'Woke' might not be the enemy, but it still deserves critique

A response to Dorian Lynskey

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Dorian Lynskey, whose work I mostly really like,1 has written a piece for The Nerve, Carole Cadwalladr’s new outfit.

It’s a publication that I’ve only previously encountered when looking for a reminder that Stewart Lee is a much better stand-up comedian than he is a political thinker.

Anyway, in a polemic titled “In a world of war, abuse and rising fascism, ‘woke’ was never the enemy”, Dorian makes the case that the writers and intellectuals who spent time worrying about ‘wokeness’ were wrong. The real enemy all along has now clearly been revealed to be, of course, Trump, Farage and right-wing authoritarianism.

The Nerve’s graphics are… idiosyncratic.

Dorian writes:

It seems absurd to lambast “snowflake” students when Trump is strong-arming universities; Critical Race Theory when he openly promotes white nationalism; leftwing hostility to free speech when he targets everyone from student protesters to talkshow hosts; politically correct language-policing when words such as “equity” and “oppression” have been scrubbed from government websites; or Black Lives Matter when ICE is murdering people in the street.

He then goes on to look back at the culture wars of recent years, and ends by concluding that:

[C]entrists, too, need to confront reality and ask themselves if truffling out low-stakes campus controversies and bad tweets was the best use of their time when fascism was hurtling down the tracks. What unites the woke and the repentant anti-woke is an urgent need to get their priorities straight and identify the correct enemies. With fundamental values such as decency, solidarity and justice under savage attack, they can’t afford to make the same mistakes again.¹

Now, I don’t think I’m one of the ‘centrists’ Dorian had in mind when writing the piece. If he knows who I am at all, it’ll be as a second-tier character on British Politics Bluesky – a face he occasionally scrolls past on his timeline.

But politically, I am a member of the class of people he has in his crosshairs. Over the years, I’ve unwisely waded in numerous times on culture war issues, and have punched left towards a number of ‘woke’ positions, even though as a centre-left type, I’m on the same ‘team’.

And worse still, I’ve done this despite the fact that I share Dorian’s view that Trump, Farage, Goodwin, and the rising tide of fascism is – obviously – a wildly more significant threat to our society than anything ‘woke’ ever was.

But where I disagree with Dorian is that I don’t think this means that criticism of ‘woke’ ideas and their proponents were absurd, misguided or disproportionate. In fact, I think these criticisms from within the left-of-centre coalition are critical if we want a left that can stand up to the threat posed by the worst people in the universe.

So please join me below the paywall as I breakdown Dorian’s argument and explain why, in my view, it doesn’t really hold up.