Can Britain survive the woke wave?
by Matthew Goodwin, UnHerd:
Back in 1963 a landmark study by academics Gabriel Almond and Sidney Verba called, The Civic Culture, looked into why the British did not follow the Germans and the Italians into the abyss of fascism, and why communism has similarly failed to take root here. They concluded that the country’s political culture made it inhospitable to radical ideologies. The British didn’t do ideology.
Decades later, and Britain seems a more hospitable place for foreign ideologies, importing America-style culture wars over “wokeism”. Or at least, this is the finding of a major study released this week by American pollster Frank Luntz. Based on three nationwide surveys and two focus groups, Luntz argues that post-Brexit Britain is rapidly following America into the abyss of highly-polarised culture wars over populism and wokeism.
“It’s not what the British public want”, Luntz told historian Niall Ferguson at one event this week, “but it’s coming anyway”. The research has already attracted a storm of criticism, mostly from British pollsters and academics who, as Nate Silver can testify, have always taken issue with American analysts daring to intervene in Britain’s domestic debate.
The case against Luntz’s thesis is not a hard one to make. The first and most obvious point to make is that most British people do not even know what “woke” or “wokeism” mean.
Recent polling by YouGov finds that while nearly 60% of British adults have heard of the term “woke” they have no idea what it refers to. Luntz himself found that not even 40% of Britain is familiar with the term and only 15% feel “proud to be woke”.
The second argument against Luntz is that, contrary to what many liberal progressives would have you believe, Britain is not America. We live in a society where debates about class are more important than debates about race. While the British continue to debate the legacy of Empire they have not had to contend with the dark legacy of slavery, Jim Crow and segregation. The parameters of our debate about race are completely different from the ones in America.
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