but, um, no. there will be no collective moratoriums, and no collective agreements either.
that’s why freddie keeps writing variations on this same post -- nobody ever agrees on anything -- because politics, as practiced and understood via the lobotomizing transom of social media platforms, is a do-nothing culture war hellscape, an endless left to right see-saw of meaningless symbolism teetering from hysterical personal grievance to feverish moral outrage. all while the world burns and our political leaders either do nothing to materially improve average peoples’ lives, or actively attempt to make them worse.
it’s all cringe, all the time. every word, every idea, every post. cringe and more cringe. it’s an infinite all-you-can-eat eternal cringe buffet.
I can't support this. As a white girl from Idaho who uses "y'all" in writing, it's just a simple fact that the english language doesn't have a better word to use than "y'all" in the settings it is used. You'll pry it out of my cold, dead... mouth?
"You guys" is two words but it's way better. I can not bring myself to say "y'all" with a straight face. And no, you guys is not gendered! I'm a guy, he's a guy, she's a guy, cuz we're all guys!
I'm from South Carolina but I live in Pittsburgh. I gave up on y'all once the woke captured it and just use yinz now. Thank god Duke's mayonnaise isn't woke. I can't give that up.
It's ridiculous that this is an essential point, because it means the common understanding of the practical understanding of politics has degraded to this point, but you're absolutely on point here, Freddie. We shouldn't have to have this reminder, and yet, here we are.
Since you last posted on this topic, I’ve been working on a definition that I post any time someone says “you can’t even define what woke means”. Then I update it based on the responses/discussion”
I’d love to hear what people here think.
Here is my current long version:
“A morally absolute political ideology focused on ”experienced” oppression based primarily on exclusionary group identification (such as race, gender, ability, etc). These precepts are presented as self-righteous demands that must be treated as self-evident, universally true and mandatory no matter how internally inconsistent or counter-productive they may be in practice. The promotion of these ideas (and any perceived or derived concepts from those ideas) supersedes any fundamental individual civil rights such as freedom of speech and any expression of contradictory personal religious or moral beliefs. Failure to comply is punished by social exclusion and expulsion from employment.”
Why can’t it be both? And I’m trying to be complete here not “grandeloquent.” And if people who believe in it claim it doesn’t exit, why shouldn’t I get to challenge them on that?
Is this... actually what you use? Are you able to define "wokeness" in a way that anyone who self-identifies as "woke" would recognize as their own beliefs?
I think there's substantial doubt about whether wokesters will ever concede to any definition of the movement. Hence the two articles from deBoer specifically addressing the constant drumbeat of "If wokeness is real what is it?"
I mean, I'd still like to see you take a stab at a definition for wokeness that doesn't define it as inherently bad. Like, the idea that wokeist demands "must be treated as self-evident" is preposterous to me; the entire body of scholarly, research, and advocacy work on racism and sexism suggests that finding and presenting evidence is a significant part of the woke project.
My test for wokeness comes down to one question: "Do you think the KKK/American Nazi Party/Black Panther/BLM/whatever has the right to hold marches and organize rallies?"
Anybody who answers "No" to that question is more than likely woke, regardless of whether or not the group they have an objection to is the KKK or BLM.
Wokeness is inherently bad because opposition to free speech is a step down a slippery slope to terrible outcomes.
Redefining "woke" as "anyone who opposes the free speech of parties they consider dangerous" is not especially useful given that _everyone_ associates wokism with social justice politics and the left. Better to call it "free speech illiberalism" or somesuch and consider wokism a subset of that, rather than expanding it to include right-wing perspectives.
Remember, the point of defining things is to be well-understood. Your definition makes you harder, not easier, to understand because you're ignoring connotations.
My point is that the original impulse is salutary but the means are not. At the end of the day the woke are a tiny minority in this country and their views are extremely unpopular with an overwhelming majority of the population. Fighting racism is actually something that most Americans support so why should woke politics be so unpopular?
It's comparable to the phenomenon where woke activists tried to define political correctness as "not being an asshole". That is something that a majority of the population agrees with: shouldn't they support political correctness? The answer is of course not and cheap rhetorical tricks aren't going to gaslight anybody into mistakenly endorsing tactics and a philosophy that they have deep disagreements with.
Finally, I would point out that it's not leftists who are holding "free speech" political rallies.
My main issue is that all that research and advocacy seems to be in service of proving a predetermined conclusion no matter what the material outcome. There is very little interest that I've seen in challenging those core beliefs because it splinters the ideology and undermines the self-righteousness that is at the core of the modern movement.
Based on the low quality and lousy replication record of that body of work, the more parsimonious suggestion that actual evidence isn't the point - having the simulacum of evidence that can be pointed to in order to comfort the doubting and convince the lazy and/or uncritical, is.
I have a shorter version based on this that I post most often.
And I have yet to meet a wokist who is willing to publicly define their beliefs. As Freddie pointed out in a previous post, pretending the ideology isn’t an ideology is part of the game.
When people complain I usually respond with something along the lines of “if you aren’t willing to define your own beliefs you don’t get to be upset if someone does it for you.”
I find it hard to believe that no one has ever defined wokeism for you. Just today, with the Bethany business, I saw dozens of people defining it, and many used a straightforward dictionary definition: "aware of and actively attentive to important societal facts and issues (especially issues of racial and social justice)". That seems fine to me, as a Wokeist
I'm trying to answer your call, but first: in that sentence, what does "social justice" mean and what does "attentive to" mean?
It often seems to be the case that "woke" refers to ideas held by two different groups of people with two different attitudes about what those ideas demand: first, a broader, expansive version that merely involves "attentiveness" and another one that people tend to dislike that requires much more aggressive action.
That elides a considerable range of opinions. An Asian American suing Harvard because of racial discrimination may be acutely aware of racial issues but in a manner that will put him at odds with most wokeist philosophy.
That's a non-definition. That's like defining Christianity as "religion" or bread as "matter." It's a total dodge. The definition rests, 100% entirely, on what those important societal facts and issues are. By this definition you provide, the most virulent KKK member in history - the most racist, the most anti-Catholic, the meanest - is also the wokest.
So what does "social justice" mean? And is it possible to be attentive to it and still be, say, anti-affirmative action? To think that affirmative action makes our society *less* just? It seems like "social justice" and "attentive" are doing a heck of a lot of work here.
Identity is the central source and instrument of political conflict where "identity" refers to a group of traits that drive social inclusion and exclusion, especially sexuality, sex, gender, race/ethnicity, and ability. For almost all of recent history, normative ideas about those traits have privileged cisgender, heterosexual, abled white men, producing gross disparities in political and material outcomes that characterize modern life.
It is important to address this by challenging these normative ideas at every level, including the language we use, which not only reinforces, but in a very real sense creates these disparties because they constitute our ideas of what is neutral or default. All western institutions and standards have been shaped by these normative forces, and consequently they are all under suspicion: from the police to our system of education to concepts like free speech, due process, and equality before the law, all of which reinforce the hierarchies that immiserate those outside the normative core.
I think the position I outlined includes accurate observations, but is damaged by half-truths, lacks perspective, and embraces a defective theory of representation, but I would much rather discuss it on those grounds than rail against straw men.
My definition is trying to find a common-ground consensus that could narrow the gap between the right- and left-wing uses of "woke" * but I feel a bit bad laying it out, because I take Freddie's point to be quite different. Instead of asking "what does woke mean?" Freddie asks "can we please not pretend like a political movement espousing an especially obnoxious version of (what I described above) doesn't exist?"
