The Wages of Wokery

Surveying a humiliated Left

One of my most popular tweets is something written off-the-cuff:

It’s amazing how much leftist discourse is just them pretending not to understand things, thus making discourse impossible.

This phenomenon might be familiar to people. If not, a good example would be this Twitter thread I was in - perhaps one day a useful historical document showing the state of the Left in our age.

They peaked, in terms of cultural authority, in the 1990s and 2000s. After that, their institutional power continued to grow but their cultural authority waned as a result of real-world events. This has escalated such that, today, they seem to be aware that they can no longer “win” debates, so instead their approach is to thwart them, to prevent any discourse advancing to the point at which their beliefs are shown to be false.

The tactics for this are many:

• misinterpret arguments

• misinterpret events

• misrepresent facts

• cite debunked data and reject (or pretend not to know about) obviously better data

• refuse to see patterns

• make false equivalences

• dismiss a speaker or a source for some flimsy or disingenuous reason

• respond to prompts to common sense by feigning bafflement about what the person could be referring to or meaning

The leftist does this in order to make her interlocutor do additional work that shouldn’t be required and wouldn’t be requested by somebody acting in good faith. The result: the debate can never get off the ground.

It can be infuriating because it is either insincere or the behaviour of a midwit, someone who hasn’t realised her limitations and so ploughs on, genuinely thinking she is a genius. But more often it is tactical. She knows she is being dishonest, but she has the cowardice or corruption to do it anyway.

Morgoth’s “hatchling” is one version. The leftist will pretend she doesn’t understand some obvious or straightforward point. The implication is not that she doesn’t understand it, but that she understands it to be false. She is smarter, wiser and more educated than the right-winger, so much so that it would be beneath her to explain why he is wrong, so instead she will simply show the crowd how stupid he is, and hopefully he will be embarrassed and learn his place.

But all of that is a cope. The truth is, if you could explain why somebody was wrong and you wanted to “win” the debate, you obviously would explain. In 2025, leftists can’t.

For young people this inability might not seem significant, but I can remember the 1990s when the situation was completely different. Back then, the Left had all the answers. I do not mean the Left were correct, just that they had an answer for everything and were very confident about it. This was ubiquitous but one example will hopefully illustrate how it was back then for people too young to remember.

Aged about 15, I watched a documentary about some social issue. (I can’t remember which, but it doesn’t matter.) It would have been made circa 1995. Appearing in it was a female academic of about thirty. She was being interviewed in some prestigious setting, maybe Cambridge. She sat back and talked very casually, expounding with suave self-assurance on what she knew to be a better way to look at things than the conservative orthodoxy, which was tragically out-of-date and quite laughable really.

By 2025 standards this woman would probably sound posh, but by 1995 standards she didn’t; she was bending her vowels and dropping the occasional T, signifying that she didn’t respect hierarchy and wasn’t afraid to show it. But she did respect learning and justice, and she was defending those things because they were still occasionally opposed by conservative fools, and she was explaining why those people should “get with it” or just be sidelined.

She had a somewhat condescending manner, frequently making a banal statement but intoning it slowly and checking that the interviewer understood it by appending “okay?” as if she were teaching a child. The Left did not change the world by understanding life with a new level of sophistication, but by simplifying it, purging it of nuance. This blithe deconstructionism was how they dissolved ancient cultural fabrics. But they pretended that what they were doing was replacing ignorant bigotry with enlightenment, so ornate that a layman might struggle to grasp it. This was a pretence of wisdom that would fail in a serious age and could never have got through anything but an open door - but of course these people believed themselves to be just as tenacious as intelligent.

What that young lefty know-all didn’t realise was that, unlike the more precarious situation of her forebears a decade earlier, her kind were now on top, completely dominant over all media and academia. She was the hegemon, and the conservatives upon whom she poured easy scorn were not. This is precisely why she could be so complacent.

All of her traits - the self-satisfaction, the pretence of wisdom, the condescension, the delusion of being the underdog - would persist in the Left for several decades after 1995. But one thing would fade away: the calmness. As the years passed and the attitude of leftists became more exacting and demanding, human nature failed to change, and they became dissatisfied, frantic and bitter.

Exacting and demanding

Conservatives meantime were saying nothing. They had completely given up opposing the Left’s social programme by 1990, and would never dare again. The conservatives were correct about human nature but the Left were correct that the conservatives were dusty and tired. Yes, human nature is perennial but society actually had changed and conservatives hadn’t kept up. The Left had prescriptions for the new age while they could only speak wistfully of the old, and in time they realised their impotence and stopped doing even that.

