Is Woke Dead?

An analysis of woke's vital status

“[Woke] is dead. [Woke] remains dead. And we have killed [it].”—Nietzsche, anti-woke commentator

“The reports of [woke’s] death are greatly exaggerated.”—Mark Twain, noted SJW

The death of woke is currently being proclaimed in many quarters. And it’s no surprise. The Cass Review all but killed child transition in the UK, and has cast doubt on the practice globally. Implicit bias training has been widely discredited, with Matt Walsh releasing his satirical Am I Racist? just in time to catch its dying gasp. In American politics, woke is now seen as a liability: the Democratic presidential campaign has shifted hard non-woke, as reflected in Kamala Harris’ statements and policy page.

Woke is undeniably in retreat—but is it dying, or just tending its wounds? Commentators have floated three main theories: (1) woke is dead or dying, (2) woke isn’t dead, it’s just become mainstream, and (3) woke lives, woke will rise again.

What is Woke?

“Woke” comes from African American Vernacular English (AAVE) and signifies being “awake” and therefore aware of social injustice, especially as it pertains to race. These days, “woke” tends to refer more generally to a style of leftism popular in the 2010s, which focuses on (1) the need for radical systemic change, and (2) identity politics, emphasizing in particular race and gender.

“Woke” is a subcategory of “leftist.” All woke is leftist, but not all leftism is woke. A campaign to raise the welfare rate is leftist, but not woke (it’s reformist). A Trotskyist arguing that we need to take over the unions to push for an international workers’ revolution is certainly leftist, but not woke.¹

Woke is its own beast. We’ll explore some examples momentarily.

Theory 1: Woke is dead

One theory, trotted out by many a hopeful conservative, is that we hit “peak woke” in the 2010s, and woke is now in its death throes. LGBTQIA2S+ will fade into the margins, race-blindness will rise, and hard-headed meritocracy will dominate the economy.²

This is essentially an argument from extrapolation:

Major premise: Woke has been on the retreat since its “peak woke” heyday

Minor premise: This trend will continue and intensify

_________

Conclusion: We can expect woke to be dead and decomposing within a few short years.

Let’s start with the major premise: that woke is on the decline.

Here are some headlines from the early years of woke, just a few years ago. They come from Everyday Feminism, a once-prominent content factory:

• How to Compensate Black Women and Femmes on Social Media for Their Emotional Labor (Feb 2019)

• 6 Tips for Making Your Conversations About Reproductive Rights More Trans Inclusive (October 2018)

• The Feminist’s Guide to Non-Racist Flirting with Women of Color (March 2016)

• 4 Ways White People Can Process Their Emotions Without Bringing the White Tears (Feb 2016)

• Here’s What’s Okay (And Not Okay) to Say to a Trans Person—Once and For All³ (June 2015)

No doubt we can find such articles still being written somewhere on the internet. But they aren’t ubiquitous like they used to be. They don’t have the same traction. These days, they tend to come off as cringe.

A certain style of unironic woke boosterism has undoubtedly died.

The Economist attempted to quantify the popularity of wokeness, and found that it does, indeed, seem to be on the retreat. 

Recent Gallup data shows that 35% of Americans claim to worry “a great deal” about race relations, down from 48% in 2021 (but up from 17% in 2014). According to YouGov, opposition to trans students playing sports in their preferred gender has risen from 53% in 2022 to 61% in 2024. The Economist corroborated polling data by doing a word frequency analysis of major news publications. They found that use of words like “intersectionality,” “microaggression,” “oppression,” “white privilege,” and “transphobia” peaked from 2019 to 2021, and have been falling since then. In 2020, the term “white privilege” had 2.5 mentions for every million words in the New York Times, and in 2023 it fell to just 0.04. The Economist concluded that while the popularity of woke is still up from 2015, it’s dropped significantly from its 2020 peak (for race; the gender peak was earlier, around 2018–2019⁴).

And so we come to our minor premise: that this trend will continue, and eventually, lead to the death of woke.

However, there are two other possibilities. The first rejects the idea that woke is on the decline, and argues it has gone mainstream. And the second accepts that woke is on the decline, but argues that it’s set to bounce back.

Theory 2: Woke has gone mainstream

When Nietzsche proclaimed the death of God, he was speaking metaphorically. He believed the Christian God had become untenable, at least as the societal default, and that we were facing an age of mass secularization. But in this new, less religious world, Christian morals would persist, out of both personal and institutional habit.

“God is dead; but given the way of men, there may still be caves for thousands of years in which his shadow will be shown. —And we—we still have to vanquish his shadow, too.”

And so we get to our second theory: that “woke has gone mainstream.” Woke as a whole might have become less relevant, but the changes and policies wrought by woke will persist out of habit.⁵

This article from the Guardian sums up the argument as, “Woke is no longer wildly anti-establishment; increasingly it’s becoming the boring old establishment, to the point where teenagers will doubtless soon be ripping it apart on TikTok, since turning into baby conservatives is the only thing really guaranteed now to confound their parents.”

It doesn’t bring the argument to its logical conclusion, as Nietzsche does with Christianity: that if woke is currently in the Late Majority phase of the adoption curve, its days are numbered.