It's true that many people that hold milder opinions also think of themselves as "woke" and it's also true that American conservative activists realize they can damage almost anything by lumping it in with this un-nameable, unpopular thing. But the group exists, and they are not just on Twitter: they are, at a minimum, represented in all our elite hegemonic institutions (universities, nonprofits, journals, NGOs), and in most cases have decisive influence in those institutions.
* Edit - I realize that the marked sentence reinforces the dumb simplification of American politics into left- and right-wings. Yes, partisans on the left and the right use "woke" differently, but I think Freddie's version has a real constituency (as would a slightly harsher version of mine), which is people alienated by current partisan alignments.
Right? I certainly don't agree with many aspects of the ideology, but there is a quasi-coherent idea there, and even Freddie is defining wokeism by its negative characteristics rather than engaging with it.
It'd be kind of nice if more people "steelmanned" it rather than taking easy shots at the worst aspects; that doesn't move the ball forward at all.
You make me think about a quip I've often heard (and used) to the effect that 'They call it class warfare when the poor fight back.' Maybe there's a parallel, in that we call it wokeness when people who've been slotted into an identity that's viewed as different in important ways embrace it, and insist that their different perspectives be treated as important.
On the one hand it's completely fair -- goose, meet gander -- and on the other hand, it implicitly accepts the previous situation (the beggars have changed places, but the lash goes on).
I've had plenty define it: "don't be a douche," or "it's being a good person." They are sneaking their politics in as the definition of "good" or "not being a douche." Nice branding, but ultimately non-responsive.
Thankfully this is one battle the woke lost definitively. Now when I contrast my liberal views with wokery everyone knows what I'm talking about. That was the outcome they were desperate to avoid, and succeeded in avoiding for most of the past decade.
But they're still winning. That is, they are winning control of the academy, of the bureaucracy, and increasingly of the economy. I'm sure they can handle losing an internet argument here and there.
I think the link to Calvinism is smart. It seems increasingly that those who are committed to social justice politics seem to have some existential fear that they might be, in truth, bad people, but that they cannot even know if they are. So they then constantly self-monitor, examining themselves for the smallest sign of "evil" and exhort others to do the same. And as with some issues with predestination, wherein one's outward acts of goodness are a kind of evidence of their salvation and internal communion with god, so too do the woke feel the need to display the outward signs that they are not racist, not bad people. I can't remember if McWhorter's piece on The Elect was explicit about this connection, but if it wasn't, it fits right in.
Replace "white privilege" with "Original sin" and you have it. Except that the woke haven't even come up with Social Justice Jesus to deliver us from our racism.
Right, which is one reason we get all these weird self-flagellating apologies and they are just never enough: apologies are something you give when you've made a mistake. You can't apologize when you didn't make a mistake; you revealed your evil nature, and there's no salvation.
Which honestly scares me. I care about social justice, but it's too easy to fall victim to paranoid readings. And I'm not going to give up my principle cause a few wannabe leftists were mean to me; been on the right, and that's a moral shithole.
On 2) and especially 3), I have lately been developing the notion that "wokeness" is a fundamentally neoliberal response to the problem of social injustice. Undergirding the philosophy of neoliberalism is a sort of hyper-individualism, and I think we see that manifest in wokeness. There's an acknowledgment of social problems like racism and sexism and etc, but because neoliberalism fundamentally abhors any kind of collective solution you get what we have. That this "solution" is accompanied by a whole lot of great market opportunities for DEI consultants & allows large organizations to pay their way into virtue is not a coincidence. Likewise it is not a coincidence that threatening individuals' labor income is one of the primary tactics to enforce compliance.
I want to thank you for providing a good working definition of neoliberalism, since commenters here (and elsewhere) tend to use it to mean "things I don't like and why I'm sad."
It's certainly not a novel observation on my part! The whole idea of neoliberalism is subjecting as much of human life as possible to the discipline of (unregulated) markets, and the defining feature of markets is that it's all individual interactions. This kind of philosophy simply requires that the solution to all problems be changing *individual* behavior.
The announcement that your whole department was laid off to earn the C-suite better stock prices included a land-back acknowledgement! And the bathrooms you're now cleaning for $8/hr are gender neutral! Progress!
I wonder about that...is the only reason we see progress on that front (I genuinely think we are better off, at least on LGBTQ+ rights) is because it doesn't actually affect the powers that be. Slap a rainbow flag on and sell it as progressive.
Now that the Soviet Union is gone, and People Of Influence And Authority no longer have to toss the masses a bone or two, they would much prefer that we dissipate our energy on dreary arguments about cultural appropriation and how many LGTBQXYZPDQ+ can dance on the head of a pin, endless and endlessly performative struggle sessions, rather than raise uncomfortable questions about how the economic pie is sliced, why the humans are feasting on salmon and prime steak and the family pets must be content with off-brand dry kibble that smells musty.
Put another way - to paraphrase Chris Hedges - elites will gladly discuss race, they will decry gender inequality most piteously, they will demonstrate a touching concern for the rights of sexual and gender minorities so oppressed that they have not even been discovered yet. They are so open-minded that they will even feign sensitivity to those who call themselves a different species, for Bastet's sake. Those same elites will not readily discuss economic class.
Or, in the negative formulation - if businesses were to stop opposing unionization of their workers, the result would be a transfer of wealth, of *concrete* *material* *benefits*, to brown and black and yellow and tabby and white working class people and cats greater than all the allyship statements ever penned, all the diversity committees ever instituted, all the preferred pronoun tags ever attached to a corporate email. Which is precisely why they will not do this.
With foregoing in mind:
1. Always remember to keep your eye on the money.
2. Never forget to keep your eye on the money.
3. Always remember to never forget to keep your eye on the money.
4. Never forget to always remember to keep your eye on the money.
Everything else is smoke and mirrors designed to get you to violate one or more of above-listed tenets and dissipate your energy into something harmless.
I think it was percolating then but Trump's election gave wokism perfect conditions to take over. Why? Because the Dems had conveniently pinned their loss not on anything they had to change but on Angry Racists. Problem was, there wasn't actually much racism floating around. In fact, many of the so-called racists had voted for Obama, just not for Hillary. So, rather than do any introspection, along comes this ideology that basically defines working-class whites as racist by definition, even if they're married to Black activists and haven't done a clear racist thing in their lives. The taint is just in there, unarguably, because they can't keep up with the linguistic fads and they won't get up at the altar call and make a teary-eyed confession.
I spoke with a journalist who insisted that the only reason anyone voted for Trump was "racism". I am not a Trump fan, but I pointed out that the counties that twice went for Obama and then flipped to Trump in 2016 amounted to his margin of victory.
Was she able to point to any evidence for these claims? Were all these counties suddenly inundated with KKK members, but only after voting twice for the black dude?
Because a fair amount of people in both the Democratic Party and activist circles that encourage whatever “woke” is anymore, genuinely believe that they are beyond reproach. They don’t have to convince you, if you don’t vote for them you’re voting against your own self interest, which they obviously know more about than you do. There are too many people who feel they are so superior that they don’t even pretend to do the hearts and minds aspect of politics, they just write off those who aren’t immediately in their camp as whatever -ist that fits the moment. Didn’t Charlie Christ literally say he didn’t want to turn DeSantis voters at one point?
Freaked out who? The current woke were freaked out by Occupy Wallstreet? I'd argue very few were much freaked out by it for long, and whatever scared them about it dissipated quickly with the utterly, utterly toothless effect Occupy Wallstreet had on anything material...and very little lasting symbolic.
