The Genealogy of Wokeism

A Complete Definition and History of “Wokeness” (Part 1)

Can We Finally Define What “Wokeism” Is?

The last thing most progressives think we need is another male writer complaining about “wokeism.” Why not talk about more important things? Wokeness is one of those things that many people think they already understand and can recognize when they see it, but if asked to define it, they often struggle to pin down a coherent definition. This lack of clarity often allows defenders of wokeism to dismiss critiques of it as confused moral panics and causes people with different understandings of what wokeism is to talk past each other. Wokeism has become somewhat of a floating signifier. It can mean different things to different people, with many people throwing the term around as a pejorative in highly inconsistent ways. However, many people at an intuitive level have a general understanding of what wokeism is and the things associated with it, but don’t have the vocabulary and historical detail to describe it in a way that is consistent or coherent.

For those on the right, wokeness seems to mean anything from political correctness and identity politics all the way to socialism and communism, or quite simply any form of social justice they don’t like. For those on the left, “wokeism” is nothing but a right-wing boogeyman based on conspiracies and moral panics aimed at distracting people from real issues. I too used to hold this opinion. It tends to be the case that those who are most stubbornly opposed to acknowledging that wokeism is, in fact, a problem happen to be the very people who embody that problem most. Often, many people are oblivious to the phenomenon of wokeness because it’s the water they swim in, normalized in their habitat to the point where they don’t see how it makes many people outside that habitat cringe. There are also some who acknowledge that “wokeness” is a real phenomenon but are unclear why it is a problem, likely because they have not experienced or witnessed real-life encounters with it, or because they just see it as an overblown issue. Then there are those on the “anti-woke” left, or the more agnostic post-woke left, who are more likely to take the problem of wokeness seriously and view it as a hindrance to the success of leftist and socialist movements.

Yet even the few people on the left who acknowledge that wokeism is “a problem” rarely define it in a clear and consistent way. Often, those who try to understand phenomena related to “wokeism” refrain from using the word “woke” out of a fear of “conceding to the right,” choosing various alternative terms or distancing themselves by associating it with “liberal” politics. However, not all liberals embody the characteristics commonly associated with wokeism.

Wokeism appears across the political spectrum. Even if the liberal progressive manifestation of wokeism happens to be the most common manifestation of it, there are also far-left variants of wokeism and various right-wing manifestations of it as well. What unites them isn’t political content but a shared style: the demand that people “awaken” to a particular consciousness before they can participate in political action. This essay focuses primarily on the liberal-left progressive manifestation of wokeism, as it’s been by far the most pervasive form of wokeism in liberal-leftist spaces more broadly, and because its capture of progressive movements should be of particular concern to people left-of-center seeking meaningful socio-economic change.

What This Essay Is Not

This essay is not a complaint about equality, equity, inclusion, or any particular egalitarian progressive principles in and of themselves, but a critique of a political style. Wokeism is not synonymous with progressivism, and it is not “Marxism.” As I will show in the Part 2 essay, classical Marxism, for all its faults, was not “woke” in the ways that parts of the contemporary left are. The inability of most critics of wokeism to provide a clear and consistent definition has been a major obstacle to understanding the phenomenon, a problem this essay aims to address.

I have always found the muddled language and inconsistent reasoning within discourses on wokeism very frustrating. Although I had long perceived that there was something wrong with the woke approach to politics, many people I encountered would stay in denial about it. After reading numerous books, researching various historical patterns, and connecting a few dots, I realized that wokeism may not be as difficult to define after all. This is precisely what this essay aims to do: to finally pin down the definition of wokeism. This piece defines wokeism and clarifies its mechanism, demonstrating the explanatory power of a precise definition. In Part 2, I trace wokeism’s genealogy: its origins in American evangelical Protestantism and its evolution throughout history into the phenomenon we recognize today.

Throughout this Part 1 essay, I show how wokeism isn’t just a culture-war spectacle, but a highly consequential phenomenon rooted in deep socio-economic transformations that have radically changed the ways in which class conflict operates, and the expressions of left and right politics. Before elaborating on why I believe my definition of wokeism fills a major gap in the discourse when it comes to understanding wokeism, it is important to first address the elephant in the room when it comes to wokeism, which is that the word “woke” has its origins in Black American communities. However, as you will see, this etymology tells us very little about the broader, actually existing macro-phenomenon that words like “wokeism,” “wokeness,” and “woke” represent.

The Etymology of Wokeism

The word “woke” itself has its origins in Black American communities, typically traced back to Marcus Garvey’s 1923 rallying cry “Wake up Ethiopia! Wake up Africa!” and blues musician Lead Belly’s 1938 warning to “stay woke” about racist violence in the Jim Crow South. By the mid-20th century, “woke” carried dual meanings within the African American community: vigilance against threats from white supremacy and broader awareness of political injustices. In the 21st century, the term was popularized by Erykah Badu’s 2008 song “Master Teacher” and gained significant traction on social media around 2012, becoming closely associated with the Black Lives Matter movement following the shootings of Trayvon Martin and Michael Brown. By 2017, the Oxford English Dictionary formally added “woke,” defining it as “alert to racial or social discrimination and injustice.” Around 2019, the term began being used pejoratively by critics.

But this common historical account doesn’t go far enough. It looks solely at the word itself, not the recurring substantive themes that define the essence of “wokeism” as a phenomenon. Whether wokeism has its origins in radical Black vernacular is beside the point; that tells us little about what “wokeism” as a style of politics is, and how it has evolved.

The etymology does give us a clue: the emphasis on awakening. The language of “getting woke” or “waking up” is the common thread, emblematic of a style of politics with very deep roots. The language of “awakening” and “waking people up” is key to understanding the essence of what wokeism is: the preconception that political and social transformation begins with consciousness transformation, that the key to changing the world is changing minds, or more precisely, awakening them to the correct understanding of reality.

Defining Wokeism

The key to pinning down a consistent definition of wokeism is in the word itself, woke. This is the fundamental thread that ties together the tendencies people often associate with wokeism (language policing, callout culture, identity politics, pronounification, virtue signaling, post-materialist politics, etc.). I discuss this in detail in the later section of this essay on “The Connection Between Wokeism, Political Correctness, and Cancel Culture.” For now, I will outline the definition of wokeism clearly as follows, because I know many people are too lazy to read full articles and instead use LLMs to summarize.

I define Wokeism as a political mentality that presupposes that awakening people to a correct consciousness is the precondition for both political solidarity and sociopolitical change. At its core, the woke mode of thinking assumes that political change requires a mass awakening to a morally correct form of consciousness, one that is assumed to be the right way to think, whereby people “wake up” to this new sensibility or demonstrate that they have already been awakened and sufficiently embrace what are deemed to be politically correct positions of the day, according to the dominant discourses and habitat that this breed of woke consciousness emerges from. The fundamental assumption of woke thinking is that if enough people become awakened to the ideas deemed politically correct, society could radically transform. If people simply come to their senses, the world will change accordingly. It is a consciousness-first approach to politics rooted in the belief that thinking the correct thoughts is what drives radical political change.

The woke consciousness-first approach reverses the traditional labor movement’s class-first approach to political solidarity and coalition building. Instead of meeting people where they are and forming alliances despite disagreement, the woke approach demands that the public first conform to a set of ideas that the woke people in question have sanctioned as politically correct before it will recognize them as allies. Because it assumes that the transformation of minds must precede the transformation of material conditions, wokeism channels most of its energy into pseudo-political activity: the cultivation of a politically correct consciousness through language management, cultural production, and the policing of discourse, rather than the building of coalitions based on shared class interests and common goals. This makes woke movements prone to self-marginalization (what I have elsewhere termed “self-contained opposition”) and incapable of doing real politics, which, in a pluralist society, requires diverse groups to come together and make decisions despite intractable disagreements. This is why there is, inadvertently, an anti-political tendency inherent in the woke mentality, which is the ironic tragedy of woke activity, given that woke people often appear to be hyper-political by trying to politicize everything. It is for this reason that woke “politics” tends to be associated more with social justice activism and culture wars rather than political reformers, let alone revolutionaries.

Instead of building solidarity through shared struggle based on material interests and common goals, the woke approach to politics tries to change things by first changing people. It focuses on changing the way peoplethinkand talk rather than working with people as they are, accepting the inevitability of disagreement, and advancing a politics based on what people have in common. This is where wokeism’s reputation for intolerance to disagreement stems from. However, even among its less annoying advocates, who genuinely believe in advancing their causes (and might not even see themselves as “woke” in a pejorative sense), you can see how woke presuppositions often still shape the ways in which many activists, intellectuals, and media pundits think of political activity. The woke approach to political action is still predicated on getting people to either convert to a certain way of thinking and speaking or conform to “the cause” by giving it tacit support. The implicit assumption is that once enough “awareness” of the cause is raised and once enough people think and talk in the proper, politically correct way, then this cultural revolution will somehow manifest into a political one.

Those possessed by the woke mentality don’t always think these things at an explicit conscious level, but their implicit preconceptions of how political progress ought to come about are reflected in their priorities and tendencies. They say actions speak louder than words, but for the woke people, the most important actions are words. Even if some of them say that “praxis” matters more than theory, woke people, in practice, tend to prioritize consciousness-raising over coalition-building, while typically presuming that they already have the correct political ideas and that the next task is to propagate them to the lay masses.

The way in which the “woke” mind envisions political change is often reflected right in the type of language they use. Those operating under the woke conception of politics often consider the purpose of protests to be something like raising awareness. Yet, this is not at all how the political left used to think of protests. Back when the political left was centered on class politics, political demands were thought to be achieved through the assertion of class power. The basis of class power is the ability to collectively weaponize labor power by stopping production and building leverage to force demands upon the state. Of course, in a democracy, a major goal of the political left is to have a government in power that represents working-class interests. If a left-wing government was in power, the way to make sure that they don’t betray their promises is to mobilize the collective power that the laboring classes have in the economy. The ultimate source of class power is the ability to shut down production, not to “raise awareness.” It is, of course, useful to raise awareness insofar as it brings more people to join the cause (or at least not making people be actively against it); however, this is not the same as the woke fixation on “raising awareness”, which is usually rooted in professional-managerial class sensibilities.

