Some claim Trump’s ascension as a victory against wokism.
“Woke” is a state of being awake in which you are alert to and critical of social inequality and environmental destruction, various forms of discrimination, including racism and sexism, and for some, exploitation.
Anti-wokism is a big deal on this day, this Invasion Day, sold to us as “Australia Day”. Aboriginal Australia is wide awake to it, inspiring their supporters.

Let’s assume for now Trump’s victory marks a defeat of “wokism”, a victory for his supporters against “wokism”.
The whole point of wokism is that citizens should be awake while they are awake. That means being critical about what they see as wrong and struggling for what they see as its correction.
It is debatable how much wokism has really been in the ascendancy. It can be argued that those who oppose it have exaggerated its ascendancy to make sure it “doesn’t go too far.” The high points in Australia might include the marriage equality struggle and all but the last six months of the Uluru Statement quest for an Aboriginal Voice.
Dutton’s supporters are anti-woke, and mainstream media, especially Sky News and other Murdoch media cultivate anti-wokism.
Anti-wokism is a thing in social media.
Anti-wokists want you to be sleepy while you are awake, to direct your energy to yourself and maybe your immediate family. I say “maybe” because an awake family member who is really awake can be defined inside the family as an outlier, an oddity, to be tolerated but not encouraged. That’s what anti-wokism is intended to do. To be derisory of others, either directly or behind their back, or both.
In Australia, anti-wokism - the world outlook against being critical in thought and other deeds - has a long history in Liberal National Party-type politics and its hangers-on.
The Liberal National Party’s PM Menzies called the awake-sleepers his “silent majority” and they kept him in office for 23 years. Until fair dinkum unionism, the anti-war movement, black liberationists, and feminists explained why being asleep while awake had bad consequences.
Then their PM Howard appropriated the “Howard battlers”, lauding their sleepy acquiescence, their quiet agreement that Howard and Costello and CEOs and politicians should just be left to do their damage because they “knew what is best for us”. They were happy just “battling” on silently, taking the wage cuts, raising their families, watching the cricket and tennis on the telly, despite the downward pressure on their standard of living, coping with whatever trial Howard and the corporations he championed inflicted on them.
Hawke and Keating made their contribution.
“Battlerism” surfed off the individualism in industry superannuation, the gift of fancy 4-wheel drives that went with taking an individual contract and the higher rungs of labour hire and fly-in fly-out working, instead of sticking with the permanent job struggle and socially useful work in publicly owned corporations. Putting their families first and dishing out a bit of charity in words or dollars to feel better, while corporations destroyed good, skilled jobs and governments made sure workers would not have union power and wages didn’t eat into profits too much. Some right-wing unions went along with this.
Defiantly, the left-wing unions – starting in the post-war years - showed the way against cultivated mass silence and “battlerism”. They showed the way of collective “struggle”, and solidarity relationships, including in the recessions and credit crunches of the Menzies years. They spread the peace movement into the working class from its champions in academia. Their strikes raised living standards for all, not just some, above the levels demanded by the bosses who loved Menzies, Howard, Costello and the like.
Therein lies the clue that wokism - as critical thought - truly works out how active solidarity building can roll back and beat, creating a social alternative instead of the decay of people and nature that is happening all around us.
Wokism is by no means perfect. Some forms of it can be its own worst enemy, especially when it is bogged in that form of identity politics that can’t cope with the reality that all identities share the exploitation that requires a common lowering of the standard of living and destruction of nature.
Wokism is rarely applied to how the economy and society work, preferring the appearance of things rather than the reality that lurks just below the surface.
The old clarion call against sleepy living, defeated living, is as necessary and as relevant as ever:
Arise ye workers from your slumbers /
Arise ye prisoners of want /
For reason in revolt now thunders /
And at last ends the age of cant!
For “cant” check the dictionary. The Macquarie definition is spot on.
So, in our modern times, we face the rise of cant against all reason.
But we also can join those before us who have rolled it back and into its rubbish bin.
Above all, it is bloody good and invigorating for all of us if we are “woke” while awake. Stick with it, recruit others and join in its defiant, joyful determination.
I go to bed around 8pm and get up at 4am. After a cup of black coffee, I can say that I'm awake. Are you?