Woke’s Not Dead: A Grim Beast Slouches Toward Us, By Brian Simpson
The chattering class is buzzing with glee, proclaiming the "death of woke" like it is the end of a bad movie. Eric Kaufmann, in his May 14, 2025, Wall Street Journal op-ed, calls it the dawn of a "post-progressive era," citing Trump's rollback of affirmative action, universities ditching DEI mandates, and a rightward shift among young people. Stephen Soukup, writing for American Greatness on May 17, agrees, hailing the collapse of woke's "Marcusian Epoch" and warning of a new Leftist phase. Both see a cultural tide turning, a rejection of cancel culture, trans ideology, and statue-toppling. But here's the cold, hard truth: this optimism is a trap. Woke isn't dissolving, it's mutating. The elites have sunk too much into this mind-control racket to let it go. As W.B. Yeats warned, "A shape with lion body and the head of a man, / A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun, / Is moving its slow thighs." Something worse, a grim beast, is slouching toward us, and we're sleepwalking into its jaws.
Kaufmann's evidence sounds convincing: Trump's administration axed 50-year-old affirmative action orders, colleges dropped speech codes and diversity statements, corporations slashed DEI budgets. Soukup adds that even liberal media are critiquing cancel culture and trans medicine, while young people, per 2021-24 exit polls and Britain's YouGov data, lean Right on immigration and transgenderism. The Left's muted response to Trump's 2024 win, leaning on free speech rather than identity politics, seems to seal it. Woke's losing steam, right? Wrong. This isn't defeat; it's a feint. The elites, globalists, tech oligarchs, WEF schemers, don't abandon multibillion-dollar investments. Woke was their battering ram to reshape society, and they're not packing up just because a few statues stay upright.
Think about the infrastructure. DEI programs, rooted in decades-old affirmative action, employ thousands, consultants, trainers, HR drones, raking in millions. Universities churn out woke graduates; corporations like BlackRock push ESG scores. Social media posts scream about "DEI's death," but they miss the bigger picture: the elite don't ditch a system they've spent 60 years building. Kaufmann's "post-progressive era" is a mirage, a controlled burn to pacify the masses while the real plan brews. Soukup's closer, warning of a "Fifth Epoch" of Leftism, but even he underestimates the beast's ferocity. Woke's not dead, it's shapeshifting.
Why won't woke die? Follow the power. The cultural Left, as Kaufmann notes, rode a 60-year wave of "progress," from sexual liberation to gay marriage, banking on Ronald Inglehart's theory that affluence breeds liberal-egalitarian views. But woke, equal outcomes, emotional coddling, cancel culture, wasn't organic; it was engineered. The elite poured billions into it: Soros funds NGOs pushing identity politics, Gates bankrolls "equity" initiatives, and Big Tech enforces speech codes. Harvard's DEI budget alone was $100 million in 2023. This isn't a movement; it's a machine, too entrenched to dismantle.
Singapore's 2023-2024 vaccine mandate, jailing refusers for six months and fining them $10,000 SGD ($7,500 USD), shows how far they'll go. Rolled out post-Gates and Tedros visits, it's a test run for compliance. The EU's Digital Services Act, as JD Vance warned, threatens U.S. tech firms with billions in fines for "hate speech" or "disinformation." These aren't random; they're the elite's toolkit to crush dissent, with woke as the moral veneer. The same machine that pushed segregated graduations and trans athletes isn't retreating, it's rebranding, ready to unleash something uglier.
Soukup's history lesson is chilling: Leftism evolves through epochs, each more radical than the last. From Rousseau's Enlightenment chaos to Marx's class war, Lukács' cultural Marxism to Marcuse's identity politics, every collapse births a worse monster. Woke, the "Fourth Epoch," is faltering, youth mental health crises, declining birthrates, and "deaths of despair" expose its failures, as Kaufmann notes. But the elite don't quit; they pivot. The "Fifth Epoch" is coming, and it's no gentle reform. Picture a hybrid of woke's worst impulses, racial quotas, speech bans, trans dogma, with techno-fascist control: AI surveillance, digital IDs, climate lockdowns. Yeats' "rough beast" isn't a metaphor; it's the elite's next project, slouching from Davos to D.C.
