On Left-Liberal Conformism

Thought Taboos and Subconscious Self-Censorship in Urban-Progressive Spaces

The Progressive Panopticon

There are many people on the left who would not admit to themselves that their political opinions are compromised by the implicit range of what is considered acceptable opinion in progressive leftist discourse. They genuinely believe what they say publicly reflects their real views. The problem is that they have never let themselves form real views on the questions they avoid. That is the function of the thought taboo, which plays a crucial yet less obvious role in how self-censorship works. Thought taboos help explain why certain social milieus fail to challenge particular ideas, no matter how ridiculous those ideas may seem to people outside those circles or how detrimental they may be to the causes people within them care about. Thought taboos exist in various political and religious environments, not just the left. However, it is the function of thought taboos and self-censorship in left-wing spaces that concerns me in this piece, because they are directly relevant to the understanding of how the hell the Great Awokening happened over the last decade, and why its residues continue to linger in left-wing spaces like the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA).

This essay initially began as part of a much bigger essay titled The Culture War Is the Class War, which is the fourth and final installment of my Genealogy of Wokeism series. Readers unfamiliar with the definition and theory of wokeism on which this essay builds are encouraged to read Part 1 of The Genealogy of Wokeism at some point. However, neither Part 1 nor Part 4 is a prerequisite for this essay. Each piece is written to stand on its own, so the series does not need to be read in any particular order. Part 4 also contains the citations, a fuller catalog of the issues the left has made taboo, and a more detailed explanation of why those taboos have become political vulnerabilities.

The subject of this shorter piece is why people in left-wing spaces continue to cling to woke beliefs or avoid challenging taboo positions, even after they have distanced themselves from wokeism in name. The answer concerns self-censorship, but self-censorship operates more subtly than people often imagine. It is not only a matter of privately thinking one thing and publicly saying another. Often it begins earlier, at the level of thought itself, as people avoid investigating a subject closely enough to form the forbidden opinion in the first place. That is what I mean by a thought taboo: self-censorship that occurs before speech has even formed.

This shorter essay and the longer Part 4 essay are directed primarily at readers who already recognize that wokeism is a problem, or who are at least open to that possibility. Parts 1 and 2 are aimed more at readers who are not yet aware of the problem at all. This essay is not directed at people with no desire to examine their own woke proclivities, but at the so-called post-woke crowd: those who consider themselves “neither woke nor anti-woke.”

What Drives Left-Liberal Conformity?

It is worth posing the question: if wokeism has been so obviously catastrophic for the left’s popularity, and if wokeism is driven by an overrepresented minority, then why hasn’t the left moved on from it? This overrepresented minority appears to still represent the cultural politics of the left, which is clear given how leftists are still expected to conform to woke narratives and practices, or at least not go against them. Why do leftist organizations still perform privilege-checking and pronoun rituals, identity politics insanity, and oppression Olympics rules (like equity cards) that organize the order in which people get to speak based on their gender or the color of their skin? Why does DSA still feel the need to retain what amounts to an open-borders policy in its latest program, and why is opposition to such an insane migration policy treated as somehow “racist”? Why does DSA feel the need, as reflected in its latest program, to loudly proclaim that Medicare for All must guarantee free and complete access to gender-affirming care, while the organization has also explicitly defended access for minors? A common formula in right-wing media has long been to treat the left’s craziest ideas as representative and use them to discredit its entire political agenda. It has been obvious for a long time that what would otherwise be a set of highly popular economic policies cannot succeed as part of a broader agenda when a small group of activists insists that they be paired with a set of much less popular policies that few people support and that are not particularly good ideas anyway. Why are leftist commentators and academics still scared to acknowledge that too much mass migration is a problem and to support a sane, pro-worker migration policy? Why, even as wokeism has been on the decline, do many leftists continue to pretend as if wokeism was never a problem, and still accommodate woke demands to this day?

What drives the silence is an incentive structure, most visible in symbolic-capitalist industries. Content creators, independent media hosts, leftist journalists, academics, and others whose work deals in symbols and who depend on either an audience or professional networks live in a precarious position. Reputation is the primary form of capital in these spaces. There is constant competition for market share, job positions, and institutional standing, and other people in the same industry are happy to use any available lever to displace competitors. In left-wing spaces specifically, the accusation categories that function as those levers are severe: questioning immigration policy gets you called racist; questioning youth medicalization makes you transphobic; noting flaws in contemporary feminist theory is sexist. These are not minor social inconveniences.

