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I am a longtime lurker on the site and wanted to pose a question to those that commonly post on the evils of wokeism. I have noticed that many posts seem to point to an increasingly nebulous boogeyman--one that could really use to be defined.
What is woke? What do you define as woke? Is there a difference between one that is socially conscious and someone who is woke?
Woke is just the omni-cause. Woke people are people who were informed of how at least one part of the standard patriotic narrative of liberalism is wrong and then devote themselves to cynically opposing every other aspect of the standard liberal narrative. If the standard liberal narrative is that America is a great place where any plucky upstarts can make a name for themselves through hard work and grit they believe the inverse must be true. America is a place where entrenched powers make it impossible for an under class of minorities - be they racial, sexual or religious - to succeed through violent suppression. They believe the west is rotten to the core and reflectively believe any criticism of it. The null hypothesis for every question is that the liberalism is a failed lie and anyone who opposes it must have a good reason.
Racial Justice activists are woke because they believe America has committed original sin against minorities and the stain of slavery and racism pervades every aspect of American institutions. They don't really even believe in progress, acknowledging past progress would be a concession to the patriotic liberal narrative so they insist that things are as bad now as they were under Jim Crow. If given a free hand to adopt any policy they want they'd find anything they built equally poisoned.
Anti-Rich rhetoric is woke because it is against the liberal idea that free enterprise is positive sum. Woke people believe every billionaire is a policy failure because they genuinely believe that to get that right you must be stealing from others.
Degrowthers are woke because they believe the liberalism must be destroying the planet. They don't want to use liberal solutions like carbon tax or deregulating nuclear because that would be allowing liberalism to try to solve the problem. Instead they oppose these liberal solutions and advocate for unworkable policies. They're more interested in using climate change as a bludgeon against liberalism than working on actual solutions.
These things are all joined by a disillusionment with the liberal order and reliably each of these and many other woke beliefs are found in the same people not as some kind of coincidence but because all those people have the same burning intuition that they were betrayed by the liberal promises they grew up hearing.
Maybe to people who live fully immersed in these illiberal mindsets it's like water to a fish but to people outside of the milieu it is very very obvious within a few seconds of talking to a woke person exactly which side they will take on any new subject that pits western liberalism against literally anything else. That a memetic clusters exists here is beyond doubt, what you call it is fairly irrelevant.
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My working, internal definition of woke is "the popularised form of Cultural Marxism, particularly its contemporary related and descendent theories and ideologies, including Intersectional Feminism, Critical Race Theory and Queer Theory."
Key features of woke include:
A key part of my definition that I emphasise is the fact it's a "popularised" form. That is to say, it is the less consistent and coherent form of a political ideology, adopted by the general population, rather than the form adopted by academics, political activists, political philosophers or others who might hold specific and more consistent form of those beliefs. In fact, I would say this is actually part of the tactic that makes woke subversive - the decoupling of the name of the popularised form of a political ideology from the name of its academic or philosophical origins. This is unusual and serves to obfuscate the philosophical origins of woke (quite successfully, I might add).
For example, there is both the popular and academic understanding of 'liberal' or 'conservative'. The average 'liberal' may very well not have the exact same beliefs as either John Locke or John Rawls, but we can recognise and it's generally understood as all belonging to the same philosophical traditions. When someone asks you to describe who are liberals, you can clearly point to and name all these things. No one would seriously suggest liberalism doesn't exist in the public because the average (social) liberal doesn't believe the exact same things as John Rawls. But this is exactly what when people who are defending wokeism by saying others can't define or point to people who are woke. Because woke is strictly a popular form and not pure, academic form which people can name and describe.
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Wokeism is blank slatism plus bioleninism.
Blank slatism in that it holds that everyone is identical but for incidental influences such as education, nutrition, and upbringing. There's no real fundamental psychological difference between any two people which can't be attributed to such influences. Racial differences are purely cosmetic and women are only weaker than men because society has taught them to be -- which leads to the next part.
Bioleninism in that, having 'established' that everyone is basically the same, anyone doing better than anyone else must be injustice. The only way it can happen under this rubric is that someone either got lucky through no fault of their own, in which case they'd better share, or else they got a leg up by taking advantage of someone else, in which case they'd better be punished.
The terminology 'woke' indicates that the woke person is now 'awake' to the universality of oppressor/oppressee dynamics and the necessity of Doing Something About It.
Wokism is a totalizing, corrosive ideology which cannot rest until all hierarchies have been leveled.
When you put it like that, it really does sound remarkably similar to the real-life experience of communism. Got some money? Or any sort of useful property? Here's some thugs coming to confiscate it "for the people."