Exactly. As FdB wrote, given all that, he would still rather vote for woke politics than Republicans. As such, it is an effective tool by the oligarchy to keep people like FdB on the reservation.
The ugly truth is that the battle has always been between the people and the powerful and the powerful today are using woke politics to divide and conquer and get cover for their amoral activities.
>he would still rather vote for woke politics than Republicans
>it is an effective tool by the oligarchy to keep people like FdB on the reservation
There is no logical connection between these two statements. If my options are wonderbread and a shit sandwich, wonderbread is not an "effective tool" to prevent me from eating the latter.
I can't give you a full assessment on every city in the U.S., but Seattle recently had a regime change (all within the democratic party), and the approach to the problems you mention (homelessness especially) has been markedly different with visible results.
Is Portland going down the tubes? Maybe. But I've seen, with my own eyes, direct feedback from public opinion, to city government, then back to the situation on the ground.
Which is the wonderbread and which is the shit sandwich? Or are they both shit sandwiches?
The goal of the oligarchy is to prevent any threats from forming to their power and position. As such, division and conflict are useful and effective tools. Keeping everyone divided and unable to form common ground is important. Stopping people from even looking for possible common ground is ideal. They want both sides locked into positions and not even consider any other possibility.
Both Team R and Team D serve shit sandwiches, however, each Team also claims that its particular shit sandwich comes with a dollop of rancid mayonnaise, and therefore we have no choice but "fall in line" and choose that Team's particular brand of shit.
This feels too simplistic to me. Woke may be a primarily American phenomenon, but cleavages of society by race, ethnicity, sex, etc. exist the world over. Are these divisions all top-down attempts by capital to distract people? A more parsimonious explanation is that these things simply matter to people - culture and identity - and that's why people flock to them and devote their energies to them. (That's also why articles like this will get ten times the readership of an article about, say, unionizing restaurant workers.) I'm also far from convinced that capital sees DEI - a multi-billion dollar industry - as a financial benefit. Instead I think the view from inside ranges from true belief to regarding it as danegeld.
Think of a Goldman Sachs DEI committee (they exist) as a form of Woke Insurance.
Companies publicly & financially support social liberal policy (racial justice, climate change, gay marriage) to buy allies against economic policies(healthcare, education, paid leave, unionization, etc.) which might make it harder for them to make money.
Yes, that would be the danegeld side of it. But there are also people, many of them, many of them very wealthy and influential, who genuinely believe in this stuff. Perhaps this varies by industry or by sector but I know plenty of true believers, many of whom inhabit the C-suite. I assure you, they're not grumbling as they change the world.
Yes, based on my work in corporate PR, they do believe it. That said, everyone believes they themselves are good guys, and it's far easier for an executive to believe that in a way that promotes business as usual with more diverse skin tones and sexualities included than it is to believe, e.g., that late-stage extractive capitalism is killing us all. I don't think it's a conscious conspiracy on the PMC's part, but I also don't think it's a coincidence that the form of Democratic Party progressivism that floated to the top was "Big Business is great, as long as minorities can also be successful businesspeople."
DEI is a financial benefit in that wokeness is a way to channel the legitimate energy born of rage against injustices like racism and sexism and various other isms in a direction that doesn't threaten the economic structure in which those isms are tangled: capitalism.
I have no doubt that many execs believe sincerely in this stuff. It is in their interest to, after all. Can't have all those angry people organizing for social change!
Given that DEI as a sector barely existed until just a few years ago - why now? It's not like racial conflict or gender conflict is anything new in this country. Why weren't they doing it earlier?
If I had to send up a theory, it’d be that the philosophical underpinnings that gird the current logic of woke ideology had yet to be laid out in academia until post-cold war/war on terror.
In other words, the market for a culture war on identity had yet to ripen.
Because the public complaints reached a fever pitch. I live in a European country where this sector doesn't really exist and as my city becomes more diverse, the same thing (the complaints, not DEI) is happening. There was recently a row about a Mexican-themed office party, complete with sombreros ordered off AliExpress. Gross, I would agree, but the reaction to it was to go to the media...which is what you do when you don't have anywhere internal to go, I guess. Anyway, all of this is to say I believe that's what happened in the US.
I agree. The leftist argument about this being a cynical deflection from economic issues strikes me as overly simplistic. Is there some subconscious desire to find something to be moral about that won't cost them money? To some extent perhaps, but I find it unpersuasive in the main.
A lot of y’all are getting tripped up. The problem with woke is less their diagnosis of cause than their prescription for what to do about it (which is be absolutely fucking insufferable to anyone close but not identical in approach to themselves). When y’all defend the woke approach as having a point about cause, you are missing the point entirely: they have no solutions at any level to anything.
Given the fact that most of these debates are not among high school students, I honestly have no idea how to assess the accuracy of this analogy. I think MOST of the folks with this flawed approach are rather guilty and well-meaning people who are at some considerable social distance from the most pressing crises facing working people. Surely, some are mean spirited. But most just want to do what they think is right in their own circles and given the tools they can conceive of.
"These stupid peasants, who, throughout the world, hold potentates on their thrones, make statesmen illustrious, provide generals with lasting victories, all with ignorance, indifference, or half-witted hatred, moving the world with the strength of their arms, and getting their heads knocked together in the name of God, the king, or the stock exchange-immortal, dreaming, hopeless asses, who surrender their reason to the care of a shining puppet, and persuade some toy to carry their lives in his purse." -- Stephen Crane
Interesting how redistributive politics/Marxism was seen as antiwoke (Hilary's "Breaking up the big banks won't stop racism"/The New Deal was racist) until the 2020 campaign at which point anti-capitalist rhetoric became woke.
Well, since it is designed to make people ignore economics and class and support the oligarchy to continue to its exploitation and abuse of people, all the while letting the credentialed members of the meritocracy feel good about themselves as they punch down on everyone else and attempt to grasp at a slightly higher rung on the ladder of exploitation, you are right in a way.
True woke politics can't focus on the reality of the economic system (the real system that is oppressive) and instead supports an imaginary version of the system that is grinding away at people and leaving most people worse off than their parents and grandparents.
We have average folks in their 80s and 90s dying with millions in the bank, while younger generations will never accumulate even a fraction of the same equivalent net worth. Woke politics hide that the Democratic Party sold out its supporters to support the richest in the country.
I would argue that woke politics as described by FdB aren't really interested in economics at all, or at least nothing like the way that they are engrossed in performance and virtue signaling.
I should add that, if the Establishment is good at nothing else, it is very good at determining whom to buy off, whom to co-opt, whom to neutralize, whom to ignore.
This is how leaders of the Civil Rights movement, people who did noble and genuinely heroic things, they faced down Bull Connor's dogs, only to become paper-pushing bureaucrats and machine politicians.
This is how fire eating Sixties radicals were neutered, going from literal bomb throwing anarchists to tame academics and advocates of "change by working from within the system".
This is how unions went from working class crusaders to a dwindling population of turkeys, voting dutifully for the very politicians that gave us Thanksgiving.
Is it not written that every hero becomes a bore at last? For that matter, were to God that all His people were prophets.
I think the right has also muddled the definition of woke politics to mean everything they don’t like. Like any diversity initiative is woke in their eyes. The conflation makes it challenging to define.
and it makes it harder to debate the actual merits of the project! I work in HR and am happy to talk about diversity initiatives and processes in hiring, because in my experience people who decry D&I don't really understand what is being proposed (anyone who says "you should just hire the best person for the job, period" usually doesn't actually understand and is just parroting anti-woke talking points).
