We’re In A Post-Woke World Now

This post, authored by Dr David McGrogan, is republished with permission from The Daily Sceptic

When I was a child, the house my grandparents lived in had a loose flagstone on the path in the back garden. I used to take great delight, whenever I visited, in lifting it up by one corner to reveal what lay beneath – invariably a horde of woodlice, earthworms, millipedes and beetles sent into squirming and scampering commotion by the suddenness of the light.

I thought about this memory when examining the reactions to the news of Charlie Kirk’s assassination amongst Bluesky users, compiled at various places around the internet – you will no doubt have seen examples of your own. The dark places of the worldwide web can breed all sorts of nasties in their dank earth. And it takes a moment like Kirk’s death to pull up the metaphorical flagstone and expose them to view. The results are something like what I used to see in my grandparents’ garden all those years ago – although at least woodlice are only passively distasteful rather than actively malevolent.

The reaction to this event seems to signal a shift in the online Left to what it seems sensible to call ‘post-woke’ discourse. The doctrines of anti-racism and ‘diversity, equity and inclusion’ at least originally gestured, however ineptly and wrong-headedly, towards the future: there was a society that their adherents wanted to construct. But we seem to have moved past that to something much uglier and more pessimistic. The woke first wanted to start again at Year Zero and build what was imagined to be a better world. The online, Bluesky Left of 2025 seems to just hate conservatives.

This can be understood to be the logical culmination, tipping into the denouement, of a form of political reason which emerged in early modernity with Thomas Hobbes and was stated most forcefully and fully by the Russo-French philosopher Alexandre Kojève in the middle of the 20th century. This category of political reason justified state authority, and conceived of the political as such, on the basis that it was not possible for human beings to access indisputable truth. Each and every individual encounters the world in a different way. And there is no external reference point against which to rank their different perspectives objectively. There is only a struggle between each and every individual accordingly – unless the state exists to impose order.

Hobbes merely postulated such a justification for the authority of the state, and made plain that he thought that the state should impose order based on the imperative of security. There may be no indisputable truth and no set of shared values that were identical for every member of society, but it is the case that all men are motivated by similar passions and desires – most notably and universally (in Leo Strauss’s reading) the fear of violent death. And the state therefore existed in order to enforce a social contract, entered into by all of the members of society, to obey its commands with that imperative in mind: the state imposes order to salve the fear of violent death.

For Kojève, writing 300 years after Hobbes, the fear which the state salved was not of violent death, but rather of inequality. What drives the human heart is the desire to be recognised – to be treated with concern and respect as an individual. Some people, the ‘Masters’, or those imbued with aristocratic virtues, are willing to risk death to be recognised. Others, the ‘Slaves’, or those imbued with bourgeois virtues, are not. And the state exists to transcend this difference by ushering in a perfect system of equity. The state justifies its authority by realising both formal and substantive equality and rendering all individuals therefore homogenous in terms of their political significance. All obtain equal concern and respect; all are given the recognition which is the individual human being’s deepest desire of all.

Whether we follow Hobbes or Kojève (or neither), the similarity will be readily apparent: both lower the horizon of human ambition, for better or worse. They place the relationship between state and individual on narrowly self-interested grounds; they are, as it were, minimalist in respect of what human life is all about. Either people crave security or they crave to be made equal with everybody else, and the existence of the state is justified accordingly. There is no model of a good life to aspire to in either of these concepts of the political – no supernatural or sacred vision, no idealised morality or system of values. There is only the minimum possible grounds on which sufficient consensus can be built: everybody knows fear. Everybody craves not to be further down the social pecking order than everybody else. And on this shallow soil, politics rests.

What we think of as ‘wokeness’ really then must be understood as an inchoate grasping towards this bare-bones, skeletal vision of the political. It is not, as some have suggested, a kind of quasi-religion or Christian heresy, but rather the complete antithesis of religion: it is what politics looks like when all that is theistic or supernatural or transcendent has been shorn away and all that is left is the individual’s most basic desires and the state which promises to realise them. It is the political reason of modernity as such, taken to its logical end, where final causes have disappeared, cosmic order has collapsed and there can be absolutely no trace of objective morality or natural hierarchy – not even a preference for family members over strangers – permitted to remain.

The problems with this, and the reasons why wokeness is dying and being replaced by something far uglier and meaner, are not difficult to understand.

The first problem is that human beings, when objective morality has been stripped away and only self-interest remains, do not limit their desire to being equal with everybody else. Rather, they want to be first among equals. It may be that the state exists to secure universal equal concern and respect. But that is only a way of aggregating the naked self-interest of all individuals in being more equal than all the rest. We are all the centres of our own universes, legends in our own lunch hours, favourite sons and daughters. And we want politics to reflect this.

This manifests itself, obviously, in very different ways. But it posits the relationship between state and individual in self-centred terms. The reason why the state exists vis-à-vis each and every person is to realise that particular person’s drive to be recognised. Kojève describes the state as the equalising force that reconciles all those individual drives in a complete and orderly and harmonious system of right – but for each of the individuals concerned it is me, me, me, all the way down.

This turns out at the coalface to be not so much a recipe for social harmony, but rather for bitter, rancorous rivalry that never ends. As soon as any individual feels him- or herself to be in some respect unequal to another, his or her reaction is instantly to look to the state to equalise things. The consequence of that is not exactly the end of the Hobbesian war of all against all, but a cold civil war between every single person alive, grouping into intersectional alliances on the basis chiefly of shifting concepts of ‘identity’, all jockeying for the state’s attention and all calling it to directly or indirectly smite somebody or other over some perceived injustice.

