Meanjin: The work of "woke"

I was honoured to be invited to contribute an essay to the Winter 2025 edition of Meanjin on the state of the nation. I focussed on how the transnational Right is using "woke" to gather a power base.

The word “woke” is tiresome. More than that, it’s the kind of cliché that terminates our ability to debate. In Australian civic discourse, and internationally, the word is used to demarcate lines of battle. In 2025, Australian politicians are hoping that it can turn a motley coalition of voters into government’s base.

Woke emerged as a concept in US Black culture in the 1920s to signal people who were aware of how the system trapped them in disadvantage. Later progressives borrowed (stole?) the label to celebrate that awareness more broadly: human rights for minorities, women, workers’ rights, refugees. By 2020, the term had become established as the Right’s latest slur for the “politically correct.”

Woke, in Budapest or Miami or Sydney, now means people who threaten Western - Christian - civilisation. The threat might manifest as a Pride flag, but it might also be a wind farm producing clean power or a mask worn to prevent infecting a cancer patient with COVID-19. For a Sky News talking head, little is more despicable than the blue-haired spinster cycling home to her vegan dinner.

The voters who might be marshalled against “woke” are varied. They could be tribal Coalition voters who still believe they are Menzies stalwarts.* They could, however, be socially conservative Labor voters who can’t stomach acceptance of trans people. The COVID-19 era fostered fury in small-business owners whose lives became a series of obstacles, but also spawned conspiracy theorists who thought children were being rescued in their thousand from tunnels beneath Melbourne, or that the vaccine was a bioweapon. Woke science was their enemy. The manosphere trolls despise the weakness they see in everyone “beneath” them, longing for strongmen in power.

Increasingly in Australia, as across the West, the coalition being cobbled together for the Right is allying itself with the label “Christian”. In this configuration, Christians are protecting their nations from the existential threat posed by Queerness or renewable energy. While many of those who wear a cross are good people, genuinely motivated by their faith, others use their new religious identity for less honourable purposes. Internet misogynists use it to crush anyone who dares challenge the natural dominance of white men. For “freedom” movement conspiracists, Pentecostal beliefs have become entwined and can be used to dignify bigotry.

Some of this is fostered in borderless spaces (that worship borders) on the internet. In other cases, it is strategic. In February, dozens of significant Australians travelled to London to attend the second global conference for the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship (ARC). Of the 4,000 attending, 200 were Australian. The organisation, founded in 2023 by Jordan Peterson, John Anderson AO and Dame Philippa Stroud, intends to put God back at the centre of the civic discourse. Their worldview is shaped by Edward Gibbon and fascist-philosopher Oswald Spengler’s fever dreams of civilisational decline: they fear degeneracy and a failure to breed. They also imagine multiculturalism as allowing “barbarians” to undermine civilisation.

Peterson is a Canadian influencer who promotes misogyny, Christianity and climate denial. Stroud is a “think” tank-aligned strategist who “founded a church that tried to ‘cure’ homosexuals by driving out their ‘demons’ through prayer.” John Anderson, former deputy prime minister of Australia announced himself to be a Reformed Evangelical Anglican in an interview with controversial American Evangelical leader Albert Mohler. He also leads a “think” tank that argues Australia has “massively overinvested” in renewables. Furthermore, Anderson runs a YouTube channel with 700,000 subscribers, leading a constant war on “woke”. In one of his videos, he asserted “civilisational Christianity” to be “our wellspring.” By contrast, he bemoaned that migrants – particularly Muslim in that context – were “barbarians” who “have got through the gate and are in our midst”.

The primary funder of ARC was Paul Marshall who has an estimated £1.8 billion invested in fossil fuel companies. A roster of fossil fuel interests, including BP and Koch industries, was represented at the 2025 gathering, alongside climate denial bodies and actors. Marshall has recently added The Spectator to his media properties. (The Australian edition of The Spectator was more radical than the British parent before that purchase: Crikey has documented it publishing white supremacists and antisemites.) Marshall was exposed as “liking” tweeted extremist beliefs such as: “If we want European civilisation to survive we need to not just close the borders but start mass expulsions immediately. We don’t stand a chance unless we start that process very soon.”

