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After Donald Trump’s victory in the US presidential election, journalists and intellectuals across Europe have proclaimed the death of woke culture. One of Trump’s election promises was precisely to do away with woke culture. Gender theory must be removed from schools, he said. Sex reassignments must not be performed on minors. Trump also promised to stop the tech giants’ censorship of politically controversial topics such as immigration and gender.
Recently, we saw how Meta’s CEO Marc Zuckerberg came out and declared that it was time for Facebook to adapt to a new reality and to remove the fact-checkers that, according to him, had been politically biased. Instead, they would switch to using the system of community notes that Elon Musk has already introduced on his platform “X”.
Political commentators belonging to the broad left do not appreciate Facebook’s new policy. They believe that Meta feels forced to conform to Donald Trump’s will. It is nothing but a concession to the new political power. But here we must remember that Trump’s will is an expression of the will of the American people because the American people have appointed Trump as their main representative in a free and democratic election. And one of the things that Trump promised in the election campaign was to offer a stronger resistance to woke culture. What Meta does, then, is to adapt to the winds that blow throughout American society and probably in the West as a whole. There should be less censorship of opinion when it comes to immigration and gender. Less of woke. Less of political correctness.
If we go to Sweden, which the author of this text knows well, the fact is that most political parties right now, in 2025, downplay issues that have to do with identity politics, gender equality, racialization and intersectionality. The large social democratic party will hold a congress in the summer of 2025 and in the proposal for the party program that has already been presented, almost nothing is mentioned about racism or the rights of LGBTQ people. Instead, a newly awakened interest in nationalism is combined with classical social democratic socialism. Even the small Green Party – which has largely driven left-wing radicalism in Swedish politics for the past 20 years – says it wants to downplay the social perspectives in favor of a more pure climate and environmental policy. And it seems to have already paid off in the opinion polls where the party has increased somewhat and now seems to be stable at 6-7 percent of the votes instead of the 3-4 percent where it has been for the past 5 years.
And this is why many Swedish opinion leaders with liberal and conservative likings have now declared that woke has simply died. Woke was just a temporary fad, people say, and now we’ve left it behind. No one believes in intersectional theories anymore and no one believes in quotas based on skin color or perhaps even in any grandiose visions of an equal, climate-smart and sustainable society.
We can take an example and mention the liberal daily newspaper Expressen, where the editorial writer Karin Pihl wrote in an article from January 6 this year saying that Swedish liberals should stop mourning the declared dead wokeism. Woke was just a political fashion, says Karin Pihl. Woke consisted of some preposterous ideas about censorship and skin color representation. All that should be completely foreign to a true liberal. Therefore it is time to realize that the woke culture should be abandoned.
It is remarkable that an editorial writer at a leading daily newspaper in Sweden can be so shallow in her analysis. Woke was – and is – of course much more than just some passing ideas about censorship and skin color. Woke should rather be understood as a profound ideological current in Western society that has features of Marxism and utopianism. Woke culture is our time’s radical rebellion against traditional identities, hierarchies and privileges. (And by privileges, I mean, for example, the privilege of being Swedish in Sweden and being able to say that this is my homeland and no one else’s.) And this woke culture will probably not disappear just because the political resistance grows stronger. If we get a democratic president in the United States after Donald Trump, he will probably tear up every decision that Donald Trump is now making to counter the spread of the woke culture.
It is also a problem that left-wing idealism has found its way into our institutions, like for example in our universities. Established researchers in humanities and social sciences often have a clear left-wing profile and they will not give this up just because Donald Trump has won a political election. Their commitment to their cause may become even stronger when they feel that right-wing and “authoritarian and reactionary politicians” – as they will name them – rule our societies. This will be a conflict that fits perfectly into their left-wing activist worldview. Now they will be able to act as champions of free research and democracy on the intellectual barricades.
It is also a fact that universities have trained entire professions in left-wing ideological thinking. Teachers, social workers, lawyers, journalists; all of them have been shaped and characterized in the last 30 years by an often left-wing education, at least in Sweden. All these people will not change their way of thinking and working easily and they will remain in our institutions for 30-40 years. We can compare this with how it looked in Sweden in the 1970s. Back then, many politicians and journalists were left-wing radicals. The whole society was permeated by the radicalism that had arisen around 1968. But the institutions – the school, the army, the church, the universities – were still populated by people from the old bourgeoisie. It wasn’t until that generation retired and moved on that political radicalism could reach the institutions. If we were to get a permanent conservative trend in the West as a reaction to the left-wing radical liberalism of recent decades, that conservatism will also have to wait for those who are now in government and in the media to grow older and be weeded out.
An even bigger problem – for those who don’t like woke culture – is that left-wing radical thinking has so clearly gained ground as a result of the fact that women have advanced their positions in public life in our Western countries. In their book “Den mjuka staten – feminiseringen av samhället och dess konsekvenser” (“The soft state – the feminization of the society and its consequences”), the two authors Erik J Olsson and Catharina Grönkvist Olsson describe how sector after sector in Swedish society has come to be influenced and characterized by a feminine way of thinking. And in some areas – such as school for example – it has gone so far that female thinking dominates. Research in the field shows that women more than men embrace values about equality. And they tend more often than men to want to exclude and censor people who do not speak and act in accordance with the values they themselves think are good and benevolent. Woke culture is a predominantly female culture and as long as we have women in public (which we can expect to have for a long time) these female woke values will influence our societies.
So it is hardly the case that woke is over just because there is an increasingly clear political and popular opposition to woke culture or just because Donald Trump wins the presidential election in the United States. Those of us who don’t believe in woke probably unfortunately have a long and persistent battle ahead of us.