Opinion editorial by Lionel Shriver

Across the non-left media world, it’s now an article of faith that Trump’s emphatic victory is a woke watershed. After asking petulantly for year upon year, ‘Now have we hit peak woke?’, like children in the backseat nagging daddy are we there yet, we learn repeatedly from the Spectator, the Daily Telegraph, and the Wall Street Journal that the progressive lunacy that’s tormented us since about 2014 (if not since 1965) has been roundly defeated.

So they won’t spout lingo like ‘cisgender’ if that might risk an eye-roll at parties. They won’t want to seem behind the times. If we convince them that woke is over, that their BLM lawn signs are passé, that maundering about ‘white privilege’ is boring and old hat, they’ll drop the whole patriarchy / neurodiversity / heteronormativity et al package in a New York minute. We just have to persuade them that woke is unhip. Which it always has been, but some people are slow.