The tendency for woke people to prioritizeshared consciousness (expressed through the performative use of correct language, positions, and the signaling of allegiance to the causes of the day) over mutual class interests or concrete goals is reflected in the highly ideologized way they think about politics. Woke people left of center tend to think of politics as primarily an ideological battle between left versus right, in which anything “right-wing” is considered bad, and “moving things to the left” is the primary goal. This consciousness-first logic is reflected in the way that progressive leftists will completely dismiss the idea of working with any people who exhibit “right-wing” beliefs, even if they have mutual class interests or could agree on specific political issues (like opposing wars, healthcare). The priorities of woke people are evident when looking at what left-leaning politicians and pundits are most likely to get “cancelled” for. Nobody gets ostracized by the woke left for having disagreements on economic policy, and left-wing politicians (like the Squad) routinely get away with abandoning economic promises (like Medicare for All) or for being cowardly on Israel (Bernie Sanders). Yet when it comes to going against the dominant progressive line on issues of immigration, trans issues, or identity politics, then suddenly the woke vampires are out for blood.

Despite distinguishing themselves as more radical than liberals, woke leftists tend to rally behind liberal progressive politicians, who may exhibit a more progressive consciousness despite conflicting economic agendas, because woke leftists are more defined by their hatred of conservatives (who are further away from them at the level of consciousness) than they are by concrete socio-economic goals. This is why a woke leftist is more likely to trust a liberal elite politician or Ivy League professor who signals they are progressive on social issues than they would a working-class conservative. Even when these types of people do recognize the need to appeal to working-class Trump supporters, they tend to imagine it occurring by “turning them left” rather than simply getting them to agree to a set of economic policies while disagreeing on social policies. This makes woke people prone to ideological gerrymandering and turns them into pawns of the Democratic Party, as it is easier for the Democrats to pay lip service to what woke people want to hear and use woke language, even if they don’t do anything.

Much of the modern left, which has uncritically absorbed this PMC conception of politics, has forgotten this crucial component of how political power works. It has instead viewed the working class as a passive “mass” that determines its political views depending on how much propaganda it passively absorbs from either political side. Leftists who implicitly hold this view thus think that winning over the working class is simply a question of having better “propaganda” than the right and that the left must counter the propaganda of the right. This is why woke leftists see any single leftist self-criticism and acknowledgement of right-wing critiques of the left as “capitulating to the right,” helping the enemy. Since similarity of political consciousness matters more than mutual class interests or shared political goals, the woke mind thinks of politics in terms of friend-enemy distinctions, but in a post-materialist way, as lines are drawn based on shared political attitudes and politically sanctioned language rather than mutual economic interests or shared policy goals.

Although the contemporary version of woke politics is most visible in liberal progressive institutions, the underlying woke mentality is not exclusive to liberals or leftists. Whenever politics is organized around prior conversion of consciousness, moral purification, and the policing of heresy within the group, it can attach itself to many different moral contents. This essay focuses on the modern progressive manifestation, not because the form is exclusive to the left, but because left-liberal wokeism is the type of wokeism that became most institutionally dominant.

This is also a large part of why a significant portion of American society sees Trump’s MAGA movement as more “anti-establishment” compared to the liberals and leftists (yes, leftists, not just liberals), who have become associated with out-of-touch cultural elitism. Many leftists and liberals still have a hard time wrapping their heads around this phenomenon, but if they understood the genealogy of wokeism, they would be better able to make sense of why similar tendencies have been occurring throughout the Western world. The drift of working-class voters to right-wing populists has occurred in elections throughout many countries in the West, and even if they might use different language to articulate it, this realignment is highly related to the macro phenomenon of “wokeism.” However, in this essay, I will focus primarily on America because, as I will show in Part 2 of this essay trilogy on the history of wokeism, the phenomenon that millions of people colloquially describe as wokeism has origins that go far back in American history. But before one can trace the genealogy of wokeism as a style/mode of political thinking (which I will do in detail in the Part 2 essay, tracing the origins of wokeism to the rise of Evangelical Christianity and “born-again Christians”), it is essential to understand the socio-economic conditions and class dynamics that drive wokeism. This is crucial to understanding who exactly the “woke” people are, where they come from, and why they act as they do.

Who Are the Woke People, and Where Did They Come From?

Rather than solely focusing on wokeism as an ideological phenomenon (e.g., the “woke mind virus”), a materialist lens is crucial to understanding who exactly the woke people are and what environment they tend to emerge from. In this section, I will unpack how wokeism tends to emerge from a particular stratum of society we can call “symbolic capitalists,” which is directly related to, but not identical with, the professional managerial class. It could be viewed as a distinct subgroup within the broader professional managerial class. It is crucial not to mistake this group as a class in a strict economic sense, but rather a group within the broader social hierarchy that includes many people who want to become more than an average worker (top 20% of society). More importantly, in their quest to climb that social hierarchy, those who aspire to become symbolic capitalists undergo a unique form of socialization, obtaining the necessary credentials through university and learning to be subjects well-suited for careers in professional-managerial-class industries. While the most important concept that will be explained here is that of the symbolic capitalists (a term which I borrow from Musa Al-Gharbi, whose book we will summarize shortly in this essay), I believe it is crucial to first unpack the notion of the professional managerial class, which tends to be the more commonly used term to categorize the type of people who exhibit “woke” behaviors.

The Professional Managerial Class and the Symbolic Capitalists

The main propagators of wokeism and the people most likely to exhibit woke thinking are those who are part of (or aspire to be part of) the “Professional Managerial Class” (the PMC). The PMC has been theorized in slightly different, but largely complementary ways in works such as Catherine Liu’s Virtue Hoarders, Barbara Ehrenreich’s Fear of Falling, Michael Lind’s The New Class War, Thomas Frank’s Listen Liberal, Christopher Lasch’s The Revolt of the Elites, and David McKerracher’s Underground Theory Volume 1. However, for clarity, the PMC could be defined simply as follows. The professional in the professional-managerial class refers to the white-collar component of PMC labor, whereas the managerial component refers to the fact that many aspire to become managers of some kind and expect to move up the ladder within the top 20% of the population. The origins of the terms white collar and blue collar have to do with the fact that people in blue-collar manual labor who work with their hands tend to sweat at their workplace, and can’t wear white, whereas those who work in white-collar industries work with their mouths and can afford to wear nicer clothing. The more important thing here is that the distinction between white and blue-collar work is ultimately about the division between manual and intellectual labor.

The category of the “PMC” has been subject to a lot of intellectual debate, as it does not exactly constitute a “class” in the clear economic sense because its members are economically heterogeneous, ranging from wealthy elites to precarious workers like adjunct professors, though they are unified by shared cultural values and political behaviors. However, what actually matters most about the PMC is how this stratum of society differs from the rest of society in a sociological sense. The PMC is technically closer to the working class economically than it is to the capitalist class in the sense that its members earn most of their money from wage labor, rather than from owning the means of production. What distinguishes the PMC from, say, a small business owner, a farmer, and a blue-collar manual laborer is primarily their different socialization, habitat, and proximity to power and social hierarchies. A person who is part of the PMC (or strives for a PMC career) typically has a college degree and aspires to get a white-collar job or a position in management, essentially to become higher status than blue-collar labor, who has less prestige and social power.

But aren’t students working class? Technically speaking, yes, they often are, especially when they work low-paid jobs and study just to get by. However, students who are workers are a very different type. At universities, students are socialized to become PMC aspirants, even if they do not become part of the PMC until later. They come to university with the expectation of eventually becoming something more than ordinary workers. University students go into debt just to get a college degree, even if it is one with less “practical value,” because having any degree does still increase the chances of employment and higher pay than if one had no degree at all.

Furthermore, this sociological difference has become especially significant politically, as holding a university education has become an even bigger predictor of voting patterns than income has, with workers without college degrees and people in blue-collar industries increasingly more likely to vote for right-wing populist parties, while people with a university education in white-collar jobs are more likely to vote for liberal-centrist or center-left parties.

This educational transformation is particularly significant given the massive expansion of higher education. In 1940, only 4.6% of the U.S. adult population had a bachelor’s degree or higher. By 2022, that figure increased dramatically to 37.6% of adults aged 25 and over holding a bachelor’s degree or more.[1] This new education divide created very different socializations between college-educated workers aspiring to PMC white-collar professions and workers without college degrees.[2]

It is not a coincidence that the primary carriers of woke politics tend to come from the PMC. The PMC-educated professionals who manage but don’t own capital are perfectly positioned to benefit from consciousness politics. They possess the cultural capital to navigate woke discourse, the institutional positions to enforce it, and the class interest to prefer consciousness change over material redistribution.

However, the PMC is not a monolith, as it includes the STEM and FIRE industries, in which people do not necessarily exhibit the same kind of clear voting habits or behavioral stereotypes that come to mind when you think of a liberal or a leftist. The primary drivers of wokeism are not the PMC as a whole, but rather a particular substratum adjacent to the professional-managerial world whose social power comes from producing and managing symbols: academia, media, publishing, arts, entertainment, nonprofits/NGOs, HR, DEI, policy, the credential and narrative industries. In other words, the sectors that shape what counts as legitimate knowledge, moral status, and respectable speech, whose work is not mainly the production of physical goods and services, but rather in the production of information, intelligence, rhetoric, images, narratives, data, interpretations, and norms. This is the stratum of society most involved in the production and reproduction of discourse, culture, and ideology. These are the “knowledge professionals” who make their living through nonmanual labor focused on the production and manipulation of symbolic data, rhetoric, ideas, and art and entertainment. The type of people we are talking about tends to include academics, university students, journalists, media pundits, and people in general who operate within the white-collar “symbolic economy”, spanning industries such as media, academia, art, entertainment, education, law, public policy, and more. Another recently popularized label for describing this social stratum is the “MANGO” class, referring to those concentrated in media, the academy, and arts, and activist NGOs, that is, the discourse-shaping professional milieus of the symbolic economy from which many of these tendencies tend to emerge. However, my preferred term for describing these people in the symbolic/knowledge economy is Musa Al-Gharbi’s concept of the “symbolic capitalists.”

The Symbolic Capitalists

By far the most sophisticated scholarly work on the socio-economic underpinnings of wokeism comes from American sociologist Musa Al-Gharbi in his book We Have Never Been Woke: The Cultural Contradictions of a New Elite (2024). Al-Gharbi’s book provides a rigorous materialist theory of wokeism, with crucial empirical grounding for understanding when and why the phenomena often associated with “wokeness” erupted. I recently had Al-Gharbi on my podcast, 1Dime Radio, which I recommend checking out if you don’t have the time to read his 400-page book yet. My analysis of wokeism draws heavily from Al-Gharbi’s analysis while simultaneously aiming to fill a practical gap in the discourse when it comes to wokeism’s definition. In the next few sections, I will essentially be summarizing some of the most important insights from Al-Gharbi’s book, which will be very useful for contextualizing many of the points I make in this essay, and it makes up the foundation of my understanding of wokeism. As we will see, my theory builds on and complements Al-Gharbi’s research by articulating a consistent conceptual definition of wokeism that ties everything together in a way that makes wokeism as a style recognizable and distinguishable from other modes of socio-political activity.