Being associated with accusations of racism, transphobia, or antisemitism can end careers in precisely the industries where most of this politics is conducted. A verdict is not required. People in academia, media, and activist networks will treat you as a liability on the basis of the association alone, whether or not they believe the accusation, whether or not they are certain what you actually did or said, and whether or not there is evidence that the accusation is true.

The result is that even people who are neither woke enforcers nor woke believers go along with it, or at least do not challenge it, because the cost-benefit calculation is unfavorable. That is, at some level, understandable. What is not honest is to rationalize prudence as a genuine belief that the issue simply does not matter. Given what happened to the left over the past decade, given the direct connection between the woke tendency and left-wing electoral failure that the companion essay, The Culture War Is the Class War, has traced at length, the claim that it is not an important issue is not a sincere position. It is a convenient one.

I have known quite a few people in symbolic-capitalist spaces who are not true believers in woke ideology but speak fluent woke in public. This includes some genuinely intelligent people who privately hold anti-woke views or mildly socially conservative opinions, yet are too compromised, professionally captured, or simply too risk-averse to express them. At most, they adopt a studied indifference, a “neither woke nor anti-woke” posture, while consistently capitulating to woke discourses in practice. If they ever venture into taboo terrain or consider any perspective that is the slightest bit right-coded, they will immediately compensate for their minor heresy by invoking some piece of leftist dogma in order to reassure the fragile woke members of their audience, who again usually make up a loud minority, that they are not fascists.

Much of the time, however, they are not even that self-aware about the maneuver. They simply lie to themselves: they convince themselves that their instinctively heterodox opinions are actually compatible with Marxism, or some other legitimating framework, rather than confronting the tension directly. This is especially common among the “culture war is a distraction” contingent, who deploy that position not as a conclusion reached through analysis but as a license not to examine the issues where they might find themselves in genuine conflict with the left’s current orthodoxies.

But declining to take a position does not remove these questions from politics. It merely allows the people with the most extreme and clearly articulated positions to answer on behalf of everyone else. When economic-first leftists dismiss cultural controversies as distractions, they leave woke activists free to define the left’s position by default. The result is that maximalist positions on immigration, gender, or any number of other questions become publicly associated with the entire left, including the many people who do not fully believe them but have never developed the courage or intellectual clarity to oppose them.

This becomes especially obvious whenever these people are pressed to explain what they actually think. Because they have avoided the question, they can neither offer a serious defense of the activist position nor clearly disavow it and articulate an alternative. They retreat into evasions: “the issue is not important,” “the question is a right-wing distraction,” “the experts should decide,” or “the person critiquing must be motivated by bigotry.” As a result, they appear weak because they have no position from which to speak. They cannot defend conclusions they have never reached, but they are also unwilling to challenge the people who have reached conclusions on their behalf.

The purpose of confronting these taboos is therefore not primarily to convert woke true believers, but to politicize the people standing indecisively between accommodation and opposition and compel them to pick a side.

I understand the prudence. If one is audience-captured or professionally constrained by a career that depends on a particular ideological milieu, then managing one’s public expression carefully is a rational response to a real incentive structure. What I find harder to respect is when that prudence is not acknowledged as such, when people behave as if their career situation places no constraints whatsoever on what they say or think. I have encountered many people who work in symbolic-capitalist industries, particularly alternative media, YouTube commentary, and academia, who perform precisely this kind of self-presentation. Even in cases where they aren’t totally oblivious to the problems of wokeism, they do not fully acknowledge their grievances with woke ideology, let alone express them, even when they have witnessed things that should give them every reason to do so. They will admit, if pressed, that they find certain woke tendencies annoying, but they will deny that the phenomenon constitutes a serious problem the left needs to confront. They rationalize this by telling themselves it is “not a big deal,” while continuing to observe the rules of the woke panopticon every time they speak in public.