I'm not in lockstep agreement with The Wokes but my overwhelming impression of the anti-wokes is that they are throwing out the baby with the bathwater for little to no discernable gain (outside of the promotion of general mainstream conservative ideologies that don't care about the details anyway)
There's a reason that Asian Americans are overwhelmingly opposed to affirmative action. To portray this as an issue of conservatives versus liberals rather than a tiny woke minority whose views are out of touch with the vast majority of the country is disingenuous.
This is perhaps what you mean by “emotionalist,” but I am struck by the predominance of therapeutic/self-help/vaguely Buddhist terminology in woke-speak. In fact I think if its linguistic tics were merely academic, wokeness wouldn’t be nearly so off putting for the uninitiated. It’s the bizarre and ugly combination of academic-ese and therapy-ese (and, to the extent that it’s distinct, activist-ese) that makes it intolerable, impenetrable, and therefore self-defeating.
Of course. It's never all of anyone. And it's not to exclude men from acting in this way either. It's just... if you have to put a label on it, it's a good one.
there's definitely a lot of Woo in some woke advocacy; I think in part it is due to the fact that leftism (defined VERY broadly, including dems) for awhile seemed almost inherently atheist, that religion was the realm of right-wingers. Which is true in some ways, but obviously in a country where at least 45% of all people count religion as very important to them, a portion of those will be on the left, especially among leftists of color. I think the conscious process of inclusivity and ensuring a wider variety of voices are heard has led to more of those voices being religious.
I agree it's well intentioned. And, cards on the table, I'm a lefty activist, academic, and Buddhist, so I suppose I should be sympathetic. But I can see how alienating it is to anyone who isn't already deep in it. And I don't know how a movement that clearly turns off/away so many more than it brings in can claim to actually be inclusive, regardless of intention. And as they are so fond of saying, impact matters more than intention...
The reason for this is the argument tactic of just assuming any decent person is on board with their assumptions about the world and how it should be. That way you start an argument having to contend with the assertion you are a bigot for not just nodding along with the latest social justice axioms.
I disagree with some portions of your definition, but I think you're missing the point of this whole Bethany episode a bit - the actual definition isn't really important, it's that it's a catchall term (like CRT) to describe anything that a particular kind of person doesn't ideologically agree with. Forcing people who use "woke" pejoratively to define it illuminates how it's actually used - as a virtue signal, if you will, by right-wingers to signal which side they're on. Asking them to define it forces them to articulate aspects of their ideology that they prefer to keep hidden or at least want to avoid being pinned down on - in this case, surely the fact that these people have a hard time defining these terms without sounding racist.
Do I think this is necessarily an effective tactic? Not really. But it's not clear that there are any effective tactics in politics anymore. I think asking someone who wrote a book about the evils of wokeness to define "wokeness" is fair play, regardless of how well people "intuitively" understand it - especially since we clearly disagree on the definition when we get into specifics.
CRT de facto means the idea that racism is baked into the country is both systemic and structural terms.
Wokeness is just old school political correctness. Do you think the Nazis have the right to march in Skokie? If the answer is no you are most likely woke.
umm... thank you for replying to my comment about how the specific definition isn't important, and that it's instead about the side signalling, with... some vague biased non-definitions that are intended to signal which side you're on?
The actual definition is important. My definition makes clear that it's not an issue of conservatives versus liberals, it's an issue of conservatives in alliance with moderate liberals against radicals.
Jonathan Chait wrote that the last spasm of political correctness died decades ago because moderate liberals turned against the PC brigades of the day in addition to the expected opposition from conservatives. That is precisely what I am talking about.
No, the definition isn't important because there literally isn't a definition. The only people who use the term cannot define it themselves and do not need to. It is not MEANT to refer to a coherent set of beliefs. It is just a pejorative for people on the other side of the culture war.
Wokeism is extremist beliefs that justify censorship and intolerance in the service of ostensibly worthy goals.
To expand on that:
The vast majority of the country believes in fighting racism and treating individuals fairly. But a tiny, woke minority believe that measures such as canceling individuals who depart from woke orthodoxy is justifiable because the end justifies the means. That is where the views of the majority diverge from woke philosophy.
As I wrote before, do you believe that the KKK has the right to hold marches, to organize rallies, to try to recruit new members on public property? If the answer is no to any of those questions you are probably woke.
"Well, here's my definition" is an admission that you have not even bothered to engage with the points that Kim and I were trying to make.
What good is it for you to have *your* own personal definition of a word? Is that not an admission that there isn't a clear, widely-held definition such that everyone is on at least some common ground when they communicate?
The fact that you've defined "wokeism" in purely negative terms means that the conservative culture warriors that coopted the word have accomplished what they set out to do and are now leading you around on their little linguistic leash.
This social movement, almost two decades in the making now, is undefinable because it's really about the right-wing enemies we made along the way? It's deliberately slippery because it can only be defined by those who use it as a perjorative, and having them define it means they have to... air their own views?
This is just madness. The reason it's slippery is that it's *extremely unpopular* and the more that the voting public hears of it, the less they like it, and this is why (and to be clear, this is an excellent strategy and one that I'd endorse if I was on the woke side) it's enforced by bureacrats and institutional fiat first and foremost, and why so much of it is done quietly.
WTF? Helping people is bad? This is such a glorification of victimhood, that even trying to help the willing is somehow suspect.
I hear you, but I reserve the right to use to them tongue-in-cheekily.
ha!
but, um, no. there will be no collective moratoriums, and no collective agreements either.
that’s why freddie keeps writing variations on this same post -- nobody ever agrees on anything -- because politics, as practiced and understood via the lobotomizing transom of social media platforms, is a do-nothing culture war hellscape, an endless left to right see-saw of meaningless symbolism teetering from hysterical personal grievance to feverish moral outrage. all while the world burns and our political leaders either do nothing to materially improve average peoples’ lives, or actively attempt to make them worse.
it’s all cringe, all the time. every word, every idea, every post. cringe and more cringe. it’s an infinite all-you-can-eat eternal cringe buffet.
so buckle up for more fluid leakage!
Sorry, but Wokémon is *in* for 2023.
I didn't see the piece as defining "woke" so much as arguing that there's a there there, by any other name or none at all.
1,008, but it's in a Subscriber post.
Ugh you’re right about “y’all.”
I can't support this. As a white girl from Idaho who uses "y'all" in writing, it's just a simple fact that the english language doesn't have a better word to use than "y'all" in the settings it is used. You'll pry it out of my cold, dead... mouth?
Goodfellas 🙌
Youse are welcome to appropriate the Australian second person plural.
TIL Australia was settled by Jersey City cab drivers
People from Liverpool in the UK also use 'Youse' as a second-person plural. Maybe that's the origin for Australians?
The pedant in me says the correct diction is "you all."
But I still say "y'all" in spoken language all the time.
I have come to love y'all, as a rural Pennsylvanian. It's far better than the Pittsburgh equivalent, "yinz", that's for sure.
"yinz"
Of interest perhaps? https://michaelmohr.substack.com/p/george-orwells-politics-and-the-english
"You guys" is two words but it's way better. I can not bring myself to say "y'all" with a straight face. And no, you guys is not gendered! I'm a guy, he's a guy, she's a guy, cuz we're all guys!
yeah i completely agree
Also, "folks".
Nope, "folks" is binary-ist or something: the correct term is "folx".
I got redneck privilege to use the word from enduring Texas for three years, the rest of y’all are on thin fucking ice
I'm from South Carolina but I live in Pittsburgh. I gave up on y'all once the woke captured it and just use yinz now. Thank god Duke's mayonnaise isn't woke. I can't give that up.
wacha'all gonna be doin...I was born and raised in Bakersfield CA. Does that count?
