Even ostensibly anti-imperialist voices have welcomed the irony of a descendant of the Irish Famine now having the authority to reprimand the nation that ruled Ireland during that Famine – ‘the Brits’. In 2020, when Biden was bristling at the prospect of a ‘Hard Brexit’, Emma Dabiri, the Irish author of What White People Can Do Next, celebrated ‘the circularity’ of the fact that a son of the Famine now has ‘the authority to thwart Britain’s Brexit ambitions’ and its ‘continued disregard for Ireland’s fate’. There you have it: imperial interference ain’t so bad when it comes dressed in the finery of identity. America’s arrogant urge to meddle in the affairs of smaller nations – in this case, Brexit Britain – is forgivable, it seems, when it’s underwritten by the cult of the victim rather than the realpolitik of power. I like reading about this topic to better diagnose what the problem is, because it’s a tough one to understand. The problem that authors face right now is that this topic is extremely saturated, so it’s difficult to write something new. But when I saw Joanna Williams’ subtitle to this book, it definitely caught my interest with it’s focus on this being an elitist movement. This is something Rob K. Henderson discusses with his theory of “luxury beliefs”. While this is a great book, there’s a lot in it that’s already been said. Following the electoral collapse of the Labour Party, in the UK’s Hartlepool by-election, Labour MP Khalid Mahmood quit Keir Starmer’s frontbench, arguing that the party had lost touch with working class voters and become more concerned with the interests of ‘woke social media warriors’. Mahmood noted: With critics now embroiled in defending themselves against charges of waging a culture war, South Ayrshire Council is planning to expand Read Woke to more schools. Shakespeare, meanwhile, is no doubt turning in his grave. Some are slowly noticing the unpopularity of woke with the electorate. In a Vox interview, the US political strategist and commentator James Carville is critical of the language used by leading Democrats:

Critics of woke capitalism claim businesses that ‘get woke, go broke’ because attempts at virtue signalling often end up insulting customers who, unsurprisingly, shop elsewhere. However, woke can make good business sense. It not only serves as a preemptive strike to deflect criticism, it also allows unprecedented management reach into the lives of employees. Through unconscious bias training, anti-racism and diversity training, enculturating staff into woke values permits bosses unprecedented access to and control over not just their employees’ time, but their personal, political and emotional lives too. More generally, woke ideology overides social class, divides workers according to identity, and allows employers to act as a neutral arbitrer in workplace conflicts. Woke capitalism, perhaps more than anything else, reveals the elite beneficiaries of woke politics.Optimistically she goes on to propound that we have much more in common than the woke would have us believe, and it is time to come together to forge a freer, more democratic and truly egalitarian future.

Joanna is the author of Consuming Higher Education Why Learning Can’t Be Bought (Bloomsbury, 2012) and Academic Freedom in an Age of Conformity (Palgrave Macmillan, 2016). Her most recent book is Women vs Feminism (Emerald, 2017).But How Woke Won also points to a way forward. The good news is that whenever woke thinking is subjected to free speech and democratic scrutiny, it falls short. Joanna Williams argues that the woke university has replaced educational goals with a mission to inculcate particular values. Woke values now extend far into established social and cultural institutions. This has happened not because of the strength of woke ideas, but because institutions have long since abandoned their founding principles. Schools, universities, museums and the media are no longer driven by an imperative to impart knowledge, to pursue truth, to preserve the past or to cultivate beauty. These important values were problematised and rejected a long time ago. Woke ideas have, far more recently, provided those in charge of national institutions with a new sense of purpose. The importance of language Universities are not the institutions they once were. They are no longer terribly bothered about educating students. At least, not if ‘educating’ means imparting knowledge; facilitating discussion and debate; or encouraging students to read widely, ask questions and engage in research by themselves. Education now plays second fiddle to a seemingly far more important project of training students in a woke worldview. Indoctrination is not antithetical to higher education: it is the whole point.