The Destructivists
14th June 2026
In February 2022, Tyler Cowen made a prediction that sounded premature to many people: wokeism had peaked. At the time, this seemed far from obvious. The elite institutions most associated with wokeness as a kind of new moral politics—universities, media organisations, nonprofits, foundations, publishing houses, museums, professional associations, and large corporations—still seemed firmly under its grip. DEI bureaucracies were still expanding. “Cancellations” still carried real social and professional force. Corporate America still spoke the language of “equity” with missionary confidence.
In Cowen’s original 2022 formulation, he suggested that the movement would survive as a subculture: educated, affluent, disproportionately white, and institutionally influential. But no longer commanding the country’s morality. The pendulum, he thought, had begun to swing. School-board revolts, growing impatience with cancellations, the backlash to progressive overreach and lawlessness in cities like San Francisco and Los Angeles, and the sheer unattractiveness of the movement’s cultural style all suggested that wokeism had passed its high-water mark.