Here we have two different British media venues: the Sunday Times of London and The Economist, coming to different conclusions about a questions that gnaws on many of us: “Is wokeness in America on the wane or on the rise?”
The Times (second article below) says “no, we aren’t even near peak wokeness”, taking issue with the Economist article (first headline below), which, based on thei analysis of trends in views and in the use of “woke” terms in the media, says wokeness has peaked. First, the Economist piece (click to read)
The results of the Economist survey and a chart:
The simplest way to measure the spread of woke views is through polling. We examined responses over the past 25 years to polls conducted by Gallup, General Social Survey (GSS), Pew and YouGov. Woke opinions on racial discrimination began to grow around 2015 and peaked around 2021. In the most recent Gallup data, from earlier this year, 35% of people said they worried “a great deal” about race relations, down from a peak of 48% in 2021 but up from 17% in 2014. According to Pew, the share of Americans who agree that white people enjoy advantages in life that black people do not (“white privilege”, in the jargon) peaked in 2020. In GSS’s data the view that discrimination is the main reason for differences in outcomes between races peaked in 2021 and fell in the most recent version of the survey, in 2022. Some of the biggest leaps and subsequent declines in woke thinking have been among young people and those on the left.
Here’s their chart. I have to say that, with the exception of race being the most important issue in the U.S., which could be dampened by the election and concerns about the economy and immigration, I’m not impressed by the “peaks”. Wokeness is still way higher than it was just ten years ago.
Polling about sexual discrimination reveals a similar pattern, albeit with an earlier peak than concerns about race. The share of Americans who consider sexism a very or moderately big problem peaked at 70% in 2018, in the aftermath of #MeToo. The share believing that women face obstacles that make it hard to get ahead peaked in 2019, at 57%. Woke views on gender are also in decline. Pew finds that the share of people who believe someone can be a different sex from the one of their birth has fallen steadily since 2017, when it first asked the question. Opposition to trans students playing in sports teams that match their chosen gender rather than their biological sex has grown from 53% in 2022 to 61% in 2024, according to YouGov.
Now that last statistic, about trans students—clearly males identifying as females playing on teams not matching their biological sex (I love that term)—I do find convincing, simply because in the media I see increasing opposition to it, and think that, on issues of fairness alone, the “transwomen are women” trope, and vice versa, is on the way out. This is about fairness (morality), not solely ideology. And, of course, you can’t contest the data on the frequency of terms used, but again, Biden and the election have pushed woke issues largely to the side. More from The Economist:
To corroborate the trend revealed by opinion polls, we measured how frequently the media have been using woke terms like “intersectionality”, “microaggression”, “oppression”, “white privilege” and “transphobia”. At our request, David Rozado, an academic based in New Zealand, counted the frequency of 154 of such words in six newspapers—the Los Angeles Times, New York Times, New York Post, Wall Street Journal, Washington Post and Washington Times—between 1970 and 2023. In all but the Los Angeles Times, the frequency of these terms peaked between 2019 and 2021, and has fallen since. Take the term “white privilege”: in 2020 it featured roughly 2.5 times for every million words in the New York Times, but by 2023 had fallen to just 0.4 mentions for every million words.
Still, maybe, just maybe, the Economist is right. The use of “white privilege”, for example, is only 16% of what it was just three years before.
The Times rejects the “peak” conclusion, although they are going largely on intuition rather than statistics. Still, the article has a point: we need longer-term data, and the wokesters haven’t yet taken over society since they’re too young to have attained much power.
Click to read, or find the Times article archived here.
Matthew Syed, disagrees with the Economist thesis because of “invisible data”! I couldn’t resist some self-aggrandizement in what I excerpt below, but it does belong in their analysis:
Last week The Economist published an exhaustive analysis of the rise and apparent fall of wokeism. The magazine defined woke — I think rightly — as a term that has morphed over the decades from denoting an awareness of racism to a spectrum of views encompassing structural racism, radical trans rights, cancellation and the like. I won’t waste time pinning down definitions since, as with pornography, I suspect most of us know wokeism when we see it (although perhaps that is now a view that could get me cancelled).
