Wokeism Turns to System Destruction

In February 2022, Tyler Cowen made a prediction that sounded premature to many people: wokeism had peaked. At the time, this seemed far from obvious. The elite institutions most associated with wokeness as a kind of new moral politics—universities, media organisations, nonprofits, foundations, publishing houses, museums, professional associations, and large corporations—still seemed firmly under its grip. DEI bureaucracies were still expanding. “Cancellations” still carried real social and professional force. Corporate America still spoke the language of “equity” with missionary confidence. 

In Cowen’s original 2022 formulation, he suggested that the movement would survive as a subculture: educated, affluent, disproportionately white, and institutionally influential. But no longer commanding the country’s morality. The pendulum, he thought, had begun to swing. School-board revolts, growing impatience with cancellations, the backlash to progressive overreach and lawlessness in cities like San Francisco and Los Angeles, and the sheer unattractiveness of the movement’s cultural style all suggested that wokeism had passed its high-water mark. 

Four years later, in The Free Press, Cowen returned to the subject with a darker twist. In retrospect, he was right that wokeness was peaking. DEI retreated in many institutions. Universities became more cautious. The public appetite for cancellation declined. Trump defeated Kamala Harris, and the Trump administration moved aggressively against DEI and affirmative-action-style policies. Elon Musk’s purchase of Twitter, now X, shifted one of the central arenas of elite discourse sharply rightward.

But now Cowen warns that the energies once absorbed by wokeism might be reappearing in more dangerous forms. In his telling, the unreasonable side of wokeism—the appetite for control, moral coercion, and the punishment of enemies had merely changed targets. The old battles over pronouns, language, and representation had given way to a harder politics of rage, sympathy for political violence, and overt hostility to the economic and technological basis of modern life.

Richard Hanania compressed Cowen’s argument into a characteristically blunt formulation: “I would much rather have to remember lots of weird pronouns than see the economy destroyed by socialism. These are not equally bad things.” 

As a hierarchy of harms, this is basically right. A society can survive tedious language norms more easily than it can survive economic vandalism, political violence, or a generalised assault on the conditions of prosperity. Pronoun rituals may be irritating, coercive, and occasionally absurd, but they do not by themselves destroy supply chains, chill investment, or assassinate people. If the choice is between awkward symbolic politics and destroying the engine of wealth creation, Hanania’s preference is not difficult to understand.

But the successor to wokeism is not socialism, at least not in any classical sense. Socialism wanted to reorganise society—often disastrously—but it did want to organise it. It had a programme: who should own the factory, how production should be planned, how economies should be structured.

The new radical mood is different. It has little interest in designing a replacement order—its instinct is punitive and obstructive. The danger now is what I would call destructivism: the belief that the most necessary form of political action is to destroy the systems one regards as oppressive.