They insist that their opinions are genuinely their own, and at the conscious level, that may be true. But the woke big other is always present in the background, shaping not only what they say but which issues they choose to engage with and which they quietly avoid. If they were to express conservative-coded opinions clearly, their professional reputation would suffer, and that risk never fully recedes from the back of their mind. Even if they arrived at the conscious realization that some of the right’s talking points about the left are true, and that the left is badly wrong on certain questions, most of them could not fully articulate those views publicly in leftist spaces without material consequences to their careers. At most, they might take a few friendly jabs at woke people here and there, but they will not dare criticize wokeism in a way that forces the woke parts of their audience to recognize that they are wrong. So they do not think it all the way through. They stop their minds from going there. This is, in the end, a form of cowardice, but I say this without particular contempt. They know not, because they cannot afford to.

Subconscious Self-Censorship

But it would be a mistake to assume that this is always a conscious calculation. Human psychology does not generally work that way. People tend to believe what they say they believe, and most post-woke people are not secretly anti-woke and merely suppressing their real views. What tends to happen instead is a broader process of non-thinking. People simply do not want to go down rabbit holes that would force them to form opinions that could get them in trouble.

This mechanism is not unique to wokeism or to the left. A useful example comes from an issue that was, for decades, taboo across mainstream American politics: Israel. The pro-Israel consensus that prevailed in U.S. politics was once one of the clearest examples of this, especially outside left-wing and libertarian anti-war circles. For decades, criticizing Israeli government policy was a mainstream societal taboo well beyond the left, enforced across institutional life in media, political parties, academia, and professional environments of every kind. A substantial number of people, including many who were not on the left, did not privately hold opinions critical of Israeli policy that they suppressed in public. They simply did not want to think about it carefully, because doing so would force a position, and a position could bring accusations of antisemitism with consequences that extended well beyond social discomfort. That taboo has since been substantially broken, and it happened the same way such taboos tend to break down: enough people became willing to say something direct when asked, until the accumulated honesty made continued silence untenable.

The same pattern applies today to trans youth policy, to immigration, to sex differences, to the dynamics causing the gender wars, and much more. The more carefully one examines these issues, the more nuance emerges that left orthodoxy does not permit. Many people on the left intuitively sense that going down these rabbit holes would force them to depart from approved positions, and that, if they departed, they would not be able to keep themselves from expressing their conclusions. So they stay away. Ignorance, in this sense, is choosing not to learn.

It is this position of indifference, of non-thinking, that so defines the post-woke disposition. Once you actually look at wokeism seriously, studied indifference becomes difficult to sustain. You may accept some of its claims and reject others, but you cannot remain genuinely agnostic about the phenomenon as a whole unless you have avoided thinking it through. This aversion to thinking honestly about the problem, this flight from confrontation with contradiction, and the unconscious fear of making enemies with people on “your side” allow woke bullshit to go unchallenged on the left.

Audience Capture & The Freedom to Think

Almost no left-wing content creators I have ever encountered admit to themselves that they are audience-captured, no matter how obvious it is that there are certain things they wouldn’t be able to say without significant backlash from their audience. People get genuinely offended at the suggestion of audience capture, as if one were accusing them of being dishonest, of performing beliefs they do not hold. But sincerity is not really the point. As I already showed in The Genealogy of Wokeism, the line between values and interests is rarely sharp. The question is not whether their beliefs are sincere. The question is about the limits of what they allow themselves to believe, and more importantly, what they allow themselves to think about, given the circumstances they inhabit.

This form of self-censorship is an unconscious mechanism by which people register, without fully articulating it to themselves, that exploring certain directions could get them in trouble and deviate them from the path they are on. Much of this is driven by the fear of ending up like the people who were made into examples. When someone on the left does break ranks on a contested issue, they are typically attacked ruthlessly, forced onto the defensive, and publicly associated with that single issue until it comes to define them. Others observe this from a distance and draw the obvious lesson: thinking too carefully about that issue leads to becoming that person. They do not want to become the person who made the trans question their entire personality and got destroyed for it. So they avoid the rabbit hole entirely, not because they disagree with what they might find there, but because they have seen what happens to those who find it.

None of this is unique to the left. Imagine a conservative evangelical whose job depends on a donor network that treats climate science as ideological treason, or a committed member of a religious community whose relationships and sense of self depend on never taking certain doubts seriously. Such people may not possess a fully formed heretical position that they consciously suppress. They may simply have no incentive to study the question closely enough for the doubt to become an opinion.

