Comedian and playwright Andrew Doyle is best known for fighting wokeness with satire through his X persona, Titania McGrath. As a self-identified intersectional feminist healer, ecosexual, and slam poet, Titania was wildly popular for parodying the Great Awokening.
However, Doyle’s new book The End of Woke: How the Culture War Went Too Far and What to Expect from the Counter-Revolution takes a different approach, offering an erudite and thoughtful reflection on the urgent need to defend liberal democracy from all forms of authoritarianism, whether woke or anti-woke.
Having received his doctorate from Oxford in early Renaissance poetry, Doyle is deeply conversant with the academic theories that morphed into the cultural phenomenon known today as “wokeness.” Likewise, he’s aware that the term “woke” is fraught, variously interpreted as a misappropriated piece of black vernacular, a progressive badge of honor, or an empty right-wing pejorative.
At one point, he offers a careful, 238-word definition of “woke,” tying it to Marxist and postmodernist frameworks. His definition asserts that “knowledge [is] a construct of power,” that all social analysis must center “group identity,” that “‘lived experience’…must take precedence over empirical or scientific methodology,” and that we need “a cultural revolution [to yield] equality of outcome” (53).
What Doyle adds is a distinctive emphasis on authoritarianism as a key feature of wokeness. It’s this deeply illiberal or even anti-liberal impulse that Doyle finds particularly repugnant.
Danger of Authoritarianism
While even the most casual cultural observer is probably familiar with particularly egregious eruptions of wokeness over the last decade, Doyle reveals just how widespread woke authoritarianism is.
For example, a 2023 Newsweek poll found that 44 percent of young adults “believe that ‘misgendering’ should result in criminal prosecution” (24). In the United Kingdom, the College of Policing introduced the category of “non-crime hate incident,” which was applied to more than 13,200 incidents in the course of a year, including examples such as a Bedfordshire man “whistling the tune from Bob the Builder” and “a man saying that he was campaigning for Brexit” (214).
Due to the incursions of queer theory, male rapists in Scotland were housed in women’s prisons, and government-funded sociologists in the United Kingdom argued that “mothers who identified as male should continue to take testosterone during pregnancy because their sense of gender identity ought to be prioritised over ‘normal foetal outcomes’ [i.e., a healthy baby]” (295). Doyle argues that wokeness happens when the poisonous ideas of critical theory aren’t merely believed privately but imposed publicly.
Although wokeness is primarily associated with the left, Doyle also warns against a reactionary backlash sometimes identified as the “woke right.” This movement is marked by many of the same attributes as the woke left: “group identity,” “the politics of resentment,” “anti-liberalism,” “anti-Semitism,” and “purity spirals” (58–60). But most of all, it too is authoritarian. According to Doyle, authoritarianism is not a problem limited to one side of the political aisle; it’s a perennial temptation that every human society must conquer.
Liberalism as the Solution
Of the individual freedoms that Doyle wants to preserve, freedom of speech is near the top of his list, not only because he’s a comedian but because he sees it as in some sense foundational to our other freedoms. If we aren’t free to criticize the powerful, reform is impossible.
Democracy is likewise a safeguard against tyranny. Any ruler elected democratically can be deposed democratically. Finally, Doyle believes that open debate is the best method we have for discovering truth. Error and tyranny fear public scrutiny, which is why the woke era was marked by cancellation and “no platforming.”
If we aren’t free to criticize the powerful, reform is impossible.
Although he recognizes that the proper definition of “liberalism” is contested and has evolved, Doyle argues it’s best understood as a kind of proceduralism. It attempts to find a way for “human beings with incompatible goals and incommensurable values . . . to live together” without dictating which goals and values are correct (107). In this sense, it’s “not an ideology, but the absence of an ideology”; it doesn’t prescribe what’s true but rather sustains the social conditions in which truth is best discovered (119).
Planted in Midair
Despite his compelling case for liberal values, Doyle struggles to articulate their basis. To his great credit, he recognizes this problem. In the epilogue, he asks, Why, after all, do we believe that “human freedom is paramount”? Is this preference a matter of “sheerest pragmatism” and “self-interest”? Or is it an “essentially religious impulse” that “[conveys] a faith in the divine” (448–49)?
While he insists he’s comfortable defending liberalism solely on the grounds that life without it would be intolerable, these questions reveal a fundamental paradox or inconsistency at the heart of liberalism.
For example, liberalism claims to be nonideological but assumes a priori that a whole suite of liberal values such as freedom of speech and freedom of religion shouldn’t be transgressed. Doyle recognizes that not all people share such values; throughout the book, he points out that many Muslims reject them. Yet only if liberal values are actually true and good can someone argue that the Muslim convert ought to forswear illiberal values in favor of liberal ones.
Abortion is another obvious sticking point, because its legality depends on irreducibly ideological questions like “Which human beings have rights?” and “Whose rights should we prioritize?” The fact that both sides appeal to philosophical and religious arguments makes the problem even worse. Liberalism attempts to avoid such questions yet nonetheless enacts policies that depend on the answers it denies having.
Liberalism and Christianity
A partial answer to these paradoxes comes from examining the history of modern liberalism, which arose within societies steeped in a Christian vision of reality.
The poet John Milton is one of several Christians whom Doyle recognizes as part of the liberal tradition due to his exaltation of freedom. Yet, as Doyle notes, Milton’s commitment to liberty, free speech, and meritocracy was rooted in, and constrained by, his Christian beliefs.
Likewise, Doyle praises Martin Luther King Jr.’s “Letter from a Birmingham Jail” for “propos[ing] a wholly liberal methodology to tackle [unjust laws]” (107). However, King’s letter explicitly grounds his understanding of just versus unjust laws in the Christian natural-law tradition of Aquinas and Augustine.
Liberalism attempts to avoid such questions yet nonetheless enacts policies that depend on the answers it denies having.
As it turns out, Western secular liberalism isn’t and never has been wholly secular. It grew out of the world that Christianity made possible. Only when Christian—and especially Protestant—theological beliefs about the inherent dignity of human beings, liberty of conscience, social responsibility, and equality before the law were widespread could “secular” liberalism arise.
This realization may be difficult for secular liberals to come to terms with. They’ll have to admit that a nonideological, “view from nowhere” liberalism is a hopeless contradiction. The postliberals are right, at least on this point. An appeal to procedural liberalism as the best way to find peaceful compromise can be met with questions like these: Why should I value peaceful compromise? And why not seek to impose my true and righteous views on other people?
Ultimately, we can’t avoid questions of truth. If Islam is true, then it makes sense for fundamentalist Muslims to desire a caliphate and to silence all dissent. If postmodernism is true, then we should decolonize math curricula and eviscerate free-speech laws. And if Christianity is true, we have a basis for the liberal principles that Doyle so highly esteems.
The crucial question is whether Christianity is true. The End of Woke reminds us we should be grateful to live in a society that still allows us to ask it.
The Gospel Coalition