Social media is buzzing with dread. Users warn of "woke 2.0," a "biometric dystopia" where dissenters are tracked, fined, or jailed. Geoengineering, with its risks of drought and crop failure, could be the crisis to justify it, starve the masses, then offer "equity" as salvation. The elite learned from woke's overreach; the next beast will be subtler, cloaked in "safety" or "sustainability," but deadlier. Kaufmann's "cultural lodestar" shift isn't freedom, it's a new cage, forged from woke's ashes.
Why the optimism from Kaufmann and Soukup? They're half-right but miss the elite's sleight of hand. The anti-woke backlash, Trump's policies, young people's rightward tilt, is real but orchestrated. The elite let woke take the fall, knowing its excesses (like men in women's sports) sparked revolt. By scaling back DEI or speech codes, they defuse populist anger while quietly building the next system. Look at Big Tech: they're not abandoning censorship; they're refining it, as the EU's DSA shows. Singapore's mandate proves they'll punish non-compliance, today it's vaccines, tomorrow it's speech or carbon quotas. The elite's goal isn't progress; it's control, and woke was just a beta test.
The elite's fingerprints are everywhere: WEF's "stakeholder capitalism," Gates' climate tech, Soros' open borders. They're not defeated; they're reloading. The "post-progressive era" is a psy-op, lulling us while the beast takes shape.
Kaufmann and Soukup are wrong, woke's not dead, and celebrating its demise is suicide. The elite's investment guarantees a sequel, a grim beast worse than cancel culture or DEI. Yeats saw it: "The darkness drops again; but now I know / That twenty centuries of stony sleep / Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle." The beast is slouching.
"Welcome to the Post-Progressive Political Era
For decades, the right lost almost every battle in the culture. But now the left has clearly gone too far.
By
Eric Kaufmann
The decline of woke isn't merely a "vibe shift." It marks the end of the 60-year rise of left-liberalism in American culture. We are entering a post-progressive era.
Woke refers to an ideology of equal outcomes and emotional-harm protection for minorities. It produced phenomena such as cancel culture, men in women's spaces and the toppling of statues. It energized a suite of policies known as diversity, equity and inclusion, whose roots lie in older racial-sensitivity training and affirmative-action programs. It is now in retreat.
The Trump administration has rescinded executive orders on affirmative action and disparate impact that were more than 50 years old. Universities are no longer allowed to enforce broad, identity-based speech codes, many of which arose nearly four decades ago. Colleges have adopted institutional-neutrality policies and ended mandatory diversity statements. Corporations have cut back on DEI. Today's anti-DEI mood is likely to outlast the current administration, reflecting a deeper shift in the culture.
Culture can change from the top as elites lead public opinion. American elite culture turned against immigration in the late 1880s, then gradually liberalized between the 1920s and '60s. Are we witnessing a similar elite-led shift, this time away from the ideology of equal outcomes and emotional-harm protection that has guided it since the mid-1960s?
The liberal left spearheaded liberation from social mores around divorce, sex and the traditional family. Attitudes toward interracial marriage, women's equality and homosexuality liberalized, making society better. Conservatives lost virtually every battle in the culture, culminating most recently in the growing acceptance of gay marriage.
The success of the cultural left created a sense of progressive inevitability, captured by Ronald Inglehart's important book, "Culture Shift in Advanced Industrial Society" (1990), which suggested that rising affluence and security propel young and educated people toward liberal-egalitarian cultural views. They in turn change society through generational turnover: one birth, one funeral and one college degree at a time. Left-liberalism was to usher in the end of history as society became more enlightened and empathetic. This confident historicist outlook could be discerned through phrases such as "the right side of history" or references to certain attitudes being out of date.
The cultural left envisioned a grand narrative of progress whose next phase would move from individual rights to group rights, citizen rights to rights across borders, and gay rights to trans rights. But what Daniel Bell termed the left's "chiliastic hopes" appear to have ended in stalemate and polarization. The attempt to push for next-level DEI policies such as segregated graduation ceremonies, mandatory diversity statements, critical race and gender ideology in schools, or males in female sports has produced an enduring antiwoke reaction. Immigration attitudes have turned restrictionist after decades of liberalization.
Young people are more culturally progressive than their elders, but large-scale college freshman data and exit polls show a substantial rightward shift among young people from 2021-24. In Britain, YouGov's tracker finds the under-25s moving sharply right on transgender issues and immigration since 2022. Both elite and public opinion on transgenderism has shifted against the left in the past two years, its first cultural loss in six decades.
