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What Do Brexit, DEI, and Wokeness Have in Common?

Dear Republic,

Closing out our series on the value of public philosophy is Robin McKenna with a breakdown of the usefulness of philosophy when confronted with polarization and politicization. Two issues that bear on the present day, to say the least.

- ROL

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I started studying philosophy in a windy town on the east coast of Scotland in 2004. While I was interested in politics—mostly the Iraq war and Scottish independence—I didn’t see much of a connection between politics and what I was studying. There was a lot of ethics and some political philosophy. But this was too historically distant or at too high a level of abstraction to relate to any of my political interests. Philosophy, or so it seemed to me, did not concern itself with such parochial matters as an ill-fated war, or the struggles of national self-affirmation of a nation that had, on the whole, done well out of its marriage of convenience to a larger neighbor.

Fast forward to 2016. Brexit had happened, Trump had been elected, and you couldn’t move for philosophers talking about politics. Everyone was very agitated about fake news and misinformation. Philosophers of language were identifying subtle dog whistles in political rhetoric and rediscovering old worries about propaganda. While it was never quite clear what exactly the problem was meant to be, there was the prevailing sense that something had gone wrong with our politics. Had we given up on truth? Had the post-modernists (or the Russians) taken over? What was going on?

It is now 2026 and not that much has changed. At least, not much has changed when it comes to the attempts of academics to make sense of all this. On the plus side, there has been the opportunity, even for philosophers, to get large amounts of grant money to study things like the “crisis of knowledge” and the prospects for knowledge “in the age of distrust”.

On the other hand, the political developments that the academics studying these things—and the bodies funding them to do it—are worried about continue apace. Trump is back in the White House and waging war on the universities and institutional science. Populist right parties are making similar moves in Europe. If Reform have a majority in the next UK parliament, we can expect a full-frontal assault on UK universities. Given how dependent UK universities are on central government, a Reform government would be perfectly capable of razing the whole thing to the ground if they wanted to.

The key knowledge institutions, in particular universities, are sites of political battles. They have become politicized. The question of how this has happened is itself a matter of intense political debate. One side says that these institutions have done this to themselves: DEI (or EDI), the pandemic, the attack on western values, and so on. The other side (let’s pretend there are only two sides) says that they are only pawns in a political game, unwilling participants in a culture war started by far right and populist politicians. There is some truth in both narratives, but the fact that each narrative seems custom-built to satisfy the assumptions of the kind of person who pushes it should make us pause, as should the crudeness of these narratives, both of which share the impulse of simplistic social theory to reduce complicated events to single causes.

What can philosophy—or a philosopher—contribute to any of this? The obvious answer is a plea for some nuance, some acknowledgement that nothing is ever as simple as this. This is all very well; you can never go far wrong if your stance is just that everything is more complicated than we think. But surely something more can be said.

One possibility is to take the politicization of our knowledge institutions as read and play the part of the political activist. The result is the activist academic, whose academic research is in service of their political activism. I’m not sure what good it does to bemoan the fact that some academics take this route. It’s a standing temptation to anyone who surveys the wreckage of academia in the 21^st century and concludes their interests are best served by making a name for themselves outside of the academy. This is understandable behavior—a rational response to incentives one might wish did not exist—though it is liable to prompt a vitriolic response, especially from those who might wish they had more of a talent for self-promotion.

It is however hard to justify this approach on principled grounds. This leaves the second possibility, which is to try and take a step back. But someone who wants to take that step back is immediately faced with a problem. Once something—an institution, but also a topic or debate—becomes politicized it is difficult to do anything with it that is not interpreted as a move in the political game. The call to depoliticize may be interpreted as an attempt to return to some real or imagined status quo. Even the attempt to try and understand how something became politicized might be interpreted as an acknowledgement that there is a genuine problem with it.

Perhaps the only way to avoid this kind of misinterpretation entirely is to step outside the arena, to simply give up and resign oneself to going with the flow, wherever that might take you. But that is not just to refuse to adopt the role of political activist but to refuse to be any sort of actor.

One difficulty with understanding politicization is that it inherits the problem of defining “the political”. A neutral definition of politicization that avoids these pitfalls would be something like this: to politicize something is to bring it more fully into the domain of political concern, however that domain is understood. According to this definition, politicization is not always or even typically a matter of making something political for the first time, but rather of drawing it into the political contests and categories of the present moment. This can be a good thing—the politicization of institutions and practices that we can all recognize as bad, such as slavery, may have been a first step towards the abolition of these practices.