One of the great myths of independent media is that the absence of billionaire funding automatically produces intellectual independence. It does not. A creator who no longer answers to a conventional boss or donor may instead answer directly to the market: to the algorithm, to views, and above all to an audience whose support has to be renewed every month. If your income comes from YouTube advertising, you need a dependable stream of clicks from a recognizable audience; if it comes from Patreon, the constraint can be even more immediate, because every political deviation can be translated into cancellations. The audience becomes a distributed employer, and the creator’s personality and politics become part of the product being sold. This does not make independent media fake, but it does mean that independence from institutions is not the same thing as freedom from discipline. A creator can be just as captive to the expectations of an audience as an employee is to the expectations of a boss, only the boss has been fragmented into thousands of subscribers.

The Rationalization of Cowardice

There is another rationalization of cowardice prevalent among left-wing pundits, academics, and professional-managerial-class individuals in general: the cult of expertise. I have encountered this excuse for indifference on woke issues frequently among academic types who invoke the principle that one should not have an opinion on matters outside one’s expertise. This sounds like intellectual humility. It is not. Would the same people say they do not need an opinion on poverty, the economy, or racial inequality? Of course not. They claim they “do not need to have an opinion on every issue,” but what they are really doing is choosing not to think about issues where doing so would put them at odds with the prevailing progressive consensus. They assume, often without examining the assumption, that the people who have thought deeply about these issues probably know what they are talking about, and that deferring to their conclusions is safer and more responsible than forming independent views.

The claim that one should defer to experts on these matters is intellectually dishonest, because the experts themselves disagree. Gender theorists disagree with each other about fundamental questions, just as economists disagree about the economy. The belief that a gender theorist must have the correct position on gender is no different from believing that an economist has the correct position on the economy when economists fundamentally disagree. Deferring to expertise in fields where the experts are themselves divided is not humility. It is an excuse for not thinking. And if applied consistently, the logic is fundamentally undemocratic. Most people do not have the time to develop expertise on every issue. Refusing to challenge woke orthodoxy on the basis that one lacks expertise is a cowardly argument dressed up as a principled one.

Agreeableness & Reptilian Performativity

When it comes to why people conform, there is also the simpler fact that most people are naturally agreeable and try to be polite to avoid conflict. They are non-confrontational. They do not have the thick skin required to handle the social fallout of being polarizing. Their ability to be liked and to advance socially and professionally depends on not making enemies. Conformity to the prevailing cultural atmosphere of one’s milieu is the path of least resistance, and most people take it without ever framing it to themselves as a political choice. However, there is also a more pernicious, reptilian way in which left-liberal conformism manifests, and it involves an understudied phenomenon that plays a more subtle role in how wokeism proliferates unchallenged in urban-PMC aspirant spaces, even among the so-called “normies” in those spaces.

In white-collar urban-PMC-adjacent spaces (especially art, academia, media, entertainment), there is a well-known phenomenon that many women have long observed: the performative progressive male, or the “sneaky fucker” as they used to say. A substantial number of men in these spaces adopt woke-coded beliefs in large part because those beliefs are socially rewarded in the environments where they socialize, date, and seek romantic partners. This is part of why some of the loudest voices condemning masculinity and chastising white men are none other than liberal white men themselves, as well as college-educated white women who want an enemy to kick down the ladder and use DEI to elevate themselves. I’m not saying that men who spend all their time attacking low-hanging fruit in “the manosphere” and meander about how all men need to change their “patriarchal masculinity” are necessarily a bunch of Machiavellian reptiles who secretly couldn’t care less about the condition of women in practice and are only virtue signaling to attract liberal women. The man who reads bell hooks and signals on his Instagram story that he attended an anti-AI protest is not necessarily consciously acting out of all-too-human motives or performing opinions he doesn’t actually hold. He may have entered feminist discourse partly as a social strategy, whether he was fully conscious of it or not, yet gradually internalized what he performed. So, as far as he is aware, his opinions are completely genuine, and it is only the toxically masculine males who are performing their masculinity.