Whatever happened to ain't? Ain'tcha'all gonna... almost one word. Dialect is fun. Everone should getta play with it.
🙏🙏
It's ridiculous that this is an essential point, because it means the common understanding of the practical understanding of politics has degraded to this point, but you're absolutely on point here, Freddie. We shouldn't have to have this reminder, and yet, here we are.
Since you last posted on this topic, I’ve been working on a definition that I post any time someone says “you can’t even define what woke means”. Then I update it based on the responses/discussion”
I’d love to hear what people here think.
Here is my current long version:
“A morally absolute political ideology focused on ”experienced” oppression based primarily on exclusionary group identification (such as race, gender, ability, etc). These precepts are presented as self-righteous demands that must be treated as self-evident, universally true and mandatory no matter how internally inconsistent or counter-productive they may be in practice. The promotion of these ideas (and any perceived or derived concepts from those ideas) supersedes any fundamental individual civil rights such as freedom of speech and any expression of contradictory personal religious or moral beliefs. Failure to comply is punished by social exclusion and expulsion from employment.”
Why can’t it be both? And I’m trying to be complete here not “grandeloquent.” And if people who believe in it claim it doesn’t exit, why shouldn’t I get to challenge them on that?
Do you see how you immediately pushing people who don't conform to your definition into an outgroup perfectly supports my definition?
Is this... actually what you use? Are you able to define "wokeness" in a way that anyone who self-identifies as "woke" would recognize as their own beliefs?
I think there's substantial doubt about whether wokesters will ever concede to any definition of the movement. Hence the two articles from deBoer specifically addressing the constant drumbeat of "If wokeness is real what is it?"
I mean, I'd still like to see you take a stab at a definition for wokeness that doesn't define it as inherently bad. Like, the idea that wokeist demands "must be treated as self-evident" is preposterous to me; the entire body of scholarly, research, and advocacy work on racism and sexism suggests that finding and presenting evidence is a significant part of the woke project.
My test for wokeness comes down to one question: "Do you think the KKK/American Nazi Party/Black Panther/BLM/whatever has the right to hold marches and organize rallies?"
Anybody who answers "No" to that question is more than likely woke, regardless of whether or not the group they have an objection to is the KKK or BLM.
Wokeness is inherently bad because opposition to free speech is a step down a slippery slope to terrible outcomes.
Add up all those characteristics and you have a recipe for brittleness and intolerance and the next step from that is censorship.
Somebody call the cops
Redefining "woke" as "anyone who opposes the free speech of parties they consider dangerous" is not especially useful given that _everyone_ associates wokism with social justice politics and the left. Better to call it "free speech illiberalism" or somesuch and consider wokism a subset of that, rather than expanding it to include right-wing perspectives.
Remember, the point of defining things is to be well-understood. Your definition makes you harder, not easier, to understand because you're ignoring connotations.
My point is that the original impulse is salutary but the means are not. At the end of the day the woke are a tiny minority in this country and their views are extremely unpopular with an overwhelming majority of the population. Fighting racism is actually something that most Americans support so why should woke politics be so unpopular?
It's comparable to the phenomenon where woke activists tried to define political correctness as "not being an asshole". That is something that a majority of the population agrees with: shouldn't they support political correctness? The answer is of course not and cheap rhetorical tricks aren't going to gaslight anybody into mistakenly endorsing tactics and a philosophy that they have deep disagreements with.
Finally, I would point out that it's not leftists who are holding "free speech" political rallies.
My main issue is that all that research and advocacy seems to be in service of proving a predetermined conclusion no matter what the material outcome. There is very little interest that I've seen in challenging those core beliefs because it splinters the ideology and undermines the self-righteousness that is at the core of the modern movement.
Based on the low quality and lousy replication record of that body of work, the more parsimonious suggestion that actual evidence isn't the point - having the simulacum of evidence that can be pointed to in order to comfort the doubting and convince the lazy and/or uncritical, is.
I have a shorter version based on this that I post most often.
And I have yet to meet a wokist who is willing to publicly define their beliefs. As Freddie pointed out in a previous post, pretending the ideology isn’t an ideology is part of the game.
When people complain I usually respond with something along the lines of “if you aren’t willing to define your own beliefs you don’t get to be upset if someone does it for you.”
I find it hard to believe that no one has ever defined wokeism for you. Just today, with the Bethany business, I saw dozens of people defining it, and many used a straightforward dictionary definition: "aware of and actively attentive to important societal facts and issues (especially issues of racial and social justice)". That seems fine to me, as a Wokeist
Dammit, Kim. Now I can’t say that anymore. But you are the first!
I'm trying to answer your call, but first: in that sentence, what does "social justice" mean and what does "attentive to" mean?
It often seems to be the case that "woke" refers to ideas held by two different groups of people with two different attitudes about what those ideas demand: first, a broader, expansive version that merely involves "attentiveness" and another one that people tend to dislike that requires much more aggressive action.
That elides a considerable range of opinions. An Asian American suing Harvard because of racial discrimination may be acutely aware of racial issues but in a manner that will put him at odds with most wokeist philosophy.
That's a non-definition. That's like defining Christianity as "religion" or bread as "matter." It's a total dodge. The definition rests, 100% entirely, on what those important societal facts and issues are. By this definition you provide, the most virulent KKK member in history - the most racist, the most anti-Catholic, the meanest - is also the wokest.
So what does "social justice" mean? And is it possible to be attentive to it and still be, say, anti-affirmative action? To think that affirmative action makes our society *less* just? It seems like "social justice" and "attentive" are doing a heck of a lot of work here.
Here's my stab at defining what woke means:
Identity is the central source and instrument of political conflict where "identity" refers to a group of traits that drive social inclusion and exclusion, especially sexuality, sex, gender, race/ethnicity, and ability. For almost all of recent history, normative ideas about those traits have privileged cisgender, heterosexual, abled white men, producing gross disparities in political and material outcomes that characterize modern life.
It is important to address this by challenging these normative ideas at every level, including the language we use, which not only reinforces, but in a very real sense creates these disparties because they constitute our ideas of what is neutral or default. All western institutions and standards have been shaped by these normative forces, and consequently they are all under suspicion: from the police to our system of education to concepts like free speech, due process, and equality before the law, all of which reinforce the hierarchies that immiserate those outside the normative core.
Holy crap, an attempt to take them seriously rather than spiking one's own ideological football? I wasn't expecting to find that here.
I was going to try something similar, but yours is better and cleaner. Well done.
Thank you!
I think the position I outlined includes accurate observations, but is damaged by half-truths, lacks perspective, and embraces a defective theory of representation, but I would much rather discuss it on those grounds than rail against straw men.
My definition is trying to find a common-ground consensus that could narrow the gap between the right- and left-wing uses of "woke" * but I feel a bit bad laying it out, because I take Freddie's point to be quite different. Instead of asking "what does woke mean?" Freddie asks "can we please not pretend like a political movement espousing an especially obnoxious version of (what I described above) doesn't exist?"
It's true that many people that hold milder opinions also think of themselves as "woke" and it's also true that American conservative activists realize they can damage almost anything by lumping it in with this un-nameable, unpopular thing. But the group exists, and they are not just on Twitter: they are, at a minimum, represented in all our elite hegemonic institutions (universities, nonprofits, journals, NGOs), and in most cases have decisive influence in those institutions.