Hence, the eventual necessity for an organic right-wing response, something which wasn’t dusty and tired, and understood the Left better than they understood themselves, and most importantly, recognised that the Left were never joking and were always vicious.

The organic response sprouted online in many different strands. These were collectively dubbed “the Dark Enlightenment”. It was “dark” because the ideas were forbidden, so ingrained was the progressive consensus. (Still today, fifteen years later, you can lose your job for voicing these ideas.)

The strands cross-pollinated and learned from each other. By 2015, we could out-argue leftists on pretty much every issue, but they hadn’t realised that yet because they barely knew of us. In addition they had total institutional backing and the wages of their ideology hadn’t come home to roost yet, partly because it hadn’t yet perverted society to the extent that it would in the coming years. As a result, leftists were still very smug in 2015. This was epitomised by the figure of the SJW. But that figure had two faces: one smug, one angry. Society might be bending to her ideology but (she could already feel) human nature wasn’t. The result was a schizophrenia of triumphalism and despair.

As the 2010s progressed, SJWs held sway in society at large but were opposed on social media by the Alt-Right, among others. Our arguments were based on reality and we’d had years of thinking and practising. By contrast, their arguments were based on theory (unthinkingly absorbed at college or, worse, popular entertainment) and they had never been challenged until they encountered us so they were terrible at arguing, completely out of practice. As a result, we beat them in debate time and time again. However, they had control of the platforms and would soon simply ban us from them. They couldn’t answer us, so they silenced us.

That action was “legitimised” by Hillary Clinton in August 2016. Her seminal speech in Reno was both insane and accurate: the progressive behemoth was facing a plurality of opponents (“deplorables”) and, because of its sheer hegemony, they would inevitably team up against it (“basket”). The Left knew this better than we, with our petty squabbles, did. Their solution was to manically equate many disparate things - Trump with sexism, sexism with libertarianism, libertarianism with racism, racism with anti-Semitism, anti-Semitism with the KKK, the KKK with conspiracy theories, conspiracy theories with the Kremlin, the Kremlin with “fake news”.

This view pleased the Left because it meant they faced only one enemy, and even better, it was an amoral sociopathic enemy. Even if its arguments might sound convincing, it was actually always lying, because “fake news” was its bread and butter. This assertion that all opponents of progressivism were malicious liars was hysterical (compare it with the complacency of that 1995 female academic!) but useful for the Left, because it provided the justification for deplatforming all of their opponents from social media.

But that process would take half a decade. In the meantime, leftists would occasionally respond to our memes and arguments online. Generally they needed to write huge slabs of text to explain why they were correct. (This inspired the phrase “the left can’t meme”.) They had to be long-winded because simple truth had flown from their world. They were verbose not because their understanding was more sophisticated or subtle, but because it was demented.

The truth is never simple but truths can be expressed simply. It is better that way; it leaves breathing space, allowing for reasonable integration of the truth with messy real life. Men of good faith will understand this and handle it accordingly. By contrast, a demented doctrine leaves no breathing space, and is not supposed to. This retards the discourse so that perennial truths, once understood as not wholly but basically true, are now seen as outrageous lies.

I can say “most women want to be protected by a strong man”. That is true not for every woman but for the majority, and for the majority it isn’t true always but usually, and even when it is true, it isn’t the full truth, because of course women are not completely helpless. And yet, it is a truth. And we all know it. From observing men and women, we all know that, despite the many caveats that could be tediously acknowledged, it is fundamentally true that women want to be protected and they appreciate (and are attracted to) a man strong enough to do it. (The cases are many of feminist women who “surprisingly” end up with a confident, masculine husband.) For the Left, the way to “refute” this truth is to latch on to some unacknowledged caveat and claim that it discredits the whole. But an honest person understands that the exception only ever proves the rule.

And that really sums up the Left’s predicament in 2025: they have to constantly be dishonest to maintain their illusions while life slips more and more out of their grasp. The more exacting their doctrine becomes, the more complicated it has to get, the more reality resists, and the less pleasant it becomes to be a leftist.