This dynamic is partly a matter of intrasexual competition and what the sociologist Erving Goffman called impression management in his classic text The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. Goffman’s text predates Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble, which popularized the idea that gender is performed rather than biologically fixed. People in left-liberal spaces often take up this notion of “performativity” but apply it narrowly to gender roles. However, Goffman’s book is far more interesting, in my opinion, because it shows that far more behavior is performed than gender expectations alone, and that the persona people perform on a daily basis is highly shaped by the norms and incentives of the particular context they are in.

This is highly relevant to the topic of performative progressive males and to the dynamics that drove (and to a lesser extent, still drive) the left-liberal accommodation of wokeism among urban-PMC aspirants in general. In female-dominated symbolic-capitalist milieus, where political correctness functions as a marker of safety and status, men compete with one another partly by displaying the attitudes most likely to be rewarded by women and the wider social environment. Men who lack the charisma, attractiveness, or social standing to absorb the cost of a heterodox opinion are especially susceptible: if a heretical view might give the “ick,” adaptation becomes the safer strategy. Political beliefs are shaped in part by interests, and romantic and social interests are among the most powerful.

The adaptation is often reptilian rather than consciously deceptive. The liberal performative male (who is often “feminist” in name only but wouldn’t be able to explain what patriarchy actually is) is not necessarily concealing a stable set of real views and knowingly performing views he rejects; he gradually adapts his presentation, intuitions, and eventually his beliefs to blend into the environment. He becomes the environment. Masculinity can be performed in much the same way in male-dominated spaces, where men become more nonchalant or competitive, and may even speak in deeper voices, without experiencing themselves as fake. Just as someone in a highly heteronormative male environment may become afraid of saying anything that could sound the slightest bit gay, men in female-dominated progressive environments learn to avoid anything that could sound faintly “chuddy” or “incel.” This is the performative dimension: repeated adaptation does not merely conceal the self; it helps produce it.

These men avoid the rabbit holes not because they have thought through the issues and arrived at progressive conclusions, but because they sense, correctly, that deviating from the approved positions would make their social and romantic lives considerably harder. A large number of men in left-wing spaces simply avoid thinking about and engaging with so-called right-coded topics out of an underlying fear that if they get too invested, they will sound like a right-wing freak, or will not be able to stop themselves from sounding like one. This self-censorship is about self-preservation in environments where political deviance carries immediate interpersonal costs.

The “Normie Woke” Disposition of Urban-PMC Aspirants

There is also a distinct phenomenon worth naming that I forgot to talk about in my Genealogy of Wokeism series: what might be called the normie woke disposition. This is different from the hyper-political woke activist. The normie woke person is largely apolitical. They are not especially passionate about any political issue. But they hold all the standard safe positions of their urban social bubble. They are socially liberal by default, but in a very depoliticized way. They pay lip service to the latest social justice trend, but are not particularly well-read on any political issues of any kind. Truth be told, they hate talking about politics or anything of importance; however, they will be the first person in the room to become visibly uncomfortable if someone says something politically incorrect. They do not initiate political confrontation because they hate confronting disagreement or thinking about anything that could make them uncomfortable. They are the type of semi-apolitical people who are generally liberal by disposition and make you feel like a crazy person if you have a strong opinion on anything, unless it’s the current thing that everyone supports or opposes. They enforce a passive boundary: certain things simply cannot be said in their presence without producing an atmosphere of tension and social cost.

This disposition is especially common in big cities, university towns, and the PMC-adjacent milieus of art, entertainment, and media. It is a form of socialization, more habitus than conviction. In these environments, holding right-coded views on trans policy, immigration, gender, or any number of other contested questions makes one a social pariah. One can sometimes get away with it if one is charismatic, funny, or attractive enough to absorb the cost. Most people are not, and they know it. So they conform. The normie woke disposition is, in this sense, less an ideology than an atmospheric pressure. It does not require belief. It requires only compliance. And compliance, over time, becomes indistinguishable from belief, even to the person complying.

This is why I am not satisfied with a merely post-woke posture, which is often a frankly cowardly way to disavow wokeism by memory-holing it rather than confronting it seriously. Truly being “post-woke” requires more than simply refusing to participate in woke discourses. It requires actually questioning the premises and ideological narratives that compel people to abide by it. The point is not that everyone on the left secretly disagrees with the approved cultural positions and merely performs agreement. It is that in order to fit in with a left whose cultural narratives are dominated by the woke tendency, many people conform to those narratives by never thinking seriously about them in the first place.

