Understanding the 'pretender ideology'
How woke rules our institutions without capturing our hearts
Nobody really likes the word ‘woke’. But the phenomenon it (usually) describes is real and significant and not about to disappear even if we stop trying to name it. For the past decade, critics from across what remains of the political spectrum have consistently resorted to the word – often while apologising for doing so – to describe something that is not synonymous with left-wing or progressive.
Of course, not everyone is so careful. The more promiscuous use of the word to mean anything vaguely leftish means that – as I noted in a previous essay – some insist it describes nothing new. For them, ‘woke’ is just what the right now calls the left, or what reactionaries used to call ‘political correctness’. And for those who are happy to call themselves woke, it is simply ‘anti-racism’, ‘caring about social justice’ or – most tellingly – ‘not being a dick’.
I say ‘most tellingly’ because this last move is characteristic of what actually is new about wokeness. In another essay, I observed that: ‘One reason the term “woke” is so controversial (and perpetually draped in scare quotes) is that its proponents do not regard it as a particular school of thought at all. It is simply what all educated, informed and decent people believe. Why should it have a label?’
Sixties radicals knew they were radicals; they did not expect their university administrators, let alone their future employers, to share their politics. Even when those radicals and their quieter peers became university administrators, teachers and employers in their own right, the ‘political correctness’ they endorsed was (mostly) intended to push genuinely offensive language and attitudes out of polite discourse. It was sometimes egregiously censorious, but it left a relatively broad spectrum of respectable opinion along which people could agree to disagree.
Woke is much less open to disagreement. The response invited by its pronouncements is ‘of course’. Particular political positions are recast as moral absolutes; to demur is not merely to express a disagreement, but to reveal yourself as morally reprobate. And if it were true that we were just talking about not being racist, that might be a reasonable view to take. We are not.
The word woke is used to distinguish the kind of people who say things like: ‘It’s not enough not to be racist; you have to be actively anti-racist!’ And what does that mean? If you’re white, it means things like dismantling whiteness, doing the work of undoing your unconscious bias while staying in your lane and being an ally of the oppressed. If you’re not white, it means toeing the line and looking as if you like it there.
Behind the verbiage, all this means conforming to an eccentric and often arbitrary ideology cooked up activists. It involves telling white children they are complicit with systemic racism and black children that society is rigged against them at every turn. It portrays the entire history of the modern West as nothing but a litany of evil. If you bristle at any of this, you are revealing white fragility or internalised anti-Blackness. Don’t we need a word for this?
The word woke is used to distinguish the kind of people who say things like: ‘Some women have penises’. Not ‘live and let live’, or even (more controversially) that we should all use trans people’s preferred pronouns, but that a biological man who identifies as a woman is literally just as much a woman as any other. That children and teenagers who experience gender confusion should not be questioned but affirmed, even to the point of administering puberty blockers and carrying out radical surgery. To dissent is not just wrong but hateful. Don’t we need a word for that?
It's not just that these positions are extreme. Within certain parameters, the content varies; it is the posture that makes woke woke. Some would not go as far as the positions set out above, but would nonetheless insist that their moderated version is common sense, basic decency rather than debateable. The literal meaning of woke lingers in the sense that it’s not really a political position at all. It’s about simple awareness.
The pretender ideology
The American writer Wesley Yang has described what I’m calling woke as the ‘successor ideology’. The idea is that a new, extra-political ‘regime’ took hold of America’s ruling classes even amid the first Trump administration, emerging from but marking a decisive break from the postwar liberal regime. Yang sees it as a ‘bourgeois moral revolution, many decades in the making, that flowered at the midpoint of the [last] decade, composed in equal measure of new political propositions, new moral premises, and new psychological underpinnings, in pursuit of what it declares to be "social justice"’. I would add that these propositions, premises and underpinnings are taken to be beyond question, even when they are not widely shared.
The second Trump administration has clearly set itself against this regime even more than the first, but having thrived in opposition before, it is not the kind of regime that can be overturned by an election. Indeed, the current political situation in the US helps clarify the nature of woke. It might be helpful to think of it less as a successor ideology or regime than a ‘pretender ideology’. Like a pretender to the throne, it claims legitimacy as a matter of right. Even when that claim must take the form of an insurgency, a lost battle here or there is of little consequence. The pretender’s court is wherever their followers exercise a degree of power.
