversion to the sort of identity politics he would espouse as a chief promoter of ethnic studies? Certainly. And I am not suggesting that identity politics was solely a product of the American security establishment; life is much too complex and contingent to permit such single-cause explanations. Still, there is no denying that university-based ethnic studies came to supply a new “dialect of power”: a way for the likes of the FBI or Goldman Sachs to deflect questions about their decisions by showcasing the “diversity” of the people who make those decisions.
The point is that those of us on the Left need more discussion of the origins of identity politics, the role it has played in creating nominally progressive liberal institutions, and its complicity with defanging actual radicalism. Chibber’s intervention in this debate wasn’t inflammatory. It was conversational, accessible, and reasonable. Chibber’s work is the answer to the millions of Americans who crave a critique of Democratic identity politics but have only found it on the Right. The viciousness of his critics only vindicates his arguments.
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Subscribe“…if the Left fails to sound its own alarm about the professional-class takeover of identity and diversity, then the Right will continue to draw upon the rage that animates working-class, non-college-educated people of all races, genders, and sexualities.”
Why do left-leaning cultural critics persevere in this silly insistence that the so-called populist Right is only attractive to non-college educated people? Does the idea that only those without university degrees (i.e. the sub-intelligent) oppose woke and bureaucratic managerialism make them feel better about being politically repudiated, not only in the United States, but in most of Western Europe as well? And what about this equally self-serving idea that the primary motivation of Right voters is “rage”? The picture this paints is of hordes of ignorant, rage-fueled, insensible plebs looking to, to steal a phrase from Mencken, get their thumbs into the eyes of their betters. But why, even in a piece that purports to criticize the excesses of woke, can the disdain of the author for the Great Unwashed not be concealed? Why are lazy generalizations about rage and education levels so readily reached for? I imagine that academics who, like Catherine Liu, are the products of our elite credentialing institutions, implicitly identify with those they criticize from their perch of ostensible objectivity. They have no real desire to understand the beliefs and motivations of the working classes. For this reason, it’s not to hard to catch the whiff of elite condescension – and incomprehension – that wafts from pieces like this.
“Why do left-leaning cultural critics persevere in this silly insistence that the so-called populist Right is only attractive to non-college educated people?”
Mostly because it bolsters their self image. ‘We are more intelligent, therefore we are better, therefore we are right’ – is the loose logic. However, what the intellectual left miss is that intelligence and stupidity are not mutually exclusive (and ironically they are the living proof of this). Intelligence is just a measure of analytical and processing ability; you can have a lot or a little. Smartness and stupidity are different, and depend on the degree to which you deploy your intelligence by taking into account all the facts, knowledge, evidence and common wisdom around a given topic when assessing it. If you choose to wilfully ignore facts (men cannot be women/biological sex is real etc) and wisdom etc in your thinking, then you are stupid. Whereas even if you are not gifted with above average processing and analytical skills, a slow and steady assessment of the facts, evidence etc. will get to the correct answer eventually; i.e. you’re dim but never the less smart. Sadly there are lot’s of intelligent, stupid people, and most of them are to be found on the left.
What’s needed now is a “way out” for the large numbers of decent, ordinary well-meaning folk who got caught up in the radicalised madness of 2020. They need a way to save face, and keep their jobs. Confronting them with the uncomfortable fact that they committed themselves and their organisations to an inherently authoritarian, anti-human, anti-progressive ideology that was sponsored and fanned by various three letter agencies and the dark forces of global capitalism isn’t going to be the way to do it. They’ll only double down. Human beings are, amongst many other things, generally stubborn and egotistical and they can’t stand to be proven wrong.
Trump doesn’t help. If “anti-woke” is conflated in the corporate and public imagination with “Trump and Musk” and therefore “the far right”, we’re sunk.
What’s needed is a more positive articulation of truly liberal, humanitarian, and progressive values for the 21st century that decent, well-meaning, middle-brow, middle-managers can buy into without thinking too much and without feeling they’re entering into an edgy culture war in which their social & economic status and ego are at stake. So that they can say that they are now all for this new thing without having to admit, at least for now and at least in public, that they’re no longer for the old authoritarian woke thing. This would make the hard woke left irrelevant again.
