The latest version of the “politically correct” of the cultural left and synthesis of its identity and/or diversary myths, wokism has been clearly identified and subject to rigorous critical analyzes in recent years. The offensive of this politico-cultural wokism embodying a new ideological conformism and a spirit of censorship has indeed encountered a strong intellectual resistance launched by snipers, academics or journalists, in the Anglo-Saxon world as in France. Wokism is nonetheless a heavy threat to freedom of expression in Western societies, where it continues to ravages. The language of wood that he has forged and managed to disseminate in various political and cultural environments retains an intimidation force with which it is necessary to count.
But a new threat appeared with an antiwokism that has become an instrument of propaganda in America by Donald Trump as in Russia by Vladimir Putin. It is this state antiwokism, an ideological factor of confusion, which is now a problem. For American or Russian antiwokists, it is a question of returning to a magnified past, of reviving or restoring in its purity and grandeur a lost or distorted tradition. The antiwokism of non -conformist intellectuals defenders of freedoms is today faced with an official, state antiwokism, as intolerant as its designated ideological enemy, Wokism, whose modes of thought he imitates by turning them against him.
We thus note a tragicomic paradox in militant antiwokist discourse: the call to “deconstruct Wokism” even though the principle of wokism is deconstruction. Critics of wokism are not immune to Wokist influence. And this statement of antiwokism in Russia and the United States has given anti-antiwokists wings. While wokism marked the plunge, the emergence of a sectarian and Manichean antiwokism offered militant wokists a symbolic advantage, that of presenting themselves as victims. This is how to wokism and antiwokism (in all its forms) was added an unprecedented anti-antiwokism, to the contours and to the objectives still ill-defined.
Like the wokism which he claims to fight by the weapons of critical thinking-on the way to turning into a new unique thought-, antiwokism has become a key term of a recently forged language of wood, spoken by those who have engaged in the great “cultural battle” between new rights (called “conservatives” or “reactionary”, “nationalists” or “fascist”, even “fascist”) “Wokists”, “decolonial”, “identity” or “Islamo-leftists”, and saying “progressive”). What the enemy brothers share is a frantic will of purification and a fear of freedom. Hence their rejection of pluralism and their intolerance deriving towards fanaticism, which is recognized by the desire to eliminate adversaries and contradictors, treated as absolute enemies.
Resist the antiwokist obscurantism
Anti-pruning has itself been instrumentalized: it has become the last mask of wokism and pro-wokism. Any criticism of the “woke religion” and wokist strategies of cultural or institutional colonization is exposed to being “Trumpized”. However, it should go without saying that we can today fight wokism by the weapons of knowledge and intelligence, without sinking into Trumpism or Putinism. The criticism of wokism is the intellectual struggle against obscurantism. Today it must open a second front, that of resistance to antiwokist obscurantism of Trumpists and Putinists.
The question now arises in the criticism of wokism: what to think, what to say and what to do with the diversion and the instrumentalization of antiwokism by demagogues and autocrats? Keep silence, so as not to become the “useful idiots” of authoritarian and sectarian antiwokists? Abandon antiwokism to Trump and Putin? Or to descend into the arena to strive to clarify the positions that have become confused, by redoing the paths of those who, anti -fascists and anti -communists in the 1930s, 1940s and 1950s, refused to recognize themselves in instrumental anti -fascism of the communist camp? This is, in my opinion, the least bad choice: state antiwokism, in all its forms, must be the subject of the same free criticism as cultural wokism.
Neither wokism, nor Trumpism (neither Poutin-Trumpism): getting out of the vicious circle of ideological extremism and crossed accusations, such is the first task of demanding intellectuals today. They must resist the temptations of binary thought and Manichaeism as well as the comfortable installation in a camp which would be that of absolute good. The fight against the Puritans, the well-rushing intolerant and the ideological purifiers, which one meets at the two extremes communicating in their dreams of excluding, censor and prohibiting, must continue resolutely and independently of the tactical-strategic calculations, because it is the condition of the freedom of the mind.
*Pierre-André Taguieff is a philosopher, politist and historian of ideas. He has just published The invention of Islamo-Palestinism. World jihad against the Jews and demonization of Israel (Odile Jacob, 2025).
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