It is time to again drop in on the most deranged linguistic infelicity of the age. For some years, the foghorn tendency has been making an infernal fetish of the word “woke”. Like its less demotic cousin “politically correct”, that term has taken an apparently irreversible journey from the progressive lexicon to the right-wing bestiary. It has developed parallel forms. The attendant ideology is dubbed “wokeism”. Adherents are swept up in “wokery”. The supreme commanders of the movement – Greta Thunberg, Meghan Markle, others – are deemed part of a “wokeocracy”. An ongoing “war on woke” is making inspirational heroes of mid-market tabloid columnists.
You know all this. A term from African-American Vernacular denoting an awareness of prejudice has become a favourite of the same up-to-the-minute blowhards who think millennials are still teenagers and that wearing a baseball cap back-to-front is the height of contemporary vulgarity. What else is not new?
Well, it does feel as if we are, this summer, reaching a tipping point in the campaign of idiocy. Last month, the Daily Mail announced that “UK builders” had “gone woke”. What could this mean? Are bricklayers demanding colleagues issue trigger warnings before uttering blue language? No, it seemed “three-quarters of tradesmen discuss their feelings with colleagues while two-thirds shun the fried breakfasts and nearly half say they are history buffs”. You could just about read “discuss their feelings” as a concession to less traditional modes of male behaviour. But “history buffs”? Tony Soprano used to watch the History Channel when not icing snitches or impregnating go-go dancers. If the word means anything here it means not conforming to the basest popular stereotypes. We hear the French have “gone woke”. Apparently they no longer wear onions around their necks while cycling in striped jumpers. That sort of thing.
There was more. “Now even The Railway Children have gone woke, it’s clear the culture war is lost,” Michael Deacon of the Daily Telegraph writes of this week’s sequel to that 1970s children’s classic. The Daily Mail was jarred by the film’s “deference to modern sensibilities”.
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All of this was mere aperitif for the feast of anti-wokery that is the ongoing campaign for leadership of the UK Conservative Party. Over on Fox News, Thomas Corbett-Dillon, a “former adviser to Boris Johnson”, was explaining why the British prime minister was forced to resign. “He became woke,” an outraged Corbett-Dillon told Tucker Carlson. That’s right. The man whose most dogged supporters included Jacob Rees-Mogg and Nadine Dorries has apparently joined the South Norwood Vegan Collective. Well, he did always have suspicious “history buff” tendencies. We should have seen it coming.
Having dispatched Mr Johnson to his basket-weaving chums, the remaining candidates set about distancing themselves from any taint of woke deviancy. Kemi Badenoch, former equalities minister, has, according to The Sun, “developed a burgeoning reputation among the grassroots for her war on ‘woke campaigners’.” Suella Braverman, the attorney general, has been equally robust. “We need to get rid of all of this woke rubbish and actually get back to a country where describing a man and a woman in terms of biology does not mean that you’re going to lose your job,” she told Robert Peston.
The transgender issue, referenced in Braverman’s remarks, is at the heart of the woke wars and, as Penny Mordaunt, the only candidate named for a Royal Navy ship (really), rose in the ratings, she sailed into neighbouring waters. Asked about the “war on woke”, she said: “I think it was Margaret Thatcher that said that every prime minister needs a Willie. A woman like me doesn’t have one.” (Thatcher’s faux pas emerged from an attempt to celebrate Willie Whitelaw.)
All of which was profoundly depressing. Significantly sillier was the kickback against Ms Mordaunt’s earlier description of It Ain’t Half Hot Mum, the 1970s British sitcom set in India and Myanmar, as “a full-house bingo card of… casual racism, homophobia, white privilege, colonialism, transphobia, bullying, misogyny and sexual harassment”. The Daily Telegraph was not amused. Charles Moore, biographer of Thatcher, stepped up under a headline that mused: “Penny Mordaunt’s wokery deserves scrutiny”. One imagines her hunched over a microphone before a contemporary, home counties version of Joe McCarthy. “Are you now or have you ever been a member of the Wokeist Party? Answer the question!” One imagines candidates blurting out forced confessions – “I had pronouns on my Twitter account!” – before a contemporary version of Stalin’s show trials.
One doesn’t really imagine either thing. Though this preposterous phenomenon could well have grim repercussions for some minorities, at its heart it is empty playacting, generated to satisfy an audience of digital wind. There may well be excessively censorious cultural gatekeepers out there, but, as the Mail’s hod-carrying amateur historian demonstrates, no substantive cause is required for the woke alarm to be hammered. The scare is a contemporary, widened-out variation on the historical panics about horror comics, obscene rap lyrics and video nasties. It is surely about to blow itself out. Then something even more stupid will take its place.
