How Woke Won: The Elitist Movement That Threatens Democracy, Tolerance and Reason: 1 (None)

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This acts much the same way as saying lavatory or toilet, napkin or serviette, sofa or settee signified social class in decades past. Woke may no longer be the self-descriptor of choice, but its ideas underpin establishment decision making and corporate mission statements. Woke is intolerant of national pride and is particularly scathing of national heritage and tradition. So powerful is the woke sense of virtue that seemingly nothing, up to and including physical violence, is off limits if it prevents those considered offensive from inflicting psychic harm on those deemed vulnerable.

The book is a comprehensive and detailed survey of the ways in which woke thought and practice have corrupted so many of the institutions comprising civil society.This attempted normalisation of woke, and the disingenuous slippage between the general and the particular, means that when Boris Johnson was asked by interviewers: ‘Is Joe Biden woke? Perhaps unsurprisingly, by 2018, as woke entered everyday speech, the association of woke with superficial displays of moral superiority had also become firmly entrenched in the public imagination. More generally, woke ideology overides social class, divides workers according to identity, and allows employers to act as a neutral arbitrer in workplace conflicts.

For example, in her role as State prosecutor, Kamala Harris oversaw the incarceration of African Americans at a rate that remains more than five times their share of California’s population.Praise was heaped upon public figures who made a display of being anti-racist, feminist, queer or gender nonconforming. The Old English roots of ‘awake’ lie in both ‘arise’ and ‘revive’, and this has long prompted metaphorical usage. Some went so far as to imply that woke had only ever been used by the right as an insult directed at all things progressive.