Woke is back – or is it?

Over the past five years, wokeism has been co-opted by neoliberal corporations – but now, real left-wing politics is making a comeback

Winds in the east, mist comin’ in. Like somethin’ is brewin’ and ‘bout to begin. Can’t put me finger on what lies in store. But I feel what’s to happen all happened before. By which I mean – is woke back? 

It certainly feels like it. In the past few weeks Sydney Sweeney, of eugenicist jean ad controversy fame, had the dubious honour of being the star of one of the biggest film flops of recent history, maybe ever (her boxing biopic Christy made just $1.3m in its first weekend). Around the same time Dasha Nekrosova, of middle-aged podcaster fame, found herself dropped by her agency Gersh and cut from an upcoming film role after she hosted right-wing basement talking head Nick Fuentes on her podcast. And just last week Zohran Mamdani, incumbent mayor of New York, visited the White House where President Trump grinned up at him like a blushing schoolgirl, seemingly totally won over after months of smearing Mamdani as a “communist” and “jihadist”. At one point when Mamdani was asked by reporters if he still thought the President was a fascist, he encouraged the mayor to go on and just say yes.

When Mamdani won the mayoral election at the beginning of November with 50.4 per cent of the vote, social media was full of posts heralding, cautiously but optimistically, the return of a more progressive era. Or to put it more succinctly: woke back? Woke back. And the posts celebrating Mamdani’s win were not only celebrating a single progressive candidate’s success, but also celebrating the supposed downfall of the right: put the pronouns back in your email signature or else.

woke is back pic.twitter.com/r6M2UHDZma

— Ebolaman (@ebolaman131) November 5, 2025

In real terms, though, it’s hard to argue that the return to woke is happening yet. After all, Trump is in the White House. JD Vance is in the White House. RFK is somehow a politician. ICE exists. The ‘Department of War’ exists. Mar A Lago face exists. The current administration in the USA were elected on a social media and real life campaign that waged a war on woke. Trump won as much because he was the “anti-woke” candidate as for his actual policies: his supporters have been apparently shocked to find that voting this way hasn’t lowered their grocery bills, and that their neighbours and relatives are suddenly being kidnapped and deported. 

When Trump was re-elected, the result was not only seen as his triumph alone, but also as a victory for an entire generation of MAGA right-wingers. When a New Yorker magazine cover featured a sea of young, white, tanned teenagers in For Love and Lemons bias cut midi dresses, and called them “The Cruel Kids Table”, the irony was lost on most people. The unwoke Zoomer right was ascendant, jubilant, and, most importantly, for the first time in their lives: cool. It must have hit like crack. This was a reversal of fortunes, after the era of ‘woke’ that had peaked around the time of the pandemic.

But as with all reversals of fortunes, the same problems plagued MAGA as plagued the supposed ‘woke left’ the first time around. Observed as the apex predators, they suddenly felt attacked, picked upon by internet meanies. The language once associated with the “snowflake” left was suddenly being weaponised by the right. Jokes on the internet at the expense of the right were justification to message someone’s boss and have them sacked. Cancel culture, once used as a derogatory shorthand for left-wing politics, suddenly had a new right-wing base. When a transgender professor at the University of Oklahoma failed a student for a badly written essay about baby Jesus, Turning Point USA seized upon the issue as a free speech and victimisation controversy. The professor has now been put on administrative leave.

“The Cruel Kids Table” cover was only released ten months ago, but it’s impossible to imagine it being read the same way today. The midi dresses are crinkled, the rented tuxes have been returned. We can admit that everyone was wearing a crazy amount of bronzer, in retrospect. The blink and you’ll miss it moment when these ‘anti-woke’ kids seemed, or at least felt they were, countercultural, and so could see themselves as cool, as the next big thing, has passed. What happened?

If anti-woke was everywhere – if it was literally in the Oval Office – then it had nowhere else to go

The same thing that happens with all cultural shifts: the dominant culture overplayed its hand. If anti-woke was everywhere – if it was literally in the Oval Office – then it had nowhere else to go. Or to put it another way, to understand why woke might return, you have to understand why there was a backlash to it in the first place.

In 2020, the idea of ‘woke’ was in the ascendant (or at least, how the internet, conservative media and political establishment understood woke at that exact moment in time). But sensing that a sheen of progressive ideals could be useful and profitable, political and corporate wokewashing quickly took over the actual progressive values behind the mentality. A neoliberal adoption of left-wing politics meant that the word, which has its origins in African-American Vernacular English, gradually lost its meaning. It became a memetic shorthand – a way for companies like Microsoft and Apple and Levi’s to try to be your friend if you bought their products. Virtue-signalling replaced real virtue.

Five years on from the peak of ‘woke’, the companies and conglomerates most closely associated with it went on to reject it when it stopped being profitable for them (Meta sacked its entire DEI team just ahead of Trump’s inauguration). In appointing single figures or performing symbolic ‘woke’ gestures, these companies seldom offered any real benefits to the communities they were ostensibly uplifting. Like its predecessor ‘political correctness’, ‘wokeness’ quickly became a term of abuse, wrote Susan Neiman last week in a NYRB essay, ‘Where Wokeness Went Wrong’. She argues that wokeness went wrong when it stopped being subversive and became completely compatible with capitalism.

The problem now is that although the culture might be slowly moving on from the anti-woke era that followed the woke heights of 2020 – although everyone might cringe when they see JD Vance tweet like an incel millennial from a government account – the real life politics of that era continues. And it continues to make everyone’s lives worse from the top down. Figures like Mamdani are the exception to the US’s political landscape, but not the rule. Not yet, at least: it seems like those within MAGA are beginning to have had enough of the post-woke era, as it trickles down to affect their own personal lives. Indiana Republican Senator Mike Bohacek, whose daughter has Down Syndrome, recently criticised the President for using derogatory slurs towards disabled people, and refused to redistrict as a result.

And in the UK it’s far harder to say “woke back”, so far at least. Although the government is nominally left-wing, in reality, Labour has spent their first year in office continually pursuing policies and arguments meant to ingratiate themselves with what could be generously called the centre-right. But in recent weeks and months, a more viable left-wing alternative has emerged in the figure of Green leader Zack Polanski (the less said about the disastrous, aborted launch of the socialist Your Party the better, frankly). Polanski, like Mamdani, is nonplussed by attacks on him specifically linked to his perceived wokeness. Where other politicians have floundered on stunt questions like “can a woman have a penis”, he remains unflustered and resolutely anti-TERF. It’s interesting that Polanski himself seems to attribute ‘woke’ fragility politics to the right now, too – the Green Party Christmas fundraiser ad includes a throwaway line criticising the “woke” argument about Christmas being cancelled.

There always has to be a counterculture. Now, if woke returns as counterculture, it will be – has to be – in a twist on what it existed as before. For better or worse, it will end up matching the dominant culture in the US and UK today: spikier, angrier and more based. For now, the neoliberal fragility politics of woke remains in the hands of conservatives, convinced everyone should be sacked for making jokes online about Charlie Kirk or daring to write “Xmas” instead of “Christmas”. But I’m optimistic progressive underpinnings of what it used to mean to ‘stay woke’ could well return with the advent of some legitimately left-wing political leaders.

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