Have we reached “peak woke”? That’s certainly what many have suggested, especially in the wake of the American election. Kamala Harris barely made mention of her historic candidacy as the first black woman to run for President, and much of the familiar tropes of progressive political campaigning had been dropped for the sake of the election. Trump’s numbingly total victory has likewise been greeted with far more introspection, and much less hysteria than in 2016, when claims of Russian “election hacking” were rife. 

The American backlash against the progressive overreach of 2016-2021, when #MeToo, BLM and Covid merged into an institution-shredding “omnicause”, has seen the emergence of a collective, popular allergy to all things that smack of political correctness. Similarly in England, the extremes of the trans movement have finally been pushed forcibly back through a concerted campaign led by gender critical feminists. Starmer has consciously sought to avoid the “exhausting” culture war, and the unique media environment that was Twitter in the Trump era has been thoroughly disrupted both by bruised publications changing tack, and Elon Musk’s thorough disruption of the platform. 

The effect of contemporary rights legislation is to write the beliefs of left liberals into law

A certain argument, familiar to those who remember the sunlit uplands of the pre-Trump age, is remerging: that it is the Right who are exclusively, and cynically manufacturing a culture war, whilst the sensible centre left just wants to impose competent technocratic government. Figures like Trump and Farage are the only ones banging on about the transing of the kidz (and the eating of the pets) whilst pantsuited girlbosses are leading with the head, not the heart.

Optimistic classical liberals, nervously emerging from their foxholes, likewise dare to dream that normal politics are back, and they can slowly slink back to the centre-left institutions they once proudly inhabited. 

Yet a glance around the cultural battlefield shows not a defeat for progressives, but only a pause in the catastrophic death march of social and cultural conservatism. The Overton window has only moved in one direction for my entire lifetime. The mild qualification of trans rights is a victory for the dissident liberal left, not for conservatives, and it is in any case an absurdly tiny win. Back in the misty days of yore when I was a child (the 1990s), I had never even heard of a trans person. By 2023, you couldn’t watch an episode of Dr Who, a programme allegedly for children, without receiving a sermon on trans inclusion. Nearly every advert, every major cultural artefact and every political speech is liberal, egalitarian and individualist, in tone, message and worldview. 

The problem is that “woke” was only ever a symptom of a deeper disease, which is the rapidly growing and mutating power of institutionalised progressivism. 20 years of Daily Mail headlines and Fox News segments have not slowed the hurricane by a single day. “Wokeness”, defined as a specific authoritarian hysteria, familiar from the student politics of the soixante-huitards, and emerging in 2016-2020, was simply the release of energies that had been building for decades across the West. 

These energies were generated and amplified by an institutional architecture essentially designed to do so. Lying at the root of almost every culture war story is the implicit assumption of some legal as well as social power produced by rights legislation. The idea of a “safe space” stems directly from statutory requirements on institutions, especially public ones. The weaponisation of “offence” takes its cue from the fact that such language is now potentially a crime. Indeed the entire managerial, HR bureaucracy that underlies “corporate wokeness” has its clear origin and basis in the fact that such administrative structures are required for them to comply with a growing body of law around equality and discrimination. In this context, “wokeness” is simply the very natural social response to the system of rules that our institutions now impose.

The effect of contemporary rights legislation is to write the beliefs of left liberals into law, and to enforce that law in every institution, public or private. This process, coinciding with an increasingly digitised, consumeristic and individualistic society, forms a mutually reinforcing pattern of ever greater and more exotic demands for status, power and money, even as collective forms of endeavour suffer and stagnate.

How did rights legislation reach such a vicious state? In its origin, our own adoption of human rights was a recent and limited development, involving the European Convention on Human Rights. A post-war development, very specifically meant to secure democracy against a slide into totalitarianism, it largely involved the restraint of the state’s ability to censor, sterilise, intern, torture or kill its citizens, or the citizens of other countries. Much of these were norms already operative in the British system, and rooted in familiar and inherited political notions. 

Paternalistic egalitarianism has manifestly failed to deliver its most basic promise

Yet in one area, a vast expansion was to take place. The protocol on “discrimination”, inspired by the horrific forced segregation of the Jews, a first step on the path to genocide, was meant to prevent fundamental abuses by governments. Yet this understanding did not remain stable. Increasingly concern came to focus not only on the state, but also private organisations that might exclude or discriminate against certain groups. And finally, such legislation fell upon the individual herself.

Human rights create a basic problem. They apparently give individuals unique protections, but in the process they empower the state as the enforcer of those rights, and, ultimately, deputise all sorts of individuals as wielders and arbiters of that enforcement power. When rights almost entirely pertain to restraining state action, the problem is reduced, but it is not in the nature of either those who wield authority to limit it, or in the nature of those given dignities to cease from demanding more. Inevitably new rights will be demanded, and enforcers of rights will seek to expand their enforcement power. These two groups swiftly become natural, though sometimes unknowing allies. 

New legislation emerged. First a slew of anti-discrimination laws, covering race, sex and disability. Then the writing of the ECHR into UK law via the 1998 Human Rights Act. Finally the 2010 Equality Act merged and strengthened the patchwork of laws, further embedding them in institutions. In America the same process occurred, as in the ECHR, via the courts. Judges are only able to overrule the government on constitutional grounds, but an expanding field of rights renders ever more questions constitutional.

The most dangerous rights are those that potentially regulate relations between free individuals, because it gives those who enforce rights unlimited scope to interfere in the very freedoms of association, speech and belief supposedly enshrined by human rights law. The right to be treated “equally” in certain situations rapidly metastasises into a general right to equality, intimately enforceable by a multitude of delegated authorities. This, not any passing hysteria, is the real root of the omnicause and “wokeness” — the legally mandated crusade for equality. 

Yet this judicial and managerial world of paternalistic egalitarianism has manifestly failed to deliver its most basic promise: actual equality. Economic inequality has soared since the 1980s, with the gulf between rich and poor widening in proportion to the power and volume of equality legislation. Most of that decline has taken place amongst middle earners. With limited opportunities, anti-discrimination is increasingly a zero-sum power game over a shrinking middle class pie, as entry into elite institutions is policed, contested and shored up. 

Populism may feed off the visible excesses and overreach of progressivism, but its real driver is the inescapable reality of liberalism’s failure. It remains to be seen if Trump, and those like him, can meaningfully challenge an ideological foe that is so deeply dug in at every level, let alone their ability to replace them with anything better. One thing is certain: there is no going back,