* Edit - I realize that the marked sentence reinforces the dumb simplification of American politics into left- and right-wings. Yes, partisans on the left and the right use "woke" differently, but I think Freddie's version has a real constituency (as would a slightly harsher version of mine), which is people alienated by current partisan alignments.
Right? I certainly don't agree with many aspects of the ideology, but there is a quasi-coherent idea there, and even Freddie is defining wokeism by its negative characteristics rather than engaging with it.
It'd be kind of nice if more people "steelmanned" it rather than taking easy shots at the worst aspects; that doesn't move the ball forward at all.
You make me think about a quip I've often heard (and used) to the effect that 'They call it class warfare when the poor fight back.' Maybe there's a parallel, in that we call it wokeness when people who've been slotted into an identity that's viewed as different in important ways embrace it, and insist that their different perspectives be treated as important.
On the one hand it's completely fair -- goose, meet gander -- and on the other hand, it implicitly accepts the previous situation (the beggars have changed places, but the lash goes on).
Does anyone self-identify as "woke"?
I've had plenty define it: "don't be a douche," or "it's being a good person." They are sneaking their politics in as the definition of "good" or "not being a douche." Nice branding, but ultimately non-responsive.
You know what they say that? Because they (Wokies) no longer believe in definitions.
https://michaelmohr.substack.com/p/george-orwells-politics-and-the-english
wow. this was well written and cogent. captures the essence
Thankfully this is one battle the woke lost definitively. Now when I contrast my liberal views with wokery everyone knows what I'm talking about. That was the outcome they were desperate to avoid, and succeeded in avoiding for most of the past decade.
But they're still winning. That is, they are winning control of the academy, of the bureaucracy, and increasingly of the economy. I'm sure they can handle losing an internet argument here and there.
I agree. Getting identified was one of the few significant losses
Tim Urban uses the term “social justice fundamentalism”, which I find quite fitting
People who use "settler" as a pejorative have imbued themselves in the Calvinism that walked off the Mayflower.
It really is so deeply rooted, this dirty racist/sexist/ableist soul of theirs can't be forgiven unless they spend their lives self flagellating.
I think the link to Calvinism is smart. It seems increasingly that those who are committed to social justice politics seem to have some existential fear that they might be, in truth, bad people, but that they cannot even know if they are. So they then constantly self-monitor, examining themselves for the smallest sign of "evil" and exhort others to do the same. And as with some issues with predestination, wherein one's outward acts of goodness are a kind of evidence of their salvation and internal communion with god, so too do the woke feel the need to display the outward signs that they are not racist, not bad people. I can't remember if McWhorter's piece on The Elect was explicit about this connection, but if it wasn't, it fits right in.
Replace "white privilege" with "Original sin" and you have it. Except that the woke haven't even come up with Social Justice Jesus to deliver us from our racism.
Right, which is one reason we get all these weird self-flagellating apologies and they are just never enough: apologies are something you give when you've made a mistake. You can't apologize when you didn't make a mistake; you revealed your evil nature, and there's no salvation.
Which honestly scares me. I care about social justice, but it's too easy to fall victim to paranoid readings. And I'm not going to give up my principle cause a few wannabe leftists were mean to me; been on the right, and that's a moral shithole.
On 2) and especially 3), I have lately been developing the notion that "wokeness" is a fundamentally neoliberal response to the problem of social injustice. Undergirding the philosophy of neoliberalism is a sort of hyper-individualism, and I think we see that manifest in wokeness. There's an acknowledgment of social problems like racism and sexism and etc, but because neoliberalism fundamentally abhors any kind of collective solution you get what we have. That this "solution" is accompanied by a whole lot of great market opportunities for DEI consultants & allows large organizations to pay their way into virtue is not a coincidence. Likewise it is not a coincidence that threatening individuals' labor income is one of the primary tactics to enforce compliance.
I want to thank you for providing a good working definition of neoliberalism, since commenters here (and elsewhere) tend to use it to mean "things I don't like and why I'm sad."
It's certainly not a novel observation on my part! The whole idea of neoliberalism is subjecting as much of human life as possible to the discipline of (unregulated) markets, and the defining feature of markets is that it's all individual interactions. This kind of philosophy simply requires that the solution to all problems be changing *individual* behavior.
I don’t know. It seems to me that one of the hallmarks of the woke is a strong pressure toward conformity & a hive-mind political identity.
Enforced stratification into a progressive stack of identity groups also doesn't seem to fit, unless of course it's not actually about those groups.
Yes!!
"We demand more diverse oppressors!"
The announcement that your whole department was laid off to earn the C-suite better stock prices included a land-back acknowledgement! And the bathrooms you're now cleaning for $8/hr are gender neutral! Progress!
I wonder about that...is the only reason we see progress on that front (I genuinely think we are better off, at least on LGBTQ+ rights) is because it doesn't actually affect the powers that be. Slap a rainbow flag on and sell it as progressive.
Well said.
Now that the Soviet Union is gone, and People Of Influence And Authority no longer have to toss the masses a bone or two, they would much prefer that we dissipate our energy on dreary arguments about cultural appropriation and how many LGTBQXYZPDQ+ can dance on the head of a pin, endless and endlessly performative struggle sessions, rather than raise uncomfortable questions about how the economic pie is sliced, why the humans are feasting on salmon and prime steak and the family pets must be content with off-brand dry kibble that smells musty.
Put another way - to paraphrase Chris Hedges - elites will gladly discuss race, they will decry gender inequality most piteously, they will demonstrate a touching concern for the rights of sexual and gender minorities so oppressed that they have not even been discovered yet. They are so open-minded that they will even feign sensitivity to those who call themselves a different species, for Bastet's sake. Those same elites will not readily discuss economic class.
Or, in the negative formulation - if businesses were to stop opposing unionization of their workers, the result would be a transfer of wealth, of *concrete* *material* *benefits*, to brown and black and yellow and tabby and white working class people and cats greater than all the allyship statements ever penned, all the diversity committees ever instituted, all the preferred pronoun tags ever attached to a corporate email. Which is precisely why they will not do this.
With foregoing in mind:
1. Always remember to keep your eye on the money.
2. Never forget to keep your eye on the money.
3. Always remember to never forget to keep your eye on the money.
4. Never forget to always remember to keep your eye on the money.
Everything else is smoke and mirrors designed to get you to violate one or more of above-listed tenets and dissipate your energy into something harmless.
Yep. And I think it is no coincidence that all this stuff only really exploded after Occupy Wall Street freaked them out,
I would say with the election of Obama, but what do I know?
I think it was percolating then but Trump's election gave wokism perfect conditions to take over. Why? Because the Dems had conveniently pinned their loss not on anything they had to change but on Angry Racists. Problem was, there wasn't actually much racism floating around. In fact, many of the so-called racists had voted for Obama, just not for Hillary. So, rather than do any introspection, along comes this ideology that basically defines working-class whites as racist by definition, even if they're married to Black activists and haven't done a clear racist thing in their lives. The taint is just in there, unarguably, because they can't keep up with the linguistic fads and they won't get up at the altar call and make a teary-eyed confession.
I spoke with a journalist who insisted that the only reason anyone voted for Trump was "racism". I am not a Trump fan, but I pointed out that the counties that twice went for Obama and then flipped to Trump in 2016 amounted to his margin of victory.
Was she able to point to any evidence for these claims? Were all these counties suddenly inundated with KKK members, but only after voting twice for the black dude?