Another Australian on the ARC advisory council is Tony Abbott. He described the 2025 conference as a campaign for “a return to moral health and a recovery of the courage to stand for freedom.” This gathering was for civilisational renewal, preventing “our current troubles” from marking “a slide into decadence and eclipse.” Abbott celebrated his sense that the election of Trump meant “we’ve finally past peak woke,” not to mention JD Vance’s “electrifying speech to the mediocrities running Europe.” Abbott practised these rhetorical flourishes in defence of Western Civilisation as a visiting fellow for Viktor Orbán’s Danube Institute.

Orbán’s operations are integrated into ARC. One of the Hungarian Prime Minister’s most fervent American promoters, Rod Dreher, wrote a turgid account of the first conference in 2023. It took place not long after the horrors of October 7. The assembled crowds seemed to be stimulated into hysteria by British protests calling for an end to Israel’s punishment of Gaza. Dreher described the multicultural rallies as an “apocalyptic unveiling of vast numbers of pro-terror, antisemitic Muslims.” One attendee averred “Hungary is our Israel.” Apparently Christians would soon need sanctuary.

Islam is one of the prime enemies for those attending ARC, with full-throated support for Israel as an integral part of the ideology. For this reason Erik Prince, then owner of the mercenary outfit Blackwater that perpetrated the Nisour Square Massacre in Iraq, is introduced to ARC 2025 as Blackwater’s founder (even though that outfit was disbanded several iterations back). That’s the opposite of a dealbreaker here. In the event’s oddest use of the label, Prince characterised the weapons industry as “woke” in his presentation.

…. (other topics include the presence of senior Murdoch journalists, the most prominent theocratic American congressmen, attacks on reproductive healthcare tied to pronatalism, attacks on women’s access to divorce, and a post-conference recommendation to hand Australia’s rare earth minerals to appease Trump.)

All the details in the passage reproduced are footnoted in the publication.

* = traditional conservatives.

Meanjin requests authors to respect that it stands behind a paywall and to invite readers to take up a subscription which costs you less than AUD 5 a month.

Postscript(s): Australians were lucky to see the Trump phenomenon reveal itself more clearly in the lead-up to our election, which took place after this essay went into the editing process. Mainstream media also began to look a little more closely at the orchestrated disinformation activity taking place (covered in this previous Meanjin essay), illustrating its shadowy funding and motivations. The AusMAGA faction was resoundingly rejected in the 2025 election.

The (main?) rightwing party of Australia - confusingly known as Liberal - has placed a more moderate woman at its helm. She leads a riven Coalition opposition. Her grasp on the leadership is razor thin and there is an Australian faction of the transnational far right connected to ARC and to Murdoch’s players that is determined to take the party back from the more traditional Liberals.

The war on “woke”, like the other strategies adopted by the decades-old project to suppress and reverse the achievements of the civil rights movement (and the Keynesian social contract), is not a short-term plan. Watch this space.

The war on “woke” is not just a campaign exercised by the Right, incidentally. A recent interview on The Irish Times podcast illustrates a reactionary Left attitude that similarly chooses to see “woke” as an enemy and a distraction from the only battle that matters: the monolithic class war. The philosopher interviewed was seriously put out at being criticised by people online. She appeared unable to see that the “identities” championed by the faction she categorised as “woke” are intrinsic to the detailed structure of class oppression. Rather than engaging with the college students who had criticised her, the philosopher chose to write a whole book flailing at “woke”. This gift to the Right is an example of the kind of “socially conservative Labor voters who can’t stomach the acceptance of trans people” that I cited above as one of the groups who might find themselves contributing to the fascist-leaning Right coalition.(1)

I hope readers will react with greater thoughtfulness to the tensions within the anti fascist coalition. We need to learn to work together against the architecture of influence designed over almost a century by plutocrat families determined to be a new hereditary aristocracy.

We must oppose them, but also not leave any targeted Other behind.

(1) This is not to assert that the philosopher is against trans rights (although others on the reactionary left and reactionary centre are). Rather, I criticise the lack of nuance in her position. The loud work to achieve equality for (and to protect the survival of) Queer and BIPOC people is no more in conflict with class struggle against catastrophic inequality and imperial violence than is the fight to protect women’s rights. It’s easy for privileged cishet White people to demand that victimised groups be quiet about the difficulties they face. If we turn on each other, however, we make the oppressive Right’s victory much more likely.