Politicization is however often a bad thing. It is particularly bad when framing a valuable practice or institution in the language of our political categories imposes constraints on how we think about it that derive their authority from political considerations rather than from fidelity to the thing’s own native logic. It may be that there is no way of fully isolating any practice or institution from politics. But there’s a difference between acknowledging that there is a sense in which almost any practice or institution is political and embracing the wholesale capture of that practice or institution by political considerations.

When scientific research becomes politicized in this sense, scholarship becomes subservient to political ends; it is only interpretable in terms of its political implications. This may manifest in a tendency towards homogeneity, as when only a narrow set of political implications is deemed acceptable: scholarship must fit with this political ideology, it must not support political conclusions that are unpalatable by the lights of that ideology. But it may also manifest in a tendency to flatten diversity, as when a diverse field of research is interpreted in such a way that any position within it must be seen as vindicating or debunking one of our standard packages of political views.

While politicization is related to polarization, they are quite different things. Polarization always requires a degree of diversity of thought—there must be at least two poles—but, in a politicized environment, that diversity is then filtered through the simplified schemas provided by the standard political categories associated with each pole. The result is not diversity of thought or perspective at all, but a simple reflection of the assumptions and commonplaces around which political discourse is structured. Every position, every stance must be coded as left or right, as liberal or conservative.

Politicization however is also possible in situations where diversity is prohibited. At its extreme, we can imagine a society where vast swathes of life are politicized—ordinary interactions, common forms of address—in ways that admit no diversity at all. Václav Havel’s famous essay “The Power of the Powerless” is, among other things, an insightful reflection on what might still be possible under these sorts of conditions. For Havel, in a post-totalitarian regime, where myriad aspects of everyday life are shot through with political significance, the only “space” for maneuver is in what he calls the “pre-political” realm—the realm of “the real aims of life.”

Havel’s pre-political realm is only outside of politics in the sense that, at least for a time, it exists outside the standard political categories and interpretations. The pre-political can become political, either because it comes to be understood as a threat to the existing political order, or because it becomes the source of a new political movement. The point, for Havel, is that it is a space where creativity is possible—ways of thinking, ways of acting that are not readily interpreted via the standard political categories of the day.

This insight is relevant outside of the specific context of Havel’s writing. We don’t face the same enforced homogeneity he did—a kind of diversity is permitted. But it is a fake sort of diversity—a diversity that primarily expresses itself in an oppositional mode, as a rejection of censorship, of DEI, of “wokeness”. If we want to create space for genuine diversity of thought, we need to look to sources of creativity that have not yet been captured by the crude logic of contemporary politics.

The question is what this might look like in philosophy. Anyone with a passing familiarity with contemporary philosophy will know that a lot of it does not do this. There’s a kind of philosopher who sets themselves the task of translating the typical politics of a humanities academic—left, but more focused on cultural issues than anything else—into the language of analytic philosophy (doxastic wronging, epistemic injustice, illocutionary silencing, constitutive social construction).

But I still think that, at its best, philosophy can provide a set of tools for transcending the politics of the day. An excellent case in point is Alexander Douglas’s recent book Against Identity, which is a provocative and to my mind compelling attack on the identitarian spirit of the modern world. Crucially, it is not a crude attack on the shibboleths of modern identity politics but an assault on identity per se. This is, of course, to go against the idea that you can define yourself by your membership in a marginalized social identity group. But it is also to go against the idea that you can define yourself by your nationality, your race, or any other accident of birth. In fact, it goes against one of the central animating narratives of modern life—the idea that there is a true self waiting to be discovered, that the task of a life is to find out who you really are or to liberate your “true self”. This is the stock message of almost every recent Disney film, the Bildungsroman genre, the hero’s journey.

Douglas’s claim is that this is a mistake. When you go looking for who you really are, all you find is a jumbled mess. The role that the usual markers of identity play is in giving a false appearance of some unity amongst this mess. We assemble our identities out of whatever materials we have to hand, but we are never satisfied with the result; upon closer examination something always seems to have gone missing, with the result that we are never satisfied. Better, Douglas thinks, to give up the quest and live in the moment, in the jumbled and contradictory mess of impressions that refuse to congeal into a unified self.

Perhaps this sounds a bit extreme; is there really no such thing as me, have I no fixed self? Whatever you make of it, though, it is an interesting possibility to consider. It’s certainly more interesting than obsessing over the minutiae of modern identity politics.

Robin McKenna is a Senior Lecturer in Philosophy at the University of Liverpool and a Senior Research Associate at the University of Johannesburg. He is interested in the politics of knowledge, the psychology of belief formation, and the ways in which our beliefs are shaped by social and cultural forces. His first book, Non-Ideal Epistemology, was published by Oxford University Press in 2023. You can find information about his academic work at robinmckenna.weekly.com. You can also find him at X/Twitter and Bluesky.