Why wokeness really is like fascism

If you had to choose a political word of the decade you could do worse than ‘woke’. Because these days ‘woke’ – and its various subsidiary forms: ‘wokeness’, ‘wokery’, ‘wokerati’, ‘the great awokening’, ‘woquemada’ – seems ubiquitous, and very much part of the verbal furniture. And yet woke has a surprisingly short history as a notable term. Though it was birthed in the 19th century, with noble origins surrounding the struggle for civil rights, it achieved its present, greater and much-changed salience as late as the 2010s – the Oxford English Dictionary only included it in 2017.

Since then, the word, initially deployed by people on the left as a badge of pride – epitomising their awareness of social justice – has become more of a boo word, used by people on the right, generally expressing dislike or contempt for perceived leftwing idiocies.