Al-Gharbi’s core thesis in We Have Never Been Woke rests on identifying a new elite class that he terms “symbolic capitalists.” Drawing on Pierre Bourdieu’s concept of symbolic capital (prestige, honor, recognition, and cultural authority), Al-Gharbi defines symbolic capitalists as professionals whose work involves the production and manipulation of data, rhetoric, social perceptions, organizational structures, art, and entertainment. The social categories of the symbolic capitalists and the PMC overlap, and both can be used to describe essentially the same group of people; however, the category of symbolic capitalists is a more specific elite formation that cuts across conventional class lines. This stratum of society includes academics, journalists, consultants, lawyers, tech workers, and those in finance and media. Their power derives not from ownership of the means of production in the traditional Marxist sense, but from their control over the production of meaning, legitimacy, and cultural authority.

Most importantly, as it pertains to this analysis, the tendencies associated with what we call wokeism are most prevalent among this new Symbolic Capitalist elite, and those who aspire to become part of it. [3] Al-Gharbi marshals considerable evidence demonstrating that the Americans most likely to hold “woke” views are not the genuinely marginalized and disadvantaged, but rather highly educated, relatively affluent white liberals. A 2021 poll confirms that the “woke” are most likely to be young college graduates living in cities with household incomes above $75,000 per year who vote Democrat.[4] By 2020, this group “tended to provide more ‘woke’ responses to racial questions than the average Black or Hispanic person” and “perceived much more racism against minorities than most minorities, themselves, reported experiencing.” The irony is striking: those who most loudly proclaim solidarity with the oppressed are themselves among society’s winners.

This does not mean symbolic capitalists are cynical manipulators. Al-Gharbi emphasizes that they are often “true believers” in their social justice commitments. However, these sincere beliefs “are rarely translated into behavioral changes or reallocations of material resources.” Their political style is fundamentally post-materialist: they prioritize symbols, rhetoric, and cultural recognition over the material, “bread and butter” concerns of working-class people. This explains the persistent gap between their progressive rhetoric and their actual lifestyles, which remain premised on exploitation (underpaid domestic workers, Amazon warehouse laborers, gig economy drivers) and exclusion (NIMBY housing policies, exclusive private schools, assortative mating patterns that concentrate wealth).

Wokeism Beyond the Professional Managerial Class

While woke discourses tend to be driven by symbolic capitalists and those most likely to support it tend to be mostly among the professional managerial class more broadly, it is crucial to recognize that woke thinking is not confined to that class. While wokeism is highly correlated with one’s socio-economic status and the environment in which one was socialized, there are many exceptions. People are not always determined by their environment; they are capable of changing how they act by being more self-critical of their own behaviors and ideologies. Hence, the importance of understanding what exactly “acting woke” means politically: it allows individuals across class positions to recognize this pattern in their own thinking and choose differently.

None of this means that everyone who adopts woke discourse is themselves a symbolic capitalist. Woke sensibilities, discourses, and the latest iterations of culturally progressive social norms are generated and refined within elite institutions, universities, prestige media, HR departments, and the symbolic industries, but they radiate outward through the same channels that distribute all elite culture: social media, entertainment, advertising, and the credentialing pipeline that spreads to people within symbolic capitalist spaces, who either passively absorb it, enthusiastically embrace it, or reluctantly conform to it just to be polite and avoid any unnecessary trouble. A factory worker who defends progressive language norms on Facebook is not a symbolic capitalist; she is a consumer of symbolic capitalist culture, absorbing the moral vocabulary that saturates the information environment. This is why the objection “I am working class and I do not think woke is a problem” misses the point. The question is not whether working-class people can adopt woke consciousness, of course they can, just as working-class people have always adopted the cultural styles of their social betters. The symbolic capitalists are the transmission vector, not the entire audience. They curate, credential, and enforce the discourse; everyone else merely receives it.

Totemic Capital: Victimhood as Status Currency

In tandem with post-materialist politics, another tendency in the Awokening that Musa Al-Gharbi dissects is what he calls “totemic capital.” He uses this term to refer to the phenomenon in woke-captured spaces whereby marginalized identities have become valuable commodities, and leftist language has played a paradoxical role in the status competition among symbolic capitalists looking to mark their territory over increasingly scarce opportunities in symbolic capitalist PMC industries. Totemic capital refers to the epistemic and moral authority afforded to individuals on the basis of bearing a historically marginalized identity (Black, LGBTQ, disabled, female). Possessing such a “totem” grants the bearer moral superiority (perceived as more ethical and worthy of power), epistemic authority (held to possess special knowledge or insight), cultural cachet (perceived as more interesting, exotic, or authentic), and material benefits (access to special funding, hiring initiatives, and mentoring programs).

This creates powerful incentives for elites to acquire these totems, sometimes through fraudulent means. Al-Gharbi documents numerous cases of ethnic fraud: white women posing as Black, Native American, or Latina to advance their careers in academia and activism.[5] Even elites from minority groups engage in this status game by collapsing distinctions (the multiracial or immigrant-origin child of professionals presenting simply as “Black” to claim underdog status). The system rewards those who can most effectively perform victimhood, which is not the genuinely disadvantaged but rather elite individuals who understand how to narrate adversity in ways that resonate with other elites.

The rise of “victimhood culture” among symbolic capitalists represents a fundamental shift in moral frameworks. Rather than cultures of honor (where status derives from reputation defended through direct confrontation) or dignity (where status is inherent and unaffected by others’ treatment), victimhood culture locates moral authority in suffering. Appeals are made to third parties (HR departments, social media mobs) rather than through direct confrontation. Individuals paint themselves as weak, vulnerable, and damaged to attract support. Personal slights are tied to historical injustices. This maximizes opportunities for status competition, as every interaction becomes a potential occasion for demonstrating one’s victimization and, therefore, one’s moral superiority.

Here, wokeism’s obsession with subjective experience is also what links it to modern identity politics and vulgarized forms of standpoint epistemology. Standpoint epistemology is basically the idea that one’s social position grants privileged access to truth about oppression. In its woke form, this often gets flattened into the assumption that the more marginalized one is, the more epistemically authoritative one’s perspective becomes, while those deemed privileged are expected to treat their own perceptions as inherently suspect. The result is not serious structural analysis, but a politics of moral deference in which social position substitutes for argument, and consciousness-policing substitutes for democratic persuasion.

The liberal-progressive/new leftist form of wokeism is probably the most well-known form of wokeism that is easiest to discern. This is seen in the obsession with enforcing the latest politically correct terminology through call-out culture, renaming streets, tearing down statues, creating college campus safe spaces, token DEI initiatives, and performative privilege-checking rituals. This kind of progressive wokeism is most notoriously embodied in figures like Robin DiAngelo and Ibram X. Kendi, promoting a vision of racial justice that is almost entirely about personal consciousness. They think that racism is perpetuated by individuals failing to confront their racial biases and that people just need to be taught to “not be racist.” It is the white people’s “white fragility” that supposedly makes them unwilling to care about the concerns of Black people, not the fact that they are too busy trying to care for themselves and their families. This ignores all the structural and material conditions that reinforce racial inequality. The solution, then, is a series of corporate diversity seminars, self-flagellation, and ritualistic declarations of privilege. All of this is more about personal atonement, the acceptance of politically correct viewpoints, or the performative awareness of systemic problems rather than actual political solutions.

This is the institutionalized form of wokeism that tends to dominate institutions because it accommodates elite aspirations without threatening existing structures. However, wokeism takes hold in both “moderate” liberal spaces and “extreme” radical-left spaces. As much as some leftists like to underplay it, anyone who has spoken to enough leftists knows that wokeism exists in the “real leftist” spaces too, not just “the Libs.”

Leftist vs Liberal Wokeism

While leftists are often quick to differentiate themselves from liberals to the general public, these terms are often used interchangeably, and many perceive wokeism to be a broadly left-wing phenomenon. This is because wokeism manifests in similar ways within leftists and liberals. Why? Because the dominant voices that represent liberals and leftists are cut from the same cloth: the professional managerial class (PMC), particularly the symbolic capitalists, those who work in the symbolic industries described above.

While leftists claim to speak for “the working class” or the most “marginalized,” liberals speak more in terms of “the middle class” and make appeals to social mobility, representation, and the ability for people of marginalized groups to move up the social hierarchy. This difference between liberal and left-wing wokeism is worth mentioning, even though it is often difficult for the average person to discern a “liberal” from a “leftist” because they both exhibit similar woke dispositions. In either case, their own class composition is often reflected in their rhetoric and political solutions, such as the framing of the 99% vs. the top 1%, which conveniently leaves out the rest of the top 20%, which many of them (consciously or unconsciously) want to become part of or already are. This is why wokeism is constantly in tension with the contradictory desires of social climbing and moral righteousness.

The reality that symbolic capitalists are often part of, or implicitly aspire to be part of, the top 20% is why the populist right often targets these individuals as part of the “liberal elite,” while the left focuses on billionaires and millionaires. Both populist narratives speak to a rational kernel of truth: one targets the top 1%, while the other applies to a stratum within the top 20%. But “real leftists” are clearly not part of the ‘liberal elite.’ Insofar as “real leftists” exist in significant numbers in the United States, the answer is no. Jimmy Kimmel, Jimmy Fallon, Stephen Colbert, and Hollywood are not out here promoting communism and socialism, at least not in a serious way.

Clearly, then, there is a distinction to be made between liberal and left wokeism, even though they tend to overlap in many ways. So what differentiates left and liberal wokeism? The line can be quite blurry. Part of why the general public often cannot discern the difference is due to the very similar behavioral tendencies and proclivities exhibited by leftists and liberals, and the fact that 9 times out of 10, the leftist is more likely to side with a liberal politician over a conservative one. That is because, sociologically speaking, many voices on the political left are often angry liberals who have been radicalized due to failing to become part of the Professional Managerial Class, so instead they become symbolic capitalists for the left.

