The hangover sets in after the ‘woke’ binge

Reverse order, comrades – ‘woke’ is dead. Even AOC (Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez – I’ll call her that, as it’s a brand everyone knows) said so, having in turn heard it from a Brooklyn councillor: ‘Woke 1 was crazy,’ he said. Of course, if she’d asked me two years ago, when I was a councillor in Livorno and was put before a firing squad for raising an objection to the idea that a decidedly phallic statue could be considered a quintessential representation of women, I would have explained it to her. Look, Alexandria, I would have told her, I think that if you carry on like this, you’ll lose every election, from now until the end of time. Instead, it took the Americans electing someone who has turned war into the continuation of insider trading by other means for them to realise that a political platform based on pronoun hysteria and the gender-realism of Netflix series would not be enough to win over a potential majority.

Admittedly, AOC’s move was a step back, not quite a U-turn: “Woke 1”, she specified. Perhaps so as not to alienate the early adopters of gender-neutral pronouns, perhaps to reassure them that the substance of the Butlerian purges was right, but the methods perhaps a tad heavy-handed. Perhaps, as I said. And yet I have the impression that if “Woke 1” was crazy, there won’t be a “Woke 2: The Sequel” anyway. Just like certain Netflix series, blessed by the algorithm, but left to die after the first season. Why? Because the market changes, fashions come and go. What sold well yesterday now fills the warehouses with rhetorical rubbish. And so, as I wrote in these very columns, all there was to do was sit on the bank and wait. Whether mine was the very modest bank of the Fossi Reali, rather than the imperial banks of the Potomac, matters little. Because, in the meantime, the first to pass by was the heroic Brooklyn city councillor, who, in my boomer mind, takes on the tragicomic features of Fantozzi: first a slave chained to the Russian film club of the dreadful Guidobaldo Maria Ricciardelli, and then a corporate Prometheus who bestows the fire of truth upon his fellow captives, offering them the most joyful of liberations. And so, after the Brooklyn councillor, after AOC, and bearing in mind the time zone of the remote province of the empire in which we live, here at last come our own.

First up is Giuseppe Conte, who spoke to a friend of his in Boston, who told him he’d seen a Botero-style statue and found it offensive to women (here we go again, another statue). At that point, Conte was flabbergasted: ‘This is going too far!’ he thought. Having heard AOC’s statement, he decided in record time to write to *La Repubblica*. Now, quite apart from the fact that all it would have taken was to give the Boston statue a nice phallus for his friend to regard it as an inclusive part of humanity’s heritage, what is rather interesting is the conclusion Conte drew from the incident: ‘woke’, he says, has become a ‘self-referential moral religion’. As an old-school feminist, I cannot help but notice how, of all the things that could have opened his eyes, Conte has chosen precisely this extremely rare example of an excessive defence of women born as such – but let’s not split hairs. I do, however, appreciate the outcome of his reasoning, the effort behind the concept. And I feel sorry for him that he now has to explain it to those in his party. To Senator Maiorino, for example, for whom the “Manichean division between man and woman, male and female, as a pair of opposites preached by the right, does not exist” (had I known that beforehand, I’d have saved myself two hundred euros on a specialist: I thought it was prostatitis, but it turned out to be nothing more than a fascist regurgitation). Or to the Tuscan regional councillor Irene Galletti, for whom my resignation wasn’t enough, because she wanted my ‘repentance’ (I’m still thinking about how I could have proved it to her). ‘A self-referential moral religion’ – I could hardly believe my eyes. Because that’s how it works in Campo Largo: first they demand your resignation, put you in the pillory, purge you, and cast you out in disgrace. Then they pull a brand-new conscience out of the cupboard and, with a cheekiness worthy of an Olympic champion, say exactly the same things you used to say, almost in exactly the same words. Just like that, with not a wrinkle in their pocket square.

Meanwhile, however, within the PD, Gori has also been quietly making his move, with a post on X: “I’m pleased that those who believed in us are having a change of heart. Personally, I’ve never been ‘woke’.” The post on X is, as is well known, that small space of freedom granted by the party leadership to the restless conscience of the reformist wing in exchange for broader acquiescence, according to a fairly well-established pattern: Putin bombs a children’s hospital, Conte comes out against sending arms to Ukraine, Schlein reiterates the united stance of the broad coalition, Senator Sensi posts #slavaukraini on X, and so on. Yet, in this case, I am convinced that others (and other women, of course) will follow in Gori’s footsteps. Whilst I predict (it is 11 am on Saturday morning as I write) that even Schlein will speak out, distancing herself from certain excesses, essentially saying what AOC said (albeit with far more words), whilst still essentially defending Butlerian orthodoxy, in accordance with the established practice which, in more gloriously brutal times, came to be known as ‘de-Stalinisation’. Translated: we’ve always been right, but we’re a bit concerned about overtourism in Siberia.

