How did the Anglophone left become the cargo cult of “woke,” in which participants believe that social justice and perhaps even revolution can be achieved through the performance of safety-oriented rituals of political etiquette? The year 2023 produced a passel of books on wokeness; some were very insightful, and many were not.¹

Woke ideology is condemned by the Right and supported or tolerated by most of the Left. Adherents of wokeness parry criticism of, for example, cancel culture with assertions that there is only “accountability culture.” Others on the Left privately bemoan wokeness and its safety obsession but in public remain quiet for fear of attack from woke online mobs. Alas, wokeness is real. In many quarters, it is hegemonic. It is authoritarian and profoundly anti-intellectual. For example, at the 2023 annual joint meeting of the American Anthropological Association and the Canadian Anthropology Society, executives unilaterally canceled a previously approved panel called “Let’s Talk About Sex Baby: Why Biological Sex Remains a Necessary Analytic Category in Anthropology” on the grounds that it would “cause harm to members represented by the Trans and LGBTQI of the anthropological community as well as the community at large.”²

Woke ideology is left in form, professing concern for the downtrodden, but right in content, because it is compatible with economic exploitation — Susan Neiman makes this point clearly in her book Left Is Not Woke — yet leaves its political economy underdeveloped.