Anti-wokeism is infiltrating the progressives’ agenda: Why is this dangerous?

Once a rallying cry for racial justice, ‘woke’ became the decade’s political insult. In both the United States and Europe, we see a rising backlash against ‘wokeism’ as we witness the emergence of a strange coalition against it stretching from the far right to parts of the liberal left. It seems that the conservative and radical right have won the culture war: anti-wokeism is increasingly being echoed by progressive voices, which are concerned with its infringement on free speech and universalism. But here’s the uncomfortable truth: The anti-woke turn, even on the left and among liberals, risks legitimising a project that is anything but liberal-democratic.

Antiwokeism from the far right to the left?

On both sides of the Atlantic, anti-woke rhetoric has become prevalent in the political game and among intellectual and business circles, even though there is no clear or shared understanding of what ‘woke’ really means. President Trump made dismantling Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) programmes a priority in the US. His executive orders 14151 and 14173 targeting DEI programmes and “reinstating merit-based standards” have marked important steps in the anti-woke crusade. In Europe, far-right politicians have mirrored Trump’s anti-woke messaging, gaining traction from Poland to Portugal by fighting battles against the ‘gender ideology’, gay pride parades, transgender people, and asylum seekers. Overall, policies aimed at opposing gender equality, LGBTQI+ rights, migration, green transition, and other so-called ‘woke’ concerns are increasingly emerging. And while reactionary and far-right politics are clearly on the rise, the success of anti-wokeism spans beyond these movements.

But what happens when a political tradition rooted in equality of opportunities and social justice endorses a criticism elaborated by a far-right faction advocating the rise of illiberal democratic regimes? Why would people ‘on the left’ step up their criticism of an ideological orientation grounded in the equality and social justice tradition they cherish? Is it a sign of the success of the right-wing ideology?

It is our view that a conceptual stretching of ‘woke’, its under-definition, and the magnification of the numbers of ‘cancel episodes’ have been a winning strategy.

From being woke to becoming wokeist

The term ‘woke’ was not always divisive. It was made divisive by the radical right propaganda. It emerged within the African American community in the 1930s as a cry to remain aware of racial injustices and racial violence. The word gained traction in the aftermath of the 2014 Ferguson protests that followed the killing of young Michael Brown. The hashtag “#staywoke” became the mantra of the Black Lives Matter movement. It then grew to integrate broader struggles for social justice, including equal opportunities for racialised and structurally disadvantaged people, migrants’ rights, decolonisation studies, and awareness of climate change.

But, as its influence grew, so did the backlash. It was swiftly appropriated by the radical right and turned into a pejorative; into a synonym of left-wing extremism, ‘wokeism’. In this version of the story, wokeism isn’t about justice—it’s about guilt, censorship, and discrimination against the majority. Anti-wokeists argued that politics should not prioritise specific minority groups at the expense of the majority. In 2022, the Stop WOKE Act in Florida went so far as to forbid teachings on historical injustices that could cause white people and cisgender men to feel psychological distress. Elsewhere in the US, School Boards issued guidelines to ban from school curricula books that include the word ‘intersectionality’. They fueled this criticism by branding wokeism as hypocritical, holding that a culturally and politically affluent liberal elite was denying opportunities for social mobility to working and middle-class individuals in the name of racial justice. Anti-wokeists also presented themselves as the vanguard for free speech, defending the right to offend against an oppressive cancel culture and political correctness.

These are powerful claims. To us, they are efforts to roll back decades of progress under the guise of defending freedom. But, unfortunately, they are very compelling.

Anti-wokeism creeping on the left

In 2020, 150 US artists, writers, and academics, of whom the majority were progressives, signed the ‘Harper’s Letter on Justice and Open Debate’, which denounced “a new set of moral attitudes and political commitments” stifling open discourse, clearly pointing fingers at ‘wokeism’. Since then, anti-woke criticisms have sprung up among left-wing intellectuals, gaining traction in Europe.

Books such as Left is not Woke (Neiman, 2023), Cancelled: The Left Way Back from Woke (Özkırımlı, 2023), or La Gauche Contre les Lumières? (Roza, 2020) criticise what they see as the left’s drift away from universalism. Even some democrats in the US have blamed the recent electoral loss on being too woke, questioning whether their focus on inclusivity left some feeling alienated (Naftali Bendavid, 2025).

But how does the left-wing critique of wokeism differ from the one elaborated by the far-right? It is often based on ‘enlightenment principles’ and the reaffirmation of ‘universal human rights’ as an undeniable achievement of Western civilisation.

What is argued is that the shift towards ‘identity politics’ embodied by ‘wokeism’ marks a departure from the universalist, rationalist, and secular values traditionally upheld by the left. This criticism holds that rights must always transcend individual identities; it is thus critical of affirmative action policies that, though aimed at correcting structural inequalities, are seen as compromising the principle of equality itself. The woke-critiques’ commitment to pluralism denounces the ‘cancel culture’ of a certain ‘extremist’ left, which would have resulted in many episodes of silencing, maintaining that all viewpoints should be able to coexist in the public sphere, and that worries for certain people’s emotional comfort run counter to freedom of expression.

The hidden cost of the backlash

What is most puzzling with the left-wing criticism of wokeism is the accompanying depoliticisation of identities. While the criticism of woke activist methods tends to converge across both the right-wing and the left-wing anti-woke, manifesting as a rejection of ‘cancel culture’, the left-liberal’s particularity lies in its resort to principled values. Its understanding of universalism trumps the urge to address specific forms of oppression and exclusion experienced as a result of gender, race, or sexuality. But structural inequality does not vanish with formal legal equality; it persists in skewed opportunities and barriers to power.

Thus, the left’s adoption of anti-woke rhetoric hands a victory to the far-right, which emerged successful in the battle over framing this issue and effectively invisibilised structural inequalities. We believe that a representative liberal democracy does not just give everyone a voice; it must also ensure that all voices have a fair chance to be heard. That is what woke activists were set to achieve. Far from being elitist, their aim is to dismantle privilege, not entrench new privileges.

Research agenda

This phenomenon prompts the need to investigate why the observed backlash against woke ideology spread from populist radical right groups to left progressive circles across the Atlantic, and with what consequences. Why and how does this ideological diffusion occur? Is this, indeed, a sign of the success of the right-wing ideology? How much does it play in the electoral success of the radical right? What may be the consequences of the anti-equality backlash on liberal democratic institutions? This is the debate and research agenda we aim to open.

Tags: wokeism