Those who make up the voices of mainstreamLiberalism (in media, academia, and politics) often tend to be those who have successfully integrated into the professional managerial class. While not all of them are necessarily “limousine liberals” or globalist elites working at Davos or the World Economic Forum, many are often on the privileged end of the symbolic capitalist stratum, and live a relatively novel cosmopolitan lifestyle that allows them to move fluidly between global cities, travel to various countries, become exposed to different cuisines and cultures, and possess the privilege of higher social mobility than workers without college degrees. Meanwhile, workers without college degrees and people in “lower-skill” blue-collar industries in general have to compete with a large supply of migrant laborers willing to work for cheaper, who will experience their wage as an increase in their relative standard of living while the native-born worker will experience it as stagnation. Liberals and leftists in the symbolic capitalist PMC tend to be very oblivious to such disparities.

The leftist partisan, in contrast to the guilty liberal professional, is usually a temporarily embittered professional who is resentful because of the lack of employment prospects that their university education promised them. The prototypical woke leftist is often someone who goes to university with the expectation of becoming part of the PMC and is either yet to reap the rewards promised by their degree (the students, who make up the shock troops of leftist protests), or is a fallen professional who started off as an elite aspirant aiming to become part of the PMC, yet is struggling due to being laid off or chronically underpaid. While the liberal sensibility is often characterized by guilt (often genuine due to their own privilege in the system, and also a performative gesture as a form of social currency), the leftist is often characterized by resentment.

Elite Overproduction: The Economics of Wokeism

Perhaps Al-Gharbi’s most important contribution is his theory that the contemporary “Great Awokening” is not a unique event but rather the fourth such awakening in the past century.[6] Each of these cycles, he argues, was driven by the same fundamental mechanism: “elite overproduction.” This phenomenon has been studied by social scientists such as Peter Turchin and other theorists who draw on the school of “elite theory.” Elite overproduction occurs when there are more educated elite aspirants than available positions; the resulting socioeconomic insecurity generates intense status competition that manifests as moral crusading.

What Changed Since 2010?

Those who defend against accusations of wokeism often tend to respond by either acting as if nothing changed since 2010 or admitting that something did change, and insisting that these changes are good, and that people who critique them are suspect. In his book, Al-Gharbi provides extensive empirical documentation of the Fourth Awokening’s scope and speed. An analysis of millions of news articles shows a major rise in terms related to prejudice (racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia) starting in the early 2010s. Scholarly databases and Google nGrams reveal a dramatic and simultaneous increase in research on these topics after 2011. Cultural outputs became overtly political, with film and television showing a quadrupled share of nonwhite leads and a doubled share of female leads approaching demographic parity.[7] The Democratic Party shifted its platform aggressively leftward after 2012, consolidating symbolic capitalists as its core constituency.

The most dramatic shifts occurred among highly educated white liberals, who underwent what can only be described as a mass conversion experience. Polling data shows this group’s attitudes on race, gender, and sexuality changed more rapidly and more dramatically than any other demographic. They became, in effect, more “woke” than the minorities they claimed to speak for. The institutional capture was equally swift: universities, corporations, media organizations, and government agencies adopted DEI frameworks, mandatory trainings, and speech codes at unprecedented speed. What Al-Gharbi calls “social justice sinecures” proliferated, creating well-paid bureaucratic jobs in diversity and human resources that served to absorb the overproduced elite.[8]

This is all just empirical sociological evidence for things many people have already known intuitively for a while. However, the most novel insight in Al-Gharbi’s analysis is that this was not the first “great awokening” and the phenomena associated with “wokeism” are older than we think they are. The pattern of elite overproduction leading to spikes in wokeism is not actually new. Al-Gharbi documents four such “awokening” cycles: the 1920s-1930s, the 1960s-1970s, the late 1980s through mid-1990s, and the post-2010 period. Each erupted when elite overproduction reached a critical threshold, and each subsided when the overproduced elites were absorbed into new institutional positions. In what follows, I will provide a brief summary of the four great Awokenings that Musa Al-Gharbi identifies in his book, illustrating how consistent this pattern has been, and why the post-2010 period is not as unprecedented as many assume.

The First Awokening (1920s–1930s)

According to Al-Gharbi, the first great “awokening” cycle coincided with the initial consolidation of the symbolic professions themselves. Between 1920 and 1930, the share of Americans with a bachelor’s degree doubled (from 2.3 percent to 4.9 percent), while those possessing a master’s tripled and those with a PhD quadrupled. The share of young adults enrolled in higher education in 1930 was nearly 50 percent higher than at the outset of the previous decade.[9]During the economic boom of the 1920s, these graduating cohorts were smoothly absorbed into the professional positions that had been set aside for people like them. Then the Great Depression hit. Suddenly, aspiring elites who had felt entitled to secure, respected, and well-paying professional jobs faced deeply uncertain futures, compounded by the looming prospect of conscription as war appeared to be breaking out in Europe again. The anxiety and looming socioeconomic humiliation quickly curdled into rage against the existing order. Students attached themselves to various protest movements: the New Negro movement for civil rights, feminism, Socialist and Communist organizing, early gay rights advocacy, and especially antiwar activism. Yet despite the radical rhetoric, the core demands of these student protesters were largely self-oriented: more financial aid from universities, job guarantees upon graduating, greater campus freedoms, and avoidance of the draft. By the 1932 election, student radicalism had grown so pronounced that large numbers supported the Socialist candidate Norman Thomas over Franklin Roosevelt, whom they dismissed as a liberal establishment candidate. Yet by FDR’s 1936 reelection, the same constituency had become one of his strongest bases of support. What changed was not their ideology but their material conditions: the New Deal’s massive expansion of government bureaucracy, investments in science, and infrastructure programs created precisely the secure professional positions that elite aspirants had been demanding. Once absorbed into these new institutional roles, the “radicals” of the 1930s settled into comfortable professional lives and eventually became the very establishment that the next generation of protesters would rebel against in the 1960s.

It should be noted that, unlike the more recent Awokenings, the symbolic capitalists of the Great Depression era were far more genuinely in solidarity with the working class than their liberal-left counterparts today. The labor movement itself had deep roots stretching back well before Marx was writing, and the radicalism of the 1930s intersected with a living tradition of working-class organization, trade unionism, and socialist politics that was not reducible to elite status competition. However, the elite aspirants who gravitated to leftist causes during this period of overproduction represented something sociologically distinct from that broader labor movement. This sociological distinction was visible not only in universities and political circles, but in the symbolic industries themselves.

During the Depression years, a notable current of Communist and fellow-traveling sentiment emerged in Hollywood, where Communist and Communist-sympathizing writers, actors, and directors increasingly treated film as a vehicle for anti-capitalist critique and ideological messaging.[10] This is significant because it shows that, in America, socialism and communism often found especially fertile ground among educated cultural producers within the spheres of art, media, and entertainment, rather than among workers themselves. The Hollywood left was, in this sense, a distinctly symbolic-capitalist phenomenon. And precisely because these actors operated within the industries of cultural production, they were especially inclined towards a consciousness-first conception of politics, one that placed disproportionate faith in propaganda, narrative, and the remaking of public consciousness rather than in the slower and harder work of organizing workers where they actually were.

The fact that much radical-left activity in first-world countries took forms that were completely antithetical to Karl Marx’s predictions is partly due to the major class transformations in advanced industrial capitalism during the 20th century. In advanced industrial capitalist societies like the United States and Britain, where the bureaucratic managerial revolution had already produced a substantial professional stratum, elite overproduction generated a new, particular form of radicalism: socialists and communists from privileged backgrounds who struggled to sell their radical visions to the very working class they claimed to represent, and from whom they were sociologically quite distant. George Orwell captured this dynamic with characteristic precision in The Road to Wigan Pier, writing toward the tail end of the first Great Awokening:

“The first thing that must strike any observer is that Socialism in its developed form is a theory confined entirely to the middle class. The typical Socialist is not, as tremulous old ladies imagine, a ferocious-looking working man with greasy overalls and a raucous voice. He is either a youthful snob-Bolshevik who in five years’ time will have been converted to Roman Catholicism; or, still more typically, a prim little man with a white-collar job, usually a secret teetotaller, and often with vegetarian leanings, with a history of Nonconformity behind him, and, above all, with a social position that he has no intention of forfeiting.… Sometimes I look at a Socialist—the intellectual, tract-writing type of Socialist, with his pullover, his fuzzy hair, and his Marxian quotation—and wonder what the devil his motive really is. It is often difficult to believe that it is love of anybody, especially of the working class, from whom he is of all people the furthest removed.”11

The passage could have been written yesterday about the contemporary liberal-left. Yet the crucial difference is that in Orwell’s time, this middle-class socialism existed alongside, and often in tension with, a genuine mass labor movement that had real organizational power in the economy. Today, that broader labor infrastructure has largely been dismantled, which means that when elite overproduction generates a new Awokening, there is no countervailing working-class movement to anchor it in material demands. With the decline of the labor movement, the symbolic capitalists now, in effect, completely dominate the left, and the radicalism they produce is correspondingly more detached from working-class life than it was even in Orwell’s day.

The Second Awokening (1960s–1970s)

The second awokening cycle is the one most people think of when they imagine student radicalism, yet Al-Gharbi’s account of what actually triggered it challenges the conventional narrative considerably. Through the early 1960s, on-campus student activism was not particularly pronounced. Most students were focused on getting degrees and securing the still-plentiful opportunities of the post-World War II economy. The civil rights movement had been ongoing for years, but it was primarily organized outside the campus through sit-ins, freedom rides, and voter registration drives, not through college student mobilization.

What changed everything was a combination of the Vietnam draft expansion and an economic downturn. After the 1964 Gulf of Tonkin Resolution escalated the conflict, monthly draft calls doubled by the end of 1965, but college students remained exempt so long as they were enrolled full-time in good standing. Then the Johnson administration changed the rules: college enrollment would no longer provide an automatic deferral. Students would now have to take the Selective Service Qualification Test, and only those scoring above a particular cutoff would be guaranteed exemption. It was precisely at this point, when middle-class students’ plans to avoid the fighting by enrolling in college began to fall through, that the nationwide student protest movement erupted. The driver was not the Vietnam War itself, which had been ongoing for half a decade with little student resistance. The driver was not the civil rights movement, which had begun to lose momentum by this time. Rather, the simultaneous draft threat and economic squeeze on professional opportunities (the share of professional-managerial jobs per college graduate had been falling consistently since 1958, and by 1969, salaries had begun declining for degree holders at all levels and across fields)[12] transformed previously apolitical students into self-proclaimed revolutionaries. As with the first Awokening, the movement subsided once the material pressures eased. Nixon ended conscription, the economy recovered, and by the mid-1970s, polls showed a major drop in the percentage of students interested in politics or activism and a sharp increase in those whose primary goal was securing a good job and a comfortable salary. The “radicals” of the 1960s, just like those of the 1930s, were absorbed into the professional establishment and went on with their careers.