If it’s true what they say, that woke has become uncool, then we can expect its remnants to be scrubbed out by the same process that ushered it in. Cool outsiders champion a different perspective—this time, populist conservatism. Early adopters within the system give it a try, and soon it explodes into the mainstream.

This is undoubtedly happening to some degree. Many of Trump’s supporters are young men, disgruntled by woke. We see a parallel to the 1960s, which ended up ushering in Reaganism.

Without a social consensus, legacy woke policies are doomed: “Christianity [and woke] is a system, a whole view of things thought out together. By breaking one main concept out of it, the faith in God [or identity politics], one breaks the whole.” —Nietzsche

If, as a society, we no longer believe in the principles underpinning woke, then the whole apparatus will fall. Whatever fragments remain will be washed away.

However, this analysis misses a crucial point: that in fact, young people happen to be insanely woke.

Theory 3: Woke lives, woke will rise again

There’s a deeper parallel between Nietzsche’s death of God and 2024’s death of woke. In both cases, the moribund is a system of thought that emphasizes compassion for the downtrodden.

Nietzsche called this ‘slave morality,’ and it involved one of his central distinctions:

• Master morality: the morality of the powerful, sanctifies qualities like strength, beauty and victory

• Slave morality: the morality of the downtrodden, reacts against master morality by elevating qualities like meekness, charity and humility

He believed that the Jews, oppressed by powerful empires, innovated slave morality so that they could still ‘win’ morally even as they lost. Christianity further developed and popularized slave morality.

We could point to Christianity’s (and Judaism’s) bloody history as proof that they’re not *really* about kindness and meekness, deep down. Nietzsche would heartily agree—his main criticism of slave morality is that it conceals a vicious ressentiment, suppressed feelings of envy and hatred that can’t be acted upon, and gets sublimated into a sense of moral superiority.⁶ “The ressentiment of those beings who, denied the proper response of action, compensate for it only with imaginary revenge.”⁷

This does parallel some tendencies in modern woke. Conservatives love pointing out that while wokeists claim diversity as a core value, they shun diversity of thought, often launching cancellation campaigns with a level of viciousness that could suggest a deep-set ressentiment. And indeed, the past decade’s wave of cancellations have been deeply unsettling. According to research from FIRE, from 2014 to 2023, over 1000 professors faced politically motivated campaigns to get them professionally disciplined, and 60% of these campaigns came from the left.

Nietzsche predicted that slave morality would persist even after the decline of Christianity, embedded within secularism (God surviving in ghost form). Some modern slave-morality-ish things that Nietzsche hated:

• Democracy

• Socialism

• Humanism

• Utilitarianism

• Egalitarianism

Safe to say, he would’ve been no fan of woke.

There’s a story we can tell about the history of the West: that it consists of a struggle between a powerful master morality, and a bleeding-heart slave morality. A great irony of our times is that the more master moralist conservatives love to defend the West by pointing its slave moralish tendencies (we were the first civilization to abolish slavery, we developed democracy); while the slave moralist leftists condemn the West by pointing to its history of brutal victory, which in the past would’ve been celebrated.

From this perspective, the rise of woke is just the newest incarnation of a tendency towards slave morality deeply baked into the DNA of the West. Our society also has a powerful Will to Power: a drive towards wealth, dominance, and beauty that’s shaped the course of our history. We do what we have to do to win, and then the bleeding hearts come in to mop it up. Some examples

• We must industrialize! Send children to the mines —> anti-child labor activism

• We must become a global empire! Import slaves from Africa —> abolitionist campaign, ongoing activism to address the legacy of slavery to this day

• We must industrialize! Let them work twelve hours for their wage —> sixty-hour week campaign, followed by forty-hour week campaign

• The Americas are full of valuable land and resources! Let’s colonize it —> past and current anti-colonial movement⁸

Modern conservatives are appealing to a kind of balance when they dredge up the West’s leftist innovations to justify its bloody history. One argument that the West deserves to be a global leader would point to the fact that we’re a society with a conscience that’s still able to be successful. Many leftists would howl at this, and in this case Nietzsche would join them—pointing out that this conscience is just a thin veneer on top of a rapacious will to power.

So what does this imply about the future of woke?

The Future of Woke

If Nietzsche is right, then woke is just the most recent incarnation of a perennial tendency. And as such it’s not dead, and will die only with the West—or perhaps even outlive it, as catholicism outlived Rome.

We all know that leftism more generally isn’t going to die. It evolves with time. Look at our second epigraphee, Mark Twain: in his time, he was considered progressive, writing his magnum opus Adventures of Huckleberry Finn to humanize Black people and challenge the moral contradictions of slavery. Today, however, the novel is often considered racist due to its liberal use of the n-word and racial stereotypes. It’s even earned a spot on the American Library Association’s list of the 100 most banned and challenged books of the 2010s.

Standards change. Conservatives might hope that the left will reconstitute itself as a version of its former self—plain old liberal progressivism (or they might fear this—the more the left moderates, the more they lose their scapegoat).

However, I’d argue that woke, as we defined it above (call for radical systemic change+identity politics) is alive and well. And it lives in the young.

