Living With Woke

A striking aspect of Oliver Dowden's speech to the Heritage Foundation think-tank in Washington on Monday was the employment of tropes familiar from the Covid-19 pandemic. Thus the Guardian tells us that "The Tory chairman has denounced what he claims is a “painful woke psychodrama” sweeping the west and sapping its confidence", and that "He claimed “woke” ideology was now “everywhere”." According to ITV, Dowden sees it as being pervasive in public life: "It’s in our universities, but also in our schools. In government bodies, but also in corporations. In social science faculties, but also in the hard sciences". Apparently the only safe space is the private home, but he isn't advocating lockdown, let alone inoculation. Consistent with the rightwing turn against Covid restrictions, the impeccably Thatcherite Dowden advocates a more robust celebration of freedom: "Conservatives themselves must find the confidence to mount a vigorous defence of the values of a free society". In the spririt of the Iron Lady they should "proclaim our beliefs in the wonderful creativity of the human spirit, in the rights of property and the rule of law and in the extraordinary fruitfulness of enterprise and trade".

It would be easy to dismiss this as playing to the audience. Conservative politicians from Churchill onwards have been happy to indulge the transatlantic view of the wider world as essentially decadent and a danger to the American way of life, with the UK as its sole reliable international partner, bound by deep cultural ties. Dowden isn't the first, and won't be the last, British politician to opine that "we are joined by the same fundamental values", or to cultivate the Heritage Foundation. But it's also true that these speeches have provided a vector whereby a more hysterical American interpretation can be injected into the British political bloodstream. Hence the tone of existential dread in the following, which strikes British ears as over-the-top but is routine in American conservative (and centrist) discourse: "We risk a collapse in resolve. If all we hear is that our societies are monstrous, unjust, oppressive why on earth would anyone fight to sustain them?" It came as no surprise to see a flurry of supportive comment pieces in the rightwing press, albeit translated into the more mocking British vernacular. 

But I'm not convinced it means the Tories are about to go big on the "culture wars" in any practical sense, as they once did with Section 28, though there will no doubt be symbolic moves, thus "our Conservative government in the United Kingdom is legislating to protect free speech on campus". The departure of Munira Mirza as a Number 10 advisor has been interpreted - correctly, in my view - as evidence that Boris Johnson intends to tack towards a more conventional Tory line on policy, whether in respect of tax (no more increases and future cuts to be pencilled in), public investment (the levelling-up plan looks dead on arrival) or social policy (more crackdowns on crime are promised in a bidding war with the opposition). That doesn't mean abandoning the rhetorical culture wars, let alone the needless antagonism of the university sector ("We will stop the sinister phenomenon of academics or students who offend left wing orthodoxies being censored or harassed"), but it does suggest that the revolutionary phase of the Johnson administration, with its dreams of a libertarian assault on liberalism's sacred cows, is all over bar the shouting.

Instead, it appears the intention is to leverage the rhetoric for party political advantage, e.g. claiming in the words of Dowden that Labour "has got woke running through it like a stick of Brighton rock" (an odd choice of metaphor for an American audience). This is partly an acknowledgement of the sterling work that Starmer and Reeves have done in assuring reactionary voters that they are on their side. Countering this move by the Labour leadership onto Tory territory requires a ratcheting-up of ad hominem attacks, and in this context Johnson's Savile slur was quite calculating, however much it offended centrist propriety. In this escalation, there is an inevitable focus on the sociology (and thus the questionable authenticity and integrity) of the Labour Party. According to Dowden, "The UK joined Nato under a Labour prime minister. And, when Left-wing parties were dominated by working people, rather than professional activists, they were just as patriotic as their conservative opponents. Sadly, the Left has abandoned the field. Its leaders are either too weak to stand up for our own common values or worse than that, they've embraced the doctrine of woke themselves". Starmer's I-heart-NATO interventions last week now seem knowingly pre-emptive, while Angela Rayner's embrace of shoot-to-kill this week looks like over-reaction.