The Civil Rights Movement Was Not “Woke”

A crucial point often obscured by the mythology surrounding the 1960s is that the civil rights movement was fundamentally separate from the elite student radicalism described above. The New Left student movements and 60s counter-culture during this second great awokening are notto be confused with the Civil Rights movement. People often make the mistake of retroactively lumping together all these movements together because many of them happened to converge at a certain time; however, the civil rights movement began far earlier. As political scientist Robert Putnam has shown, gains for African Americans began around 1860, before any of the Great Awokenings and indeed before the Civil War itself. After the war, Black progress proceeded steadily through the next century: a consistent closing of gaps between Blacks and whites, a steady increase in rights and protections, significant Black institution-building and political organization, and growing interracial solidarity despite persistent campaigns to halt this progress.[13] This progress was rooted in the material reality of the labor movement: Black workers organizing within trade unions, the Great Migration bringing millions of African Americans from the stagnant Jim Crow South into northern industrial economies where a growing Black middle class could develop, and the New Negro movement building Black cultural and political institutions from the ground up. It was this long arc of incremental, materially grounded progress, sustained over decades through organized collective action, that eventually crystallized into the landmark achievements of the civil rights era. Critically, Al-Gharbi demonstrates that the civil rights movement notched most of its major legislative and institutional successes before the Second Great Awokening began. The movement was not a product of the 1960s student radicalism.

From the mid-1960s through the present, the racial story in America has largely been one of stagnation and decline. Black-white income disparities in 2016 were roughly identical to what they were in 1968. Gaps in wealth and home ownership between Blacks and whites have actually grown larger than they were in 1968. Rates of incarceration among African Americans, and racial disparities in incarceration rates, while declining, remain higher than they were in 1960.[14]As a recent National Bureau of Economic Research paper by economist Erik Hurst and coauthors shows, the growing centrality of the symbolic professions played a central role in halting racial progress. As the significance of the knowledge economy rose dramatically from the late 1960s onward, overt prejudice-based discrimination in most job markets declined, but skill- and education-based discrimination increased dramatically, as did the returns on having the “correct” credentials. Because education was (and continues to be) unevenly distributed, the practical effects of these new “meritocratic” forms of exclusion have been comparable to overt racial discrimination in many respects. In short, the century from 1860 through 1960 was defined by steady and broad-based gains in racial equality, driven by organized labor and political struggle. Every Awokening since has coincided with the stalling or reversal of that progress, not its acceleration. This is perhaps the most damning indictment of the consciousness-first approach to politics: the era in which symbolic capitalists have had the most cultural power is precisely the era in which material progress for the groups they claim to champion has ground to a halt.

Wokeism vs The Silent Majority

Awokenings often appear larger, more culturally dominant, and more widely supported than the actual distribution of popular opinion warrants. The energy of student movements, the proliferation of protest, the rapid institutional adoption of new language and norms, all of this creates the impression of a society in the midst of genuine mass transformation. Yet this impression is, in large part, an artifact of who controls the mechanisms of cultural production. Because symbolic capitalists occupy the commanding heights of media, academia, art, and entertainment, the narratives they generate saturate the information environment in ways that systematically crowd out competing perspectives. The result is an echo chamber that mistakes its own volume for a consensus. This lack of self-awareness is also why sustained, coherent criticism of the woke mentality remains so scarce in mainstream discourse, and why the arguments advanced in this essay, alongside those of Musa Al-Gharbi, are still not understood by people in the symbolic capitalist bubble. The apparatus through which such ideas would need to travel to reach broad audiences is largely controlled by the very class whose assumptions are being challenged.

The clearest evidence that these Awokenings do not represent popular majorities lies in the persistent and dramatic disconnect between their cultural visibility and actual electoral outcomes. During the Second Awokening, George McGovern and his campaign believed they could translate the energy of the student movement and the counterculture into a governing coalition. The media attention was enormous; the sense of a generation in revolt, palpable. Yet Richard Nixon defeated McGovern in one of the most lopsided landslides in American presidential history, carrying forty-nine of fifty states and winning over sixty percent of the popular vote. The silent majority had been there all along, largely invisible to the symbolic capitalists who had convinced themselves that the cultural ferment of universities and prestige media represented the direction of the country as a whole.

A strikingly similar dynamic unfolded in France with the May 1968 uprising, which generated such an atmosphere of revolutionary possibility that de Gaulle himself, believing the situation ungovernable, temporarily left the country. The imagery was extraordinary: barricades in Paris, mass strikes, the Fifth Republic appearing to teeter. Yet just weeks later, in the June 1968 legislative elections called in the immediate aftermath of the uprising, de Gaulle’s party won a sweeping parliamentary supermajority, one of the largest in French republican history. The working class that the student vanguard claimed to represent had largely declined to follow their lead. What May 68 demonstrated, and what the McGovern campaign confirmed across the Atlantic, is that the intensity of a symbolic capitalist awokening bears little relationship to its depth of popular support. The loudness of the movement is a function of who controls the megaphone, not of how many people are listening. It was precisely this gap between the apparent radicalism of the cultural moment and the underlying conservatism of popular sentiment that gave rise to the concept of the silent majority, the broad mass of ordinary people who do not align with the transgressive politics of the symbolic capitalist class, but who also lack the institutional voice to make their disagreement audible.

Popular reaction to wokeism would manifest in a similar but different way following the Third Awokening of the 1980s. Though symbolic capitalists had not yet achieved the institutional consolidation they would reach in later decades, their cultural presence was sufficient to generate another awokening cycle, one that produced its own swift and decisive reaction. Ronald Reagan won his 1984 re-election with a margin comparable to Nixon’s, carrying forty-nine states, as working-class and middle-class voters rejected the cultural politics associated with the liberal-left establishment. Still to this day, Reagan’s resounding re-election victory is not well understood by liberals and leftists. Many still don’t acknowledge that the rise of Reagan and conservatism more broadly was, in part, a reaction to the excesses of both the late 60s counterculture and a culture-war backlash to the third great Awokening of the 80s. It was this dual dynamic of awokening and reaction (woke overreach followed by populist backlash) that defined the political rhythms of the Third Awokening, a period of history that tends to be underexamined compared to the 60s and 70s.

The Third Awokening and The 80s Culture Wars

The third cycle was, by most measures, the shortest and smallest of the four, lasting only about half the duration of the others. Al-Gharbi suggests this may be because the crisis that elites faced was less severe, and they were appeased more quickly. Nonetheless, the underlying mechanism was identical. Throughout the 1980s, Republican-led austerity gutted university budgets, forcing schools to raise tuition and reduce student aid. Aspiring symbolic capitalists were increasingly forced to go into significant debt just to secure their professional credentials. To stay solvent, universities turned to recruiting international students, who would pay full tuition and who, after graduation, were often willing to accept significantly lower salaries for high-skill work than their American-born competitors, giving employers every incentive to prefer them. Then came a series of economic shocks: the savings and loan crisis (1986–1995), a stock market mini-crash in 1989, and a subsequent recession. Meanwhile, a wave of corporate mergers and restructuring, guided by consulting firms like McKinsey, eliminated enormous numbers of middle-management jobs and other formerly secure positions that aspiring professionals had been counting on. The real earnings of college graduates dropped consistently through the late 1980s, although the divide between college-educated and non-college-educated workers grew because everyone else was faring even worse.[15]

As with every previous cycle, frustrated symbolic capitalists channeled their economic anxieties into a new wave of radicalism, ostensibly in the name of racial equality, feminism, gay rights, and environmentalism. But what distinguished the Third Awokening culturally was the degree to which it became institutionalized within the academy itself. This was the era of the “postmodern turn” and the “postcolonial turn” in the humanities and social sciences, in which entire disciplines were reorganized around the project of “decolonizing” curricula, deconstructing Western canons, and replacing universalist frameworks with particularist ones rooted in identity and “lived experience.” Critical Race Theory (CRT) emerged during this period out of the Critical Legal Studies movement, as legal scholars attempted to explain why racial inequalities remained so pronounced despite the civil rights victories of the 1960s, and why the country had swung so sharply to the right under Ronald Reagan. Third-wave feminism took shape and the concept of “intersectionality,” coined by Kimberlé Crenshaw in 1989, gained traction, building on the Combahee River Collective’s earlier theory of identity politics, which we will discuss more in Part 2 of the Essay. The debates around “identity politics,” the idea that words can be regarded as a form of violence, speech codes on college campuses, and the policing of “offensive” language all became fixtures of academic and institutional life during this decade. Central to this era was the evolution of the term “politically correct.” Political correctness has a revealing history that illuminates its connection to wokeism and the obsession with consciousness-policing.

The Origin of Political Correctness

As Al-Gharbi documents, the phrase “politically correct” originated in U.S. Communist circles in the 1930s. “At the time, it was used both in a positive way, to denote someone who was genuinely committed to ‘the cause,’ and sometimes in a negative way, to refer to someone who was overly zealous, compliant, or dogmatic.”[16] The term “politically incorrect” was later adopted by Black Power and New Left movements of the 1960s and 1970s to describe people who were out of step with movement orthodoxy (“problematic” in today’s parlance). In the 1980s, it migrated into feminist circles during the “sex wars” of that era, where one faction used “politically correct” somewhat literally to boast that their politics were correct, while their opponents associated the term with rigidity and closed-mindedness. Over that decade, “political correctness came to be associated with a certain approach to “culturally left” politics more broadly: hailed by advocates as a necessary evolution of the quest for social justice and criticized by its detractors as being needlessly alienating and esoteric, and too focused on symbols over substance.”

The crucial insight here is that the schism over “political correctness” began as an internal dispute within the left itself, between those who saw it as a necessary evolution of social justice politics and those who saw it as needlessly alienating, esoteric, and too focused on symbols over substance. It was only after this internal leftist dispute had become visible that the political right seized the term, weaponizing it as a catch-all slur against anything left-of-center. Therefore, the reaction to political correctness didn’t emerge out of nowhere as “moral panic” concocted by the political right. Rather, it was a real tendency that did indeed first emerge on the left, and as more left-wing people began to bring it into mainstream institutions, the reactionary right was on the defensive and capitalized on wokeism’s own contradictions.