The data backs this up. The popularity of woke has declined among all groups, but it remains high among Gen Z. 58% of Gen Z want businesses to support Diversity, Equity and Inclusion in the workplace (as opposed to 49% overall). 57.7% of 18 - 29 year olds in 2024 believe that Black Lives Matter is uniting the country (as opposed to dividing it), the only group in which this view was a majority. 47% support trans women competing in women’s sports with 35% opposing, in contrast to the average across all age groups, where 61% oppose.

But isn’t this just the intemperance of youth? Can’t we expect these Gen Z’s to sober up and embrace centrism as they age?

Not really. According to an analysis by the Financial Times, Millennials have overwhelmingly bucked previous generations’ trend of becoming more conservative as they age, instead becoming the least conservative 35-year-olds in modern history. Gen Z is likely to follow a similar trend.

Lately I’ve taken on the hobby of asking young people about their political views. A few gems from recent experience:

• A nineteen-year-old taking for granted that all the land in North America should be given back to Indigenous people

• A twenty-year-old who took it as a given that the current conditions of Black people in America are tantamount to slavery

• A university professor telling students they didn’t have to do the course work that semester because she expected them to be traumatized by the genocide in the Gaza Strip

The last point is telling.⁹ The energy of woke, battered on such issues as BLM and trans rights, has been redirected into Israel-Palestine. The Pro-Palestine movement hits all the woke qualifications: focused primarily on race, arguing for radical, systemic change (in this case, Palestinian statehood and the end of Israel as a Jewish state). 

The Pro-Palestine movement has a lot going for it over previous iterations of woke. For one, it’s more substantive: 2010’s peak woke was often mocked for focusing on banalities, like gardening being racist, white people wearing dreadlocks, and retiring ableist terms like ‘lame.’ With the War in Gaza, leftists are back in the land of life and death, opposing (in their view) world-historical injustices like colonialism, imperialism, and genocide. Gaza is both important and intellectually complex, and this gives the current iteration of woke a weight that the 2010s version lacked.

As woke evolves, it’ll likely lean into this trend. We can expect more emphasis on colonialism and Lenin-style anti-imperial politics.

But it won’t end there. Ultimately people want their moral systems to involve their lived reality, and as such I predict a re-emergence of class analysis. Class has the same advantage as Israel-Palestine of being both materially and intellectually substantive. Indeed, the left’s best ideas have always been about class, and the modern left would be wise to draw from that intellectual history. A worker’s movement is unlikely, given the popularity of remote work and gig work, but there are different ways to cut up class and I expect the New Woke to find them.¹⁰

Feminism is deep into a decades-old schism and is unlikely to be taken up by the left for some time. Most young people I talk to are ambivalent about the term, due to its associations with gender critical (non-trans affirming) feminism. There’s a version of feminism that embraces trans identity and hand-waves the brutal sexism of Islamists, but that version is so convoluted and diluted it loses urgency.

To sum up, I predict Gen Z’s political consciousness to reflect:

• The continued importance of anti-imperialist discourse

• Feminism becoming more marginal; the basic tenets of trans/gender politics still affirmed but not emphasized

• A renewed emphasis on class in the domestic sphere

For better or for worse, woke is not dead; it’s just going through a generational shift. And no amount of wishful eulogies will change that.

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1. Some leftists like Slavoj Žižek even argue that woke is in important ways anti-leftist.

2. It’s worth noting that not all rightists want a return to this sort of status quo. More outlandish rightist ideologies are becoming popular, and not just among MAGA normies. As discussed in the book Conspirituality, once-leftist spiritual communities are now embracing right-leaning narratives. We also see emerging intellectual and artistic movements embracing rightist ideas, like the community surrounding Jordan Peterson in Toronto, or Dimes Square in New York. I’ll elaborate on these trends in a future article.

3. Reader, the issue was not settled once and for all.

4. You might notice that several of the Everyday Feminism articles are from earlier than this. They were Early Adopters, while peak woke tracks the Early Majority (see adoption curve below).

5. We might make the analogy to Schrödinger's Cat: having gone establishment, woke is neither fully alive nor fully dead. Alternatively, a closer analogy might be our state of uncertainty with regards to woke, creating a metaphorical superposition.

6. In Christianity this dynamic is more complicated. As the religion gained power, it took on many of the trappings of a more straightforward master morality, like soaring cathedrals and the British Empire’s air of cheerful entitlement. A Nietzschean analysis would acknowledge that both tendencies exist. He’d point out that the religion was originally built on a foundation of slave morality (Jesus is the ultimate martyr, triumphing even in his wretchedness), and that this strain perennially breaks through.

7. Conservatives, so often the Culture War underdogs, have indulged no small amount of ressentiment themselves. Ironically enough, many contemporary conservative positions are just warmed-over identity politics (white identitarianism being only the most obvious).

8. Nikki the Hegelian pointed out in personal conversation that these examples suggest a tendency towards black-and-white thinking, failing to resolve in dialectical resolution.

9. And not just as an example of the stranglehold woke still has over academia.

10. One such possibility is Émilie Carrière’s attempt to reform identity politics as a class system.