It's not a coincidence.
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Thank you for this definition. So in your mind it is the necessity of doing something about it/coercing others that delineates wokeness from other definitions under the umbrella of social justice, or do you see it as something they all share.
I guess a more clear way to ask this is (borrowing from @narabums definition), is left wing identitarianism divorced from coercion/coerced action still woke?
No; I don't see it as pertinent at all. Wokeism comes down to a political preference which, like any other political preference, may or may not be forced upon others. Coercion is neither unique nor integral to wokism and I'm not sure where I might have implied otherwise.
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All but one, it's own (a.k.a the progressive), which makes it not unusual.
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Although I don't really disagree with most of what's written here, I do think a lot of it comes from intuition rather than reliable empiricism. If you look at what studies actually find, Wokeness is the informal term used to describe people who favor antiracism and transgenderism.
If you don't mind independent research carried out by random posters on TheMotte, then I can also tell you the woke tend to agree on a cluster of issues that are:
But if I'm also allowed to speculate with everybody else, I'd say what makes the woke so terrifying is that they have an uncompromising moral vision that no one is really allowed to attack. "Fairness is good, racism is bad" is a blank check America has spent the last several decades writing the woke that allows them to drive civilization to complete bankruptcy. (Where "bankruptcy" here is a metaphor for whatever you think it is, including, heck, not having any money.)
I think this is a very insightful post. In particular, the research you conducted and the use of the Nolan Chart to define different political values and where they fall in the grid. If I am understanding you correctly, if one is left of center, tender minded/idealistic, but libertarian, in they would not be defined as woke, correct?
I would argue that the financial bankruptcy is thanks to modern monetary policy and the Triffin Dilemna, but I digress. We can agree that fairness is good and racism is bad, but the devil is in the details, no?
I had to think about this hypothetical person for a moment.
Although arguably a tender-minded leftist who is also libertarian is as far as 70.53 degrees off from the woke by basic trigonometry, this is only true if you presume each axis is of equal importance. In practice the left-right axis is far more salient than the others, which will diminish this person's ideological separation from the woke crowd enough that they'd likely fit in pretty well. Currently wokeness isn't a fringe movement - it's captured a large degree of public support, and has enough power to have (for example) made it standard procedure for us to have to fill in the "What pronouns does your child use?" blank in the doctor's office at Small Town Red Tribe USA. In practice this hypothetical person is likely to support the woke package, they'll just balk at some of the details, such as shutting down people's right to speak.
Ultimately going to say "No, I don't really think of this person as woke," but it's more because I think it's OK for Canadians to get mad when you call them American, and because despite my anti-wokeness, I'm also rather woke-adjacent. If I were a Trump/Musk/Whatever supporter on the other side of the map, I'd still dislike and oppose the hell out of this person (and probably me as well).
I think the woke make a good case against fairness and in favor of racism, in just the same way that the real live National Socialists of the 1940s made a very good case against the principles of German fascism. Looking from one to the other, I can't help but think maybe none of those principles matter, or all of them matter, and really most people are too quick to think they know things when Socrates has been telling us all along he's the wisest because he knows nothing.
I appreciate this response. The reason why I asked is because that hypothetical person is more or less me. I've been a libertarian most of my adult life, but have found myself drifting leftward the last 8 or so years, as the culture war has picked up. Accelerating this has been overt social conservatives, like Dave Smith have been masquerading as libertarian (something about Hoppeian sunset towns does not sit will with me and is at odds with libertarianism, you know?). I think having equality and similar results between racial groups is a good ideal, but believe that meritocracy is important and do not agree with many of the means to achieve this put forward by progressives. It seemingly does not matter, as I now am considered woke by some family members, despite them not being able to define "woke" in a coherent way. I think you are correct, it does seem in today's zeitgeist, social alignment seems to be more important than economic alignment.
What specific mechanism do you think the "woke" make in favor of racism specifically? Is it their lack of ability to actually solve for their main issue, or is it something else? What has been proposed by people like Ibram X. Kendi is genuine racism itself, and does not even shy away from calling it as such. For example, the only antidote to racism is racism, the only antidote to discrimination is yet more discrimination...
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Naraburns probably said it the best, including how this question of "define woke" is often used as a trolling technique to derail discussion. In fact these rhetorical techniques are often very useful to certain strains of woke, as naraburns said woke stems from so called Critical Theory, which functions best when it is well - criticizing - as opposed to explaining. So using some form of rhetorical judo in discussions is used quite often to have opponents on back foot and in defense, where they are the ones asking questions and criticizing all answers. While at the same time they do not subject their own terms to the same scrutiny.
