Death of woke — the left must reclaim universalism to defeat the far right

What is (or was, depending on your point of view), ‘woke’? Where did it come from, where did it go — and why, after its ignominious defeat, does the left seem so reluctant to let it go? We urgently need a left cleansed of woke. Time is running out.

Natale Labia writes on the economy and finance. Partner and chief economist of a global investment firm, he writes in his personal capacity. MBA from Università Bocconi. Supports Juventus.

For roughly a decade, between 2013 and 2023, wokeness was one of the great forces animating Western culture and politics.

Most progressives could not – or would not – admit it. But they embraced it. Institutions changed their language, corporations rewrote codes of conduct, universities reshaped themselves around its tenets, and politicians recited its vocabulary.

The word itself has a reasonable enough origin. “Woke” surfaced out of black America as a description of being vigilant towards racism and aware of structural inequalities. It spread through progressive politics before being latched on to by the right as a term of abuse and ridicule, much as “political correctness” had been a generation earlier. Right-wing populists now apply it so promiscuously that almost anything they dislike qualifies.

Essentially, wokeness sought to identify and correct inequalities affecting minority racial groups, women, LGBTQI+ people and other marginalised groups. It placed particular emphasis on structural discrimination; the idea that unfairness could persist for generations without conscious bigotry because institutions, conventions and inherited norms themselves reproduce inequality.

This was all broadly correct. The killing of George Floyd in 2020, following cases like Trayvon Martin’s death in 2012, became symbolic of the enduring racial divide in the US. The civil rights revolution might have transformed America, but it had not abolished social or economic injustice.

As Yascha Mounk argued in The Identity Trap, parts of the movement departed sharply from the universalism of the civil rights tradition – in many cases, running completely contrary to it. Martin Luther King Jr’s promise had been one of integration, much like Mandela; the goal should be a society in which race matters progressively less, not more. The intellectual currents that came to dominate the discourse of the 2010s moved in the opposite direction.

These once fringe currents drew on the post-structuralism of Michel Foucault, an intellectual tradition obsessed with power and adamant that institutions can never be neutral. This was more Biko than Madiba. A movement to quash racism shifted from transcending identity to organising everything around racism.

What woke was not, was liberalism, and neither was it socialism. This distinction matters because the populist far right has been incredibly successful at erasing it. In the Trumpian lexicon, anyone to the left of him and his Maga faithful can be simultaneously described as liberal, socialist and woke. A vote for anyone wanting to impose higher taxes on billionaires is one step closer to your daughter having to share a bathroom with a man.