Introduction: I’m your host, Iona Italia. My guest this week is Andrew Doyle. Andrew is a writer, journalist, and satirist. Among other works, he is the author of Free Speech and Why It Matters (2021)—which is the best book I’ve read on the topic—as well of The New Puritans: How the Religion of Social Justice Captured the Western World (2022). Today, we’ll be discussing his most recent book, The End of Woke: How the Culture War Went Too Far and What to Expect from the Counter-Revolution (2025). We focus on why he believes that both the woke madness itself and some of the backlash against it have been driven by an authoritarian impulse and why the best way to combat such impulses is a renewed and far more thoroughgoing commitment to classical liberal ideals like free speech and the rule of law. I hope you enjoy my conversation with Andrew Doyle.

The End of Woke: How the Culture War Went Too Far and What to Expect from the Counter-Revolution: Doyle, Andrew: 9781408723968: Amazon.com: Books

The End of Woke: How the Culture War Went Too Far and What to Expect from the Counter-Revolution [Doyle, Andrew] on Amazon.com. *FREE* shipping on qualifying offers. The End of Woke: How the Culture War Went Too Far and What to Expect from the Counter-Revolution

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Transcript

Iona Italia: We’re here to talk about your book, The End of Woke. I’m just holding up so that listeners can see it. Hi, Andrew. Welcome to the Quillette podcast.

Andrew Doyle: Hello. Thank you very much for having me. Really appreciate it.

II: The book is called How the Culture War Went Too Far and What to Expect from the Counter-Revolution. I do feel that’s a slightly misleading title, especially the second part, but I think we’ll get into that later. But I absolutely loved the book. I’ve read a lot of books on the woke phenomenon. I was expecting your book to repeat a lot of points that I’d heard elsewhere, but I didn’t even care if it had been entirely 100 percent repetition of things I’ve already heard because you have such a beautiful prose style. I find your work an absolute joy to read no matter what you’re talking about. But the book is somewhat different from other books on the woke phenomenon in that it’s an extremely thorough-going defence of liberalism. Your central thesis is that woke culture was illiberal and what would have been needed to combat it would have been a stronger and more consistent adherence to principles of liberalism.

AD: Yes, that’s the key argument. I suppose I could have included the phrase liberalism in the subtitle, but I think there were some reservations that it puts people off, maybe. But you’re absolutely right. Yes, liberalism is the key argument that I’m making in the book.

II: You talk about “the liberalism of the three Johns.” Can you explain what you understand by the central tenets of liberalism? Then maybe we can get into how those tenets have been abused and how an adherence to those tenets could have prevented the kind of madness that we’ve been going through.

AD: In the book, I make clear that when it comes to liberalism, we have a fundamental problem, which is that every liberal thinker who has ever existed seems to have a different perspective of what liberalism actually is, which means that you need to be very clear about your definition when you’re writing about liberalism, what it is you are defending. In my book, I draw on three Johns—Milton and Locke—I draw on Hobbes, John Stuart Mill, obviously. I talk about the various perceptions of what it means to be a liberal. In doing so, I also tease out where the differences lie. It isn’t the case that what I’m doing is I’m drawing on a particular author and following them to the letter and saying that this person has all the answers. You couldn’t do that. John Stuart Mill, for instance, his conception of liberty would not include Catholics, neither would Milton’s for that matter. That would exclude me.

One of the mistakes that people make is using these texts as a guidebook, a new ideology, replacing other forms of ideology with an ideology that you might call “liberalism.” That’s not what I’m doing. In fact, I make the case in the book that liberalism is the absence of an ideology precisely because it doesn’t draw on a set of rules. But what you can say is that it reaches after certain ideals. In the book, I list what the ideals of liberalism are. This is individual autonomy, collective and social responsibility, equality before the law, meritocracy, democracy, freedom of speech, freedom of the press, freedom of expression, freedom of association, freedom of religion. All of these ideas to me summarise where the most overlap in terms of liberal thought lies. Fundamentally, what it means to be a liberal is that you believe that anyone should be able to say what they like, do what they like, so long as they don’t encroach upon the rights of anybody else, right up until that point.

But there’s more to it than that. One of the key things I’m trying to say in the book is that liberalism can only flourish and work if the conditions are right. Partly that means you have to cultivate a social contract. The cultivation of a social contract is not something that can be imposed. As soon as you impose it, it becomes authoritarian. It’s something that has to be cultivated and developed over a long period of time. It takes work. It takes tradition. It takes endless negotiations societally over many, many decades, many, many years. That’s also why I make the case that we shouldn’t be tearing down cultural institutions, those very cultural institutions that have enabled a form of liberalism to prevail, that we tear those down at our peril.

