If you had to choose a political word of the decade you could do worse than ‘woke’. Because these days ‘woke’ – and its various subsidiary forms: ‘wokeness’, ‘wokery’, ‘wokerati’, ‘the great awokening’, ‘woquemada’ – seems ubiquitous, and very much part of the verbal furniture. And yet woke has a surprisingly short history as a notable term. Though it was birthed in the 19th century, with noble origins surrounding the struggle for civil rights, it achieved its present, greater and much-changed salience as late as the 2010s – the Oxford English Dictionary only included it in 2017.

The argument that woke cannot be defined is bogus. It is difficult to define, but that is a different thing

Since then, the word, initially deployed by people on the left as a badge of pride – epitomising their awareness of social justice – has become more of a boo word, used by people on the right, generally expressing dislike or contempt for perceived leftwing idiocies. In this usage it becomes a kind of swearword and one that can be spat with gratifying, four-letter venom. As the word woke has been ‘weaponised’, so the woke left have fought back (these lexical skirmishes are a fascinatingly fierce corner of the wider culture wars). Generally, the pushback involves two arguments: one, there is no strict definition of what woke is, rendering it useless, and two, it is now used so much it is doubly meaningless.

Both arguments have merit; however, they ultimately fail, because the exact same arguments can be made against the term fascism. As historians of 20th century politics know very well, fascism is fiendishly hard to define. It doesn’t help that the word has such an eccentric etymology: Mussolini coined it from the Roman word for bundled sticks: ‘fasces’. Nor does it help that, unlike other grand creeds and ideologies, fascism lacks a truly foundational text. There is no Little Red Book or manifesto for fascism.

Nevertheless, thinkers have endeavoured over the years to define it and generally they settle on check-lists. If a political force ticks most of these fascist boxes – patriarchy, militarism, misogyny, worship of nation or creed, cults of violence and so on – then we can agree it is fascist. Hardcore islamism, for instance, ticks virtually every box: hence the term islamofascism. Can we do that with woke? I reckon we can, and, intriguingly, we can use one of those checklists, created by Umberto Eco in 1995, which he used to define fascism. In brief, here it is, adapted for woke:

1. ‘The cult of action for action’s sake’: i.e. it’s not enough to be quietly anti-racist, you must be actively and overtly anti-racist: you must show your allyship.
2. ‘Disagreement is treason’: see the way Terfs are treated in the transgender wars, see the way any dissenting voice is treated in woke academe: they are not just people of a different opinion, they are traitors to be cancelled.
3. ‘Fear of difference’: everyone must concur, free speech is passé and sinister, there is only one opinion allowed, there is no more debate to be had.
4. ‘Appeal to social frustration’: all inequality is based on oppression/colonialism/sexism/racism/transphobia (etc.).
5. ‘The obsession with a plot’: wokeism sees white supremacist and imperialist power structures at everywhere, even buried in every white soul.
6. ‘The enemy is both strong and weak’: those who benefit from white Pprivilege – i.e. white people or people who are white-adjacent, such as Jews and East Asians – simultaneously hold all the power, and yet suffer from white fragility.
7. ‘Pacificism is trafficking with the enemy’: doing nothing is not enough, you must ‘do the work’ of self realisation until you accept your white/Jewish/East Asian racism; ‘silence is violence’.
8. ‘Machismo and weaponry’: violence and terror against those coded as oppressors is glorified or excused (see 7 October, punching Terfs).
9. ‘The use of newspeak’: wokeness constantly redefines language to suit its ideology – see the ever-changing terminology applied to non-white people, from the once fashionable Bame (now almost verboten) to ‘people of colour’ to Bipoc, and beyond.

The Umberto Eco list is not perfect. I’m sure most observers could add a few more; I would add that typical wokeness also displays:

1. An obsession with racial and sexual identity and skin colour (even as these are themselves seen as mere social constructs); raising them, in importance, above all other attributes of humanity.
2. A pathological need to order people in complex hierarchies of ‘oppression’.
3. An aversion to demonstrations of logic and reason (a.k.a. ‘factsplaining’); indeed woke exhibits a positive relish for the illogical and emotional as more authentic and real – see ‘lived experience’ versus actual experience; note that ‘my truth’ is superior to the truth.

The argument, therefore, that woke cannot be defined is bogus. It is difficult to define, but that is a different thing. And just because something is tricky to pin down, does not mean we should abandon the attempt. Fascism is a cruel and menacing ideology even if it doesn’t have a handy Fascist Manifesto encoding all its core beliefs, that does not mean we can dismiss it as non-existent.

What then of the other argument against the angry employment of woke: that it is now so overused that it becomes meaningless? There is some truth in this. One rightwing tabloid recently accused British builders of being ‘woke’ for taking an interest in history or discussing their masculine feelings. There are many other farcical examples. But again this mirrors the overuse of the word fascism. From the facile Rik Mayall character in that ancient sitcom the Young Ones to shouty kids marching down Whitehall today, ‘fascist’ is a boo word so overused by the left that it has been applied to any policy to the right of Corbyn’s Labour, anyone who thinks the police might actually do good things, or anyone who even thinks, for a terrible moment of voting Tory. Despite these juvenile exaggerations, true fascism exists and recognising where it exists is important. We only have to look at the mullahs in Tehran beating women to death for not wearing hijabs or take the measure of Putin’s imperialist, nationalist, militarised Russia, to see that fascism – real fascism – has not gone away.

Is it too much to see wokeness as a threat equivalent to fascism? On the face of it, perhaps – until you consider those woke US university presidents in Congress who were unable to condemn calls for the genocide of Jews on campus. How did they reach that insane, dangerous position? Because wokeness subtly instructed them to think this: Jews, in the intersectional woke hierarchy, are inherently colonialist oppressors, therefore they are unworthy of the protection given to more deserving minorities. And this is also where wokeness crucially differs from fascism. Fascism is brutal and overt: it attacks from the front and it glories in its aggression. Wokeness, by contrast, is stealthy, insidious and tentacular. It corrodes from the inside out. And the corrosion is spreading, daily.