Is Wokeness "Dying?"

We have heard a lot these past couple of years about the "death" of wokeness, sometimes for what can seem very slight reason!). Is there anything to it?

Answering that question we get at least a little further if we spell out just what it is that we mean by "wokeness"--and what it would mean for such a thing to "die."

The standard answer to the question "What is wokeness?" is that wokeness is alertness to and support for social justice, but this is unsatisfactory. Social justice does not have a single, fixed, clear meaning, and the "woke" idea of such justice is indeed very particular. It is specifically a postmodernist conception of social justice, concerned with race and above all gender, not class (indeed, hostile to concern for class), which directs its attention away from material conditions and their associated concerns toward consciousness, self, sin, trauma, and of course, "representation." In practical terms wokeness is a matter of respect for the identity politics of the historically marginalized and their claims upon society at large. As this implies it is a grouping together of a host of different concerns, of very differing levels of controversy and very unequal weight (some issues much more contentious, much more charged, than others), with aims and results unlikely to be assessable according to objective criteria.

Making a judgment about whether all this is "dying" is very far from easy--though given the description here there would already seem to be grounds for doubt about of this "going away." Certainly no one who looks at the content of the mainstream media could possibly imagine that the slant of the news coverage, the positions of the commentariat, the products of the culture industry, have changed appreciably in this respect. (Indeed, the hyperbolic condemnation and valorization of Sydney Sweeney that make rather slight acts or statements on her part seem like the dealing of a death blow to wokeness that "won the culture war" only underline that.) Rather what those speaking in such terms seem to have in mind is something very limited in relation to all this, not wokeness as such, but the broad, concerted push on behalf of wokeness that we saw in the 2010s, such that for a period it was fashionable for giant corporations to affiliate themselves with it; and whether that push, especially insofar as it was identifiable with movements such as Black Lives Matter and #MeToo, appears exhausted.

This is something which it is more plausible to argue over. After all, as of 2025 it seems that Black Lives Matter had its peak five years ago; and #MeToo is not the force it was (though not for lack of trying on the part of the culture war-mongers at the New York Times, to go by the way in which they foolhardily seized on the Lively-Baldoni controversy). Business seems more hesitant to jump on the bandwagon, with companies like Ford and Target and Meta backing away from their earlier grandstanding and such ostentatious displays as that bizarre and confusing Jaguar commercial that had no cars in it (but lots of what seemed to be diversity and body positivity) mocked even by those who could have been expected to be most sympathetic as behind the times at the moment of its arrival. Yet all this, too, can seem ambiguous, less indicative of the end of activism than of particular lines of activism, which may simply have been a function of the complacency "liberal" opinion makers encourage when there is a Democratic President in the White House, with that encouragement's usual quick result. (Remember how the anti-war movement melted away after Obama's election, even as the war and all associated with it only became more rather than entrenched in American life? Remember how it was under Obama that weekly Tuesday morning "kill lists" became "a thing?") Black Lives Matter and #MeToo, surged in the first Trump administration, then waned in the Biden era, plausibly to resurge later.

Still, even if one takes the view that wokeness is merely napping, or even in transition, rather than defeated and "dying," the political victory of the Republicans in 2024, especially because it saw a Republican White House combined with Republican control of both the House and Senate, and the Republicans made gains in the state legislatures, combined with the makeup of the Supreme Court and the judiciary more broadly, and the cohesion of the party (2024 a far cry from 2020, let alone 2016, let alone 1976)--combined with the faintness of the opposition--has put the right in the strongest position it has been to promote its preferred policies in living memory, with all that implies for the course of American politics. (Indeed, one may imagine that it is less any sea change in the opinion of the public than the extent to which right-wing politicians cultivating anti-woke support have been empowered by these victories that has business more squeamish about being identified with "social justice.") At the same time the limits of the postmodernist conception of social justice, especially in the wake of so many defeats (What has Black Lives Matter to show for its efforts? Even with a Democratic President in the White House and the party in a far stronger position generally than it is now, what did #MeToo bring to the fight to defend reproductive rights?), may well have the discontented looking at other ways to understand the situation, and other ways to protest it.