Indeed, the right-wing “culture wars” of the late 1980s and 1990s were not spontaneous eruptions of reactionary sentiment. They were, in large part, a response to the institutional capture that symbolic capitalists had achieved within academia, media, and the nonprofit sector during the preceding decades. Allan Bloom’s 1987 bestseller The Closing of the American Mind crystallized the conservative critique: that the postmodern and relativist turn in the humanities had degraded the intellectual mission of the university, replacing rigorous inquiry with ideological conformity. Christopher Lasch, writing from a heterodox left perspective, would later develop a parallel critique in The Revolt of the Elites and the Betrayal of Democracy (1995), arguing that the cosmopolitan professional class had seceded from the common life of the nation, abandoning the democratic culture of the middle and working classes in favor of a self-referential elite moralism. These were not identical arguments, but they converged on the same basic observation: the symbolic capitalists who dominated the production of culture and knowledge had become deeply alienated from the broader public, and they were using their institutional power to impose a worldview that most ordinary people found foreign, condescending, and disconnected from their material concerns.

Furthermore, the perception that academia and mainstream media had been captured by liberal and left-wing symbolic capitalists produced a concrete institutional response from the right. As Al-Gharbi documents, in the aftermath of the Second Awokening, many on the right had already concluded that academia was a lost cause and sought to build an alternative intellectual ecosystem, beginning with think tanks like the Heritage Foundation (1973) and the Cato Institute (1977). In the wake of the Third Awokening, the conviction deepened that a right-aligned intellectual sphere alone was insufficient, and moves were made to establish right-aligned media: first through the explosive growth of conservative talk radio, most prominently Rush Limbaugh, whose show became nationally syndicated in 1988 and quickly attracted an audience of millions, and later culminating with the 1996 establishment of Fox News. These institutions were born directly out of the culture wars, and their business model was premised on sowing mistrust in mainstream symbolic capitalist institutions. To the extent that mainstream symbolic capitalists actually did approximate the right-wing caricatures of them during the Third Awokening, they produced and empowered their own gravediggers.[17]

And yet, as with every preceding cycle, the Third Awokening died out once the material conditions improved. By 1993, incomes for bachelor’s degree holders began rising sharply again, while incomes for most others remained stagnant or declined.[18] As their own fortunes improved, symbolic capitalists’ social justice concerns receded into the background. The debates about political correctness faded from the front pages, identity politics retreated to the margins of academic life, and the Third Awokeningdied out as this generation eagerly embraced Bill Clinton, his worldview, and his agenda. But the right-wing media infrastructure that the culture wars had produced, the talk radio ecosystem, Fox News, and the think tank network, did not disappear with the Awokening. It persisted, and it would prove to be waiting and ready when the Fourth Awokening arrived.

Action Precedes Reaction: What Liberals and Leftists Don’t Get about Culture Wars

Recognizing this cyclical pattern is important because leftists and progressives tend to make several key analytical errors when looking back at these culture wars and comparing them to the present. The first error is misunderstanding the conservative backlash. When right-wing backlash occurs, whether it is the rise of conservative talk radio and Fox News in the 1990s or the MAGA movement today, leftists typically assume it is a reaction against material progress or genuine gains made by marginalized groups. Al-Gharbi demonstrates that this is demonstrably false. These periods of Awokening rarely result in any actual redistribution of wealth or material gains for the truly disadvantaged. The backlash to wokeism is not simply a “reaction against progress.” It is a reaction against the alienating, militant, and condescending ways that symbolic capitalists attempt to censor and shame anyone who disagrees with the latest iteration of their moral vocabulary. The conservative who resents being called a bigot for holding the same views that were considered mainstream five years ago is not necessarily defending oppression; he is reacting to an elite moral program that demands ideological conformity while delivering nothing tangible to his life. This does not mean that all conservative backlash is legitimate or that the grievances it channels are always well-directed, but it does mean that dismissing it as mere bigotry or “reaction against progress” fundamentally misdiagnoses the problem. The backlash is, in large part, a predictable response to being lectured and policed by people whose material interests are not aligned with yours and whose “radicalism” evaporates the moment their own career prospects improve.

The most common error leftists make in their understanding of reactionary movements is ignoring the self-serving, intra-elite nature of woke progressive movements. Leftists often romanticize these cultural Awokenings as grassroots uprisings of the oppressed, as if the culture wars were fought between the forces of liberation and the forces of reaction. In reality, as the pattern across all four cycles makes clear, these movements are driven overwhelmingly by highly educated, relatively affluent professionals who leverage social justice discourse to compete for status and power within their own elite circles. Anti-woke reactions, even if weaponized by elite conservative businessmen, aren’t simply elite attempts to shut down grassroots movements. Reactionary movements capitalize on pre-existing animosity that many ordinary people, often the furthest thing from elites, have towards the agendas and attitudes of woke symbolic capitalists. Popular waves of reactionary sentiments following awokening cycles can represent a revolt against the revolt of the elites, in which the silent majority rejects the cultural agendas of the liberal symbolic capitalist elites at the ballot box.

By fixating on niche, symbolic issues (renaming buildings, policing language, enforcing the latest terminological conventions) woke symbolic capitalists alienate working-class people and ethnic minorities who are more concerned with concrete, material “kitchen sink” issues: wages, housing, healthcare, the cost of living, and whether their children will have better opportunities than they did. The culture wars are not a battle between the powerful and the powerless; they are, in large part, an intra-elite status competition that the rest of the population is forced to endure. Recognizing this does not require dismissing every cause these movements champion, many of which are legitimate. It requires recognizing that the form in which those causes are pursued, the consciousness-first, language-policing, heresy-hunting form, is itself a product of elite class dynamics rather than a natural or inevitable expression of the struggle for justice.

The Fourth Awokening (2011-2020s)

Now, before we return to my definition of wokeism as a mode, it’s crucial that we finish describing the most recent cycle of wokeism that Al-Gharbi outlines in his book, The Fourth Awokening, which deserves immediate attention because it defines the current landscape. The Fourth Awokening (post-2010) follows the same pattern of elite overproduction. The 2008 financial crisis produced elite overproduction on a massive scale, and the painfully slow job recoveries that followed only intensified it: between 2000 and 2015, the United States added twenty-two million workers with at least a bachelor’s degree, but only about ten million jobs that required a college degree.[19] The resulting competition for shrinking opportunities ignited the fourth cycle. Crucially, Al-Gharbi demonstrates that this awokening began before Trayvon Martin, before #MeToo, before Trump. He pinpoints the origin to September 2011 with the Occupy Wall Street movement, which, contrary to popular mythology, was never a working-class movement. Seventy-six percent of participants had a bachelor’s degree or higher, and a majority of the rest were enrolled in college.[20] According to this view, although it spoke in the name of the working class, Occupy Wall Street was a movement driven by elite aspirants of the top 20% rebelling against the top 1%, who they saw as responsible for the lost professional opportunities they were promised. Later, as the economy slowly recovered but with not enough jobs to fill a generation of people who expected far more out of their degree, symbolic capitalists gradually shifted their focus from Wall Street to identity politics, but the underlying class dynamics remained unchanged.

The Missing Piece: What My Theory Adds

Al-Gharbi’s materialist analysis brilliantly explains when Awokenings occur (during periods of elite overproduction), why they occur (status competition among symbolic capitalists), and who participates in them (highly educated, relatively affluent professionals). He demonstrates that the contemporary Great Awokening was driven not by moral progress or technological change, but by the material conditions of elite oversupply following the 2008 financial crisis. This is an essential foundation for any serious critique of wokeism.

Al-Gharbi identifies “post-materialist politics” and the obsession with changing symbols and culture rather than material change as a core characteristic of wokeism, which overlaps quite well with my definition. However, Al-Gharbi explicitly refrains from giving a single, straight definition of what wokeism actually is. This is not a fault in his analysis; it is a deliberate methodological choice. He demonstrates that we can still measure the tendencies of wokeism and the factors that drive them without distilling the phenomenon of wokeism to a fixed essence. He points out that fixed definitions can be a rhetorical trap that can prompt critics to myopically look for any contradictions in the definition to discredit the entire theory. This is an important point, as there are plenty of terms, such as “love” and “justice,” that are notoriously hard to define consistently, yet no one would seriously claim that these words are “meaningless.”

While Al-Gharbi’s decision not to provide a clear-cut definition of wokeism’s essence makes sense and is intellectually defensible, it nonetheless leaves crucial questions unanswered that may carry significant practical importance in helping people understand and identify wokeism in everyday life. If someone accepts Al-Gharbi’s entire analysis and then asks, “But what exactly defines the woke mentality? What makes certain forms of socio-political activity woke? Why do some left-wing people often get described as woke while others do not? How would I recognize wokeness when I see it? How do I stop acting woke?” Many people who can perceive the phenomenon of wokeism at an intuitive level often can’t put their finger on it and thus can’t explain it to those who are too oblivious or too stubborn to recognize the problem. This practical clarity is precisely the gap that I believe still needs to be filled.

My essay provides the missing piece: a concrete definition of wokeism that we can give whenever someone questions what wokeism even means and asks you to define what you are critiquing. Dismissing critics of wokeism for not consistently defining what wokeism is has been an all-too-common tactic that people (often woke people themselves) deploy to avoid engaging with the substance of the critique. If critics cannot provide a clear, consistent definition of what it means to act woke and what distinguishes wokeism from other forms of political activity, they appear to be attacking a phantom.

To reiterate the definition once again: Wokeism is a consciousness-first approach to political activity that presupposes that the awakening of a correct consciousness is the prerequisite for political solidarity and that changing social attitudes (by changing culture) is the prerequisite for political change. This definition explains not only the liberal-progressive variant that Al-Gharbi analyzes, but also right-wing forms of woke politics and the presence of woke dynamics even among self-identified “class-conscious” Marxists. The form of woke politics (consciousness-first, awakening-dependent) travels independently of its content. Furthermore, in Part 2, I will sketch out a historical genealogy of wokeism as a phenomenon, tracing its origins back to the rise of American Evangelism and showing that it is a tendency not exclusive to the left or the right. But first, I want to demonstrate the practical explanatory value of this definition of wokeism in elucidating some of the most common tendencies that often come up when people discuss wokeism and what ties them all together.

The Connection Between Wokeism, Political Correctness, and Cancel Culture

I believe my definition of wokeism accurately captures the common denominator that ties together phenomena of cancel culture, political correctness, and identity politics. These things are often treated like separate issues, with some people taking issue with one of these things but not the others; however, many people can intuitively tell that these things are somehow interconnected but can’t articulate how. This is where my definition of wokeism (a consciousness-first approach to political activity that prioritizes shared sensibilities as the prerequisite for political alliances rather than mutual class interests and shared policy goals) comes in handy.