Two can play the same game of gish gallop: define racism, define systemic racism, define whiteness, define white supremacy, define heteronormativity, define gender etc. We can also play the same game with much older terms such as: define capitalism, define socialism, define communism, define neoliberalism. All of these can and were used as "boogeymen", however they continue to be used and they capture something.
Might also be useful to apply it to more general terms. Define Problematic. Define Toxic.
Exactly, the world problematic itself has a special meaning at least in Foucaultian analysis, which is also often used in "woke" - you take something and "problematicize" it - analyze it for power relation stemming from ideology. It is very similar to this critical approach, something like:
This can be used for anything. Hiking is problematic and racist. Gyms are sexist nests of manspreading and mansplaining etc.
This is a very fair critique, as there is always an asymmetric amount of effort put for by those looking to define a term versus one providing a critique. That being said, how does one ensure that a discussion is not two people talking past one another without defining terms?
This effort discrepancy isn't lost on me, in next week's thread I will put forward a definition of fascism for you and others to critique in the spirit of fairness and to continue the dialogue.
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One of the problems is that some people just seem to use "woke" as a synonym for "authoritarian" or "illiberal" - usually authoritarian and illiberal leftism (chiefly forms that aren't Soviet communism), but in case of people talking about "woke right" it's obvious that they're liberal types who first got frightened of authoritarian tendencies in leftist communities, moved sharply to the right and then noted similar authoritarian and illiberal strains in their new right-wing communities.
Of course the problem here is that liberalism is taken as something of a given when the vast majority of people ever living in the world during the history of humanity have believed in authoritarian ideologies, it takes genuine work to make people truly believe in things like "you should let people speak even if they're wrong" or "people have the right to advance religious ideals even if you think they are rank heresy or mere superstition" or "innocent until proven guilty even if they really really seem shifty in an obviously guilty way" or a dozen other basic things underpinning liberal democracy.
When it comes to "woke" itself beyond the whole authoritarianism thing, it's really a combination of multiple things and ideologies, within the US chiefly progressive African-American nationalism (and other ethnic minority nationalisms usually deriving from the ideological work already done by progressive African-American nationalists, with "progressive" separating this ideological straing from non-progressive African-American nationalisms variously advanced by Marcus Garvey, NOI/Black Hebrewites/other cults or these days by black manosphere types like Tariq Nasheed), second- and third-wave feminism, and to some degree the sexual revolution and the related groups.
The whole "intersectionalism" things is an attempt to tie these, particularly progressive African-American nationalism and feminism, together to a coherent combination, but since there still is friction related to the importances of various causes, the coalition is straining all the time and wokeness doesn't seem to have that much staying power, as shown by the developments after Trump's election.
The "woke right" doesn't exist. It doesn't make sense. It's incoherent. It's an enemy anti-concept designed to derail the conversation.
The left noticed how useful it was for the right to be able to name their political project and has been fighting tooth and nail to destroy the word "woke", whether by endless isolated demands for rigor asking for a perfect definition (as in the OP) or by embracing, extending, and extinguishing the term into uselessness (as in "woke right").
Don't fall for it.
There is something to the concept of the "woke right". To simplify, they accept all the woke theories, but just switch the morality on its head - sometimes trying to even to flip the narrative of oppression. Yes, men did form patriarchy to oppress women and it was is a good thing - just look how shit the world looks like when they rule now. We should go back and repeal the 19th. Yes white supremacy is the boogeyman that woke activists describe. And we can become powerful again and rule the world, even woke people envy that power and want to take it for themselves. Why give them that?
This was always the problem with any victim-victimized ideology, especially if it wins the culture war: why assume that people will sympathize with victims? It is just slave morality, embrace the narrative and reclaim the power from the rabble.
This makes sense, provided you believe yourself to not be the rabble.
Slave morality won because people did the math and figured out that there are a lot more slaves than masters.
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Everyone I've seen using the term "woke right" has belonged to the right-oriented anti-woke group themselves.
It makes plenty enough sense if one just interprets "woke" to mean authoritarianism. There certainly are plenty of authoritarian right-wingers.
I've only heard it from zionist republicans as a way to refer to anti-zionist right wingers without having to talk about what they believe that makes them woke (that Israel is committing genocide in Palestine).
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I'd pick a few nits over authoritarianism being to focal point, while there are some authoritarians under the "woke-right" umbrella, being authoritarian seems neither necessary nor sufficient to be "woke right". "Illiberal" seems like it's hitting the nail on the head, as it's a label I would answer to, and something I could fully understand the anti-woke liberals turning on me over, since I am, after all, opposing their core values.