The suspicion that this is a foretaste of electioneering to come is reinforced by the parallels Dowden draws with international relations, and thus implicitly with patriotism. For example, "Rogue states are seeking to challenge the international order. And at the precise point when our resolve ought to be strongest, a pernicious new ideology is sweeping our societies". The enemy within is lined up with the cross-hairs: "Just when our attention should be fixed on external foes we seem to have entered a period of extreme introspection and self-criticism, that threatens to sap our societies of their self-confidence. Just when we should be showcasing the vitality of our values and the strength of democratic societies, we seem to be willing to abandon those values, for the sake of appeasing a new groupthink". Dowden names the enemy as "social justice warriors" pursuing a "form of Maoism", though he's also careful to note that the enemy is multi-faceted and cunning: "It goes by many names". Perhaps your own children have been infected? Perhaps they would benefit from a posting to Ukraine's frontline?

This is obviously an absurd strawman, but a shadowy conspiracy with distinctly alien characteristics is not just the recycling of the classic antisemitic trope, it is also employs the form of the classic anticommunist trope in which the enemy is potentially everywhere and we are all vulnerable to brainwashing. That in turn reminds us that these tropes themselves were heavily influenced by older ideas about the spread of disease and its relationship to vice and virtue: the plague as the judgement of God on a world of sinners; the danger of the Bolshevik pandemic becoming a global pandemic through "useful idiots" (the phrase is often attributed to Lenin but appears to originate at the start of the Cold War in the late-40s). Just as racial integrity and the quarantine of the Ghetto were the defence against the Jew, so constant vigilance and (in an Orwellian irony) the policing of language was necessary to prevent the spread of the Communist bacillus. Resistance to "wokery", like "political correctness" before it, is a species of anticommunism. The absence of any unifying woke theory, despite the myth of Cultural Marxism, is no more problematic than the fact that neither Russia nor China is plausibly communist, or the idea that LGBTQI+ campaigners are in league with Muslim reactionaries.

The limited press pushback against the speech has focused on the questionable funding and advocacy of the Heritage Foundation, or it has accepted many of the premises ("there is an issue with cancel culture and an intolerance of views outside rather limited parameters") but also raised the spectre of rightwing populism. The connection between Dowden's conception of freedom's enemies and the pandemic restrictions has been overlooked. This is an opportunity for Labour, but one that they have predictably missed, despite their broadly careful and considered approach to the pandemic (the chief error being the early haste on reopening schools). That the Conservatives seem keener to protect society from the imaginary threat of "cancel culture" than from the very real threat of Covid-19 is surely worth mentioning, not least because it addresses popular concerns. The percentage of the population that care about the culture wars is actually tiny, and few of those who believe in the reality of "woke mobs" are likely to be swing voters. Instead, Labour seems committed to a campaign directed against its own version of the enemy within, namely antisocial elements and the left, and a small group of foreigners who have brought sickness to this island, namely Russian oligarchs.

The obvious question that any politician or journalist should be asking the Conservative Party Chairman is: If you think we should get used to living with Covid-19, why shouldn't we also get used to living with the woke? If an endemic disease, killing a few thousand more people a year than would otherwise die, is something we should tolerate, why should we be worried about a social tendency to be more sympathetic towards disadvantaged groups and to cultivate greater self-awareness? How many is that likely to kill or leave with chronic illness? Put like that, Dowden's concerns are obviously ridiculous, but why shouldn't it be put like that? One reason is that a sense of proportion runs counter to the very nature of our politics and media, in which claims of seriousness by "grown ups" barely masks the hysteria and irrationalism. But the reason this frothing nonsense is tolerated is that it reflects a more general human desire to avoid reality. Far too many of us would rather be angry at imaginary enemies than have to face the real threats of the world, such as climate change. We will accept creeping death and distract ourselves by fulminating against people's choice of pronoun.