Wokeism treats political activity as an effort to “change minds” and suppress “bad ideas” rather than to form alliances based on shared interests. If enough people adopt the “correct” views, then justice, equity, and fairness will naturally follow. Of course, this is not how history works. This is why wokeism inevitably leads to the policing of language and ideas. If you believe that the key to liberation is ensuring everyone has the right consciousness, then the logical next step is to control what people think and say. This explains why wokeism manifests in speech codes, cancel culture, and the obsession with rooting out heretics: the lack of people who possess a certain notion of a “correct consciousness,” or the deviation from that prescribed consciousness within the in-group, is seen as the main barrier to the actualization of justice. What connects political correctness, cancel culture, and call-out culture is that they’re all manifestations of consciousness-policing.

Wokeism is an anti-democratic current that wants to re-create the demos in its own image. At its core, woke politics is bent on ideological conformity, but because it’s impossible to get everyone to actually agree, the best it can achieve is getting enough people to pretend they agree by enforcing politically correct speech codes. Because wokeism is fundamentally centered around consciousness and hostile to disagreement, when it fails to win enough voluntary converts to its worldview, it retreats from mass politics and obsesses over enforcing politically correct language codes. Political correctness is the linguistic dimension of consciousness policing. If you believe that awakening to the right consciousness is the prerequisite for political solidarity, then language becomes crucial, not just as a means of communication but as evidence of one’s awakened state. The obsession with terminology, with constantly updating the “correct” words to use, makes perfect sense within this framework. Language doesn’t just describe reality; it shapes consciousness. Therefore, controlling language becomes a means of controlling thought, and controlling thought becomes a means of achieving political change.

Wokeism and Narcissism

Woke politics is powered by a simple premise: society changes only after people “wake up” into the correct consciousness. History becomes a seminar. Politics becomes pedagogy, and in the case of most woke politics, it is pedagogy on behalf of “the oppressed” rather than any kind of concrete working-class movement with concrete goals. If enough minds can be purified, the world will follow. This is where a distinctly narcissistic temptation creeps in, not narcissism as a clinical disorder, but narcissism as a political posture. A woke person with this posture thinks: the main problem is that the world does not conform to my moral worldview, my understanding of reality, my interpretation of harm, and therefore the central task of justice is to “re-educate” everyone and change the social atmosphere until it does. In older democratic politics, you fought opponents over wages, laws, and power. With the woke style, you end up fighting the public itself, people’s common sense, their “problematic” jokes, their “socially conditioned” patriarchal white heteronormative intuitions, etc. They end up wanting to “kill all normies” as Angela Nagle described it in her book of the same title back in 2017, shortly before she got doxxed, harassed, and canceled from the left for her leftist case against open borders (2018).

Another reason why there is an inherently narcissistic dimension to wokeism is that a huge portion of contemporary social justice discourse interprets conflict through the lens of stigmatization. If people are suffering, the primary explanation is that they are being invalidated, misrecognized, or symbolically harmed by norms and language. The cure is therefore not only legal equality or material security, but a total renovation of the moral environment: new speech rules, new educational scripts, new rituals of public affirmation. Disagreement is no longer treated as disagreement. It is treated as a pathology. It becomes “phobia,” “violence,” or “harm.”

Notice what happens here. Tolerance is demoted. Acceptance is demanded. In liberal life, you do not have to accept your neighbor’s metaphysics to coexist with them. You only have to respect their rights. Conservatives and liberals do not accept each other’s moral universes, but they tolerate each other as fellow citizens. Yet the woke moral style often treats mere tolerance as insufficient, even suspect. It wants the dissenters not merely restrained, but converted. The goal is not peaceful coexistence under shared rules. The goal is a world in which the rules themselves become a machine for producing the correct inner sentiments.

This helps explain the obsession with symbols and status rituals. Awards, representation, language policing, mandated trainings, public confessions, the performance of “allyship,” the staging of moral innocence. These are not sideshows. They are what “consciousness-first politics” looks like when it becomes institutionalized. It is easier to engineer recognition than to build coalitions. It is easier to manage symbols than to redistribute power. And it is easier to treat dissent as moral deficiency than to negotiate with it. The deeper irony is that this style of politics is often sold as compassion, while it smuggles in a kind of moral solipsism. It asks the public to treat one framework as unquestionable, one vocabulary as mandatory, one interpretation of reality as the price of entry into decency. That is not persuasion. It is catechesis.

Typical Examples of Wokeism

One of the more obvious examples of woke discourse that many people are familiar with is the pronounification of gender, the attempt to make a particular metaphysics of gender not merely tolerated, but publicly enacted through compulsory linguistic ritual. For a long time, many people were willing to treat sexuality and even unusual gender expression as matters of private liberty: live how you want, do not be harassed, equality under the law, etc. Pronoun discourse shifts the terrain. It asks the public not only to leave people alone, but to speak as if contested ideological frameworks and theories of gender are already settled, and to treat noncompliance as moral injury. In practice, this expands into a whole ecosystem of “inclusive language,” from normalizing phrases like “assigned at birth,” to institutional templates that pressure people to announce pronouns, to the deliberate replacement of ordinary words like “mother” or “woman” with bureaucratic abstractions like “birthing person” or “people with uteruses.” Whether one agrees with these innovations or not, they illustrate the woke impulse perfectly: political progress is imagined primarily as a mass re-education of common sense, carried out through language management, HR policy, and symbolic compliance, rather than persuasion and democratic bargaining.

This is also why the pronoun issue became such a flashpoint. Woke discourse increasingly treats tolerance as insufficient, and pushes toward mandatory affirmation, enforced through stigma terms like “phobia,” which often come to mean not hatred or mistreatment, but dissent from the approved vocabulary. The result is predictable. A politics that might have remained a straightforward question of civil rights becomes a struggle over compelled speech, institutional policing, and the remaking of everyday language. It spreads fastest in precisely the spaces most saturated with symbolic power, universities, media, nonprofits, white-collar workplaces, where changing language is easier than changing material reality, and where moral status is accumulated through visible performance. People are free to advocate these norms in a liberal society, and people are equally free to resist them, but once the demand becomes “you must say the words, and you must mean them,” backlash is no longer mysterious. It is the foreseeable reaction to a politics that tries to engineer belief through linguistic compliance, then acts shocked when “normies” refuse to convert.

Are Identity Politics Always Woke?

Before anyone hits me with the “class reductionist” charge, let me be clear. I am not saying race, sex, gender, or “cultural” issues are unimportant, and I am not saying that all expressions of identity politics are inherently woke. None of what I am saying denies the reality of racial injustice, and none of it implies that any politics dealing with race, gender, or anything outside of class politics is automatically “woke.” What matters is the approach. As I argue in greater detail in Part 2, the Civil Rights Movement, at its core, was not a woke phenomenon, precisely because it was oriented toward concrete political goals and concrete institutional victories, desegregation, integration, anti-discrimination law, equal political rights, and enforcement through the state. It was not premised on the fantasy that you can eliminate racism by converting every individual soul into a non-racist overnight. Its goal was to end discrimination through law and power, not to perfect the inner moral state of the entire population. It also intersected with class dynamics and institutional capacity, including the way New Deal era changes and the emergence of a Black middle-class cadre helped create the leverage required to impose demands on the state. In other words, it treated racism as a political and structural problem, which would wither away gradually through changes in social relations between blacks and whites, not as an ideological sin to be cured through socially engineering the minds of the masses.

The same distinction applies to gender politics.Feminism is not inherently woke, and women’s issues are not inherently consciousness politics. The first-wave struggles for basic legal rights, and later battles over equal citizenship, workplace access, divorce, and reproductive rights, were political fights over power and policy. Even when feminists used structural language like patriarchy, the practical orientation, at its best, was toward changing material arrangements and institutional relations, not simply hunting down bad attitudes. You can disagree with particular demands or outcomes, but the form of politics is recognizably political. It is about winning rights, securing protections, and altering conditions that shape dependence and vulnerability. That is categorically different from a politics that treats misogyny as the master key, then makes the eradication of sexist attitudes the primary battlefield, with culture as the main terrain and discourse as the main weapon.

This distinction becomes especially clear in the discourse surrounding Indigenous politics in North America, especially Canada. Just like how in the United States the people most obsessed with “deconstructing whiteness” and “abolishing the police” during BLM were usually privileged white upper-middle class students, it is typical to find white activist types in Canada with a peculiar fetishization of Indigenous issues, shouting #Landback, calling other white people settlers, and posturing about how Canada and the US are illegitimate countries because they are founded on “stolen land.” When it comes to these sorts of issues, the lighter, liberal form of wokeism tends to manifest in the form of white guilt, privilege checking, and obsession with land acknowledgements. Whereas the more “radical” leftist manifestation of wokeism often comes in the form of calls for “decolonization” and a flirtation with third worldism, a pseudo-radicalism defined less by constructive political goals and more by hatred of “the West” and a fetishization of anti-colonial struggles abroad.

Here too, the difference between a political approach to these issues worth taking seriously versus a woke one does not lie in whether Indigenous issues are acknowledged as real, but in how they are approached and what is prioritized. In its woke form, Indigenous politics is often reduced to symbolic gestures and moral signaling: land acknowledgments treated as political substitutes, the renaming of streets and institutions, ritualized declarations of Canada as a “settler colonial” state, and abstract calls to “decolonize” that remain largely detached from concrete political strategy. These practices create the appearance of radicalism while leaving the underlying material conditions of Indigenous communities largely untouched.

A materialist approach, by contrast, begins from the concrete realities that actually structure Indigenous life: persistent lack of clean drinking water, inadequate housing and infrastructure, limited access to healthcare, and the absence of genuine sovereignty over land and local governance, including meaningful consent when development projects are imposed on territories where Indigenous people already live. What distinguishes the woke mode of politics is not that it is merely co-opted by elites after the fact, but that it is structurally predisposed toward symbolic politics from the outset. Because it is driven primarily by professional-managerial actors whose political engagement is oriented around moral performance and symbolic capital, it predictably elevates semiotic victories over the slow, conflictual work of winning material gains. In doing so, it treats correct consciousness as a prerequisite for political solidarity rather than as a possible outcome of collective struggle. The result is a politics that fragments potential coalitions, substitutes moral purity for strategy, and ultimately undermines the very material demands it claims to advance.

This is where you can see how movements with legitimate goals can drift into a woke mode once the emphasis shifts from structures to symbol. The focus often moves from legislation to language, representation, and the purification of discourse in media, education, workplaces, and everyday speech. That is when “liberation” starts looking less like building coalitions to win institutional change, and more like an endless project of consciousness management. The results are predictable. People learn the speech codes, they perform compliance, and resentment accumulates, especially when all of the virtue signaling and symbolic victories do virtually nothing to address the declining standard of the ordinary working majority.