The Economist looked at a variety of trends: how often terms like “intersectionality” and “white privilege” are used in print media (it examined millions of articles); how often they are used in TV programmes (it analysed thousands of transcripts); how often they are used in scientific papers; how often they feature in companies’ financial reports; how often calls are made for academics to be disciplined; and so on. As I say, the data was exhaustive and, I would add, superbly assembled.
But it was the way The Economist interpreted the data that troubled me. It noted that trends, by almost all these measures, particularly in America, were falling back after a high point roughly around the aftermath of the George Floyd riots. It concluded that the phenomenon was on the decline. We are, it said, almost audibly breathing a sigh of relief, “past peak woke”.
I disagree. I say this because, while the visible data reveals a clear pattern, I find myself asking: what about the invisible data? What about the cancellations that have become so normalised they are no longer reported? What about the initiatives (like mandatory unconscious bias training, which has never had evidence to support it) that are no longer mentioned in quarterly reports because they have become routine? What about the conservatives who self-censor out of fear of cancellation? When you take a step back, the data shows that woke is not past its peak but has moved from the wallpaper and into the brickwork.
Consider that Auckland University has now started requiring all students to take a course that is “effectively indoctrination in the coloniser/indigeneity hierarchy”, according to the decorated academic Jerry Coyne. This was scarcely reported. The list of cancellations in western universities grows daily, but is no longer newsworthy.
Or take a blog post from ten days ago revealing the scale of censorship in publishing, none of which shows up in datasets because the books are not, well, published (the subhead was: “Widespread censorship is killing writers’ careers before they begin”). I know authors who have had to edit out words like “stupid” and “mad” because they are considered “ableist”; who have deleted references to drinking through straws as they might prove offensive to people with disabilities who can’t use a straw; who have referred to the moon as “a small white rock orbiting the Earth” and had to remove “white” because it was racially sensitive. And I haven’t even mentioned how difficult it is to publish anything that hints at benign aspects of the British empire.
(I have to note that my article was about New Zealand, not the U.S., which was what the Economist piece was about.)
But, as you see, Syed doesn’t really give data; rather, he gives anecdotes (there are more). But it is true that deplatformings and censorship aren’t considered by the Economist, and I suspect that FIRE’s database of college deplatforming really would show an increase in the last few years (do the analysis yourself). And of course a lot of wokeness was instantiated by pro-Palestinian demonstrators, who are by and large on the Left and see Israel as white oppressors. Yet none of the friction caused by those demonstrations aren’t measured, either, and the issue isn’t going away any time soon.
Syed’s main thesis is that the woke are young and haven’t gotten societal power that will keep wokeness increasing.
Forgive a crude generalisation, but those on the right tend to go into finance and business because they are motivated by money. Those on the left tend to go into museums, charities and academia because they are willing to play a longer game. That is why cultural institutions trend left and Marxists console themselves with the thought that, while they live in smaller houses, they have the greater — if subtler — influence.
And this, I fear, is the other fallacy in The Economist’s analysis. It’s true that a fightback against wokeism has begun, largely driven by older liberals who — after cowering rather pathetically out of fear of cancellation — started to stand up for free speech, due process and the reality of biological sex. But you can glimpse its grip on our cultural institutions in the fact that much of Gen Z, which will soon replace the present generation in positions of political, cultural and corporate power — has markedly different views. And that is why it is in a decade or so that the rubber will hit the road: on women’s rights, single-sex spaces, free speech, the West’s relationship with Israel, our understanding of history, indeed our very sense of self.
Well, the liberal mainstream media is already colonized by the woke (check reports about the Slack channel of NYT reporters), but there are still nonwoke people writing for the paper. What happens when they leave?