I suppose one of the things I want to emphasise here is I think there’s a big misunderstanding when it comes to liberalism. A lot of critics of liberalism, what they’re actually criticising is liberal universalism, this Pollyanna-ish view that absolutely everyone has the same goals and the same objectives, everyone wants democracy, wants freedom, and all you need to do is open all the borders and everyone will want the same things and behave in the same ways. That’s not liberalism. Because the case I make in the book is that for liberalism to flourish, you need the rule of law. Not a set rule of law that cannot be negotiated or repudiated or challenged, because repudiation and challenge is part of that development of the social contract that I’m talking about. You need that rule of law. You need equality under the law. You need a sound educational basis. You need an educational system that facilitates the development of this social contract. You need a nation state. You need a form within which those ideals can be cultivated and can prevail.

When people say liberalism defeats itself, the seeds of the destruction of liberalism are within liberalism itself, I don’t think those people have understood liberalism. I think it’s quite a banal critique because whenever they point to a failed liberal system, they are always invariably pointing to the moment at which liberals have reneged on the principles of liberalism. It undermines their point, actually. I’m saying that any society which embraces wholeheartedly the principles of liberalism, as I outline in the book, I’m not saying I have all the answers or that this will solve every single problem. I’ve never made that case. But I think what is clear is it’s never been done. I know people will mock me for that. It’s like the socialists saying, well, real socialism has never been tried. I put it to anyone. Tell me a society where the principles of liberalism as outlined in this book have been wholeheartedly embraced and applied, in any society in history. Where is it? Bet you they can’t.

II: You differentiate liberalism from endless permissiveness, whereby anybody can behave in any way they like, no matter how damaging it is to other people, and an inability to acknowledge the fact that there are trade-offs that your behaviour, your freedoms could impose on other freedoms that your freedoms only go as far as the end of the other person’s nose. That is something that tends to be forgotten when people say that the problem is that liberalism has failed. What they mean by liberalism is that some people will be above the law and able to do whatever they like because they’re part of a group that is considered sacrosanct.

AD: What they’re doing there is they’re critiquing a failure of liberalism. That’s exactly what they’re doing, but they don’t see it that way. That to me is odd. There’s a reluctance to accept that virtually all liberal thinkers—from the conservative liberalism of Friedrich Hayek to the social liberalism of John Rawls—everyone agrees that the rule of law is necessary to preserve a liberal system. The idea that liberalism is just some kind of free-for-all, that it means that people can just do whatever the hell they want, irrespective of the consequences, irrespective of the rights of others, is a complete pigheaded misunderstanding of what liberalism actually means. As soon as you are encroaching on the rights of others, you’re no longer a liberal. That shouldn’t really have to be spelled out.

What I would like to see happen is for people who criticise liberalism to criticise what it actually is. Now I’ve said already that there are different variations on liberalism and there are, and there are various people who have different perspectives on it. But at the same time, there are these overlapping points of generalised agreement, there are some fundamental principles, in other words, that are really not negotiable, which is the liberal does not accept authoritarianism, and a liberal system must encapsulate freedom of speech and autonomy up to the point that others’ rights are encroached upon.

But it also must entail social responsibility. You would be hard pushed to find any great liberal thinker who doesn’t agree with that. Yet that aspect seems to be overlooked. I suppose it makes it easier to criticise if you’re criticising a straw man. I would like to have a serious discussion about this perception that liberals are calling for this free-for-all. Who is actually saying that? Who is actually making the case that they would like anyone—no matter what their cultural values—to just do whatever the hell they want. Who is actually making that case? I can’t think of anyone. I think that’s just a phantom.

In the book, there’s a long section on John Milton, because Milton very explicitly talked about this distinction between liberty and licence, which is an ancient Christian idea of liberty, but it doesn’t need to be Christian. Insofar as liberty and licence are distinguished, the licence is where you have the free-for-all, is where you do whatever you want. Liberty in Milton’s view is more about virtuous self-regulation. It’s about reaching the truth through reason or at least attempting to, and having that freedom of choice with the recognition of the responsibility that comes with it. That’s what we mean by liberty.

Again, as with so many of these cultural debates we tend to be having, the two participants in any given debate tend to be talking about completely different things. We see this all the time with the gender wars. If you have two people debating about women’s rights and gender ideology, et cetera, well, one party of that typically believes that to be a woman is a biological category. The other party typically believes that a woman is an identity category. They’re completely incompatible points of view. Yet they’re arguing as though the word woman in that debate that they both have the shared definition. They don’t. Before you even get to that debate, you have to talk about what exactly it is you are you talking about. The same goes for the debate about liberalism. We’re getting a lot of lazy criticisms of liberalism, but what they’re actually talking about is liberal universalism. It’s very important that those of us who still believe in liberal values, who still believe in freedom, reassert what it means to be a liberal. That’s what the book’s about.

