How This Woke Mess Happened

With most conservative parties split between populist and establishment wings, and with the West challenged in ways not seen in almost a century, John O’Sullivan’s Sleepwalking into Wokeness: How We Got Here‘s collection of essays is both timely and instructive. Indeed, there are few better placed to reflect on the travails of the Anglosphere than O’Sullivan, who has been a key conservative intellectual for over four decades. He was Margaret Thatcher’s speech writer at the time of her Bruges oration that marked the beginning of a credible Brexit movement. In America, he edited National Review for a decade. In Canada, he helped to found the National Post newspaper. And in Australia he edited Quadrant for two years. He now runs the Danube Institute in Budapest (where I am a visiting fellow), a think-tank bringing conservative perspectives to economic, social and strategic issues; striving, in particular, to reconcile economic liberalism with social conservatism in ways that “unite the right”.