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The thing about zealots, conspiracists, monomaniacs and cranks is their initial reasonableness. Few of them start off a conversation with their most extreme opinion. Their tactic is to establish common ground first, as a salesperson gets a customer saying “Yes” to some opening questions. Only then does the zeal seep through, by which time it is too awkward to dissent. So, cornered at a party, I might endure the following exchange:
Crank: This Sadiq Khan is a useless mayor.
Poor Janan: Yeah, what a chump.
C: Renaming the train lines after suffragettes and such.
PJ: It’s like, mate, just catch the phone thieves.
C: But then I suppose it’s to be expected.
PJ: How so?
C: Well, you know he’s a Soros pawn, don’t you?
PJ: Oh.
As the conversation grows more outlandish, I resort to non-committal sounds (“Mmm!”) rather than words.
Now imagine this bait-and-hook tactic on a grand scale, and you have the anti-woke movement. Until recently, conservatives put forward a case that had lots of voters nodding: that woke-ism is illiberal dogma; that liberals themselves are too weak to stand up to it.
Now, having prevailed, this argument is sliding into free speech absolutism, scolding of the insufficiently patriotic and a general obsession with culture for which the public appetite is smaller. Read JD Vance’s Munich speech. Or Kemi Badenoch’s in London soon after, which the 45-year-old aspiring UK premier began with a line (“Western civilisation is in crisis”) that could be the house motion in an intervarsity debating tournament.
As someone who called Peak Woke early, and wasn’t sad to see it go, I’ll say this: the public wants woke disposed of. It doesn’t want to be subjected to an ongoing conversation about the topic. And it certainly never signed up for the geometric opposite of that movement, which is cultural conservatism. The right is overcorrecting.
As proof of western crisis, Badenoch lingered on a poll in which young Brits showed too little love of country. (Russia, meanwhile, she passed over in a sentence, which should establish her essential unseriousness beyond doubt.) Even if the speech wasn’t self-negating — our civilisation is “amazing”, but also so brittle that it can’t survive a cohort of stroppy youths — why is she talking about this foolery at all? What is a UK government meant to do about the arc of civilisation? I don’t know her economic plan but I am increasingly well-apprised of her cultural angst. If this is more Hegelian abstraction than I want in a prime minister, imagine what the electorate makes of it.
One consolation of getting older is that life starts to reveal itself as reassuringly pendular. When you are on your third recession, you know not to take the next boom too seriously. In sport, even a Manchester United or an Arsenal win titles in bursts, then recede for decades as hubris leads to poor decisions. The old line about Chinese history (“the empire, long divided, must unite; long united, must divide”) has a universal ring to it, because the cyclicality it describes applies to lots of things. A bad Bordeaux vintage is a trusty predictor of a great one fairly soon.
Politics might be the ultimate case in point. Public opinion is often “thermostatic”, in that it starts moving right once a government of the left is elected, and vice versa, hence the high noon of woke after Donald Trump entered office. Whether this is fickleness or prudence, it gives you a sense of how the coming years will play out.
Having rejected woke, voters will be increasingly protective of other liberal gains. Misreading this, and high on themselves, conservatives will end up weirding people out in a major way. We can’t predict the exact form of the over-reach — the right’s equivalent of Defund the Police — but some fatal gilding of the lily is coming. These people don’t know how to take Yes for an answer. It is a wonder that such enthusiasts for western culture should ignore one dictum of it, inscribed on the Temple of Apollo as an eternal warning. “Nothing in excess.”
janan.ganesh@ft.com
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