Wokeism is sustained not primarily by true believers but by the mass of people who never think carefully enough about the contested issues to discover that the approved positions do not hold up under scrutiny. Breaking these thought taboos is therefore not a distraction from the real work of politics. It is among the most necessary conditions for delegitimizing the narratives that hold woke ideology together and that give woke operatives their authority in left-wing symbolic-capitalist spaces. Before a speech taboo can be challenged, the thought taboo beneath it must be broken. People cannot publicly contest conclusions they have never permitted themselves to think seriously about.

Complicity with wokeism when driven by such imperatives, unconsciously or not, is part of a broader phenomenon that David McKerracher of Theory Underground calls “castration culture.” I’m not just telling leftists to “grow a pair.” Often, you need a certain degree of intellectual freedom to be able to think freely, unbounded by the castrating imperatives of audience capture and the fear of making enemies or losing social and sexual capital, opportunities, dates, allies, or even friends.

We all know that the freedom to speak freely is to some degree constrained by the imperatives of careerism and the fear of being disliked that is common among agreeable people. However, what is less acknowledged is that these same imperatives often prevent people from even thinking about certain taboo subjects at all, because people unconsciously know that if they do, it will be harder to keep their mouths shut and stay out of trouble. This is worth re-emphasizing because it is a major component of self-censorship that people rarely acknowledge.

While prudence and long-term patience are wise in many cases, there is a great intellectual freedom that comes with not giving a fuck about any of that. This kind of intellectual freedom requires some power to resist those constraints, but I don’t think that power depends solely on one’s social position or intellectual capacities. That is, you need to keep it real with others and yourself when it comes to what you really believe and why. It means taking radical responsibility for the political factions you choose to align yourself with, rather than turning a blind eye to the problems. When people point out things that turn them off from the left, don’t deny reality just because you don’t want your side to look bad.

Is Anti-Woke Just Another Form of Wokeism?

So far, I have called on reasonable leftists concerned with economic priorities to confront the elephant in the room of wokeism, which would be a dead horse if the left hadn’t been keeping it alive, and to think more honestly about cultural matters. Some critics might object to my position by claiming that it resembles the “woke” consciousness-first politics my Genealogy of Wokeism series has criticized. One wouldn’t be able to honestly make this critique of my work if they read my essay on Myth of the Movement, in which I propose an alternative political strategy. Nonetheless, the woke thought taboos that I encourage people to challenge are the ones that do not reflect reality and have had real strategic consequences for the left. Challenging them is not an effort to reshape reality by reshaping thought. It is an effort to dismantle their institutional dominance by articulating arguments that show their narratives simply do not correspond to how things actually are.

The first test of any woke idea or narrative should be whether it corresponds to material reality and can justify itself through reason and evidence, rather than merely imposing itself as an approved moral conclusion. When the hard facts are contested or not yet clear, one useful clue is whether the narrative’s defenders permit open inquiry and healthy debate. People confident that the truth is on their side are generally willing to argue, cite evidence, and allow opponents to test their claims. People who do not trust their position to survive scrutiny are more likely to shut down debate, punish dissent, and enforce the conclusion institutionally.

A truly post-woke left is one that has moved beyond woke rather than one that lightly dismisses it and acts as if nothing happened. It is one in which people are not afraid to give opinions on the questions where the woke tendency has secured hegemony and enforced silence.

This is not a demand to spend all of one’s time denouncing woke. The demand is narrower and more fundamental: to reject the thought taboos that wokeism has installed across the left, and to stop allowing those taboos to prevent people from thinking clearly about issues the left is currently not permitted to challenge. Breaking those taboos requires courage and intellectual honesty.

In practice, this means being able to debate taboo subjects such as trans politics, feminism, and immigration openly, without silencing disagreement or pretending that every question already has a pre-approved answer. Ordinary people think about these issues, form opinions on them, and notice realities that do not always correspond to the left’s approved narratives. If the left permits no position outside the politically correct package it adopted during the Great Awokening, it will shut many ordinary people out of left-wing politics, including people who might otherwise support its economic agenda.

