After Woke Comes the Real Tyranny: The Left’s Shift from Shaming to Violence

Tyler Cowen called it back in 2022: wokeness had peaked. And he was right. By 2026, the corporate DEI grift is retreating, universities are quietly dialling back the worst excesses of cancel culture, Trump is back in the White House with Republican control, and even the media landscape has shifted rightward. The era of corporate pride flags, mandatory pronoun rituals, and firing people for wrongthink on social media has lost momentum.

But here's the brutal twist Cowen nails: what followed is worse.

The Left didn't gracefully accept defeat and return to old-fashioned liberalism. Instead, large parts of it have moved from cultural shaming and institutional capture to something far more dangerous — overt political violence, intimidation, and raw authoritarian impulses. The mask of tolerance has slipped, revealing the real face of modern progressivism: if you can't cancel someone, you try to silence them by other means.

From Campus Tantrums to Street Tyranny

We've seen it play out clearly. What began as "mostly peaceful protests," statue-toppling, and no-platforming has escalated into targeted violence, doxxing campaigns, and organised disruption that goes well beyond ideas. The same activists who once claimed "words are violence" now treat actual violence as a legitimate tool when elections don't go their way or when their cultural dominance is challenged.

This isn't random. It's the logical endpoint of a movement built on the belief that opponents aren't just wrong — they're evil. Moral monsters who deserve no quarter. When you've spent years teaching young people that Western civilisation is irredeemably racist, sexist, and colonial, and that dissent equals harm, the shift from deplatforming to physical confrontation was almost inevitable.

Australia's Version of the Same Disease

Don't think this is just an American problem. Our own universities — the training grounds for the next generation of lawyers, judges, bureaucrats, and journalists — remain saturated with the same ideology. Even as overt wokeness recedes in corporate Australia, the underlying intolerance festers.

We see it in:

The growing willingness to shut down debate on campuses with protests that turn nasty

Politicians and activists who cheer "direct action" against coal mines, farms, or anyone questioning net zero zealotry

Media and legal elites who treat conservative or even centrist views as beyond the pale

The steady erosion of free speech in favour of "safety" and "inclusion"

The pattern is identical: first they capture the institutions, then they enforce orthodoxy through shame, then — when that stops working — through force.

The Deeper Danger

Cowen's point should alarm every ordinary Australian. The woke phase was corrosive and annoying. But the post-woke phase risks becoming genuinely tyrannical. A Left that no longer believes in persuasion or democratic norms, only in power and punishment, is far more dangerous than rainbow-washing corporations ever were.

This explains so much of the current political temperature: the fury at Trump's return, the refusal to accept election results, the embrace of lawfare, and the normalisation of street-level aggression. When ideas fail, power fills the vacuum.

The lesson for Australia is clear. We cannot afford to let our institutions — especially universities — remain captured by this mindset. The next generation of elites is being trained there right now. If they emerge believing that violence, coercion, or state power is justified against their fellow citizens, we're in serious trouble.

Ordinary Aussies who just want affordable energy, secure borders, strong families, and the right to speak their minds deserve better than rule by activist elites who've moved from performative wokeness to something darker.

Wokeness may have peaked, but the real fight against tyranny is only beginning. Time to push back harder, before the shaming turns into something we can't ignore.

Australia first. Free speech first. No more excuses for the violence that follows when the Left loses the culture war.

https://www.thefp.com/p/tyler-cowen-wokeness-has-peaked-what-followed-is-worse