The woke onslaught is demoralising the Anglosphere just when it needs its confidence
Like in the 1930s, faith in our values is being chipped away by activists and politicians
Over the past 10 years or so, fundamental assumptions that sustained an optimistic vision of the international order have been collapsing. The assumption that globalisation was the key to future harmony and prosperity. The belief that the EU, having adopted a single currency, was on the way to increased integration, economic success and international influence. The hope that Russia would move towards greater liberalisation, or at least become a less potent nuisance. The expectation that China, the cornerstone of globalisation, would become an increasingly friendly participant in the World Trade Organisation and the “rules-based order”. The confidence that the election of Barack Obama in 2008 signalled a United States that was gradually surmounting its racial tensions.
Every aspect of this optimism has failed. The Covid epidemic and now Russia’s blatant sabre-rattling make the point dramatically. Liberal democracy itself seems in serious trouble where it seemed most solidly rooted. The EU, divided and vulnerable, has proved irrelevant to a major crisis on its borders, and its leading members, Germany and France, have exuded what the Defence Secretary, Ben Wallace, called “a whiff of Munich”. Russia, despite its economic weakness (an economy smaller than Italy’s), has proved the master of brutal diplomacy, backed by a bloated military budget sustainable by dictatorship.
Among the major powers, only the United States and Britain have given solid support to Ukraine, which may or may not prove effective in deterring Vladimir Putin’s plans – whatever they are. In these circumstances, the fallback solidarity of the “Anglosphere” may seem all the more necessary, and to some extent reassuring.
Brexit implied closer ties between the English-speaking nations. There is a logic here. First, of course, is the assumption of cultural and political affinity. This does not mean that politics and culture from Auckland to Edinburgh are identical, or even similar, but that they have certain important values and interests in common. Second is the observation that as economic globalisation hits the buffers, closer trading and security links with politically friendly countries using the same law and language is desirable, indeed inevitable.
Is this another over-optimistic expectation? The bedrock of the
Anglosphere is the belief in a shared history and democratic culture. Again, this does not mean an identical view of the past – for example, the American patriotic “foundation myth” is of rebellion against Britain. Nevertheless, there has been a broad narrative of what is often called “Whig history”: that past crimes and conflicts have been surmounted to create a shared set of democratic values.
What we now see in all the Anglosphere countries, however, is a concerted attempt to create a very different narrative: one of violence, genocide and perpetual conflict. This campaign, now habitually referred to as “woke”, is pushed by activists within educational and cultural institutions, from primary schools to national museums. The aim is not simply to condemn past wrongs, but to use them selectively to foment divisions in the present. They openly seek to undermine the idea that Anglosphere countries have over the centuries developed values and institutions that are precious, not only for themselves but for others who aspire to democracy and liberty.
Some of the woke campaigns are literally delusional, most recently the accusation, backed by the Trudeau government itself, that Canada was guilty of “genocide” against indigenous children – an accusation that led to the vandalism of dozens of churches last summer, and which was
The woke aim is not simply to condemn past wrongs, but to use them to foment divisions in the present
gleefully played up by China. This self-flagellating politics has gone so far in certain countries that doubts are now widely expressed about whether Canada and New Zealand can be regarded as solid allies.
Mr Wallace’s reference to Munich is commonplace in foreign policy debate. But it does, in present circumstances, provoke reflection. Yes, there are obvious similarities between Ukraine and Czechoslovakia, and between the threats of Putin and those of Hitler. Ethnic minorities being used as the tools of aggressors. Neighbouring countries pressing both Ukraine and Czechoslovakia to make concessions to prevent open conflict. No one wanting war over “a far-away country of which we know nothing”, not least the Anglosphere. And Putin doubtless despising his antagonists as Hitler despised Chamberlain.
Another similarity is the demoralisation of the democracies from within.
It is frequent to hear today that democracy is facing a desperate crisis. So it was in the 1930s – but hugely worse. In Washington in 1932, army units (commanded by MacArthur, Eisenhower and Patton) used tanks and bayonets to disperse a siege of the Capitol by 30,000 people. In France and Britain, politicians of Right and Left were desperate to conciliate the Nazis and blame German aggression on the West. The Labour elder statesman George Lansbury praised Hitler as a peace-loving vegetarian. Clement Attlee told the Commons that if we did not rearm, the fascists would not either. At the same time, leading intellectuals and clergymen competed to dismiss parliamentary democracy and praise Stalin’s Soviet Union as “a New Civilisation”. Blind faith in the impotent League of Nations recalls Remainer nostalgia today.
This was the atmosphere that provoked George Orwell’s reproach in 1940 that Left-wing intellectuals felt “a duty to snigger” at every institution and had for years been “chipping away” at British morale and causing the fascist states to judge the democracies as decadent.
How can we not be reminded of today’s identitarian Left? All across the Anglosphere, it is obsessed with historic wrongs, genuine or invented. But where are the student demonstrations protesting against the fate of the Uyghurs? Or against modern slavery in the Gulf? Or the persecution of “blasphemers” in several Muslim states? Easier to pull down a forgotten statue or change the name of a university building.
Does the woke agitation really matter? It is common for those who regard themselves as progressive to dismiss it as an invention of conservatives. The former Remainer MP David Gauke recently wrote in the New Statesman that “the biggest problem is not ‘the doctrine of woke’ ”, but Brexit and populism. I doubt if anyone disagrees that woke is not our “biggest problem”. But in Orwell’s words, though it was “questionable how much effect this had, it certainly had some”.
Britain has so far had a relatively mild woke contagion, but it is alarming that other democracies, especially those in the Anglosphere, are badly affected.
Moreover, there is a connection between woke identity politics and Mr Gauke’s “populism”. Both are rooted in a loss of national cohesion and an associated weakening of political participation and accountability. The phenomenon of “technopopulism”, as it has aptly been called, is the appropriation of power by unaccountable bodies, of which the EU is the biggest. This has widened a gulf across the democratic world between rulers and ruled, and between a woke elite and the rest. If Brexit and other examples of what opponents call “populism” are attempts to bridge this gulf, the woke campaign seeks to widen it by destroying the very idea of national solidarity.
Democratic governments have the right and the duty to restrain publicly funded bodies – which include some so-called charities, museums, local authorities and, of course, schools – from propagating divisive distortions of both our past and our present. But it will require a long march through the institutions to counter the present woke influence, and there are rightly limits to what liberal democratic governments can do. Ordinary voters, parents and students will have to provide the dynamism.
In the 1930s, there was a radical change in public opinion only when the danger of fascist aggression became shockingly evident with the Nazi invasion of Czechoslovakia. Fortunately, Russia and China pose a far less horrifying threat. Yet their aggressive actions might similarly cause the peoples of the Anglosphere democracies to reject the “chipping away” of shared values and solidarity, which remain their best protection against internal and external challenges.