Tribune published on May 19, 2023 in Libération

"The feeling of déjà-lu is immense," says Simon Blin in an editorial in Libération dedicated May 12 to my book Is Wokism a form of totalitarianism? ". This is because he believes he knows its political orientation: "The essay could be signed by an RN ideologue and no one would notice." It is true that, since wokeness has become an object of debate in the University, the cultural world and the media, assimilation has become automatic: wokeness would be left-wing, obviously, and anti-wokeness right-wing, necessarily - or even far-right. And certainly, in the United States where the phenomenon comes from, the Trumpists have resolutely mounted the anti-woke crusade, adding to their usual targets of censorship "gender theory", "critical race theory" and the "DE&I" protocol (Diversity, Equity and Inclusion). It is difficult in these conditions to denounce the excesses of wokeism without risking being excluded from one's own camp when speaking from the left.

            And yet, in the progressive camp, more and more voices dare to affirm that it is possible, and that it is must even, denouncing wokeism not good that one is left-wing, but precisely because we are left-wing. Although still timid because it is intimidated, this left-wing anti-wokeism has distinguished itself, in the United States itself, under the pen of Mark Lilla, Jonathan Haidt, Susan Neiman, or in Spain under that of Daniel Bernabé. This criticism is not that of progressivism, as is the case at the National Rally, which has just made anti-wokeism its new hobbyhorse as it had done with secularism. Because it is not a question of denying the reality of injustices, inequalities and discrimination of all kinds, nor the need to combat them. It is a question of opposing the excesses of a pseudo-progressivism that is the enemy of these humanist values ​​that are republican universalism, rationality, secularism and freedom of expression.

            But wokeism, based on a communitarianism borrowed from Anglo-Saxon political culture, is by definition anti-universalist, indifferent to the common good because obsessed by affiliations to victimized collectives. It prefers ideology to science (or makes a point of confusing the two, which amounts to the same thing). It sees the defense of secularism as an attack on religious minorities. And it practices without complex this form of savage censorship that is cancel culture, without appearing bothered by this paradoxical antinomy between an ideological censorship claiming to be progressive and a left-wing tradition which has always defended freedom of expression.

            Identitarianism, ideologism, censorship: these are the major components of wokeism in its various forms, from inclusive writing to the activism of knowledge, from the rewriting of texts to the toppling of statues, from identity assignments to semantic prohibitions and the concealment of class relations behind racial and gender obsession. However, as I show point by point in my book, each of these components is part of a certain form of totalitarianism.

This word here does not of course refer to a diet totalitarian, as those who pretend not to understand try to make me say: the hold of wokeism on a part of the University and the cultural world, its penetration into large companies and its infiltration into the radical left have not yet been transformed, fortunately, into a state power. For the moment, it is what I have called a "totalitarianism of atmosphere": a totalitarian mentality, more or less prevalent depending on the context, which tends to pass for granted these obligatory assignments, these prohibitions imposed in the name of "wounded sensibilities", these programs of re-education and rewriting of the classics, this perverse game on the alliance of victimization and guilt, which should bristle any progressive worthy of the name.

            So that's the gist of my argument: to identify and denounce the potentially totalitarian dimension of wokeness from a left-wing position, which is concerned about the way in which certain excesses open up a boulevard for the RN. Where have we "already read" this? And isn't this point of view likely to interest readers of a left-wing newspaper?

            But the old sectarian reflexes resurface, which evacuate any questioning by stigmatizing it as reactionary or even far-right. And, as in the time when it was not Wokeism but Stalinism that dominated the progressive camp, those who want to remain faithful to it find themselves forced to betray their own values, while those who want to remain faithful to their values ​​find themselves traitors to their own camp. This is the paradoxical injunction that, in the past, some were able to resist, before the truth of the facts imposed itself and definitively proved them right. With Wokeism, it is in the form of a dark farce that this dirty story is repeated.

            This is why the defenders of wokeism who equate its protest with reactionary thinking and accuse its detractors of "playing into the hands of the extreme right," just as the Gulag denouncers were once accused of being "CIA agents," unwittingly demonstrate what they strive to deny: namely, that, for want of taking the trouble to think, they fit perfectly into the totalitarian mentality. There is, alas, "the impression of an immense déjà vu."