How The Anti-Woke Won

Professor Umut Özkırımlı writes:

I knew exactly what I was walking into when I set out to write a book challenging the prevailing orthodoxy on identity politics — or to use a phrase now dripping with scorn, “wokeism”.

Sure, my leftist credentials were unimpeachable: a hefty publication record, a scholarly trajectory steeped in constructivist epistemologies, and a well-honed disdain for nationalist dogma. The book wasn’t some right-wing hatchet job produced in the dank basement of a Heritage Foundation outbuilding.

Cancelled was meant to be a warning and a call to action. What passed as progressive politics was anything but. The left thought it could beat the right by mimicking its ways and playing the culture war game on the right’s turf — a strategic error of catastrophic proportions, doomed from the start by a lack of resources to fulfill its ambitions. In the meantime, it systematically eliminated dissenting views, alienated potential allies, and destroyed any chance of building the broad coalitions necessary for actual, you know, winning — which last I checked was still the point of politics rather than hollow virtue-signalling and algorithmically curated rage.

But none of this mattered. The book landed with a thud. Part of that was our own doing. The title, Cancelled, was market-friendly, yes, but also misleading. It gave the impression of a personal memoir of cancellation, or worse, an opportunistic rant against cancel culture. Readers who never got past the cover assumed I was lamenting the loss of dinner party invitations, not proposing a political overhaul. My publisher, Polity, also made a spectacular marketing blunder, publishing Susan Neiman’s book on the same topic at the same date. The two books, Cancelled and The Left is Not Woke, couldn’t have been more different. Mine: a nuanced critique of identity politics drawing on Black feminist thought, particularly the groundbreaking activism of the Combahee River Collective. Hers: bland Enlightenment universalism — the intellectual equivalent of non-dairy creamer.

But most of the response wasn’t our fault. The book was systematically ignored by mainstream media and liberal/left outlets such as The Guardian and openDemocracy — publications I had contributed to for years and which apparently developed collective amnesia about my existence overnight. I found myself accused of cosying up to the far right at best, or being a straight-up fascist at worst.

Two years on from its release on 31 March 2023, two things have become clear.

First, everything the book warned about has come to pass. The culture war was lost — not just a battle here or there, but the entire theatre of operations. The huge backlash helped bring the reactionary right to power not only in America with Trump’s return, but also saw the surge of the far right across Europe — from Marine Le Pen’s ascendancy in France to the AfD’s gains in Germany to Wilders’ victory in the Netherlands — making the far right, if we are to believe The Economist, “Europe’s most popular family of political parties by vote share … for the first time in modern European history”. Meanwhile, from Turkey to Hungary, authoritarians have entrenched their power through elections — history’s favorite plot twist, where democracy becomes the midwife of its own undoing.

The left? Decimated. It has become nearly impossible to speak up, as the reaction to campus protests in the wake of October 7 has shown — whether it’s voicing solidarity with Palestinians without being labelled antisemitic, or calling out censorship without being accused of endorsing violence.

Yet curiously, the woke left itself didn’t suffer the blow. Its leading figures simply migrated to Bluesky, or relocated to Canadian universities (take Jason Stanley, the self-appointed “fascism expert”, who announced he was leaving his job — as in tenured Ivy League professor, not factory-floor dissident — because the US is at risk of becoming a “fascist dictatorship”). They lit the match, but only others burned: the deported students and immigrants, for example, or the federal workers targeted by DOGE.

Not that the woke activist gives up. Turns out, privilege is easier to theorise than to forfeit. Consider the double standards at play vis-à-vis rule of law. Marine Le Pen is fined €100,000 and sentenced to four years in prison for embezzling public funds. Rule of law. Victory for democracy. A U.S. federal judge blocks Trump’s attempt to revoke legal protections for 500,000 immigrants. Rule of law. Victory for democracy. Italian courts stop Meloni’s plan to detain asylum seekers in Albania. Rule of law. Victory for democracy.

But when the UK Supreme Court rules — precisely, and in full accordance with the legal framework — that the term “sex” in the Equality Act 2010 refers to biological sex, while still protecting trans people under the category of gender reassignment, the reaction is delirium. Suddenly it’s not about rule of law, but about — again — “genocide” and “fascism”. Unaware that their world crumbled, they updated their bios, sidelining solidarity for metrics, for ego, for the illusion of moral clarity.

Second, the views expressed in Cancelled have become conventional wisdom for the few who can spot both a trend and a revenue stream. The ambassadors of moral purity have become anti-woke overnight, executing ideological pirouettes that would make Olympic gymnasts envious.

Examples abound. California’s former woke poster-boy Gavin Newsom now podcasts with right-wing provocateurs like Turning Point USA’s co-founder Charlie Kirk and MAGA mastermind Steve Bannon, railing against LatinX, and questioning the fairness of “trans athletes” participation in women’s sports”. Arch-woke Novara Media contributor Ash Sarkar speaks of class and material analysis in her debut book as if she just discovered The Communist Manifesto behind a stack of Jeremy Corbyn posters.

And not only individual social justice warriors. According to a recent timeline published by Forbes, companies who rolled back DEI programmes include, Warner Bros. Discovery, Goldman Sachs, Paramount, Citigroup, Pepsi, Coca-Cola, JPMorgan Chase, Morgan Stanley, NPR, PBS, among dozens of others. The New York Times set the tone of the “vibeshift” in the media by publishing an article titled “In Shift From 2020, Identity Politics Loses Its Grip on the Country”, followed by similar editorial changes in other former cathedrals of liberal piety — Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, even The Guardian which asked on March 30, 2025, whether #MeToo was an epic failure?

What I feel now is akin to what the mythological character Cassandra must have endured: the gift of prophecy, poisoned by the curse of disbelief — that peculiar mix of vindication and despair that comes from having been right when it no longer matters. The ideas that got me — and scores of others, notably gender-critical feminists who’ve been fighting for years against the erasure of of biological sex as a legally meaningful category — labelled a fascist sympathiser are now repeated by the same people who did the labelling, without so much as a footnote acknowledging their about-face.

I personally take no pleasure in this vindication. What use is being right when the damage is already done? The far right didn’t need my help to rise; it needed exactly the kind of strategic malpractice I warned against. And now those warnings, once deemed heretical, are repeated as received wisdom by the very same heresy hunters who would have happily lit the pyre beneath me.

History doesn’t always repeat itself, but it rhymes with remarkable precision. And the rhyme scheme here is bitter indeed — a sonnet where every line ends with the same word: “too late”.