Opinion
Have we indeed reached Peak Woke? By which of course, I do not mean a peak of Wokeist drooling idiocy. Like all human stupidities, that one is a never-ending river of lunacy. No, what I mean is that we appear to have reached the end of the tether of normal peoples’ tolerance for the rank cretinism of the Woke left.
After all, most of the most egregious eructations of Wokeism only succeeded by stealth. After decades of steadily white-anting the West with its Long March through the Institutions, in the last decade, the Wokeists decided the time was ripe to strike. And, in a blitzkrieg of bullshit, they largely got away with it: well-meaning people who were hoodwinked into supporting gay marriage suddenly found that it was in reality a Trojan horse for groomers. Nice, well-meaning types spouting “racism is bad” slogans found themselves swamped by violent racism against themselves.
Having subsumed the institutions, the field was mostly given over to the Woke to run amok. The only problem is that they still, very occasionally, have to deal with the few tattered remnants of democracy that they haven’t been able to do away with.
Because whenever one Wokeist principle or another is unavoidably put to the people for a vote, the people wisely tell the Wokeists to shove off.
In Australia, it was 2023’s “Voice” referendum — an attempt by the left to leverage the racist tenets of Critical Race Theory into the Constitution. But the popular revolt against Wokeism has been rolling along since 2016.
It was one in a global series that began in the UK with Brexit in 2016 and reached Ireland earlier this month. And the progressive side keeps losing them, by big margins.
Brexit broke 52-48 (in favour of independence); Euro progressives worked tirelessly to undo this result. The Chilean referendum (on a new green constitution in 2022) was rejected, 62-38. Anthony Albanese’s voice went down 60-40. And Ireland has just rejected a woke rewrite of its constitution by an even larger majority. What is going on? Why is the left losing these big battles in the culture war?
The Irish result has not grabbed headlines. Only a few conservative-leaning media outlets have given it any space. But, as we debate whether we have reached “peak woke” in the West, the episode is an important one.
Well, as BFD readers know, they can rely on us to bring them the important stories the mainstream media want to keep buried.
On International Women’s Day, three-quarters of Irish voters committed what has become a heresy for the day’s ideologues. They wanted the state to continue to recognise “that by her life within the home, woman gives to the state a support without which the common good cannot be achieved”. The trendy new clause would have removed this recognition of women. Ireland voted to retain it […]
The progressive attempt to make paid childcare the moral equivalent of (if not actually morally superior to) mothers raising their own kids at home did not fly.
Even in the US, the epicentre of Woke, the backlash is gathering pace. The University of Florida just saved itself millions — and almost certainly improved its academic standards — by sacking every single DEI officer. The 2020 Trump campaign will once again be framed as an anti-woke crusade.
Peak woke? I ask more in hope than expectation. But the argument is not hopeless. It was Margaret Thatcher who reminded us that the facts of life are conservative. When progressive fantasies of equality and human fungibility are put to electoral tests, they often lose. Common sense, a feature more prevalent in right-of-centre public policy than left, has a habit of reasserting itself.
Issues of race and gender, which the progressive left have colonised and grown powerful exploiting, remain subject to the commonsense scepticism of the broader population. And the identity politics referendums the left keeps insisting on keep delivering the results it hates.
The Australian
Brexit was a rejection of both globalism and the meritocratic arrogance of the left elite. The Donald Trump election the same year, even more so. When Chile tried to shoe-horn “indigeneity” and climate alarmism into its constitution — again, at the behest of a globalist, meritocratic elite of “experts” — it was rejected every bit as emphatically as the “Voice” and the Irish referendum.
These are a stark reminder that the so-called “consensus” is too often merely an echo chamber of the globalist elite noisily agreeing with one another. When “progressive” dogmas are forced to emerge, blinking and scowling, from the shadows of the universities and the bureaucracies into the bright sunlight of democracy, they are struck down like the cultural vampires they are.