After covering the siege of Sarajevo, the genocide in Rwanda, the invasion of Afghanistan, or the tensions in Iran, David Rieff (Boston, 1952) does not mince words. The son of Susan Sontag and sociologist Philip Rieff studied History at Princeton University and combines the depth of an academic with the agility of a journalist. He is not afraid of controversies, writing against dogmas and orthodoxies, whether they come from American universities, the technological tyranny of Silicon Valley gurus, or global humanitarian crises.
In 2017, he published his latest and forceful essay, not without controversy - In Praise of Forgetting (2017) - in which he questioned the cult of historical memory and warned about the instrumentalization of a past that can become a weapon of war, a way to deepen hatred. This fall, he returns with Desire and Destiny. The woke, the decline of culture, and the victory of kitsch (Taurus), a critical and somewhat apocalyptic manifesto because, for him, does a society in free fall intellectually and that despises high culture deserve to be saved? With a more quixotic than cynical humor, Rieff dissects the woke ideology (and fashion) with phrases like this: "The woke fantasy is a kind of infernal mix of Blake and Mao Zedong: the cult of experience fused with the cult of cultural revolution."
He also brings back our Miguel de Unamuno and his canonical The Tragic Sense of Life to recall the idea of an unshapable Truth that exists independently of the individual: "Truth is what it is and remains true even if thought of in reverse." A sentence as uncomfortable as Rieff's lucid and ironic jabs in an era of hypersensitive subjectivities due to the most ridiculous microaggressions and cancellations, from the purging of books in the name of a supposed "moral cleansing" (Roald Dahl's descriptions of "an enormously fat child" changed to "was enormous") to content warnings in universities (Northampton did it with the very dangerous 1984 by George Orwell, V for Vendetta by Alan Moore, or Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit by Jeanette Winterson). Rieff will be in Spain on the 14th for an event at the Hay Festival in Segovia, where he will discuss the evolution of the relationship between Europe and the United States and the current challenges of liberal democracies.
While writing Desire and Destiny, with a surgical analysis of the woke wave, Rieff has not stopped traveling to Ukraine, where he teaches part-time at the University of Kiev. "I started going shortly after the large-scale invasion by Russia. Now I spend a lot of time there, I would say almost 40%..." he says after two months in the country.
After returning from Kiev or a conflict zone, talking about 'wokism' almost seems superficial...
Wokeness is not the end of the world. It's not climate change. It's not Gaza. It's not Ukraine. But if you care about culture, Western high culture, and also the great cultural traditions of Asia, then you should be concerned about wokism. There used to be talk of an elite culture, until it became an insult. That culture exists today in Japan, China, and India. In the Arab world, it existed until the 18th century. But wokism is a deadly danger to high culture.
Your book reads like a requiem for the values of the Enlightenment and the Age of Enlightenment that shaped Western culture. Do you see the situation as apocalyptic?
I don't think I'm alone in thinking that Western high culture is glorious and should be honored, preserved, and continued. High culture is difficult. Most, not all... But it's easier to listen to Taylor Swift than Brahms. And by saying Brahms, I'm choosing an accessible composer... It's easier to read a manga than to read Thomas Mann. The problem is that people don't want to do that work. And now they have been given a moral justification. Wokeness is a kind of moral guarantee to get rid of anything that is culturally difficult: it offers commercial culture the legitimization of its mediocrity. When I go to a bookstore in New York and look at the novels on the front tables, almost all are autobiographies, mostly by non-white people talking about how this culture makes them feel bad. Art can turn inward, but you have to be a kind of genius, a Walt Whitman. In summary: the traditional idea of the arts was transcendence, while in wokeness representation is imposed, only aspiring to the condition of autobiography. The artifacts of Western past that were long presented as examples of the highest expressions of civilization are now seen as an increasing glorification of barbarism in its lowest expression.
