Author: Chris Kremidas-Courtney
When America’s Far Right Speaks Through Europe’s Center
The latest for Our Kindred Future. A big thanks to Sorcha Ní Fhaoláin (Sorcha Rosa) and Nadya for helping me finish this one!
Frequently people in Brussels will sigh and say something like, “I’m tired of all this woke nonsense.” They say it with annoyance rather than malice, the way one might talk about bureaucracy or bad weather. But when I listen to them, I realize they are repeating the same talking points I’ve heard for years from the American far right: that “woke” means censorship, fragility, and moral policing. Its always strange and a little chilling since none of these people have ever voiced support far right causes. And yet, somewhere along the way, a word that meant awareness and empathy has been turned into a cultural epithet and then sent across the Atlantic.
The term woke was born from the African American community as an appeal to stay awake to injustice. To “stay woke” meant to stay alert and not look away from racism and inequality. But over the past decade, American conservatives weaponized the word, stripping it of its moral depth and turning it into shorthand for everything they find threatening about social change. As the historian Barbara J. Fields once said of racism itself, “ideology is what makes social relations seem natural.” The reframing of “woke” performs that trick by making awareness and social justice seem extreme.
As Professor Bart Cammaerts observes, this rhetorical inversion is part of a what he calls “social justice abnormalization,” a process through which calls for equality are pathologized as extremism while achieving a “re-normalization of racist and fascist ideologies.”
What’s troubling is how easily this framing has seeped into European discourse. Various scholars and writers have traced how European commentators, especially on the right, but increasingly in the center – have adopted “anti-woke” rhetoric to describe everything from gender-inclusive language to climate activism. In France, le wokisme represents a national anxiety that is blamed for corroding “universalism.” In Germany, the Alternative für Deutschland rails against “woke ideology” to defend “traditional values” and the center-right Christian Democratic Union has echoed their messaging. In the UK, Spain, Greece, and parts of central and eastern Europe, mainstream politicians invoke “anti-woke” crusades to assert cultural sovereignty against what they portray as imported Western moral decay.
This diffusion mirrors what Cammaerts calls the “abnormalization” of social justice, the subtle transformation of progressive ideals into signs of irrationality. When European centrists describe gender inclusivity or anti-racist education as too woke, they are, in effect, participating in the same shift that marks compassion as excess.
In each case, the word functions as a mirror on what they fear most – the loss of racial and cultural hegemony. This fear gets projected onto a word that originally embodied attentiveness to injustice, solidarity, and inclusion. Hungarian scholar Angéla Kóczé calls this a “dual attack on social justice”: first, delegitimize the language of awareness, then dismiss movements promoting human rights.
The pattern reveals something uncomfortable about Europe’s relationship with American culture wars. For decades, Europe has prided itself on being immune to America’s extremes of guns, populism or performative outrage. But language is porous. Terms like “cancel culture,” “identity politics,” and “woke” migrate through European headlines and social media, shedding their context and gaining new life in our own debates. They offer politicians and pundits a ready-made script for moral panic without the effort of understanding.
Nowhere is this more visible than in France, where le wokisme has become shorthand for everything supposedly wrong with modern discourse. Former education minister Jean-Michel Blanquer launched an official “Laboratory of the Republic” to fight it, warning that “wokism divides and destroys.” What began in the US as a backlash against racial justice was thus reborn in Paris as a defense of republican universalism. In the process, American far-right rhetoric was repackaged as centrist respectability by translating “anti-woke” into the idiom of Enlightenment reason and secular virtue. French scholars like Mame-Fatou Niang and Laurent Dubreuil have called this a “panic against pluralism,” a way to silence uncomfortable questions about race, gender, and colonial history under the guise of intellectual balance. When the language of inclusion is reframed as a threat to reason, modern European values themselves become suspect.