Because a fair amount of people in both the Democratic Party and activist circles that encourage whatever “woke” is anymore, genuinely believe that they are beyond reproach. They don’t have to convince you, if you don’t vote for them you’re voting against your own self interest, which they obviously know more about than you do. There are too many people who feel they are so superior that they don’t even pretend to do the hearts and minds aspect of politics, they just write off those who aren’t immediately in their camp as whatever -ist that fits the moment. Didn’t Charlie Christ literally say he didn’t want to turn DeSantis voters at one point?
Freaked out who? The current woke were freaked out by Occupy Wallstreet? I'd argue very few were much freaked out by it for long, and whatever scared them about it dissipated quickly with the utterly, utterly toothless effect Occupy Wallstreet had on anything material...and very little lasting symbolic.
The People Of Influence And Authority referred to by the OP
Exactly. As FdB wrote, given all that, he would still rather vote for woke politics than Republicans. As such, it is an effective tool by the oligarchy to keep people like FdB on the reservation.
The ugly truth is that the battle has always been between the people and the powerful and the powerful today are using woke politics to divide and conquer and get cover for their amoral activities.
"As such, it is an effective tool by the oligarchy to keep people like FdB on the reservation."
Keeping people in the veal pen is entirely the point.
>he would still rather vote for woke politics than Republicans
>it is an effective tool by the oligarchy to keep people like FdB on the reservation
There is no logical connection between these two statements. If my options are wonderbread and a shit sandwich, wonderbread is not an "effective tool" to prevent me from eating the latter.
I can't give you a full assessment on every city in the U.S., but Seattle recently had a regime change (all within the democratic party), and the approach to the problems you mention (homelessness especially) has been markedly different with visible results.
Is Portland going down the tubes? Maybe. But I've seen, with my own eyes, direct feedback from public opinion, to city government, then back to the situation on the ground.
My breath is bated.
Which is the wonderbread and which is the shit sandwich? Or are they both shit sandwiches?
The goal of the oligarchy is to prevent any threats from forming to their power and position. As such, division and conflict are useful and effective tools. Keeping everyone divided and unable to form common ground is important. Stopping people from even looking for possible common ground is ideal. They want both sides locked into positions and not even consider any other possibility.
>Which is the wonderbread and which is the shit sandwich?
Reader's choice. If you don't want to eat shit you don't want to eat shit. Attractiveness of other options is immaterial.
Both Team R and Team D serve shit sandwiches, however, each Team also claims that its particular shit sandwich comes with a dollop of rancid mayonnaise, and therefore we have no choice but "fall in line" and choose that Team's particular brand of shit.
True.
You nailed it. You are indeed, one cool cat.
Chirrup!
This feels too simplistic to me. Woke may be a primarily American phenomenon, but cleavages of society by race, ethnicity, sex, etc. exist the world over. Are these divisions all top-down attempts by capital to distract people? A more parsimonious explanation is that these things simply matter to people - culture and identity - and that's why people flock to them and devote their energies to them. (That's also why articles like this will get ten times the readership of an article about, say, unionizing restaurant workers.) I'm also far from convinced that capital sees DEI - a multi-billion dollar industry - as a financial benefit. Instead I think the view from inside ranges from true belief to regarding it as danegeld.
Think of a Goldman Sachs DEI committee (they exist) as a form of Woke Insurance.
Companies publicly & financially support social liberal policy (racial justice, climate change, gay marriage) to buy allies against economic policies(healthcare, education, paid leave, unionization, etc.) which might make it harder for them to make money.
Yes, that would be the danegeld side of it. But there are also people, many of them, many of them very wealthy and influential, who genuinely believe in this stuff. Perhaps this varies by industry or by sector but I know plenty of true believers, many of whom inhabit the C-suite. I assure you, they're not grumbling as they change the world.
Call it a badge of PMC membership. Just as members of the hegemonic class once really believed something about one's station in life or whatever.
That makes it no less real to them, nor any less real to others the effects of the actions driven by that belief.
Yes, based on my work in corporate PR, they do believe it. That said, everyone believes they themselves are good guys, and it's far easier for an executive to believe that in a way that promotes business as usual with more diverse skin tones and sexualities included than it is to believe, e.g., that late-stage extractive capitalism is killing us all. I don't think it's a conscious conspiracy on the PMC's part, but I also don't think it's a coincidence that the form of Democratic Party progressivism that floated to the top was "Big Business is great, as long as minorities can also be successful businesspeople."
DEI is a financial benefit in that wokeness is a way to channel the legitimate energy born of rage against injustices like racism and sexism and various other isms in a direction that doesn't threaten the economic structure in which those isms are tangled: capitalism.
I have no doubt that many execs believe sincerely in this stuff. It is in their interest to, after all. Can't have all those angry people organizing for social change!
Given that DEI as a sector barely existed until just a few years ago - why now? It's not like racial conflict or gender conflict is anything new in this country. Why weren't they doing it earlier?
If I had to send up a theory, it’d be that the philosophical underpinnings that gird the current logic of woke ideology had yet to be laid out in academia until post-cold war/war on terror.
In other words, the market for a culture war on identity had yet to ripen.
Because the public complaints reached a fever pitch. I live in a European country where this sector doesn't really exist and as my city becomes more diverse, the same thing (the complaints, not DEI) is happening. There was recently a row about a Mexican-themed office party, complete with sombreros ordered off AliExpress. Gross, I would agree, but the reaction to it was to go to the media...which is what you do when you don't have anywhere internal to go, I guess. Anyway, all of this is to say I believe that's what happened in the US.
What's gross about sombreros?
Nothing inherently? but a bunch of white Europeans celebrating some vague and fuzzy idea of Mexico with Chinese-made sombreros is questionable
I agree. The leftist argument about this being a cynical deflection from economic issues strikes me as overly simplistic. Is there some subconscious desire to find something to be moral about that won't cost them money? To some extent perhaps, but I find it unpersuasive in the main.
A lot of y’all are getting tripped up. The problem with woke is less their diagnosis of cause than their prescription for what to do about it (which is be absolutely fucking insufferable to anyone close but not identical in approach to themselves). When y’all defend the woke approach as having a point about cause, you are missing the point entirely: they have no solutions at any level to anything.
Given the fact that most of these debates are not among high school students, I honestly have no idea how to assess the accuracy of this analogy. I think MOST of the folks with this flawed approach are rather guilty and well-meaning people who are at some considerable social distance from the most pressing crises facing working people. Surely, some are mean spirited. But most just want to do what they think is right in their own circles and given the tools they can conceive of.
"These stupid peasants, who, throughout the world, hold potentates on their thrones, make statesmen illustrious, provide generals with lasting victories, all with ignorance, indifference, or half-witted hatred, moving the world with the strength of their arms, and getting their heads knocked together in the name of God, the king, or the stock exchange-immortal, dreaming, hopeless asses, who surrender their reason to the care of a shining puppet, and persuade some toy to carry their lives in his purse." -- Stephen Crane
You forgot cavies, but otherwise no complaints here
Interesting how redistributive politics/Marxism was seen as antiwoke (Hilary's "Breaking up the big banks won't stop racism"/The New Deal was racist) until the 2020 campaign at which point anti-capitalist rhetoric became woke.
I haven't seen anti-Wall Street and anti-oligarchy rhetoric describe as woke.
I would argue that woke politics as described by FdB don't really have a coherent, cohesive set of economic politics.
Well, since it is designed to make people ignore economics and class and support the oligarchy to continue to its exploitation and abuse of people, all the while letting the credentialed members of the meritocracy feel good about themselves as they punch down on everyone else and attempt to grasp at a slightly higher rung on the ladder of exploitation, you are right in a way.