The ‘ideological capture’ of institutions is key to the success of woke, but the term is misleading. It is not that radical activists have stormed the barricades or even won any particularly heated arguments. Woke ideas are by their very nature taken for granted. Being against racism and sexism is just basic decency, isn’t it? Trans rights are simply the new gay rights. To oppose them is surely to be on the wrong side of history. To this way of thinking, woke is indeed nothing new. It is simply the working out of arguments won long ago.
The effective depoliticisation of ‘progress’ means it is detached from political or moral discernment. To say, or to be trapped into saying, that feminism or anti-racism have ‘gone too far’ is to mark yourself as a reactionary. Never mind that navigational metaphors might not be the best, or even a very good way to think about these things. Understanding them in properly political or moral terms is hard work. Consequently, at some point in the 2010s, big organisations began to outsource their social consciences – and internal codes of conduct – to consultants and campaign groups. And to err on the side of caution was to err on the side of radicalism.
Stonewall is the paradigm case in the UK: basking in the moral authority of equal rights and same-sex marriage, the charity pushed a radical trans agenda and rewarded compliant organisations with coveted accreditation logos; its aura of inerrancy has only recently begun to fade. And, of course, the eruption of Black Lives Matters protests after the killing of George Floyd in 2020 moved companies and institutions across the world to declare themselves actively anti-racist and commit to rooting out white supremacy. In the absence of Ku Klux Klan members to sack, this meant bringing in professional anti-racists to work their magic. For now, their aura remains mostly intact.
Pretending to be popular
All this is why woke so often seems more bureaucratic than political. Its tenets are copied and pasted between non-profit mission statements and corporate DEI policies, inevitably finding their way into learning materials from primary level to continuing professional development. As much as woke excites outraged attention on Twitter/X/Bluesky, its real natural habitat is LinkedIn. There, people display their pronouns for no better reason than that the automated form asked for them, and accept their peers’ woke declarations with the same cheerful compliance. The true believers are noisy but few; woke is influential because of the many more people who go along with it all without taking any of it remotely personally.
And that’s how people manage not to notice that what passes for anti-racism is often closer to the opposite, and that trans ideology is a polite fiction gone mad. It’s why they can dismiss anti-woke arguments without seriously considering them. Haven’t right-wingers always pushed back against progress? To this way of thinking, complaints from gammons on social media are an indication that your brand is doing something right.
The great pretence of the pretender ideology is that this stuff is mainstream. That it is ‘gender critical feminists’ who are eccentric. That anti-woke sentiments are ‘controversial’. That populism is unpopular. In fact, woke could only ever have risen to prominence through institutional capture, because institutions lack something the general public still just about clings onto: common sense. That’s why, for all its faults, democratic politics remains a bulwark against woke.
While left-leaning parties have recently won general elections in the UK, Canada and Australia, nobody sees this as a vindication of their woke wings. Indeed, it is widely understood that you have to marginalise those more ‘idealistic’ voices in order to get elected. According to the pretender ideology itself, this is an unfortunate but perhaps necessary compromise until such a time as the general public catches up or at least learns to play along. In the meantime, ‘social justice’ is better pursued through work places, universities and, of course, art galleries. (What else are those for?)
The great irony is that this not only harms those institutions by subverting their proper purposes. It is also bad for genuine social justice, which can only be achieved through democratic politics, because it is through democratic politics that we decide on the ‘genuine’ part. There is a reason people were historically persuaded to support equal pay for equal work and rules against racial discrimination, but will not back gender self-ID or requiring 21st century Britons to pay reparations for 18th century slavery.
Contrary to woke assumptions, we are more likely to find a genuinely just approach to still-vexed issues like immigration, euthanasia or the regulation of AI by thrashing these out in the public sphere than by delegating them to activists. Or indeed the scientific experts who have given us catastrophic net zero policies. After all, an aversion to politics and open debate is a common thread between woke and what might be called the ‘climate emergency regime’.
In another previous essay, I explored how woke moralism has fused with an avowedly post-ideological technocracy: ‘The radicals’ belief that their moral critique is driving progress, overcoming the errors of the past, echoes the technocratic belief in scientific progress.’ In both cases, ‘progress’ becomes an end in itself, with little consideration of what makes it progress. This is naïve enough when it comes to science and technology; applied to political and moral questions, it is disastrous.
The woke regime’s only claim to legitimacy is its family resemblance to post-war liberalism, a progressive bent now turned against liberalism itself. Indeed, it rejects the moral and political norms that quietly underpinned its predecessor’s reign and shaped its understanding of progress. No wonder it lacks that quality without which no pretender can ultimately succeed: the common touch.