Was Woke “Co-opted”? The “Elite Capture” Excuse

It is a popular argument among progressives that identity politics and phrases like “stay woke” went from originally being an authentic form of “grassroots radical politics” to being “co-opted” by corporations and liberal politicians. The kind of people who make this argument blame the failure of woke identity politics on the “elite capture” of what could have ostensibly been radical emancipatory movements had they not been “co-opted” by liberal capitalists who dilute “the cause” to symbolic token gestures. These critiques of “co-optation” tend to be shallow because they do not grapple with the problems of the woke mode of politics itself and the reality that these “awokenings,” including the “radical leftist” manifestations (not just the “liberal” kind), were already driven by elite overproduction, before they were “co-opted.” The hard pill to swallow is that woke progressive identity movements were always alreadycaptured by elites to begin with, that is, disgruntled PMC symbolic capitalist elites and elite aspirants. It is a mistake to think that there ever existed a “real movement” of radical identity politics from the ground up that could have “succeeded” if only it hadn’t been captured by elites at the top. It is equally delusional for leftists to think that they can help resurrect this imagined “real movement” by distancing whatever they deem to be “real leftism” from status quo-liberalism. In reality, these socio-cultural movements undermine themselves politically due to being based in a woke mode driven by a stratum of symbolic capitalists whose interests and socialization naturally orient them towards this kind of politics. A consciousness-first politics, driven by people trained to work in the knowledge economy whose careers are centered on the distribution of symbols and discourse, easily lends itself to performance-based politics over real material change.

Wokeism’s Anti-Political Character

Woke politics tends to focus on changingculture rather than changing material conditions because the pioneers of woke politics tend to be the “cultural elites” whose careers involve the production of discourse and text-based and/or visual media. This is why Musa Al-Gharbi’s concept of the “symbolic capitalists” is so useful. This group of symbolic capitalists, whose careers are dependent on the funding of actual capitalists and/or the state, control the commanding heights of cultural production, universities, media, HR departments, nonprofits, but lacks the power to significantly transform economic relations, unlike big capitalists and the full-time laborers who do physical work. Thus, it should not be a surprise that symbolic capitalists are disproportionately drawn to symbolic solutions. They tend to imagine that changing language and representation is the same thing as changing the world, because in their own domain, language and representation are power. They police speech because speech is their terrain. They moralize discourse because moralized discourse is how status is allocated in their milieu. They believe that changing the way we talk about things will lead to changes in the way we do things, because their jobs literally revolve around making “the way we talk” a lever of control. The problem is that this produces a politics that can win cultural compliance without delivering material change. It can force people to speak correctly without giving them higher wages, cheaper rent, union power, or any institutional capacity at all. And when symbolic victories substitute for structural ones, you get the exact backlash pattern we keep seeing: outward conformity, inner resentment, and an eventual revolt against the people perceived as enforcing the codes.

But changing how people talk does not automatically change how people live, and it certainly does not automatically build the durable coalitions required to win power. Backlash emerges not necessarily as backlash against progress as such, but rather against an elite moral program that demands ideological conformity while delivering little tangible improvement. Even for marginalized groups that progressive identity politics are supposed to benefit, woke “politics” rarely manifests in successful political change, because realpolitics would have to involve coalitions of different groups coming together to make decisions despite disagreement, rather than form a consensus by converting everyone to “the right way” of thinking. To be clear, this is not a claim that woke people believe every last individual must be converted before progress is possible; no serious person holds such a literal position. The argument is rather that they operate as though consciousness conformity must reach some sufficient threshold before political solidarity can be forged, a presupposition that is betrayed by their persistent prioritization of discourse management over the kind of broad coalition building that durable political change actually requires. For this reason, it is no coincidence that this sort of woke politicking tends to be associated more with the term social justice than with radical politics.

From Hyperpolarization to Depoliticization

Wokeism tends toward depoliticization despite appearing hyperpolitical. At its core, wokeism is an anti-political worldview. Politics, in its true sense, is about the polis, the political community one is a citizen of, and in a liberal society in which who governs the polis is determined by elections, one must work with the demos, which will always be marked by a significant degree of pluralism and contradiction. But wokeism reduces politics to a matter of thought and belief, of who is pure and who is impure, rather than who holds power and how that power can be contested.

Sheldon Wolin’s distinction between politics and the political helps make this precise. Politics, in his account, is the ceaseless contestation among organized and unequal powers over access to public resources, the normal churn of institutions, parties, and managed conflict. The political, by contrast, is episodic and rare: it is the moment when a plural demos, composed of different classes, cultures, interests, and temperaments, nonetheless produces a lived experience of commonality, a shared public world in which collective power is used for the general well-being. That is what makes wokeism anti-political in the deepest sense. It breaks the preconditions of commonality by converting disagreement into moral pathology and by making belonging conditional on an approved consciousness. In this sense, wokeism is not “too political.” It is politics without the political, a permanent frenzy of contestation that cannot generate a common world.

Seen through this lens, wokeism is anti-political not because it lacks intensity, but because it lacks the capacity for commonality. This is why wokeism so often becomes self-marginalizing: it does not seek to act with the polis as it is, but to bypass politics by trying to recreate the demos in its image. Instead of building politics based on what people have in common, wokeism treats commonality as an obstacle, seen in the constant contempt for “heteronormativity” and the obsession with transgressing norms, taboos, and customs. Wokeism is about cultivating or enforcing uniformity rather than finding commonality that already exists. When there is a failure to come together to make decisions based on common goals in spite of intractable disagreements, the remaining form of action often becomes what my late intellectual mentor Asad Haider called “dismissal”. Dismissal is the depoliticizing process whereby politics implodes into moralized ejection, denouncing, ostracizing, stripping status, pressuring employers, and forcing resignations as a substitute for building power in the polis.[21] Therefore, wokeism is self-marginalizing and culturally maximalist but politically suicidal. It can reshape norms, language, and status hierarchies faster than it can win durable institutional or material victories. Dismissal is what politics looks like after the political has died: a public world cannot be built across differences, so the only remaining form of collective action is the policing of membership and the removal of impure actors. The fixation on ideological purity serves a specific function within systems of power: it transforms political struggle into a moral crusade, effectively neutralizing any threat to existing material arrangements. This is the paradox of woke politics. Those who espouse it sometimes do so opportunistically, out of fear, or out of a genuine belief that they are part of a great awakening.

Even in its most radical manifestations, woke politics usually amounts to self-contained opposition. It dismisses and excludes people who don’t have the “correct ideas” either because they have not yet been “awakened,” are unwilling to accept them, or are rendered incapable of understanding them due to their different “lived experiences” or backgrounds. The particularist anti-solidaristic nature of woke politics renders it incapable of becoming successful mass politics because appealing to a mass of people requires navigating a plurality of different viewpoints. Instead of mass politics led by big-tent organizations, the woke method leads to swarms of individual micro-groups segregated into safe spaces.

This is why wokeism, despite its fanatically hyper-political posturing, ultimately retreats from politics by trying to change the world by changing the culture of society without building coalitions and trying to win people over first. Many people on the left are still caught in a highly right-wing “friend-enemy” conception of politics, whereas a more deliberative understanding of politics would be the coming together of diverse groups within the polis to negotiate shared interests and agree on a decision in spite of irreconcilable disagreements. Wokeism fails on both counts. Its intolerance of ideological diversity makes it incapable of the strategic alliances and coalitional work that even anti-establishment mass politics requires.

Now that the fundamentals of the theory of wokeism are established (the definition of wokeism, who the woke people are, the socio-economic conditions that drive wokeism, etc.), the Part 2 essay will be a bit more historical, tracing the genealogy of wokeism as far back as the First and Second Great Awakenings (1730s and 1740s, 1790 to the 1840s), and how the woke mode later evolved into the modern “progressive” form of wokeism many recognize today. In doing so, we will look at the following questions: why does wokeism appear to be particularly so much more intense in America than in other places? The answer, as Part 2 will show, lies not in Marxism, not in postmodernism, and not in any foreign import, but in one of the oldest and most deeply rooted American traditions there is: Protestant Christianity. That genealogy is the subject of Part 2 in this essay trilogy.

Footnotes/Sources Cited

[1] U.S. Census Bureau, “Table A-2. Percent of People 25 Years and Over Who Have Completed High School or College, by Race, Hispanic Origin and Sex: Selected Years 1940 to 2024,” Current Population Survey (CPS) Historical Time Series Tables, updated September 3, 2025, accessed December 27, 2025.

[2] Pew Research Center, “Americans with Higher Education and Income Are More Likely to Be Involved in Community Groups,” February 22, 2019, accessed December 27, 2025.

[3] Musa Al-Gharbi, We Have Never Been Woke (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2024), 13–14.

[4] Al-Gharbi, We Have Never Been Woke, 42, 81.

[5] Al-Gharbi, We Have Never Been Woke, 272-280.

[6] Al-Gharbi, We Have Never Been Woke, 96-97, 109.

[7] Al-Gharbi, We Have Never Been Woke, 80, 83.

[8] Al-Gharbi, We Have Never Been Woke, 123-124.

[9] Al-Gharbi, We Have Never Been Woke, 98.

[10] Bob Herzberg, The Left Side of the Screen: Communist Ideology in Hollywood, 1929–2008 (Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Company, 2011), 3–18.

[11] George Orwell, The Road to Wigan Pier (Orlando, FL: Harvest, 1958), 173, 175. Cited in Al-Gharbi, We Have Never Been Woke, 95–96.

[12] Al-Gharbi, We Have Never Been Woke, 104–105.

[13] Al-Gharbi, We Have Never Been Woke, 121. Drawing on Robert Putnam, The Upswing: How America Came Together a Century Ago and How We Can Do It Again (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2020), chap. 6.

[14] Al-Gharbi, We Have Never Been Woke, 121–122. See also Erik Hurst, Yona Rubinstein, and Kazuatsu Shimizu, “Task-Based Discrimination,” NBER Working Paper No. 29022 (2021).

[15] Al-Gharbi, We Have Never Been Woke, 108.

[16] Al-Gharbi, We Have Never Been Woke, 34.

[17] Al-Gharbi, We Have Never Been Woke, 128–130.

[18] Al-Gharbi, We Have Never Been Woke, 109–110.

[19] Al-Gharbi, We Have Never Been Woke, 85-88, 109.

[20] Al-Gharbi, We Have Never Been Woke, 87.

[21] Asad Haider, “Dismissal: The Relevance of the Cultural Revolution,” The Point, October 21, 2020.