I’m not sure exactly what all of this looks like. But I think it has to be grounded in a balanced popular narrative that acknowledges that we are all flawed beings; that everyone makes mistakes and deserves compassion and forgiveness but also that there is a need for retributive, fairly administered justice; that we are all unique human beings with unique proclivities and talents, but also that systemic historical inequalities do have a bearing on us; that we each have free will, but are also symbiotically shaped by our environments; that our system of liberal democratic government, and our history of empire-building, has and had both good and bad points; that digital technology can be a handy tool but it isn’t a panacea for the world’s ills; that nation states are important locations of political autonomy and power but also that both local communities and international co-operation are also highly valuable; that equality of opportunities necessarily requires some inequality of outcomes but that extreme inequality of outcomes is unhealthy; and that, most of all – whatever your religious beliefs might be – ultimately we are not the masters of our own fate and our existence in this world is fleeting and contingent.
It could be thought of perhaps as a philosophy of the “Balanced Centre”, which rejects both the hard woke “no borders” Left and the “MAGA” isolationist Right, and is the direct opposite of the “Far Centre” embodied by the likes of Tony Blair, Emmanuel Macron, Mark Carney, and various other globalist “extropians” who seem stuck in the 1990s worldview that there are no limits.
If someone could please convert that into popular book that could sell like hotcakes from Waterstones with an accompanying Ted talk that gets shared millions of times on LinkedIn it would be much appreciated, thanks.
i’m not sure this is possible. I’m seeing meltdowns and mass freakouts among people who are Democrats NOT caught up in woke. They make comments about a “demented” president with a complete abandonment of self-awareness about the previous guy. They are convinced that doom is on the horizon.
Exhibit A is famed Democrat Caroline Kennedy who after spending decades being a non-public person thought it necessary to appear in social media rant against her cousin RFK Jr. To pile on, her ‘village idiot’ son Jack Schlossberg took to social media to make fun of his uncle’s speaking disability. It’s as if the entire Progressive/Democrat/liberal/left sphere is melting down. ‘Woke’ is just the rainbow umbrella encompassing that entire sphere. It’s the glue holding the Progressive Democrat circus together. There’s no way these people can govern, at least not in the near future. They’re too busy dealing with stuff that doesn’t matter to the common wo/man.
It’s their secret sauce.
“Far Centre” – I like this term, it captures a valid observation really well.
As for the Left, I expect it’ll take them perhaps a decade to recover and come back to sanity. The radicals will double and triple down on everything until they’ve lost all credibility and support first.
The problem with compassion-first type lefties is they’ll be manipulated and used ruthlessly – whether that’s “liberal sponsors”, big money, or agencies or more dangerously hubristic authoritarian lefties themselves (think ogs like Stalin, Mao, Castro).
Explain how this group is anything but a cult. When its members attack an academic who is the editor of a socialist journal and interviewed by the likes of Jacobin, the group is in cult territory. Ms. Liu may well find herself in those same crosshairs. The woke left is impervious to self-awareness, introspection, or any reconsideration of its dogma. It’s like a slightly less violent version of Islamism.
Look at what identity politics has caused. A young woman is being accused of DEI favoritism following last week’s mid-air collision in DC despite no evidence of having done anything but earn her place in the Army. She was highly ranked among ROTC cadets in college and nothing in her service record indicates lowered standards. But she was female, possibly gay, and perhaps a liberal, which inadvertently highlights a key flaw of the left’s fixation on identity – it often harms the people it claims to try and help.
So the origin of Woke is a basically CIA/FBI psy-op to defang actual criticism of the capitalist status quo? I guess it worked, after a fashion, although the blowback has been immense. Almost all the pillars of Western civilisation have been subjected to its rot.
In this decade of manufactured viruses escaping their creators’ control , how spectacularly ironic that the organs of government, including apparently the FBI and military, are now so infected with this mind virus that the hardest job facing an incoming president is to clean house.
And now that selfsame virus is eating the Left too.
Agreed. If the theory is true, it would’ve been better for the FBI to have let the radicals be radical, get violent & reveal their malevolence, and give reason for normal Americans to put out that fire for good, instead of sweeping the embers to the edges where it rekindled.