True woke politics can't focus on the reality of the economic system (the real system that is oppressive) and instead supports an imaginary version of the system that is grinding away at people and leaving most people worse off than their parents and grandparents.
We have average folks in their 80s and 90s dying with millions in the bank, while younger generations will never accumulate even a fraction of the same equivalent net worth. Woke politics hide that the Democratic Party sold out its supporters to support the richest in the country.
I would argue that woke politics as described by FdB aren't really interested in economics at all, or at least nothing like the way that they are engrossed in performance and virtue signaling.
I should add that, if the Establishment is good at nothing else, it is very good at determining whom to buy off, whom to co-opt, whom to neutralize, whom to ignore.
This is how leaders of the Civil Rights movement, people who did noble and genuinely heroic things, they faced down Bull Connor's dogs, only to become paper-pushing bureaucrats and machine politicians.
This is how fire eating Sixties radicals were neutered, going from literal bomb throwing anarchists to tame academics and advocates of "change by working from within the system".
This is how unions went from working class crusaders to a dwindling population of turkeys, voting dutifully for the very politicians that gave us Thanksgiving.
Is it not written that every hero becomes a bore at last? For that matter, were to God that all His people were prophets.
So what you’re saying is: Keep your eye on the money? 😂😂😂
https://michaelmohr.substack.com/p/george-orwells-politics-and-the-english
It could be seen that way.
I think the right has also muddled the definition of woke politics to mean everything they don’t like. Like any diversity initiative is woke in their eyes. The conflation makes it challenging to define.
and it makes it harder to debate the actual merits of the project! I work in HR and am happy to talk about diversity initiatives and processes in hiring, because in my experience people who decry D&I don't really understand what is being proposed (anyone who says "you should just hire the best person for the job, period" usually doesn't actually understand and is just parroting anti-woke talking points).
I'm not in lockstep agreement with The Wokes but my overwhelming impression of the anti-wokes is that they are throwing out the baby with the bathwater for little to no discernable gain (outside of the promotion of general mainstream conservative ideologies that don't care about the details anyway)
There's a reason that Asian Americans are overwhelmingly opposed to affirmative action. To portray this as an issue of conservatives versus liberals rather than a tiny woke minority whose views are out of touch with the vast majority of the country is disingenuous.
🙏
Agree. It’s sides play ball here. Positive feedback loop.
Civil Rights Act: woke. Log Cabin Republicans: woke. Trans Exclusionary Radical Feminists: woke.
Maybe if Rush Limbaugh hadn't sucked all the juice out of "politically correct", we wouldn't have needed this lap on the euphemism treadmill.
This is perhaps what you mean by “emotionalist,” but I am struck by the predominance of therapeutic/self-help/vaguely Buddhist terminology in woke-speak. In fact I think if its linguistic tics were merely academic, wokeness wouldn’t be nearly so off putting for the uninitiated. It’s the bizarre and ugly combination of academic-ese and therapy-ese (and, to the extent that it’s distinct, activist-ese) that makes it intolerable, impenetrable, and therefore self-defeating.
Another word for it is feminine.
Ugh. No. Not all females!
Of course. It's never all of anyone. And it's not to exclude men from acting in this way either. It's just... if you have to put a label on it, it's a good one.
there's definitely a lot of Woo in some woke advocacy; I think in part it is due to the fact that leftism (defined VERY broadly, including dems) for awhile seemed almost inherently atheist, that religion was the realm of right-wingers. Which is true in some ways, but obviously in a country where at least 45% of all people count religion as very important to them, a portion of those will be on the left, especially among leftists of color. I think the conscious process of inclusivity and ensuring a wider variety of voices are heard has led to more of those voices being religious.
I agree it's well intentioned. And, cards on the table, I'm a lefty activist, academic, and Buddhist, so I suppose I should be sympathetic. But I can see how alienating it is to anyone who isn't already deep in it. And I don't know how a movement that clearly turns off/away so many more than it brings in can claim to actually be inclusive, regardless of intention. And as they are so fond of saying, impact matters more than intention...
True. Therapy speak for sure.
https://michaelmohr.substack.com/p/george-orwells-politics-and-the-english
The reason for this is the argument tactic of just assuming any decent person is on board with their assumptions about the world and how it should be. That way you start an argument having to contend with the assertion you are a bigot for not just nodding along with the latest social justice axioms.
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I disagree with some portions of your definition, but I think you're missing the point of this whole Bethany episode a bit - the actual definition isn't really important, it's that it's a catchall term (like CRT) to describe anything that a particular kind of person doesn't ideologically agree with. Forcing people who use "woke" pejoratively to define it illuminates how it's actually used - as a virtue signal, if you will, by right-wingers to signal which side they're on. Asking them to define it forces them to articulate aspects of their ideology that they prefer to keep hidden or at least want to avoid being pinned down on - in this case, surely the fact that these people have a hard time defining these terms without sounding racist.
Do I think this is necessarily an effective tactic? Not really. But it's not clear that there are any effective tactics in politics anymore. I think asking someone who wrote a book about the evils of wokeness to define "wokeness" is fair play, regardless of how well people "intuitively" understand it - especially since we clearly disagree on the definition when we get into specifics.
CRT de facto means the idea that racism is baked into the country is both systemic and structural terms.
Wokeness is just old school political correctness. Do you think the Nazis have the right to march in Skokie? If the answer is no you are most likely woke.
umm... thank you for replying to my comment about how the specific definition isn't important, and that it's instead about the side signalling, with... some vague biased non-definitions that are intended to signal which side you're on?
The actual definition is important. My definition makes clear that it's not an issue of conservatives versus liberals, it's an issue of conservatives in alliance with moderate liberals against radicals.
Jonathan Chait wrote that the last spasm of political correctness died decades ago because moderate liberals turned against the PC brigades of the day in addition to the expected opposition from conservatives. That is precisely what I am talking about.
No, the definition isn't important because there literally isn't a definition. The only people who use the term cannot define it themselves and do not need to. It is not MEANT to refer to a coherent set of beliefs. It is just a pejorative for people on the other side of the culture war.
Well, here's my definition:
Wokeism is extremist beliefs that justify censorship and intolerance in the service of ostensibly worthy goals.
To expand on that:
The vast majority of the country believes in fighting racism and treating individuals fairly. But a tiny, woke minority believe that measures such as canceling individuals who depart from woke orthodoxy is justifiable because the end justifies the means. That is where the views of the majority diverge from woke philosophy.
As I wrote before, do you believe that the KKK has the right to hold marches, to organize rallies, to try to recruit new members on public property? If the answer is no to any of those questions you are probably woke.
"Well, here's my definition" is an admission that you have not even bothered to engage with the points that Kim and I were trying to make.
What good is it for you to have *your* own personal definition of a word? Is that not an admission that there isn't a clear, widely-held definition such that everyone is on at least some common ground when they communicate?
The fact that you've defined "wokeism" in purely negative terms means that the conservative culture warriors that coopted the word have accomplished what they set out to do and are now leading you around on their little linguistic leash.
This social movement, almost two decades in the making now, is undefinable because it's really about the right-wing enemies we made along the way? It's deliberately slippery because it can only be defined by those who use it as a perjorative, and having them define it means they have to... air their own views?
This is just madness. The reason it's slippery is that it's *extremely unpopular* and the more that the voting public hears of it, the less they like it, and this is why (and to be clear, this is an excellent strategy and one that I'd endorse if I was on the woke side) it's enforced by bureacrats and institutional fiat first and foremost, and why so much of it is done quietly.