You define 'wokeness' as a "cultural revolution" sweeping through much of the wealthy world. In 1993, you published an essay in 'Harper's' magazine where you described capitalism as a "commanding partner of multiculturalism." To what extent does capitalism go hand in hand with 'wokeness'?
Wokeness does not threaten capitalist economy because there is nothing in woke criticism that is serious. It destroys the symbolic order but leaves the economic one intact. It arises from the left and progressivism as a utopian narrative to celebrate diversity and end discrimination. Stated like that, who could oppose it? But it demonizes Western high culture while adopting total permissiveness towards class inequalities. It is intolerant of everything except capitalism. Capitalism benefits from the infinite segmentation of the market because manufacturing desires is more profitable than manufacturing automobiles... Corporations, whether Citibank, Santander, or an aerospace company, were able to assimilate wokeness because it did not threaten their bottom line or shareholder value. Despite the fact that most people in academic and cultural left imagine themselves as revolutionaries, they actually pose no threat to capitalism. I think they live under an illusion, not understanding that they are tolerated because they do not threaten the economic order.
Let me tell you an anecdote that surprised me. This summer, I needed a swimsuit for the pool and searched on Nike's website: 'swimsuit + women'. The result: only one swimsuit, five bikinis, and eight burkinis. With European brands, that 'market segmentation' is not as pronounced, not at this level...
What surprises me is that Nike still allows a Women's section [laughs ironically]. These things have entered popular culture in a very powerful way. Practically every ad for young people is an interracial couple, even in European countries with very little racial diversity. I don't think many Maghrebi immigrants in Spain buy a burkini from Nike, but it's about their virtue signaling. And that's the pernicious effect that reminds me a bit of Maoism, but without anyone being killed. You constantly have to affirm your vanguard and loyalty.
In 'wokeness,' you see certain ideas borrowed from communism, starting with neo-Marxist rhetoric. But it forgets the most important: class, capital, and labor. Have identities and minorities replaced the class struggle and workers' rights?
Wokeness has an interesting effect on the politics of developed countries. All social democratic parties have lost their working-class base, it happens in France, Spain, Germany... They have become parties of a certain progressive middle class. But identity politics is a way to continue considering themselves the moral party, even though they don't actually represent the workers. You can't say that Pedro Sánchez or the PSOE represent a factory worker in Murcia! You can hardly say that without laughing [indeed, laughs]. Wokeness serves as a moral justification to abandon the working class, whose members are often seen as barbaric, xenophobic, sexist, anti-trans, blah, blah, blah. In the 2016 presidential campaign, Hillary Clinton described Trump voters as 'deplorables.' She used it as a noun. And that's what Keith Starmer, Sánchez, Merz, and Schultz think... And they could pay the price.
You wrote this book in 2023, before Donald Trump's reelection. In a way, what you describe explains and predicts his victory...
In part, yes... All post-Protestant countries, as my father used to call them, are places where people easily go to extremes. So suddenly you go from a language without pronouns to a million pronouns, even mobile pronouns. Today you can ask to be addressed as 'he' and tomorrow as 'she.' Trump understood that people didn't agree with what precisely the Democratic elites supported. Part of the drama and defeat of Kamala Harris is that the elites can't understand why people don't want to listen to them anymore.
What happens when even a language is modified to create an inclusive language? In the case of Spanish, the RAE establishes that the grammatical masculine functions as inclusive and that the use of the letter 'e' as a supposed gender marker is foreign to the morphological system of our language...
I don't know how long the authority of the Spanish Academy will last. I mean, that depends on whether people use that language massively. In Argentina, the left has adopted inclusive language. And they don't say things that are unpronounceable in Spanish like 'Latinx,' only Hispanic Americans who no longer speak Spanish correctly could imagine that was the way to do it... In the English-speaking world, there is no academy that unifies language, and dictionaries like the Oxford one have long ceased to function as prescribers. The RAE or the Académie Française are institutions that act as barriers to the triumph of these things, which is nothing more than a debasement of language. But we don't know how everything will be in about 10 years...
