It’s time to give the diversitycrats their marching orders: In 2023, we need to wrest back our institutions from all those intersectional activists.

Most people trace the origins of the current ‘Great Awokening’ to roughly around 2013, meaning we’ll be celebrating its 10th anniversary this year. One reason for thinking it might be peaking is that its growth has been accelerated by social media and – presumably – its decline will be, too. Twitter, in particular, has been one of the chief platforms for promoting woke ideology, as well as for punishing those who dissent from it, and that is bound to change now that Rocket Man Elon Musk is in charge.

The woke cult’s appeal is partly rooted in the idea that it is of a piece with the Zeitgeist, that the woke are ‘on the right side of history’, and that those resisting it will inevitably end up looking foolish and out of date.

Fortunately, there were signs in 2022 that being woke is no longer as ‘on trend’ as it was, and that could be a serious blow to its authority. Take, for instance, the fact that the unashamedly patriotic Top Gun: Maverick was the highest-grossing film of the year, beating out an endless stream of woke offerings. Once the victory of the social-justice warriors ceases to look historically inevitable, many of the less committed will fall by the wayside.

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However, there is one further source of hope – the terrible state of the world’s economy as a result of the disastrous lockdowns. The silver lining to the West’s mismanagement of the global pandemic is that we soon won’t be able to afford all this virtue-signalling. The armies of diversitycrats employed by the public sector – the mean salary of an EDI officer is £42,700 – will have to be given their marching orders. All that money multinational corporations spend on ESG (environmental, social and governance metrics) will have to be cut back. What’s more, Hollywood won’t be able to make any more politically correct, box-office disasters like The Warrior Queen, Lightyear or Bros. Straitened financial circumstances will mean few companies can afford to go woke without going broke.

So, on balance, I’m optimistic about 2023. There may not be a Berlin Wall moment to break the woke spell, but the feeling of unstoppable momentum surrounding this toxic movement is beginning to fade. And even if it doesn’t run out of steam, it’s rapidly running out of money.