More generally, as a knock-on effect, one might therefore expect a decline in the number of rainbow bench unveilings in local authorities run by the centre-left, less attention paid to those demanding the universal right to menstruation, and less circumlocutory fervour aimed at replacing ‘women’ with ‘people with uteruses’ (incidentally, I’ve become fascinated by AOC’s frozen egg saga: fingers crossed!) and other trifles of that sort.

So, the hangover has passed, and what remains is the headache of unanswered questions. The first, and most obvious, concerns the very nature of that attitude which has come to be known as ‘woke’. Because, in our context, ‘woke’ has not merely been the religion of ethical narcissism (as I have written before, and better than Conte). Above all, it has been a method. An experiment in blind faith-based engagement, founded on an algorithmic mechanism that rewards polarisation, the silencing of dissent, the absence of debate and the stigmatisation of the outcast. The identification of a scapegoat and the subsequent stoning on social media. Ultimately, an extreme market-segmentation strategy that identifies loyalised niches to which one can sell anything, provided they remain locked within that protected bubble where everyone agrees with one another. And for a while, it works. It works until the Titanic of schwa’s, asterisks, people with uteruses, safe spaces and trigger warnings, microaggressions and whingeing collides with the iceberg of reality, in the form of a Brooklyn city councillor, a Livorno councillor or any old Fantozzi forced to leave his lovely onion omelette behind to watch the Russian film forum instead of the football match.

Finally, another question remains, given our certainty that nature abhors a vacuum: if ‘woke’ is dead, something else will have to take its place. In Britain, Jeremy Corbyn and Zarah Sultana provided their own answer in 2025 by founding Your Party. The political insight – well ahead of AOC – was precisely that ‘woke’ would be buried beneath the rubble of Gaza, which would serve as the building blocks for a militant left. Mélenchon’s La France Insoumise, moreover, had already been ahead of its time, working to forge a bond between the left and Islamism for much longer, and able to draw on a healthy dose of justified postcolonial guilt and the guilty conscience of the reflective French middle class.

After all, whilst the mindset of the historical Left has been shaped by the idea of class struggle, the void created by the decline of the communist utopia in this age of social fluidity is easily filled by the dream of political Islamism to expand dar al-Islam (the abode of Islam) as far as possible within dar al-harb (the abode of war, that is, the one inhabited by us infidels). “If we rely on white, Catholic workers to establish socialism in France, we’ll never see it,” said Mélenchon. It goes without saying that getting as many people as possible to vote, and representing everyone, is in itself a good and just thing in a democracy. However, there remains a very strong suspicion that even this aspiration may end up in a state of intoxicating excess (which, incidentally, is hardly ‘halal’).

So we must remain here for a while longer, in partibus infidelium as it were, sitting on the riverbank waiting for this new intersectional variation on the same fundamental misunderstanding to pass in two years’ time. Because no aspiration to redemption, in the European societies we like (why are they the very best? I don’t know, and who cares: we like them because they’re ours, and that’s enough) can be regarded as maxims that cannot be elevated to the status of universal legislative principles. But since I fear that the void left by ‘woke’ will be filled by new slogans that mimic its method, in the meantime, anyone who tries to raise a doubt or put forward a dissenting view will find themselves subjected to exactly the same treatment, because the wolf may shed its blue-dyed fur but not its old habits. They will be pilloried by the good and the righteous, struck off the phone books, disowned by particularly committed PD relatives – as, for example, happened to me (which I still laugh about). We must therefore remain on the bank of the very same river on which we have stood all our lives. The river that flows into the sea of the most extraordinary utopia: to one day live in a world no longer divided between those who whinge about a misplaced pronoun and those who’d like to go about carrying an AK-47. A world in which things are discussed – even harshly – but openly, with the mutual respect that stems from our shared experience of human frailty. A world in which you dress as you please, sleep with whoever you like, and go by whatever name suits you best – but where you cannot legally force me to wear a condom over my tongue when I speak to you, just to name one example. A world in which the state keeps its distance from my fundamental freedoms. A world in which it is finally accepted that humanity is a crooked piece of wood that cannot be straightened. What’s more: a world in which the crookedness of human nature is a source of wonder and admiration. Is that asking too much? I hope not. In the meantime, however, I’m reminded of that extraordinary press conference held by the Mayor of Livorno, organised in a great hurry, with the entire council lined up in front of the cameras, to eliminate the outcast at the speed of light. I’m reminded of the headline of an article in La Repubblica that labelled my posts “homophobic” (my friend, you know what they say in Rome, don’t you? “When you were still in the cradle, we were already queers”). It all comes back to me. And I’m sorry – far more for them than for myself. But in the end, truly: tout est pardonné.