In the end, Syed asserts that he is somewhat of a progressive, and is in favor of diversity, forms of affirmative action, and so on. But he ends like this:
But I have long feared radical wokeism, a strangely transmissible virus that could yet prove lethal to our future, and that has inspired a mirror version on the populist right, which seems just as keen to denigrate our history, the memory of Churchill and Nato.
That is why epitaphs for wokeism are not just premature but dangerous. Indeed, when you look at the invisible data, you’ll see that the fightback has only just begun.
My take: I am not sure if wokeness is on the wane. Certain aspects of it are, like the willingness to allow men identified as women to enter women’s spaces, but other aspects are on the rise, most visibly (to me) the incursion of wokeness into science journals and magazines. But the important conclusion is that wokeness is here and ubiquitous, and seems entrenched in many areas. But whether or not it’s increasing, it needs to be fought at every turn. And that means that those of us who object to the invidious side of Social Justice—of course “social justice” is not all bad; I’m referring to the ca[ota;ozed performative and non-effective pretense of fixing society by changing words, bird names, and monitoring speech and behavior—must stand up and call out this nonsense when we see it, It’s not pleasant, as you’ll be ostracized and demonized, if not fired, but since when was society ever improved without people taking flak from those who wrongly see themselves as the pinnacle of morality?
h/t: Pyers
Dumb question perhapse, but is “wokness” even a valid construct? Like if we conducted polls and did a factor analysis or other type of cluster analysis on the poll results, are we going to get something like the g factor we get with IQ, or is it possible that we end up with several distinct categories with very little in common. In other words, what if there are fundamentally different categories of “wokeness”, each having little correlation with eachother. (Holding woke views A, B and C but not woke views X, Y and Z)
Im not denying that wokeness exists, im just wondering if it wouldnt be more useful to view different types of “wokeness” as opposed to one large category. Maybe I’m “woke” in some ways but not others.
I understand this interest in the meanings of a word like “woke” (or “the successor ideology” or “authoritarian Utopianism”) instead of focusing on the consequences of the thing the word represents however approximately (cancellations, affirmative action, surgically removing the health sex organs of mentally ill people). But it seems to me focusing on the words isn’t very productive because the map isn’t the terrain.
At a Heterodox Academy function last week, two panelists discussed their divergent answers to the question “What is the purpose of a university?” The Q&A afterward partly focused on whether a university should adopt institutional neutrality wrt political events and social justice goals. Two folx from my university’s Faculty For Palestine chapter also attended (wearing keffiyehs and very severe haircuts), and they seemed intent on disrupting the event or at least tilting it toward their own answer to the question (the purpose of the university is to free Palestine etc.). But they couldn’t seem to engage with the question: they could only pester the two panelists with questions like “what’s political?” or “how do you define social justice?” This made no contribution to the conversation, and changed no one’s mind about the issue, because everyone else could see past the map of words and look directly at the terrain of the university. Seems like a shame because those folx are smart and motivated and could make a real contribution if they could get past the terminology.
I assure you i am not being pedantic by asking if wokeness is a valid construct or if it is a cluster of loosely related constructs. By analogy, imagine if one asked “are resperatory illnesses on the rise or decline”? This question might be met with the follow-up, “which resperatory illnesses?”, because stayed whether the net occursnce of several illnesses might not be meaningful at all. An increase in one may coincide with a decrease in another.
On the topic of whether or not wokeness is decreasing, it’s important to define what wokeness is and whether it even is one thing. What if cancelations of speakers decreases but support for rase-based affermative action increases? What does that say about wokeness as a whole?
Ok I see what you mean: we should set aside the definitions of broad terms, and focus on specific categories of undesirable things. Agreed, and I don’t think you’re being pedantic at all! Lung cancer might decline while asthma is on the rise.