I have known many people who are sympathetic to, or outright supportive of, left-wing economic ideas but are alienated from left-wing politics by its positions on culture. In fact, among the people I have encountered who do not see themselves as firmly right-wing, whether they identify as left-leaning, politically homeless, or neither left nor right, cultural questions are often their greatest source of disagreement with the left.

The goal should be a social climate in which left-wing politicians and public figures can speak normally to the general public again, rather than walking on eggshells and calibrating everything they say against the approval of an activist minority. We should not live in a climate where politicians such as Tim Walz, whose appeal is supposed to be that he can speak to normies, freeze up when asked a basic question such as “What is a woman?” because a plain answer risks offending woke activists. It also means ending the pronoun rituals, the privilege cards, and the points-of-privilege procedures that DSA and NDP chapters still formally use as if the Fourth Awokening never ended. They are basic tests of organizational seriousness.

Another major test of organizational seriousness and of what a truly post-woke left would look like is whether the left is more concerned with appealing to the broad majority than with appeasing an activist minority. When leftists are too afraid to reject unpopular woke ideas, they reverse that priority and actively hinder the left’s ability to reach the masses for the sake of appeasing a woke minority.

It is worth being honest about why people go along with all of this: most are simply trying to be polite, or trying not to be ostracized from organizations where they want to make friends and belong to something. That is a human impulse, and it is understandable. But perpetual politeness is not a political strategy. If you are too polite all the time, you enable the nonsense. And the nonsense does not stay contained.

These are not isolated procedural failures. They are symptoms of a broader pattern: the left’s systematic refusal to develop positions on the questions where its opponents are most active. Declining to engage a contested cultural question does not remove it from the political terrain. It cedes that terrain to whoever is willing to occupy it. In the current environment, the field will be occupied either by the woke tendency, which will enforce its preferred answers through institutional pressure, or by the reactionary right, which will exploit the vacuum for recruitment. Yet the strange thing about much of the neither-woke-nor-anti-woke crowd is that, on the taboo subjects that actually matter, its supposed moderation often consists less in holding a principled middle position than in having no real position at all. Its members do not openly defend the craziest claims, but neither will they treat those claims as serious enough to oppose. Their moderation therefore amounts to passive accommodation: it leaves the field to whichever faction is willing to take a position.

When one critiques the left along these lines, the common response is that this amounts to “policing the left,” and that unity and forward movement should take priority over internal criticism. That response misrepresents what is being asked. I do not expect woke people to all be purged from the left. Maybe shifting towards more culturally moderate policies will cause them to self-purge and run away to the Green parties or the more fringe groups where they would otherwise be isolated if they hadn’t been accommodated on the broader left. Though I do not expect this to happen because, as I showed in The Genealogy of Wokeism, “awokenings” are caused by structural socio-economic factors like elite overproduction. However, that does not mean leftists who are skeptical of wokeism should conclude that there is nothing that can be done about wokeism and continue to accommodate the woke minority at the expense of reaching the common majority. The fact that the Awokening of the mid-2010s has begun to decline in the 2020s is all the more reason why people on the left should use this as an opportunity to reject this bullcrap and move on. So what I encourage is not to simply go on a crusade against woke people themselves, but for leftists who are “neither-woke nor anti-woke” to have the courage to think and pick a side, rather than timidly capitulating to the woke minority. It’s easy to voice heretical opinions and mild critiques of woke when it becomes safe to do so. It takes more courage to reflect seriously on the touchy social issues that many ordinary folk take the left to task for, yet are still too taboo in left-wing spaces because the cultural radicals continue to gatekeep the narratives. If you lack opinions on these cultural questions, you should honestly ask yourself why. Why have the left avoided these subjects? Given how consistently the left is prone to being attacked on exactly these grounds, these cultural issues are a clear blind spot for the left, and it only hurts left-wing movements to continue to ignore them. Not only that, but thinking about topics where thought taboos have caused one to avoid having a strong opinion is important for simply figuring out what you as an individual truly believe. Bracketing out the entire terrain of the culture war as “a distraction” not only makes one oblivious to a large number of issues that many people care about, but it also stunts the intellectual development of one’s political journey. That is why the first and foremost challenge that I ask of my left-wing readers & listeners is not to merely leave one camp for another, but to have the courage to think.

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