Opinion pages and YouTube channels alike have, in recent years, increasingly asked whether we have reached and already passed peak wokeness. The question has gained renewed relevance with the onset of the second Trump term, the rise of the so-called “new right,” and a growing, decidedly post-progressive pushback against the moral policing and cultural conformity once enforced under the banner of the woke.
Back in 2024, The New York Times columnist Michelle Goldberg penned what she called an obituary for “wokeism,” arguing that it was already on its deathbed. “Diversity, equity and inclusion departments, briefly prized, are being dismantled,” she observed. “The era of content warnings and the policing of microaggressions may have come to an end.” But she also used the article to warn about the pendulum swing that follows any moral crusade.
But before we can decide whether we have reached and passed peak wokeness, we first need to know what wokeness actually is. That requires a definition a little firmer than the discordant ones that float around social media, where the term was initially a progressive badge of honour and is now broadly a catch-all insult.
Political scientist Eric Kaufmann describes wokeness as “the sacralisation of historically disadvantaged race, gender, and sexual identity groups.” His use of “sacralisation” captures both the moral intensity and the blasphemy logic that characterised the movement’s peak years. When certain groups are treated as sacred, harm becomes heresy and dissent a form of profanity. It also helps explain why institutions shifted their focus from equal treatment to equal outcomes.
Andrew Doyle approaches the same phenomenon from a political angle, calling wokeness “a cultural revolution that seeks equity according to group identity by authoritarian means.” If Kaufmann describes its theology, Doyle defines its method. In his reading, equity is the end and administrative coercion the means. The new rules on language, hiring, and speech are or were the instruments of a moral revolution which was bureaucratically enforced.
The age of sexual wokeness may be fading, but the allure of socialism and communism remain as strong as ever
Taken together, these definitions reveal wokeness as more than a set of progressive manners. It is a moral and administrative project that fused the fervour of religion with the machinery of policy. A combination that explains both its extraordinary ascent and, perhaps, the inevitability of its decline.
It does seem that, at least in parts of the West, the tide has begun to turn on sexual and gender identity. The once-dominant narrative of perpetual victimhood appears to be giving way to a more grounded view that biological sex matters, while recognising a small number of hard cases. That said, public opinion is uneven by country and cohort, and survey categories are messy. A decline in people choosing “non-binary” or “other” on forms doesn’t necessarily mean fewer trans-identifying people, since many trans men and women select “male” or “female.” It might therefore not necessarily be a clean ideological retreat. The grasp on the broader public may be loosening, but how much and where remains an open question.
A similar, though less forceful, pushback has also emerged against the racial identity wing of wokeness. The instinctive suspicion that every disparity must reflect structural oppression is no longer taken as self-evident truth. Yet this resistance has been more cautious, perhaps because the question of race and historical disadvantage is far more complex and more deeply rooted in material history than the comparatively conjectural terrain of gender ideology.
In a recent analysis, Kaufmann examined surveys of US undergraduates conducted through the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) and several preparatory schools. He found that in 2025 only 3.6 per cent of students identified as a gender other than male or female, down from roughly 6.8 per cent in 2022 — 2023. That’s a notable shift, but it primarily tracks non-binary and “other” categories. It doesn’t tell us whether the number of trans-identifying students has fallen, since many trans men and women identify within the male/female binary and would be counted there. The change could reflect cooler fashion, relabeling, or survey design rather than a broad retreat from trans identification. It’s a useful signal but not a verdict.
That said, whether the West has truly moved past peak woke depends on whether you limit wokeness to its race, gender, and sexual groupings. In my view movements rarely vanish, they evolve. What begins as one form of moral absolutism often reappears in another.
I would argue that wokeness is simply the 2020s expression of the victimhood politics that have animated every generation of neo-Marxist ideology. In this light, we have not passed peak wokeness but we are merely entering its next phase. The axis of grievance is shifting from identity to class, returning to the classic Marxian struggle between the oppressed and the oppressor, dressed in the language of inequality, precarity, and the cost-of-living crisis.
We can already see early signs of this mutation. It’s evident in the Mamdani moment in the New York mayoral race where progressive candidates frame urban politics explicitly in terms of class hierarchy rather than cultural identity. Moreover, it’s seen in the minor resurgent polling of the Green Party in the UK. Both point to a renewed politics of economic resentment rather than intersectional moralism. The slogans have therefore changed, but the structure of grievance remains intact.
And that, I would argue, is the enduring essence of wokeness, namely grievance politics. Beneath its changing vocabulary, it remains a neo-Marxist mode of thought that defines justice through victimhood. It stands in stark contrast to the constructive politics of responsibility, growth, and shared endeavour, the kind that seeks to build rather than to indict and to create rather than to condemn.
The persistence of this mindset is evident in recent data. A 2025 Cato Institute — YouGov survey found that 62 per cent of Americans aged 18 — 29 hold a favourable view of socialism. Likewise, research by the Institute of Economic Affairs (IEA) in the United Kingdom reported in 2021 that 67 per cent of 16 — to 24-year-olds (the so-called Zoomers) say they would prefer to live in a socialist economic system. These findings suggest that the rhetoric of victimhood and redistribution has not waned.
The fact that historical memory fades with time certainly plays its part. With each passing decade, the West moves further from living memory of the Cold War and of the catastrophic realities of communism in its purest, most coercive form. As that memory fades, so too does the caution it once inspired. The moral horror that immunised earlier generations against class-struggle romanticism has given way to abstraction of a safe, aesthetic socialism detached from the gulags and breadlines that once defined it. The further the atrocities recede into history, the more attractive their ideals become in theory.
This also helps explain why race-based empowerment policies, the South African iteration of this broader Marxian logic, have remained politically unshakable in my home country. South Africa remains firmly in the grip of grievance politics even despite the Trump administration recently calling on the South African government to forgo its race based policies and transformationist agenda inspired by Azanian critical theory as a prerequisite for more cordial relations between the two nations. Even as much of the Western world has grown weary of wokeness and even as prosperous, pragmatic societies such as Singapore, Japan, and South Korea have never adopted it, the South African state continues to treat historical grievance as the organising principle of policy despite now more than three decades of evidence of its failure. In that sense, the ideology of victimhood endures precisely because it is adaptable. When one moral frontier collapses, another opens.
Although the age of sexual wokeness may be fading, the allure of socialism and its older sibling, communism, remains as strong as ever. University campuses still teem with blissfully ignorant youth, wearing Che Guevara shirts and blaming capitalism for everything from eating disorders to serial killers, declining libidos and any other modern malaise that fits the narrative.
What will be particularly fascinating to watch is how this reversion to class-based grievance interacts with elements of the new right. Many populist conservatives now voice similar frustrations about global capitalism, financial oligarchies, and technocratic elites. The overlap is uneasy but real. Both camps channel a growing disillusionment with the establishment and a hunger for meaning in an economic order that feels impersonal and extractive. The danger and perhaps the opportunity is that these parallel dissatisfactions could either converge into a more honest reckoning with dysfunction, or dissolve into another populist theatre of mutual contempt.