Jerry’s last paragraph acknowledges examples of this: declining support for males in women’s sport, but increasing politicization of science journals. That’s ok: the map is imprecise (woke is harmful, or “I have a cough”) but it’s led us to this spot on the terrain (maybe woke is declining, or “I made it to the ER”) where we can look up and see both things happening (Lia Thomas vs. Scientific American, or “Oncology on the third floor, allergies on the fourth floor”) without continuing to refine the map.
Where I think the analogy breaks down is intersectionality. Lung cancer needs an oncologist, but asthma needs an immunologist, so one needs to go the right direction from the ER.
But the successor ideology is not like this. Instead it’s profoundly intersectional: in a factor analysis, all the members of F4P would cluster in one tight group along all the usual axes including cancellations, affirmative action, genderism, Palestine, decolonization, neurodivergence, ableism, fat acceptance, etc. At that panel discussion, one of the F4P members who attended (with a really severe haircut) studies trans youth in sport, settler colonialism, *and* disability rights. Whatever the symptoms, it’s the same single disease.
I think one solution can help us all breathe more freely: by sticking to Enlightenment values (fairness, equality, evidence, reason), and ridiculing the ideologues (cf. “What is a Woman?”, “Am I Racist?”).
I believe wokeness is a manifestation of the current creedal passion period:
https://mikealexander.substack.com/p/cycles-of-radicalization
This period is projected to peak in 2019-20 according the math model Peter Turchin developed in 2012. Data so far supports a peak around then:
https://mikealexander.substack.com/p/where-are-we-going-politically-part#:~:text=Table%202%20shows,winding%20down.
Mike: Be careful of Turchin. He’s not a crank by any means – his “elite over-production” ideas are top notch. The decrease of standards (and IQ) of unis admitting lower IQ students and the attendant growth of DEI, etc. does result in elite overproduction which in turn causes more DEI and other useless nonsense.
But his cyclical theories are for the birds. History isn’t cyclical. At THAT point Turchin has to be dismissed.
best,
D.A.
NYC
If no insight can be garnered by consideration of the past, then all study of a past is a fool’s errand. It may turn out that this is true, but I believe it is an open question.
So, I tend not to dismiss Turchin’s ideas or those of other non-crank scholars out of hand.
https://mikealexander.substack.com/p/trying-to-learn-from-history
That Substack article goes overboard and loses me with its gratuitous use of abbreviations.
Oh boy… I’ll try to make a brief comment.
Woke bears the signatures of gnostic and Hermetic religious cults, operating in a highly literate 21st century. As such, the game is of subversion in written form. This is also been associated with unrestricted warfare, or long march through the institutions – emphasis on long.
If a given subject is viewed in these lights, a cult religious pattern might be discerned – a motte of things normally secular people agree on like respect of individuals, E Pluribus Unum, and a bailey – the intended operational success, usually total control – not the motte.
See Nicholas Shackel 2005 on motte and bailey.
… I tried! But such is the nature of subversion with written language.
Addendum :
A music analogy elevator pitch I was coming up with might be how lots of popular singles with great new melodies come out over the years, and are perceived to be unique for those details – like the words of woke obsession – but overall form can fit a lot of the time into standard chord progressions, like ii V Is – the woke operational objective. I’d need some examples.
But a more advanced example might be the descending chromatic line passus duriusculus – found in Hotel California, Stairway to Heaven, My Funny Valentine, Dido’s Lament…
My elevator pitch concludes.
I think there have been several meaningful wins against wokeness, especially in business, but I don’t know that we are on the other side of the hill. Certainly, governments Federal and local still seem to be all in on being woke. Since Harris, Walz, and H. Clinton have recently confirmed their pro-censorship and propaganda stances, I would expect a positive barrage of woke in the media if Harris wins. As has been made clear, once the MSM starts bombarding people with certain viewpoints, people adopt them, if they don’t have other sources of information. How many people still believe in the Russian Election Interference hoax, even after it was shown to be false propaganda? If Harris wins, woke will be shoved down our throats.