And the second problem with wokeness is that it makes synonymous justice and self-interest. What is just, for Hobbes, is simply what the law says as a reflection of sovereign command; what is just, for Kojève, is rather what realises equity. But neither of these conceptions can sustain social relations because they essentially abolish them: the only relationship that matters is ultimately that between individual and state. The state issues commands which each and every individual must obey, and this for Hobbes is called justice; alternatively, the state intervenes in all social interactions, for Kojève, implicitly or directly, to realise the equity which justice demands. Either way, the individual is not called to reflect on any external moral standard whatsoever politically – though Hobbes at least made plain that he thought that individuals would be governed by their own understanding of natural law, which was implicitly, of course, religious, whenever the real law fell silent.

These problems converge in practice into the precise opposite of what either Hobbes or Kojève would have intended – a form of government which neither realises security nor achieves equity but which reduces politics to a zero-sum battle over whom the state should prefer at any given moment. The result is an amoral competition characterised by rivalry, feuds and unending jockeying for position – something like the politics of the chicken coop. And what we can now see is that this undermines even the most elementary justification for state authority that Hobbes suggested, since it implicates the state itself in the war of all against all. That war is re-emerging. It is just that its target is the levers of the state itself – the ultimate goal being the permanent installation of oneself, and the ramshackle alliance one has built around oneself, as the most equal of all. The state thus becomes a tool to be fought over; a prize to be won, and then turned upon any and all who do not feature in the alliance in question.

This goes a long way to explaining the hatred that has descended on the extreme fringes of what were once the optimistic woke. The state is the tool to secure and recognise oneself and by extension those with whom one is identified and temporarily aligned. That is what it is exists for. And it follows that politics loses its democratic character and more and more nakedly comes to represent a zero-sum contest. There is nothing to negotiate for, nothing to compromise over, nothing to understand – there is only winning and losing in the battle to be the most equal of all. In the chicken coop there is only peck or be pecked; the goal of politics is to capture the state and use it to actualise one’s desires for recognition. Anyone who stands in the way, it follows, must be extinguished, lest they be victorious instead. It is not enough to win electoral victory, in other words, and certainly it is not enough to accept electoral defeat. And where electoral politics does not achieve results, violence becomes the natural alternative.

At the same time, of course, one’s political opponents become not just subjects of one’s hatred but also one’s fear. For, within the woke framing, if those opponents can gain control of the state apparatus, there is nothing stopping them from deploying it exactly as one intends to deploy it oneself – as a weapon. The logical outcome of the association of justice with mere self-interest, and the rejection of external morality of any kind, produces a situation in which trust evaporates. Gone are the days when political parties would trade opportunities to govern or be ‘loyal opposition’ – because any other party except the one which one supports is, by definition, a threat. It represents the ‘equalisation’ of different identities at the expense of one’s own. And it thus represents only risk and no benefit – not so much a difference of opinion as an implacable rival in the race for power.

‘Wokeness’ then simply is no recipe for a lasting political settlement of any kind, and we have already seen the results – a nasty combination of flavours that cannot combine into anything like an edible dish. There are too many rivalries over foundational matters (consider feminists versus trans activists), too many inconsistencies (consider the incipient crisis over gay rights which will soon destroy the Islamist-Green alliances sprouting up across Europe), too many fights brewing on the horizon (particularly as identitarianism takes off among white majority populations in the West). What began in idealism ends in grubby and malicious in-fighting. And what results from that is the emergence of genuine political violence as the obvious outgrowth – because what alternative could there be when politics itself makes no reference to objective good or moral value and insists that justice can only be conceptualised in terms of what is in accordance with self-interest?

Hatred of conservatism is the natural by-product of this set of circumstances emerging. This is for two simple reasons. The first is that conservatives reject the association of politics with self-interest and moral nihilism: there is an external moral order, knowable to humanity, which does not reflect mere individual desire and often conflicts with it. And in doing so they throw into question the entire premise of woke politics per se. The second reason is that within the woke framing it is easy to construct conservatism as merely a disguised form of identitarianism – the identitarianism of the privileged, as it were – and hence a mere competitor in the chicken-coop pecking order. The end result is that conservatism as such represents not just a disputable set of doctrines or preferences but rather a political threat. If conservatives gain political power then they will use it to pursue identitarian ends in the same way as would members of any other identity group. And as a result they are a particularly noxious and dangerous threat, because that threat is combined with (purported) economic, social or cultural privilege that those of other identities purportedly lack.

Conservatives then both problematise woke political reason by calling into question its most basic premise (the rejection of indisputable truth), while at the same time representing, within the framework of the political which wokeness erects, a clear and present danger – a particularly powerful and successful enemy. In this respect it is little wonder that at the fringes the woke movement should have decayed under that movement’s own pressures and inconsistencies into something akin to a neurotic hate-fest directed at ‘fascists’, particularly as wokeness itself begins to implode in on itself and all its pettiness and vindictiveness is brought to the fore. We can expect Bluesky, as the muddy point of congregation beneath the loose flagstone of woke politics, to further come to resemble a concept of ‘Two Minutes Hate, all the time, everywhere’. We can only hope that the further violence that ensues will be short-lived.

Dr David McGrogan is an Associate Professor of Law at Northumbria Law School. You can subscribe to his Substack – News From Uncibal – here.

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