The Death of Woke?

Wokeness promised compassion. Instead, it normalized conformity, hypocrisy, and division.

If you’ve ever paid any attention whatsoever to the so-called “culture wars” over the past decade or two, you will no doubt have come across a seemingly endless stream of think pieces about “wokeness”.

Everything from how it’s just another word for compassion to assertions that it’s slowly corroding the fabric of our society; from how it affects the latest US elections to how it has “destroyed” Hollywood box office numbers. Lately, and quite inevitably, there have been endless assertions that the “peak woke era” is over and, just as inevitably, these have been met with rebuttals asserting that it’s stronger than ever.

This article, I admit, doesn’t exactly transcend that particular trend, but there have been a number of incidents over the past few weeks and months, both at home and abroad, that have held up a mirror to our societies and have asked us to consider, once and for all, what this buzzword really means, what its effects are, and why it’s long past time to finally put it to bed.

Woke: A Working Definition?

Obviously, before getting into any of this, we have to define our terms. “Wokeness” is central to the “culture wars” and the resulting dissolution of the social discourse, but it says something about where we are in 2026 that no one seems to be at all able to actually explain just what the hell we mean when we say the word “woke”.

The major trap that seemingly all sides of the argument fall into when discussing “wokeness” is that both those who are for it and those who are against it end up arguing over strawmen that actually don’t represent the other side’s argument. Or, more simply, when both the left and the right argue about “wokeness”, they both deflect it onto something that is actually very different from it: which is to say, your basic, garden variety liberalism.

The defenders of “woke” (usually on the Left) shut down all criticism by presenting arguments against it as a direct attack on the basic liberal concepts of equality, compassion and inclusiveness, whereas many of its most vociferous critics (usually on the Right) present it as nothing more than liberalism gone haywire as a way to obscure more basic prejudices.

I would argue, though, that “woke”, for all that the term may have originated in the Civil Rights movement where it meant, very simply, “being awake to injustice”, in its current form, it actually has little to do with liberalism, even extreme liberalism. That it’s actually its precise opposite.

While liberalism is defined by free speech, individualism, open debate, and, perhaps most importantly, Dr Martin Luther King Jr’s maxim of judging people not by the colour of their skin (or other immutable characteristics) but by the content of the character, “wokeism” calls for conformity of thought, “de-platforming”, and for judging people according to how much their group identity (those same immutable characteristics) make them either oppressor or oppressed; victim or victimizer. Liberalism puts its highest value on empowerment; “wokeism” on victimization.

Which is why, for all that it might draw on left-wing ideologies like Marxism and post-modernism, a “woke” right has started to claim a certain amount of dominance by, in effect, flipping the roles, so that victims become victimisers; the oppressors, the oppressed. Either way, the basic idea is the same and the liberal ideals that so many of us hold dear have been undermined and corrupted by this insidious ideology, even as its right-wing counterpart moves centre-right conservatism towards something much darker and much more dangerous.

A Timely Case Study

There is precisely one area in which both right- and left-wing wokeism intersect, though. Both have a real problem with Jews and an even bigger problem with Israel. To the woke left, Jews are “uber-whites” with outsized influence, power, and privilege, whose country represents the last bastion of Western imperialism and whose “unprovoked oppression” of the Palestinians is the source of all conflict in the Middle East. To the ascendant woke right, Jews are insidious tricksters whose ability to “pass for white” is used to pollute “decent society” – the great replacement theory, as it is known - and whose country uses and manipulates their allies, especially the USA, to do its bidding.

“Woke” is the current term but anyone with even the slightest knowledge of history will immediately recognise them for what they are: Soviet and Nazi antisemitism, respectively.

Which is why it’s deeply ironic that one particular recent example of the insidious nature of wokeness occurred in Berlin, in particular at the Berlin Film Festival. There was a whole manufactured controversy around the festival where the usual gang of idiot celebrities and activists wrote an open letter to the organisers of the festival, condemning them for censoring filmmakers who call out Israel’s “genocide” of the Palestinians and demanding that the film festival itself condemns Israel for its alleged crimes against humanity.

This despite a Palestinian film winning a prestigious “first feature” prize at the festival, Gaza being mentioned in several speeches, and the usual array of kefiyahs and Palestinian being on full display all over the place. But more simply, why on earth does a film festival have to officially venture a political opinion on something with which it has absolutely nothing to do – especially as it’s set in a city and a country with a, shall we say, complicated past with one of the involved parties?