2020->2024 seems to have been like that emergence of malevolence/incompetence leading to resistance from normal people.
And yet … and yet … Chibber felt able to critique woke in 2025. Would he have done so in 2020 or even early 2024?
Of course, they will not give up on Woke. Woke is the only concept which most of these idiots understand – that lifting up the oppressed is the highest calling, that solving the problems of the marginalized is the Road to Virtue. There is no CONSEQUENCE-BASED thinking in Woke – no one thinks of the outcomes. It’s all just compassion.
So true. Many, probably most of these people are compassionate idiots. Just passion defeating logic (as it is wont to do). The trouble is, it’s a really large number of people. I doubt that a super successful DT presidency can form a crack. Even if we get 8+ years of strong Republican leaders, I’m not sure. Now it feels like a neverending quest to win at all costs, like some sort of demented Hollywood comeback sequel. I hope I’m wrong.
Both can be true. The Left will never willingly let go of Wokery – it is the best weapon it has devised in decades and is supremely effective as a tool of censorship, bullying, political assassination and just plain spite towards the Left’s enemies.
But just because the Left will never let go of it doesn’t mean it will remain an effective weapon. Nobody outside the echo chambers of leftwing activism is fooled for even a moment that woke tactics are any sort of sincere attempt to improve society or to address injustices. There’s nobody left who actually trusts anyone who operates in that way. So as a platform from which to achieve political goals it is decaying rapidly before our eyes.
Very well thought out and communicated…
Alternatively, the professional Left are bickering like they are wont to do, ever since the People’s Front of Judea dissed the Judean Popular Front.
Splitters!
Admittedly, the Crack Suicide Squad has been less than expeditious in showing up and getting on with the job.
You could argue that the Left (or Democrats) are a broad church – with a Progressive cult sitting within it. That cult follows typical cult behaviour cementing in-cult loyalty and demonising those outside the cult.
As long as the cult hangs on limpet-like the rest of the Left cannot distance itself or choose to use non-cult language.
The woke and the illiberal left are rattled probably by the landslide in the recent elections. Just look at the USA’s most progressive state, California, is now functioning on par with a country in the third world and, within the next twenty years, will more than likely resemble one. The “progressives’ who are captured beyond repair will continue down the same road, with every signpost, at every junction, saying virtue, all the while destroying the very society they claim to be so committed to trying to help. It’s regressive at almost every level. The people responsible for this live in an echo chamber where cognitive consonance reinforces the madness and still, even when the evidence of their failed policies and ideology is all around them, drive on reinforcing the mayhem with even more madness. Trump, love him or loathe him is representing the silent majority, its not over yet, but he is making sterling strides in ridding the political landscape of this pernicious, racist and regressive mindset.
Woke, and anti-racism is cause to lucrative to cure. Look at all the people employed in DEI roles in business, government, academia and the non-profit world here in the USA. Then there are consultants and contractors.
According to the Boston Free Beacon, 21 Sep 2023, “Kendi became a wealthy man for his “antiracism” work. In addition to his blockbuster books, Kendi received a $625,000 “genius” grant from the MacArthur Foundation in 2021 and charged $20,000 per speaking engagement.” All while running a center in Boston University that hardly produced any research.
And after have DEI and wokeness are we any better off?
Mish mash article. The number one reason the “Woke” establishment will fight to the death is called MONEY! Imagine how many Billions, maybe even Trillions have been invested by the left into these programs and untold Billions and Millions from taxes that the government threw at DEI and all the other alphabet agencies. A lot of folks are making big Jack leading the “justice” causes as well as members of their families, and other political connections. California cannot account for 24 Billion in funding given to NGO’s for providing services for the homeless. I would guess that only 10 to 15 percent actually went to homeless people, the rest went to “Administrative Fees” or the more realistic Payoffs.
Nope, you will have to pry the bucks from their cold, dead hands as these folks aren’t particularly suited for real work. Just think of what Al Gore and his buddies will do when they stand to lose Billions of dollars. They will use the courts to go to the wall because they don’t know, like the other folks, what else to do when you no longer have the political and Bureaucratic state in your pocket.
So in your world DEI is interchangeable with climate change warnings?
Well said. Years ago, the left would criticize the wacko left; now, it’s only the right who criticize the wacko left. The wacko left and the wacko right need to be called out.
