Tyler Cowen: Wokeness Has Peaked. What Followed Is Worse.
Tyler Cowen argues that the peak of wokeism occurred around 2022, a claim that faced skepticism at the time. By 2026, he observes a shift in political dynamics, with a notable increase in political violence and a retreat from progressive policies in universities. The media landscape has also shifted rightward, reflecting broader changes in societal attitudes.
- ▪Cowen suggested in early 2022 that wokeism had peaked, which was met with skepticism.
- ▪As of May 2026, he believes his prediction holds true, with a Republican trifecta in government.
- ▪Universities have retreated from cancel culture and DEI initiatives since the peak of wokeism.
3 outlets in our directory ran this story, first to last over 12 hours. All of the coverage we found sits in one bucket: lean right. That one-sidedness is itself worth noticing.
- ▪ Tyler Cowen: Wokeness Has Peaked. What Followed Is Worse. Plus. . . — The Free Press
- ▪ “Wokeness has peaked. What followed is worse.” — Marginal Revolution
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| Original publisher | The Free Press (Substack) |
| Canonical URL | https://www.thefp.com/p/tyler-cowen-wokeness-has-peaked-what-followed-is-worse |
| Publication time | Mon, 18 May 2026 21:57:20 GMT |
| Retrieval time | 2026-05-18T22:04:56.986Z |
| Last seen | 2026-05-18T22:04:56.986Z |
| Headline source | Publisher (no WeSearch rewrite) |
| Excerpt source | publisher body |
| Excerpt method | First ~120 words (~800 chars) of extracted publisher body, fair-use limited. |
| Summary | WeSearch · cerebras-chat (WeSearch summarizer) |
| Summary source text | contentText |
| Citation coverage | Summary is a WeSearch-generated derivative; primary citation is the original publisher URL. |
| Cluster | ZE8nelOploi- · 3 stories |
| Cluster logic | Grouped by semantic title/content similarity across sources within a rolling window. Same-publisher template collisions are excluded from coverage comparison. |
| Ranking reason | Story pages are not engagement-ranked. Hub feeds use recency, with optional source-diversified chronological ordering (cap consecutive stories per source). No personalized ranking. |
| Publisher visit | Yes — open original |
| Substitutes article? | No — link-out required for full text |
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| Indexing | May the item be indexed (stored, ranked, made findable)? | Allowed |
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| AI summary | May WeSearch generate its own short summary of the article? | Limited |
| Retrieval / RAG | May the content be exposed for third-party retrieval-augmented generation? | Not asserted |
| Model training | May the content be used to train AI models? | Not asserted |
| Commercial reuse | May the content be reused commercially? | Not permitted |
Basis: Derived from the published RSS/Atom feed. Contact: [email protected]. Reviewed: 2026-07-24.
Opening excerpt (first ~120 words) tap to expand
Tyler Cowen: Wokeness Has Peaked. What Followed Is Worse.(Illustration by The Free Press; images via Getty)Today’s wave of political violence reveals how much of the left has shifted from shaming its opponents to taking more overt action.By Tyler Cowen05.18.26 — U.S. PoliticsFOLLOW COLUMN --:----:--Upgrade to Listen5 minsProduced by ElevenLabs using AI narration22Early in 2022, I argued that wokeism had peaked. At the time, that suggestion was met with a mix of skepticism and hostility, as wokeism still seemed to be rising to many people. Corporate boards were still adopting racial equity audits, for example, and young employees were pressuring companies to adopt progressive stances.But if we fast-forward to May 2026, my prediction seems pretty good.
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