This isn’t concern for the lives of Middle Easterners, but a purity test that is based purely on how much you’re willing to “condemn” (read: “hate”) the world’s only Jewish State. Want proof? How about the fact that not a single word was uttered about the continuing massacre of Iranian civilians by their radical Islamist government, which has by many accounts claimed more civilian lives over two months than the entire Israel-Hamas war did over two years. And while the so-called “genocide” in Gaza has been suspended ever since Israel got its hostages back (an odd move for “genociders”, wouldn’t you think?), what’s happening in Iran is very much an ongoing concern, even if the protests that sparked it were violently quashed weeks ago.

Indeed, it’s hard to think of something that reveals the callowness of the woke ideology more than its abysmal reaction to the evils of the Islamic Republic, especially on the woke left. Complete indifference to the plight of the Iranian people is actually the least of the woke left’s crimes. Much worse is its insistence on not holding the actual parties responsible (the regime and its armed wing, the IRGC) for the oppression of their own people and shifting the blame to the US and Israel for... I don’t know, being “Western” and “white”. It’s as if they can’t imagine that “brown” Muslims who fall towards the bottom of the ridiculous “woke pyramid of oppression” are capable of evil if it’s not ultimately the blame of “white colonialists”.

Yes, it is this dumb.

Worse still, is how the same woke leftists have called out Iranian expats for “Islamophobia” for calling out the vile Islamist ideology that lies behind the people that have actually been oppressing, murdering, raping and torturing their people for the better part of half a century. Just when you thought it couldn’t get more morally craven.

Of course, now that the US and Israel are actively at war with the Iranian regime, these same far-left ideologues aren’t simply questioning the legality, strategy and purpose of the war (all of which absolutely need to be questioned) but on attacking the IRGC and the regime it supports. There are many reasons to be reluctant in supporting this war, but it takes a particular sort of mindset to portray the Islamic Republic as the undeserving victims of US and Israeli aggression.

But then, this is perhaps less surprising when you consider one of the woke left’s greatest but most bizarre allies: those very same radical Islamists.

Strange Bedfellows

If wokeism did, indeed, actually have anything to do with actual liberalism and values like equality, humanism, and societal progress, it would have absolutely nothing to do with an ideology that represents its exact opposite. But it does. And it does so most frequently, through the duplicitous, underhanded method of calling anyone who dares to condemn Islamism as an ideology, let alone Islamists as people, “Islamophobic”.

I can hardly think of a more disgusting insult to ordinary, peaceful, moderate Muslims than to conflate them with one of the most noxious ideologies on the planet. Islamism, may have different forms - some violent, some not; some limited to Muslim-majority countries, some not - but certainly the most extreme of these forms are, by their very definition, imperialist, colonialist and fundamentalist as they share the common goal of the creation of a worldwide caliphate ruled by fundamentalist Sharia law and purged of any non-Islamic elements. To, in effect, turn every country into modern day Iran. And yes, it is an ideology that to achieve its aims has become the biggest sponsor of terrorism on the planet

To protect such an ideology and those who are the most extreme examples of it - the Islamic Republic of Iran, Hamas, the various Islamist groups in North Africa – is already unforgiveable enough, but conflating ordinary Muslims with this noxious ideology is nothing short of grotesque – not least because it is frequently they who are its biggest victims.

Had Enough?

It hasn’t passed my notice that all this seems to prove that wokeism is alive and well (and I haven’t even touched on the right-wing wokeism of the likes of Tucker Carlson) but we are seeing a push back against it by people from across the political spectrum who have grown tired of being bullied into compromising their speech and beliefs. The reaction to the recent débâcle between King David and Roedean, which overwhelmingly condemned the latter of using Gaza as an excuse for anti-Jewish bigotry, is proof that there might be light at the end of the tunnel. Certainly, you get a much better picture of things when you talk to actual people outside of the cloistered, often mad worlds of social media, academia, extremist politics, and biased media.

Maybe it’s the optimist in me, but it really does feel like people are starting to say enough is enough. It’s about damn time.

Ilan Preskovsky is a Johannesburg-based freelance writer, who has covered everything from international politics to Jewish culture/ religion to film and TV reviews. His work has been featured online on the likes of News24, Popverse and BizNews, and in print in Business Day, Jewish Life Magazine and the Star, among others.