Checking in on “Woke Europe”

“Like the United States, Canada, and the United Kingdom, continental Europe would, therefore, do well to dial down the moralizing rhetoric associated with wokeness and return to the enlightened pragmatism, cultural liberalism, and scientific curiosity that gave us the modern world.”

In 2021, I wrote a piece for Merion West on Europe’s descent into wokeness. The United States’ racial reckoning, represented by the Black Lives Matter movement, had made its way across the pond in a tidal wave of regressive identity politics. But despite considerable backlash benefiting primarily the far right, those pushing woke ideology on the continent have only grown more vocal and influential over the past few years. This is especially noticeable when it comes to the topics of gender, diversity, and colonialism.

Gender and Diversity

Transgender ideology, in particular, has gained considerable steam here in Europe in the time since 2021. Visiting Vienna, where I used to live, during Pride Month this year, I saw that almost all of the rainbow flags had been replaced by what is known as the Progress Pride flag. This new flag, which features additional stripes for trans-identified individuals and people of color (and sometimes a yellow triangle with a purple circle representing the intersex “community”), was flying on Vienna’s public metro and city buildings.

What is wrong with that? For starters, public authorities ought to remain ideologically neutral, and the Progress Pride flag stands for a specific ideology that negates not only social reality but also basic biology. This is a movement that has shown itself intolerant of criticism while throwing vulnerable young people, many of them gay, under the gender-ideological bus. In contrast, the rainbow flag symbolizes a general attitude of tolerance toward sexual minorities in line with secular democratic values. Political equality, after all, requires neither gaslighting nor double mastectomies.