Weaponised Wokeness: How the Right Wins With a Word No One Understands
Dr. Adam North talks about what it means to be "woke" and the politicisation of the word.
During the bank holiday weekend, I found myself discussing politics with the neighbours— dangerous I know. One theme became clear to me in the conversations: lots of people do not know what woke means.
The conversation went like this:
“You can’t say actress anymore these days because of woke!”
“The Oscars still have the best actress award though?”
“Not for much longer because of woke!”
“Who exactly are the woke people?”
“Exactly! You tell me.”
“What exactly do you think woke means?”
“I don’t know.”
“It means awake to social issues.”
This conversation confirmed what I have long suspected but not experienced in person before, that most people don’t know what ‘woke’ means.
Depending on who you ask, it’s a sign of moral awareness or a synonym for everything that’s gone wrong in Britain. For right-wing politicians, it’s a gift—vague enough to be all things to all critics, and potent enough to suck oxygen out of almost every meaningful political debate.
Rishi Sunak declared that Britain would not be held “hostage by woke culture.” Kemi Badenoch has made fighting “woke ideology” a cornerstone of her political brand. Suella Braverman warned of a “woke elite” out of touch with ordinary people and to give Braverman—whose appeal relies more on provocation than charisma—her due, hilariously described her opponents as “Guardian-reading, tofu-eating wokerati”. But ask the average person what “woke” means, and you’ll get hesitation, confusion, or a definition that does not match its intended usage.
That’s not an accident. The vagueness is the strategy.
Originally rooted in African American Vernacular English (AAVE), “woke” once simply meant being alert to racial injustice. Over time, it was adopted more broadly to signal awareness of social inequalities—race, gender, sexuality, climate, and beyond. But in the UK, the term has been successfully weaponised by right-wing commentators and politicians into a pejorative catch-all. It now stands less for specific ideas and more as a signal of moral panic: a culture out of control, elites disconnected from the public, and values “imposed” by an imaginary progressive overclass, the Guardian-reading, tofu-eating wokerati.
And the political utility of this tactic cannot be overstated. By invoking “woke,” politicians don’t have to explain policy failures, address structural inequality, or articulate a vision for the future. Instead, they offer a villain: the woke mob, the activists, the students, the academics, the migrants, the civil servants, the trans people—anyone who can be cast as part of the cultural elite supposedly oppressing the “real” public.
Polls show many voters now associate “wokeness” with negative connotations, but few can define it. That fuzziness is part of the appeal. When a word means whatever the speaker wants it to, it becomes a powerful rhetorical weapon. It’s a magic trick: redirecting attention from wealth inequality, economic insecurity, climate crisis, and collapsing public services to a cultural elite waging a war on “real Britain”.
This tactic mirrors similar trends across the Atlantic, where Republican politicians have declared war on “wokeness” to deflect from their own policy regressions. Florida Governor Ron DeSantis framed his entire political identity around being “anti-woke,” while offering little in terms of practical solutions to inequality or poverty. The British right is following suit—importing both the term and its political playbook wholesale.
But here’s the deeper issue: the left continues to walk into the trap. Too often, progressive voices respond to accusations of being “woke” with denial, defensiveness, or worst of all, attempts to abandon the language of social justice altogether. In doing so, they concede the frame and the terrain.
Rather than dancing around the label, progressives must expose the emptiness behind it and truly define it. They should ask: What is the government proposing when it wages war on “wokeness” and what is it distracting from? Is tackling institutional racism now too woke? Is acknowledging climate change woke? Is supporting transgender people’s rights woke? Is decreasing wealth inequality woke? If so, why is it wrong to care about those things?
Instead of rejecting the term, we should interrogate its use. Who benefits from making “woke” a dirty word? And what crucial conversations are we being distracted from every time the culture war dominates the headlines?
It’s important that the public gets clarity. And this could be achieved by flooding the zone, as I argued in a previous article. If politicians are going to build an entire political strategy around attacking “wokeness,” they should be forced to define their terms and explain what they’re opposing. And voters should ask themselves why, at a time of economic crisis and social fragmentation, so much time is being spent fighting an adjective no one can properly explain.
The right has won the narrative war on “woke” not because they’re right, but because they’ve filled the term with menace and mystery. It’s time to empty it out and fill it back up.
