Woke zealots have my sympathy

I share the average liberal’s unease at woke-ism, or ‘hyper-liberalism’ – let’s call it Woke Zeal. But I disagree with those pundits who see it as a new thing, at odds with the vague liberal consensus of the past. Because it is willing to curtail freedom of speech in the pursuit of its aims, they say, and because it can advocate an aggressive tribalism, based on identity politics, it must be a fundamentally new creature.

In reality Woke Zeal is a fairly natural development of our core shared creed. It is in some ways an intensification of liberalism, in other ways a cry of frustration at the limitations of liberalism. But it can’t be separated from the long tradition of liberal idealism.

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To understand Woke Zeal, we have to see that liberalism is not a stable orderly tradition.