Identity Politics is How the Cultural Elite Seeks Dominance

A review of "How the Woke Won: The Elitist Movement that Threatens Democracy, Tolerance, and Reason” by Joanne Williams, 2022

Williams is a UK journalist and academic who dares to critique her own milieu – the “cultural elite”. In her view, this elite includes not just the ruling class but the professionals and well-educated middle class who support it. The old ruling class, or “establishment”, got a bad rap in the 1960s so Williams sees the new cultural elite as seeking a new moral purpose that will divert attention from resurgent issues of class and inequality. To her the term “woke” codifies this new ideology of victimhood and cancel culture:

    “Woke describes a moral sensibility that insists on putting people into identity boxes and then arranging these boxes into hierarchies of privilege and oppression, with some groups in need of ‘uplifting’ while others must beg atonement.…woke privileges performative displays and linguistic correctness above material change”. “Cancel culture describes woke’s censorious approach to dissenters”, especially against celebrities such as J.K. Rowling. It “demands that transgressors be removed from social media and public life more broadly”.

    Yet this cancel culture is denied by the woke themselves: “Arguing that this is a right-wing plot to win votes has become a boilerplate response from woke’s advocates”. This denial “reveals the fundamental lack of confidence that woke’s advocates have in the values they espouse”.

    The bottom line is that “claiming to act on behalf of the oppressed allows wealthy people to morally justify their own privileged position…what’s more, woke helps maintain elite rule by dividing the masses into more easily manageable groups.” But in the process “woke hijacks progressive rhetoric” and “breathes new life into old forms of prejudice”, especially racial prejudice. “Woke is how the professional-managerial class maintains its position”.

The rest of the book digs more deeply into the history and mechanisms of “woke” in modern society. There are chapters that lay out the intractability of woke in the ideology and politics of race and gender, in schools and higher education, business and media, and more. But Williams ends on a note of hope, despite noting that woke “resists accountability and avoids public debate”.

    This hope lies with the people – the vast majority “who do not identify with the goals and aspirations of the cultural elite”. Already the working class has begun to fight back - the Brexit vote being the prime example in the UK, with the Trump vote being its counterpart in the US. Williams rejects the blaming of such votes on bad identity politics (racism, sexism, bigotry, etc). Instead she sees them as a rejection of elitism – the cumulative economic inequality and its associated social inequality, or woke itself. She identifies the cultural war as the backlash to the blaming and shaming instigated by the woke.