Losing sway and going away are two very distinct things. The extreme Left and extreme Right will always be with us. But the ascendancy of this brand of woke, prominent since the (I believe defensible) shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson is on the wane. As the late 80s early 90s version known as Political Correctness waned before it. Waned, not disappeared.
Liu’s argument gains strength toward the end, when she calls on her fellow Lefties to call out this menace, still too prominent throughout academia. But the opening premise is weak given the context: Jacobin is radical; militantly Left. A readership for whom Marxist is a badge of honor. This ain’t liberalism, not anything close to a moderate Leftism.
What if a self-declared conservative were to somehow make it FOX News prime time and denounce MAGA? He or she would get pilloried too, and celebrated by MSNBC and the NYT. Not that FOX News is far right across the board, but right now they are all in for Trump, as inclined to see only rainbows in MAGA-land as MSNBC ever was in the Obama White House. Close call anyway.
I’m treating Trump’s quick and severe attack on DEI as a net good. With the huge caveat that no one should instantly blame all disasters on diversity, nor pretend that a juggernaut of almost all white men at the top, like America 60 years ago, somehow reflects a pure meritocracy. In any case, while it won’t fully diasappear, I don’t think this particular bubble of Left identarianism, which indeed peaked in 2020, will ever recover. Hallelujah in advance to that. Knock on wood.
Socialism implies levelling, so, at bottom, it stands in contradiction to Wokery, which treats people differently accoding to which rung they stand on in the Woke ladder. This contradiction must play out if the two political schemes are tried at once.
The Woke are capitalists in cast off drag attempting to control the means of production via infiltration of workers’ negotiation with capital. The game is now up and it is just a matter of time before they are history. The critics of Chibber know this and are scrambling for relevancy.
Not only that. If one presumes that some minorities are over-represented in the lower economic strata of society, then supporting the working and underclasses as a whole will automatically help those minorities more. That is not to say that things like prejudice do not exist, but basically ignoring the economic side of a left wing cause makes no sense. However, I can see why those who invested their career in this identity-based leftism might be panicking. They already lost the working class, the postmodern right is getting more effective and now more and more left wing intellectuals want to go back to the basics.
That intelligence was involved in left wing movements is known and understandable from a cold war perceptive. And not just on American universities. Supposedly some declassified CIA documents show they were monitoring, and possibly influencing, French left wing radical in the 60s as well as prominent postmodern thinkers such as Michel Foucault and Roland Barthes in the 70s and 80s.
Excellent essay Ms. Liu. Concise and well-written. Thank you.
RE: “William Clare Roberts, an assistant professor of politics at McGill University, suggested that Chibber is “no different” from liberal writers like Matt Yglesias or Jonathan Chait: “I am weary of having to treat him like he’s a serious thinker on the socialist left, much less a Marxist”.
Nothing says “We are determined to lose all the elections” quite like a bougie Marxist professor pissed off about being asked to think about the disgusting, repellant beliefs and behaviors of the proles.
This is middle-class female identity across not only the West, but educated Asia and the middle-class Middle East too. Why should we take these enlightened beliefs away from all these young ladies the world over?
this is a very good piece. Identity politics has been at times very divisive and exclusive. It is connected to the PMC and the pious ´woke´ of that class can at times talk down to people and be patronizing to the working classes.
Also the PMC which centres identitty politics essentialism, fails to recognize that its possible for working class Afro Americans, Hispanics, Asians to identify with the working classes generally. We don´t hear enough the perspective of working class racial minority groups.
However, in the UK there has been criticism of identity essentialism from people of the left who from different racial backgrounds. eg Kenan Malik is very insigthful also Ralph Leonard.
Unfortunately you cannot utilize an AI to research “woke” as the umbrella of actions and ideas castigated as “woke” have substantially evolved since early in 2023. The use of the rights term woke is similar to crazy giants utilizing humongous sledgehammers to smash whole villages of thought they find disgusting or disruptive or what ever that triggers their vainglorious effort to rid the world of a widening disease of liberal thought. This is Fascism at its arrogant finest, killing off that which is repugnant to the all mighty AltRight.
”Alt-Right” – is it still 2017?