II: One of the things that you emphasise in the book a lot—I think it’s a very important point that people are missing—is that this isn’t a bipartisan struggle. It’s not about Left versus Right. What happened with woke authoritarianism is that it got embedded into bureaucracies and organisations and administrative structures and universities and everywhere else. In some cases, governments were asleep at the wheel. They were just like, These aren’t very important issues. We could just delegate them to this bunch of bureaucrats. Some of the craziest things became such established orthodoxy that they were championed by Left and Right. This happened much less in the US where things were more politically polarised, but definitely in the UK, as you point out, a lot of the worst stuff, for example, a lot of the anti-free speech measures that happened, the non-crime hate incidents, the online safety bill, et cetera, came in under a conservative government. Here in Australia, there is an incredible buy-in to woke ideology among the Liberal Party, who are the right-wing party in Australia. As far as that bureaucratic woke stuff goes, you can just about fit a piece of paper between the orthodox views of the two parties on many issues, particularly free speech, again, where we also have an e-safety commissioner and both parties are talking about protecting people from the harms of what they might read on the internet.

AD: Absolutely. You raise a number of key points and you also raise an added complication. You’re speaking in Australia where the Liberal Party, as you say, is the right-wing party. Most Americans use the word liberal synonymously with left. I’m talking about the classical liberal tradition, which is neither left nor right. That’s why I spent so long in the book defining exactly what I mean by liberal so that hopefully those confusions are ironed out before I get to the nub of the argument.

But you’re absolutely right that we must emphasise that the culture war has never been about Left or Right, not really. I think a lot of the critics of liberalism who are generally speaking on the right, or the ones that I’m talking about at the moment, they generally see liberal and left-wing as being the same thing. They blame the culture war, the wokeness on the left, the Left did that, without taking into account that, as you say, the worst excesses in the UK certainly came from the Tory government, came from the right-wing government. Because this was an ideology—like liberalism—that actually straddles Left and Right and everything in between. Illiberalism can occur irrespective of your political views, but so too can liberalism. Therefore, we need to completely reframe our understanding of the culture, or we need to see it through a new lens.

Once we’re seeing it through the lens of Left and Right, we are reducing it to something that it isn’t. I completely take the point that a lot of the philosophical origins of wokeness are drawn from left-wing thinkers, absolutely. But that’s not what we’re dealing with here. That’s not the case. We are dealing now in our current cultural war situation with those who believe in liberty and those who believe in authoritarianism. That’s the real dividing line. I would say Right and Left are over anyway. The cultural war killed those designations off and we should perhaps move on and think in these terms as well.

I think a lot of the critics of liberalism are really right-wing ideologues trying to score points against the Left, but they’re having a debate that I’m not having. It’s very interesting when I’ve had right-wing people react to this book. They’re not happy with it. They tend to try and imagine that I’m making a case that I’m not making. They try and reframe my argument in terms of Left and Right, but that’s not an argument I’ve ever made. It’s interesting that the only way they can attack the point I’m making in the book is to misrepresent it. That’s interesting to me.

When people read the book, I hope they will understand and I hope it will be very clear that I’m not taking a tribalistic position. Because I believe that authoritarianism is an instinct that is innate in humankind. I think it’s actually the default in humankind. That’s a case I make very strongly. I think that’s why you see it emerge on the Left and the Right and everywhere in between, throughout history. The evidence is in on that. I don’t think I’m making a particularly controversial point there. Therefore, the solution to authoritarianism, or at least the way to push back against it, are those core principles of liberalism that I’m advancing. I no longer even consider myself Left or Right. I don’t see what that means. I think those terms are too open to misunderstanding. I don’t think in this current climate they have any utility. I don’t know what you think about that, that’s where I’ve ended up.

II: I feel that I have shifted over to a more centre-right perspective from a kind of centre-left perspective. It makes sense to me and I think it’s a case of a change in priorities. It’s not that what I believe in has changed at all. It’s just the order in which I think things need to happen has changed. I’m still a big fan of the welfare state, of a social safety net for people, but I think it’s more important to focus first on prosperity and wealth generation. Once you have enough wealth, then you can create your social safety net. That’s been the main reason for my shift rightwards. But the other thing is—and this goes to your point of it being very arbitrary—the Left has outlawed nuclear power in Australia, which is obviously a topic we’re not going to get into today. There’s nothing intrinsically right-wing about being pro-nuclear or intrinsically left-wing about being anti-nuclear. It’s just that I’m not able to support the Left whilst they are banning nuclear because again, I think the most important thing is prosperity. That comes first and prosperity has got to be underpinned by abundant energy, affordable energy.