The new vibe shift isn't, as with the 1990s reaction to political correctness, confined to the pages of elite outlets like the New Republic and the New York Times. Instead, social media and today's opinion-led media, which helped spread woke ideas off campus in the 2010s, have facilitated a wider backlash that has entered state and federal politics. Op-eds in liberal outlets have criticized diversity training, cancel culture, transgender medicine, DEI administrators and diversity statements.
Confronted by this broad-based rejection, progressive activists have lost confidence and energy. This contributed to the muted and disorganized reaction to Donald Trump's election in 2024 as compared with 2016. Indeed, the left's response to Mr. Trump today draws more on traditional idioms like free speech, due process and the Constitution than on the tropes of identity politics.
A further source of progressive malaise is that a series of culturally inflected problems elude progressive solutions. From endemic populism to declining birthrates, youth mental health to working-class social collapse and deaths of despair, the cultural left seems to be part of the problem rather than the solution. While the economic left remains relevant, cultural progressivism is losing influence. When a quasi-religious movement that sees itself as the vanguard of history stops rising, the effect is more profound than when an incremental reform movement is forced to moderate. Like a bicyclist who has stopped pedaling, the results are cataclysmic.
We are leaving the age of progressive confidence, but what will replace it? When the stories that set the direction for society no longer seem relevant, an opening is created for new ideas that can build on criticism of the existing order. How long the transition takes and what replaces progressivism as our cultural lodestar will become evident only in the fullness of time.
https://amgreatness.com/2025/05/17/if-woke-is-dead-what-comes-next/
"If Woke Is Dead, What Comes Next?
Woke may be dying, but history warns: every collapse of the left births a new epoch—often more radical than the last.
The other day, The Wall Street Journal published an op-ed by Eric Kaufmann, a professor of politics at the University of Buckingham in England, proclaiming the death of woke and the end of the Progressive Era. This is more than a "vibe-shift," Kaufmann writes; it's "the end of the 60-year rise of left-liberalism in American culture." He continues, arguing that the backlash against the left's aggressive embrace of identity politics and its imposition of that politics on every aspect of our lives is far more profound and widespread than the 1990s reaction to "political correctness" and has even seeped into the left's own organs of cultural transmission, including the mainstream media. This, in turn, has created a crisis of confidence among cultural liberals, leaving them disorganized, despondent, and marking the end of "the age of progressive confidence."
On the one hand, I think Kaufmann is unequivocally right about all of this. I have written about the death of woke and the end of this current era of leftism myself, and I believe that Kaufmann has identified the causes and indications of the cultural left's collapse quite nicely and succinctly.
On the other hand, I'm not sure that the death of woke will necessarily be the panacea some might hope. As even Professor Kaufmann concedes, "What replaces progressivism as our cultural lodestar will become evident only in the fullness of time." Unfortunately, if past is prologue, "progressivism's" replacement may well be even worse.
If one looks at the totality of the history of the left—from its bloody birth in the Enlightenment and the French Revolution to the present—then neither the death of woke nor my apprehension about the future should come as much of a surprise. Since the beginning, the left has progressed through a series of conceptual epochs, each lasting a handful of decades, following similar patterns: intellectual inception followed by slow but sure growth, resulting, eventually, in cultural domination, and then a swift demise related to its inability to deliver upon the millenarian promises it made.
The rise and progression of the left is presaged by the Enlightenment and, especially, by Jean-Jacques Rousseau, the intellectual godfather of the left. The Enlightenment purposefully destroyed the old moral order, which had existed for roughly 2000 years, and attempted to replace it with a moral order based exclusively on reason, as opposed to the "superstitions" of the past. Given that the Enlightenment both caused and bled into the French Revolution, I think it's fair to say that the post-Enlightenment period begins around 1799, with Napoleon's ascent to power and the end of the revolution. This, then, can also be taken as the starting date for the First Epoch in the left as a political enterprise.
This First Epoch is distinguished mostly by its heterogeneity and, in some ways, its genial naivete. It saw the rise of Utopian Socialism in France and Great Britain and of philosophical leftism, primarily in Germany (Kant and Hegel, most notably). The ideas that dominated this epoch included ethical systems with foundations not derived from the supernatural and radical egalitarianism. Francois-Noel ("Gracchus") Babeuf became the first true champion of the latter of these and, through the efforts and writings of Giuseppe Maria Lodovico Buonarroti, became an inspiration for the early communists and, in time, for Marx and Engels as well. The First Epoch is marked mostly by confusion, contradiction, and slow but sure formulation of a grand utopian scheme.