The same pattern is visible in the spread of the phrase “gender ideology.” Like “woke,” it began as a far-right talking point in the United States, coined by Christian conservatives in the 1990s to attack feminism, reproductive rights, and LGBTQIA+ equality. Through networks such as the World Congress of Families and Alliance Defending Freedom, the term migrated into Europe—first through religious groups, then into the vocabulary of mainstream politics. By the 2010s, “gender ideology” had become a European code word for discomfort with social change: invoked in Poland and Hungary to defend “traditional values,” in Italy to oppose same-sex marriage, and in France to warn of an “Anglo-Saxon cultural invasion.” Scholars like Agnieszka Graff and Elżbieta Korolczuk have shown how this American-born panic was rebranded as a defense of European identity, allowing far-right narratives to pass as centrism. The mechanism is identical: fear of pluralism disguised as cultural common sense. And at its core, the term performs a familiar sleight of hand by reframing people seeking equal rights as if they were advancing a radical political doctrine, turning a straightforward quest for human-rights into an invented threat.
What’s most striking is not the politicians who weaponize the term but the moderates who adopt it unknowingly. When thoughtful Europeans start calling things “too woke,” they are often not reacting to the substance of progressive change but to the accusations of the discourse around it, the tone, excess, and fatigue of constant correction. But the language they borrow has a history of being used to discredit social justice.
To call someone “woke” in the American right-wing sense is to accuse them of caring too much and seeing injustice where others see “order.” When that logic takes root in Europe, it risks undermining the EU’s main strengths: its moral imagination and quest for social inclusion. The construction of the EU itself was driven by a refusal to sleepwalk back into brutality – an act of wokeness if there ever was one. Its human-rights frameworks, social safety nets, and slow but real progress on inclusion all come from people who stayed awake to the pain of others.
The European far right understands this, which is why they have eagerly imported the “anti-woke” label. They know that if you can make compassion sound naïve, you can make cruelty look pragmatic. Once the moral vocabulary of awareness becomes suspect, what follows is disdain for minorities and migrants, nostalgia for “traditional values,” and the slow normalization of exclusion.
What we are witnessing is ideological laundering. Rhetoric that begins on the American far right arrives in Europe and is repackaged as centrism; polished, polite, and ostensibly reasonable. When European commentators borrow these perspectives, they take on not the substance of American debates but their fear. And fear dressed as moderation is the most persuasive form of extremism.
The word “woke” has become a convenient strawman, emptied of its original meaning and refilled with whatever anxieties its critics wish to fight. By railing against “wokeness,” politicians and pundits can point toward a threat without defining it, collapsing diverse movements for justice into a single caricature.
The mythology travels too. American right wing pundits love to speak of professors, journalists, and workers being “”cancelled” or fired due to “woke ideology,” yet even in the United States those stories rely more on sound bites than facts. In Europe, the same trope now circulates through talk shows and op-eds as if it were evidence of a spreading tyranny of sensitivity. It’s not evidence at all but an imported narrative designed to keep us fighting shadows instead of addressing flawed systems.
We can also anticipate the next far right phrase soon to arrive to our shores; “toxic empathy.” On the US right, voices such as Allie Beth Stuckey now argue that Christian empathy has been “weaponized” as a mechanism to discipline and silence dissenters under the banner of compassion. The same way “woke” arrived in Europe repackaged as a political virus, “toxic empathy” is poised to follow, leading to not only discrediting social justice movements but redefining the meaning of Christian compassion.
To see “woke” dismissed in European cafés and news programs as if it were merely excess sensitivity is to observe how the machinery of cultural backlash goes global. It shows how a Union that prides itself on protecting human rights can become an echo chamber for imported narratives that run counter to its stated values. The challenge for Europe is to recognize when language is being twisted to tilt the scales against human rights and choose to reject it.
Staying awake means noticing that drift and refusing to let borrowed cynicism define our moral common ground.Tagged america, Democracy, Europe, gender, social justice, united states, values, woke
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