Re: the Russian Election Interference hoax
Perhaps someone should inform the FBI.
https://www.fbi.gov/wanted/cyber/russian-interference-in-2016-u-s-elections
My “decorated” (hehehe. Makes me think of you in some kind of fancy dress… Caturday party maybe? hehehe).. friend PCC(E):
The doubting guy Syed is correct, to characterize his argument as mere anecdotes I don’t think works here.
I read the Economist article before this and I was tut tutting so loud I woke my doggie! I’ll read the Times now.
Earlier in my life I was an options/equities trader and the silence, the graveyard of unseen causation isn’t necessarily “anecdotes”. It can be very real and with woke I believe it is. I’m a HUGE believer in data and proof but also one must consider the data that didn’t get into the numbers. Syed does.
And so… this is admittedly rare.. the Economist is wrong.
Woke is deeply embedded, backed by billions of dollars, careers, advanced DEI “degrees”, mission creep and the hearts and minds of an addled younger generation. We’re screwed.
There’s good blowback to woke – and you are in the trenches there – but it is a HUGE fight where meritocracy is severely imperiled and ID politics continues apace. Because it plays on biases and assumptions it is more dangerous than creationism or even the old time religious nonsense you and I have been battling against for a long, long time.
Respectfully,
D.A.
NYC
I too am dubious that woke is generally in decline. Some companies are abandoning DEI because it’s not cost effective. But it’s firmly entrenched in academia and government.
In Canada (and New Zealand) the indigenous wave is just getting stronger.
PCC(E):
In your conclusion there is a typo, “ca[ota;ozed”. I can’t quite figure out what should be there.
“Capitalized”?
The Social Justice Cultural Revolution is only over or winding down in the same way a war of conquest winds down when the capital and every governing institution has been captured and all that remains are a few mop-up operations.
Weren’t places like the Economist and other MSM outlets not so long ago denying the existence of cancel culture, denying the existence of a free speech crisis sweeping American academia, denying that people were being required to take DEI fealty oaths as an employment requirement? Did they ever confess their errors? Or did they go straight from denying these things to ignoring them?
Now that political discourse has been reduced to a constant neverending culture war mostly revolving around Globalists v Nationalists, liberal writers and journalists seem to think it’s an urgent moral requirement for them to always be shielding and defending the Illiberal Left—I guess it’s the same old “No enemies to my Left” plus this reflex to denounce any statement if the wrong person (the morally suspect person who may be sympathetic to the other team) makes it, regardless of its urgency or accuracy.
But if you meet or know any educated person under say age 30, especially people who’ve graduated from the better schools and live in the big cities who will be our future cultural and political leaders, the Social Justice belief system is their natural worldview and morality—shielding the “marginalized” from hurtful words, always burning a pinch of incense to the intersectional gods, rating everything and everyone according to racial classification, and knowing all the words and thoughts that are verboten and “problematic”—all this is natural and normal to them.
Every day in America a classic liberal dies and a true believer in the reigning ideology turns 18 and prepares for adulthood. Someday in the near future, we’ll live in a society reconfigured and re-founded on Social Justice principles and barely anyone will notice and it will seem weird, subversive and suspicious to question or oppose it.
I agree with you. There are generations that have been inculcated in this stuff who will be replacing us. The second article attributed the following statement to “a blog” (that he didn’t identify) : “widespread censorship is killing writers’ careers before they begin”. We know that’s true and it’s invisible.
Back to its basic intentions after the classic pathetic seesaw of emotions from both sides.
No, seriously, I respect the basic motives of respecting those who’ve in the past been pushed aside, forced into the shadows or simply abused.
Hard to say, but the fact that some companies and now, even some universities, are jettisoning their DEI bureaucracies is a positive sign. To the extent that wokeness is a phenomenon of young people and those of early middle age, it will remain at a high level for quite some time to come—either until it ages out or otherwise becomes discredited. I wonder what high-school-age think. If wokeness loses currency with them, it’s only a matter of time before the fad comes to a close—but it will still be a long time, probably a couple of decades.
