Yesterday’s Progress

Wokeness is the subject of twenty-three critical analyses published by scholars and journalists between 2018 and 2025. Each analysis presents a theory or description of wokeness as a contemporary phenomenon; many analyses also present a theory of the “Great Awokening” as a historical event. Liberal critics generally theorize wokeness as an ideological phenomenon based on authoritarian psychology, the substitution of religion, or changing moral and cultural attitudes. Leftist critics generally theorize wokeness as a sociological phenomenon rooted in society’s domination by an elite; leftists typically portray this elite as the professional-managerial class (PMC). Conservative-liberal critics generally theorize wokeness as a political phenomenon emanating from civil rights legislation, which created expansive state bureaucracies engaged in identity-based redistribution. Each theory implies a practice: fighting the battle of ideas against wokeness, organizing beyond the PMC that upholds it, or enacting laws and policies against it. Despite this diversity of approaches, all twenty-three analyses of wokeness trace its historical origins to the 1970s–2010s neoliberal era or to the 2010s, the decade of neoliberalism’s terminal crisis. The Great Awokening expresses ideological, sociological, and political tendencies historically specific to the neoliberal regime of capital accumulation and to its corresponding imperatives of sociopolitical regulation. The Trump administration’s “war on woke” suggests that postneoliberalism will no longer be characterized by these tendencies and imperatives. In this sense, wokeness, once progressive, assumes a historically conservative character. The politically diverse nature of wokeness’s discontents suggests that opposition to wokeness may furnish one basis for consensus in the emerging postneoliberal political order.