Does the Left Really Need to Be Chastised for the Past Decade of Deviation?
I was recently asked by a French journalist to give my opinion of “le wokisme”. “I’m sorry, what?” I replied. It’s not that I was unfamiliar with this unfortunate borrowing, which by now every last pensioner living on Aldi store-brand rosé and LeaderPrice frozen dinners of cuisse de lapin has mastered. It’s that, for me, in April, 2025, being asked for my views on wokeism is not so different from being asked what I think of the suffragettes or Prohibition. Who cares?! Have you not checked the news for the past three months?
France is always a bit behind —that’s why we love it—, and it is not entirely surprising to see that this is no less the case with the recent massive upheavals in global politics than with, say, the discovery of rock and roll or the internet. Not long from now a certain Marine Le Pen might storm to power, take vengeance on her persecutors and prosecutors, create a French equivalent of DOGE that wipes out 80% of the civil service —the first to go would surely be permanent-resident foreigners like me—, and deport planefuls of sans-papiers to detention camps throughout Françafrique. I suspect that if and when this happens, journalists will no longer be asking members of the chattering classes whether or not France has gone too woke. But for now, I guess, this place is still, as ever, a bit décalé.
Or is it? I mean, are French people really behaving differently than their more with-it American homologues? I admit that I hardly have my finger on the pulse of the United States these days, and I could be misinterpreting the faint signals I’ve been getting. But I have noticed at least some indications that some Americans as well are still flogging that incapacitated horse, which so many from my own cultural milieu rode so proudly and confidently between roughly 2015 and late 2024. And what I want to know is whether its floggers are only drawing on that same futile energy that Dostoevsky, upon seeing an actual prostrate horse getting whipped to death,1 identified as the purest expression of his own countrymen’s essentially sadistic spirit, or whether, rather, this flogging might do some good, as perhaps once the beast is fully dead we can cut it open, the better to understand its pathologies and learn to avoid them in the future?
In what follows I’ll weigh up these two possibilities, and, with any luck, will deliver the final verdict you’ve been needing.
