UnHeard Reports: “Wokeness” is receding, according to the mainstream conventional wisdom. Having peaked in the plague-and-reckoning year 2020, the story goes, Left identity politics and the disciplinary practices that usually go with them have been on a downward trajectory ever since. The election of 2024 decisively affirmed the decline of woke: how could progressives continue to use terms like “Latinx” when half of Latino men pulled for Donald Trump’s GOP at the ballot box?

But the woke Left apparently hasn’t received the memo. Witness the social-media mobbing of Vivek Chibber, a professor of sociology at New York University and the editor of the socialist journal Catalyst, after he dared to historically analyse wokeness as an illiberal, authoritarian tendency.

Chibber made his comments last week on a Jacobin magazine podcast titled Confronting Capitalism: The End of Wokeness. It triggered a firestorm of angry “X” comments that ranged from mischaracterising him as a Right-wing goon to outright obscenity. Ajay Singh Chaudhary, the director of the Brooklyn Institute for Social Research, dismissed Chibber’s critique of wokeness as “tripe” and a “carbon copy” of the Right’s.

Laleh Khalili, a Mideast scholar at the University of Exeter, denounced Chibber as a “brownshirt waving a red flag.” William Clare Roberts, an assistant professor of politics at McGill University, suggested that Chibber is “no different” from liberal writers like Matt Yglesias or Jonathan Chait: “I am weary of having to treat him like he’s a serious thinker on the socialist left, much less a Marxist”. Many other commenters didn’t even bother with full sentences. Instead, they simply called Chibber a “paedophile” and the like.

So much for the vibe shift. But what did Chibber actually say that so incensed the professional Left? Perhaps it was because he dared to point out that wokeness is not popular. Or perhaps it was his definition of wokeness that rankled its acolytes: Chibber defined wokeness as a professional-class movement for social justice that excludes socialism from its political project and that is highly intolerant to boot.