*Note that everything I opine about above is pure speculation.
Whether or not wokeness as a whole is declining, I can tell you that gender identity ideology is intensifying. More boys are competing in girls’ sports, more places (such as Planet Fitness and the YWCA) allow men to use women’s facilities, and, at least where I live, more men are openly impersonating women and claiming to be actual women. Anyone who speaks against all this, myself included, is not only cancelled, but harassed and threatened. Women are rapidly losing our hard-fought rights for single-sex spaces. I’ve witnessed little girls who fear using bathrooms because boys will be inside. Even the Olympics awards medals to men who beat up women while simultaneously congratulating themselves for achieving “gender equity” at the Games. Maybe woke racism is declining, but woke misogyny is most assuredly not.
I’ve been hesitating to go back to the gym where I let my membership lapse during covid, and some of my hesitation is due to knowing there will be men in the dressing rooms.
It isn’t fear behind this nor is it modesty – it’s sheer anger.
An acquaintance still has a Planet Fitness membership (long story) and she says there are more men in the women’s locker room than women.
You’re correct — it’s not modesty at all. It’s the loss of our privacy, safety, and dignity.
But, … but,… the poor dears fear for their safety if they have to undress in front of men, you see. If you are merely angry, you are a transphobic bigot who deserves to get punched in the face with a hard male fist. (I hope it’s obvious this is sarcasm….but it is what the activists say.)
What’s not sarcastic is that you have to lobby for legislation to remove “gender identity and expression” from your state or provincial human-rights codes or other civil-rights legislation that places obligations not to discriminate on non-state actors. This will mean that employers won’t have to hire trans people and businesses won’t have to serve them if they don’t want to — so sad — but this is the only way you will get your women’s spaces back in places where self-ID is enshrined as a human right. You tried* to be reasonable and inclusive and accommodating, feeling their pain, hoping the activists would be also reasonable on the women’s spaces question. But invading women’s private spaces is exactly what the activists wanted all along to show they could make society knuckle under to their absurd claim that transwomen are women. (It’s like compulsory pronouns.) They were never going to concede on women’s spaces. So it’s time to be unreasonable and exclusive.
If exercising a right makes everyone else worse off, with no positive externalities, ever, then the right needs the heave-ho into the Dustbin of History. You have to repeal self-ID laws and laws that empower the state to punish private actors (like gyms and violence shelters) for not accommodating trans people.
———————————
* assuming you were even asked, which you probably weren’t.
It’s not going away, it become more normalized.
Our executives have 20%-25% of their annual bonus based on achieving DEI goals, so naturally it becomes part of our corporate culture to have affinity teams (segregated teams based on if you think you’re a sex that you’re not, where your ancestors came from, or who you like to have sex with). We recruit from HBCUs and hold job fairs at LGBTQ student events at colleges so that we can say that we’re accepting of all applicants and not favoring any special group but that we just happen to get more applications from “diverse” people. We have trainings each quarter to tell us how all groups are equal in ability, and then meet behind closed doors to consider management candidates with the goal of excluding certain attributes from being considered so we can achieve our numbers (>50% of all new managers must be women, >25% of all new hires must be “diverse”, etc.). Until we stop rewarding this, it won’t end. And neither will high-paid DEI consultancy jobs to support what we do; we throw $10k of company money to a speaker to come in to talk to the troops for an hour so that we can check that box off on our “things to do to get our bonus” list.
There has been good discussion on Mumsnet about some of the effects of allowing transwomen, i.e. males, to use women’s toilets. One effect worth noting is that Muslim women cannot use these toilets if transwomen can, and this may apply also to orthodox Jewish women. This means, for example, that universities that allow male people who identify as women to use toilets for women may keep Muslim women from being able to attend as students. There is a good discussion of the “bathroom issues” in Holly Lawford-Smith’s book, Sex Matters, which brings out how important public toilets for women were in making it possible for women to not be confined to their homes.