All that is great about western civilization is being undermined by a progressive political and cultural project that aims to reject and rewrite our history, prioritize group identity above the individual and embed this agenda into our laws and institutions. Welcome to The Western Surrender, an NP Comment series ranking the five Anglosphere countries by their adoption of these ideas. Today, we start with No. 5, the United States.
The Origins and Meaning of 'Woke'
In something like its current usage, the term 'woke' originated a century ago among African Americans in reference to awareness of racial prejudice. More recently, it came to embody modern identitarian progressive ideology — and then quickly became shorthand in the U.S. for leftist excess. Americans' long exposure to battles over identity and our insistence on treating people as individuals may have granted us strong immunity to a toxic political movement our country spawned. While wokeness is, at its core, an American innovation and export, the movement is in retreat across most of American society.
The NAACP's Defense of 'Woke'
In 2023, after 'woke' had already become a contentious term signifying, among proponents, a far-reaching social justice agenda and, among its opponents, a totalitarian ideology that treats people as members of groups rather than as individuals, the National Association of Colored People (NAACP) protested. 'The words "Wake Up" and "Woke" have served as a call to action as conveyed by social activist Marcus Garvey who stated, "Wake up Ethiopia! Wake up Africa", and the Negro Mine Workers who in 1940 issued the statement, "We were asleep. But we will stay woke from now on," in advocating against discriminatory pay,' the NAACP asserted in a resolution.
Critiques from Scholars
But the NAACP was fighting a rearguard action. Two years earlier, Columbia University linguist John McWhorter, himself Black, published Woke Racism: How a New Religion Has Betrayed Black America. He argued that wokeness 'is actually a religion in all but name' that irrationally repackages racism in antiracist form. It had its roots, he wrote, in critical race theory which 'tells you that everything is about hierarchy, power, their abuses — and that if you are not Caucasian in America, then you are akin to the captive oarsman slave straining belowdecks in chains.'
Helen Pluckrose and James Lindsay made similar points in their 2020 book, Cynical Theories: How Activist Scholarship Made Everything about Race, Gender, and Identity — and Why This Harms Everybody (the 'cynical' in the title is printed as a scrawl over a crossed-out 'critical'). 'Wokeism,' they wrote, is another term for social justice ideology that applies neo-Marxist academic filters to old concerns about inequality to arrive at a 'new religion.' The woke belief system asserts that 'society is simplistically divided into dominant and marginalized identities and underpinned by invisible systems of white supremacy, patriarchy, heteronormativity, cisnormativity, ableism, and fatphobia.'
Why the U.S. Ranks Last
The United States, despite being the birthplace of wokeness, ranks fifth in The Western Surrender series because its strong tradition of individualism and its history of grappling with identity issues have made it relatively resistant to the movement's most extreme manifestations. While other Anglosphere countries have embraced these ideas more fully, America's cultural and legal emphasis on individual rights has acted as a buffer. The movement is now in retreat across much of American society, though it remains influential in academia and certain institutions.