That basic, naive scheme failed to produce much by way of political reform, however, and by 1848, the men and women of Europe were tired, disappointed, and in the mood for radical change. From Napoleon's ascent to the revolutions of 1848 and the concomitant publication of The Communist Manifesto was 49 years. During this period, the ideas constituting "the left" took form, namely its essential ethical justification and its basic economic scheme, but meaningful political progress remained elusive. And thus ends the First Epoch.
The Second Epoch in the evolution of the left can probably be said to start in 1867 with the publication of the first volume of Marx's Kapital, his magnum opus, and with the subsequent rise of more overtly political and less strictly intellectual efforts to move the left's agenda into the broader public domain. From 1867 on into the early twentieth century, the left was characterized by the dominance of Marxism (as described by Marx), as well as the rise of more practical competing and complementary efforts to turn the leftist vision into political reality (Syndicalism and Anarchy in Europe, Pragmatism and Progressivism in the United States). The Second Epoch was also, however, marked by the complete collapse of Marx's vision with the onset of World War I. Marx had insisted that, under such circumstances, the "workers of the world" would "unite" and throw off their chains, choosing class solidarity over national allegiance. The Great War, of course, proved otherwise. Its onset, in 1914—47 years after the publication of Marx's opus—signified the end of the Second Epoch, the epoch of Marx.
The Third Epoch can be said to start with the publication, in 1923, of György Lukács's own magnum opus, History and Class Consciousness. Although there are many people and many works to pick from in this era, I'll use Lukács and his book as the epochal marker because he is generally acknowledged to be the father of "cultural Marxism," and it is generally considered to be his blueprint.
Industrialized Europe emerged from World War I shattered and broken, not just physically, but psychologically, emotionally, and most especially, spiritually. The new Europe was exhausted and scarred, increasingly frustrated with the old gods but far from enamored with the new ones. It rejected Marx openly, just as it rejected every teleological ethos.
As a result, nihilism replaced faith. Pessimism replaced hope. The "Ego" replaced everything else. Marx's fears were realized, and his antagonist, Max Stirner, was proven prescient in his warnings about the "Ego's" steadfastness.
In order to get the Marxist program back on track, Lukács—plus Gramsci, plus Adorno, et al.—had to fight back against the ascension of the ego, against the selfish rejection of communism for the satisfaction of the self. Cultural Marxism and its long march through the institutions constituted the plan for that fight.
This Third Epoch lasted only 41 years, however, and ended in 1964, when one of the cultural Marxists' fellow travelers—Herbert Marcuse—simply conceded defeat. His book, One-Dimensional Man, was a eulogy for Lukácsian and Gramscian cultural Marxism. It was also a primal scream in frustration at the persistence of the ego (and the prescience of Stirner). Most notably, however, it was a blueprint in its own right for advancing the cause and promoting the revolutionary mindset.
Marcuse conceded that the capitalist system was simply too good at providing goods and services that made the masses comfortable and happy. It therefore deprived them of ever knowing or caring about their true oppressed consciousness. Workers had become one-dimensional consumers, distracted from their fate by their egos and the creature comforts of capitalism. As a result, Marcuse determined the left would have to recruit an entirely new revolutionary class to facilitate the revolution. He identified the socially oppressed—minorities, women, sexual subgroups, etc.—as this new revolutionary class.
Marcuse's focus on identity evolved, over time, into political correctness and then into "woke," which is our present-day plague.
This Fourth Epoch—the Marcusian Epoch—has been longer and more thoroughly culturally dominating than previous epochs, but as Eric Kaufmann and others have noted, it too is fatally flawed and bound to collapse. Its end may have been delayed, but it too was/is inevitable.
The real question at this point is what will come next. What will characterize the Fifth Epoch in the history of the left? I think a Fifth Epoch is unavoidable, largely because the moral and social foundations of Western Civilization, which were destroyed by the Enlightenment, remain in tatters. Indeed, they grow more and more tattered by the day. Marxism, per se, is no longer a real threat to the West, but then, it hasn't been one in more than a century. The "left," however, will adapt again, and it will morph to fill the voids left in Western Civilization by the Enlightenment.
In other words, celebrate the death of woke but brace yourself for whatever comes after it."
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