WELCOME TO The post-woke world.

The sudden rise in the early 2010s of critical social justice ideology – that sprawling, complex and disparate movement known colloquially as ‘woke’ – has meant that the terms ‘left’ and ‘right’ have lost much of their utility. Definitions of ‘woke’ are as varied as can be imagined, but it is best understood as a cultural revolution that seeks equity according to group identity by authoritarian means. Yet for all its institutional clout, this ideology has never enjoyed popular support. Estimates by More in Common, a nonprofit organisation committed to the promotion of social cohesion, suggest that, at its height, the woke movement was endorsed by approximately eight per cent of the population of both the US and the UK. As such, its power could only ever be sustained through misdirection and imposition.

We now find ourselves entering a new phase of the culture war, one in which the woke ideology is being tamed and will soon relinquish its chokehold on the Western world. The death rattles have become so audible that they can no longer be gainsaid. Major companies such as McDonald’s, Walmart, Ford, Amazon, Google and Meta have scaled back their diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) policies. Black Lives Matter is now a largely discredited movement. Leftist politicians, such as Democratic representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and former US secretary of transportation Pete Buttigieg, have quietly removed the pronouns from their social-media profiles. Multiple sporting bodies have barred men who identify as women from competing in female categories. Gay-rights groups are rejecting the forced teaming with divisive LGBTQIA+ campaigns. The UK Supreme Court has ruled that ‘sex’ means ‘biological sex’ for the purposes of equality law, meaning that men who identify as women have no legal right to enter women-only spaces – the Telegraph ran with the frontpage headline, ‘Trans women are not women’.

Good news, except for Britain, where the “authoritarian means” are already established well enough to survive whatever becomes of wokeness.