You are very critical of the role of American universities, where 'wokeness' originated, and compare certain professors and ideologues of the movement to "intellectual Uber drivers"...
Wokeness was born in the United States because it is a completely self-absorbed country, giving narcissism a bad name. It quickly spread to English-speaking countries, but I fear it is increasingly taking hold in Europe and Latin America. American universities are run on a business model, with students as customers and diminishing weight for professors. American cultural hegemony, even when anti-American, remains very powerful. I mean, why does this literature professor in Berkeley become the most influential thinker on gender?
Are you referring to Judith Butler?
Exactly. How did that happen? I really think her work is one of the great frauds of our time. It's like phrenology! But American cultural hegemony still has a lot of influence, even when denouncing America, and all these clones of hers have appeared in Buenos Aires, Madrid, Paris...
In the 'wokeness' movement, you see the triumph of what you call a "therapeutic revolution" that completely distorts Freud's psychoanalysis. Has the Grand Inquisitor become the Grand Therapist?
The idea of trauma is ingrained in this society tormented by microaggressions and collective traumas of racial minorities. Wokeness is a product of the obsession with health and the confusion of physical health with psychic health: there is a certain idea that not expressing yourself is causing yourself physical harm. The new generations of the outraged are of an irascible fragility, their psychological health is endangered by a book or a movie... We live in times of social and moral hypochondria. One of the things that strikes me is that in wokeness there is a deep rejection of the idea of destiny. That's why I chose the title Desire and Destiny. Many people confuse their desire with their destiny. It's the belief that one's subjectivities, reactions, or feelings are much more important than any other measure and that you can completely reinvent yourself whenever you want. That's why trans becomes the ultimate wokeness stance: because it's the maximum subjectivity. I'm going to tell you a stupid joke from my high school days: a businessman comes home after a business trip and surprises his wife with a lover in bed; the wife looks at him and says, 'Who are you going to believe, me or your lying eyes?' The trans movement is like that: 'I still have a penis, but I am a woman.'
In his book, he highlights a chapter of just five lines in which he summarizes the most perverse of paradoxes: "We live in a society that forces you to consider yourself a victim or, failing that, an oppressor." Do you see the logic of the present as so reductionist?
I can't think of a more stupid way to see the world, but people are seduced by binary thinking. 'If you're not part of the solution, you're part of the problem' or that 'left brain and right brain' thing, which frustrates my neurologist friends, as if it were that simple... But it's an easy thought. There's a kind of deliberate naivety in wokeism. Regarding the idea of victim and oppressor... Anyone who has seen a war, even a refugee emergency, or spent time in a favela knows that victim and perpetrator roles change hands all the time. Today's victim is tomorrow's perpetrator. Something that is summed up in the conflict between Israel and Gaza.
He also analyzes the conclusions of the report on Democracy from the V-Dem laboratory at the University of Gothenburg. The data is devastating: in 2023, electoral autocracy represented 68% of the world's population (in the latest report of 2025, it's already at 72%). He goes on to write that in the future, the very term 'democracy' will become imprecise. Do you think that in 10 years we will have difficulties identifying a true democracy?
In China, there are elections... The concept of democracy is being emptied. I don't think democracy will formally disappear. But liberalism and social democracy can no longer respond to people's main challenges and concerns. It seems that representative democracy is not working, citizens don't feel represented, and that makes it very difficult to defend it... The autocratic solution is more persuasive, it presents itself as having those answers. And I wonder how long it will be before various masked forms of autocracy emerge. They will be of a different kind, not just landlords, industrialists, and kings. I'm not suggesting that we will see Mussolini's March on Rome, it won't be dramatic in that way. But simply our societies are becoming less democratic, in a very profound way. The V-Dem report is probably an indicator of the future. Just look at Trump, Meloni, Milei... Democracy would have to reimagine itself. And I don't see world leaders capable of doing that.