“Peak Woke”

The occasion this month of the mockumentary The Office celebrating the 25th anniversary of its first appearance on television, an anniversary marked by a couple of actual documentaries, will have prompted some to revisit the comedy, or watch it for the first time.

Many who have done so will have inevitably asked themselves the same question: why did television comedy used to be so funny, and why is that not the case anymore? It’s not a conclusion that will be confined to us old timers: it’s said that there is vogue for all things turn-of-the-millennium among generations Y and Z.

Seeking to counter what it called a decade-long “revisionist movement” to “rewrite our Nation’s history,” the Trump administration issued Executive Order 14253 on March 27, 2025, directing federal officials to review Smithsonian exhibits and programs for ideological content.  Pursuant to that order, the White House Domestic Policy Council released a report, “Saving America’s Story,” on America’s 250th anniversary of Independence Day arguing that the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of American History has strayed from its core public mission: telling America’s story with honesty, seriousness, and civic pride.

COTTONWOOD, Arizona — In something like its current usage, the term “woke” originated a century ago among African Americans in reference to awareness of racial prejudice. More recently, it came to embody modern identitarian progressive ideology — and then quickly became shorthand in the U.S. for leftist excess. Americans’ long exposure to battles over identity and our insistence on treating people as individuals may have granted us strong immunity to a toxic political movement our country spawned. While wokeness is, at its core, an American innovation and export, the movement is in retreat across most of American society.

It was once the jewel in the tarnished crown of the BBC – remember those Christmas idents of 2009, when David Tennant charmed a devoted nation with his reindeer-drawn TARDIS? But this week, the BBC announced that not even its heralded ‘festive special’ would go ahead. As it stands, the show’s future looks uncertain, with the BBC reported to be inviting production companies to pitch for a role potentially co-producing a new series.

Albert Einstein wrote the following in a letter to his son in the 1950s about American politics: “There’s something amazing about America’s democracy, it’s got a gyroscope, and just when you think it’s going to go off the cliff, it rights itself.”

Some 70 years later, we see that gyroscope is once again at work.