They must be asking themselves nowadays… “when did it all go wrong…?” The answer is that their doctrine was wrong from the start. It was never going to work, because it was built on fantasy notions of human nature. Namely, it denied human nature outright, claiming the blank slate and infinite malleability. From this absurd prior only folly could follow, and it did. At first the creed was novel enough and there was enough prosperity and institutional force to keep it going, but eventually its effects manifested. This triggered the immune response of sanity. The Left’s outraged response to that was to double down… and the result was:

• a baby trying to suckle “chest milk” from a male “mother”

• a 12 year-old girl being used by a band of Pakistanis while her father outside was arrested

• a woman turning 40 and realising she should have become a mother but now never will, and having to tell herself she is happy.

These are just some of the things that leftists cannot explain or justify about modern life. You could reel off a whole list. Just about the only thing their creed does perceive correctly is that “mega-rich people run the world and despise the rest of us”. But even this insight doesn’t help, because they mangle it with “racial justice” foolery and so prescribe bad solutions. It is difficult to think of anything else they get right. You might agree with them (as I do) that the state should provide welfare for the vulnerable, and even a socialised healthcare system - but such things have been endorsed by right-wingers since Bismarck so we don’t need a force, ie. the Left, to advocate them.

As for their other crusades, the results are disastrous:

• mass immigration
  It is increasingly obvious that mass immigration has been a huge failure. Post-Boriswave, Third Worlders are even in the villages and in some towns are very prominent among the school children. Less than a decade ago they were entirely absent from these places. What this means is there is nowhere left for people to “white flight” to, which has been the traditional method for leftists to maintain their illusions about the people they diligently avoid. Well, in the 2020s, nobody can avoid them any longer. As a result, the illusions break down: diversity is good, backward cultures are impressive, race is a fiction, Black people are terrific, Islam is peaceful, we’re not becoming outnumbered, etc.

• gay rights
  What started as a request to let consenting adults do what they want in private has evolved into a doctrine that is overbearing, unpleasant, anti-family and often simply gross. Few people object to the presence of gays in their lives, but the demand upon us to celebrate them is unnatural and ridiculous. And deep down, everyone knows that the foreigners among us will, if they ever gain power, utterly eradicate this stuff, so it has a sort of built-in shelf life; it cannot withstand what is inevitably coming.

• transgender politics
  This was virtually unheard of fifteen years ago, had a very rapid (and completely astroturfed) ascent in the 2010s, but by the mid 2020s was beginning to get discredited, at both the institutional and social levels. Horrors such as drag kids, and men being allowed into women’s spaces, make all of this untenable in the long run. To maintain it requires the pressure of “respectability”, but that is predicated on prosperity which is now collapsing.

• feminism
  This is the bedrock. It underpins all other leftist causes, with the possible exception of atheism/nihilism which might underpin even this. Either way, the results of feminism are men and women not finding life partners, not having families, and feeling general intense frustration with their lives. It has not been good for society or for people. Women have been unpleasantly masculinised, men tragically emasculated. It has also not been good for business; diversity-hiring women into traditionally male roles has caused stagnation, over-bureaucratisation and economic sclerosis.

Disastrous results of leftism… yet leftists have nothing to say. The fruits of their own ideas discredit them.

Instead, they get nasty and dictatorial. This has become obvious since Brexit and Trump’s win in 2016, signposted by Hillary’s speech. Surrounded by failure, the Left react by calling for censorship, to prevent the saying of things which perturb them. And it is a huge range of things - facts, statistics, opinions, attitudes - that threaten their political crusade (in 2016) and their self-image (in 2025). Once upon a time, fuddy-duddy conservatives wanted to ban outrageous imagery; the Left want to ban actual ideas and the discussion thereof. They want all the questions to go away… because they can’t answer them.

In the face of this, their smugness seems completely unwarranted and will not be tolerated; this might be why Stephen Colbert’s show has been axed.

In short, the Left have lost the complacency exuded by that trendy academic back in 1995. She saw conservatives as dinosaurs but now the Left are the dinosaurs, clinging to disproven beliefs, feigning attitudes that no longer “work”, and unable to seriously engage with today’s world. Whenever they do, they have to use tricks to interpret it in a way that preserves their beliefs. To ordinary people, this self-delusion is not impressive, not good enough, not going to work.

I think we are seeing the end of the Left as a political force - at least, the Left we have known since the Bloomsbury Group, over a hundred years now. I think it is dying.

The cause is not just the failure of their ideas but their inability to acknowledge that failure. As I have said before, any intelligentsia (and in our age that word is synonymous with “the Left”) that cannot address, or at least appear to address, the real world is surely doomed. This disengagement from reality means that, without realising it or wanting to, the Left are vacating the discourse.

In the coming years there is going to be massive territory to seize, occupy and colonise.