However what's driving me insane about the deployment of the label is either it's laziness, or if you want to be more cynical, it's deliberate use to obscure the nature of the conflict. "Woke Right" implies something like "these right-wingers are substantially the same as the left-wingers we've just finished fighting", and so there's no need to investigate what they want and where are they coming from. My contention is that we're not, that we have criticisms that the liberals have no good answer for, and I'd further say that the liberals know this. It can be easily observed in the approach to debate between various factions. Back when it was the woke left vs. the liberals, the liberals were itching for a debate, while the woke left employed various methods of avoiding it, or even trying to delegitimatize the very idea of debate. Now that it's liberals vs the "woke right", it's the "woke right" itching for a debate, while the liberals are trying to avoid, or delegitimize it. In fact from where I sit, it feels like avoiding and delegitimizing debate is the very purpose of using the "woke right" label.
Per Josh Neal, this is an old tactic going back at least to Richard Hofstadter’s The Paranoid Style in American Politics:
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There's more from Neal on this in his appearance on the J. Burden show. And I'm also reminded of a bit from this decades-old blog post about Gandhi:
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That's not what happened. We've been on a years, if not decades, long loop of Please Just Fucking Tell Me What Term I Am Allowed to Use for the Sweeping Social and Political Changes You Demand, until progressives started using "woke" in a self a descriptive manner, when they were feeling particularly strong. Their opponents pounced, as they say, figuring they won't be able to wriggle out of a term they unironically used themselves, which they tried to do anyway.
Now that the liberals feel they were mostly done with progressives they're trying to redirect some of the anti-woke momentum against the illiberal right.
I don't think this is what happened either. I don't see "woke" as being particularly different in kind compared to its predecessors like "SJW," "identity politics," "political correctness," or "CRT." These were all used unironically to describe oneself and one's in-group, often in a way meant to invoke pride - I both partook in and observed this happening all the time within progressive leftist circles about 10-20 years ago. Even "political correctness," which was a derogatory term in most of the 90s, was being reclaimed during the late 2000s/early 2010s as simply what any decent human just considers as "correct."
Thing is, as Shakespeare might put it, shit by any other name will stink just as foul, and so people figured out that the ideological projects described by these mostly innocuous-sounding terms were actually quite foul, and so these terms became foul, necessitating the shift to a different label. What sets "woke" apart, I think, is that it was the term in use when shit really hit the fan in the mainstream, when the naked power and demands of the "woke" were too large and too extreme for a large part of the mainstream to accept everything just on vibes, but rather compelled people to look under the hood and properly connect all the dots. So it's become difficult, if not impossible, for the SJWs, idpol-types, PC-types of yesteryear to slide into some other, as-of-yet untarnished label. It's sort of happening with "DEI" becoming "BRIDGE," but, I mean, those same 3 letters are still in the latter, and I think the overall awareness of these types of politics is just too high for the sleight of hand to work nearly as well this time.
The term "woke right" seems to be trying to get at a subset of rightwingers who follow a similar sort of resentment- and identity-based thinking when it comes to society as the "woke." And I can why people like James Lindsay - who's the person responsible for like 95% of the usage of the phrase "woke right" that I've seen in the wild - would want to do this; there are few things rightists hate more than "woke," and it's not unreasonable to believe that the dangers of right-wing identity politics could be a blind spot for many anti-woke rightists. But in terms of the meaning of the term, it just seems unnecessary, since it's just describing plain old racism.
The "woke" way of thinking involves justifying discrimination against individuals of race X and in favor of individuals of race Y because, in the past, society was structured to favor race X over race Y, and modern society still suffers from downstream effects of such structures such that individuals of race X today are advantaged over individuals of race Y. This is equivalent to the stereotypical classical racist rationale that, due to a difference in the grace of God/genes/essence/intelligence/etc. race X is intrinsically inferior to race Y, it's just a version that's been adapted not just to be palatable but to be delicious to people who want to consider themselves non-racist.
So whatever cluster of people the "woke right" is describing, it just seems to me to be describing classical racists among the right-wing, just using a label that's meant to provoke a greater disgust response (interesting that, again, since a rose by any other name smells just a sweet, it seems that "racist" has become a less nasty thing to be associated with than "woke").
"CRT" post-dated the use of "woke" and "SJW" and "identity politics" always were terms of derision from what I remember. The only one that could plausibly contradict what I said is "political correctness", maybe was used self-descriptively back in 90's, but that was before my time. The rest of what you said fits perfectly well with what I think happened to these terms.
That's the motte. The bailey is that any right-winger who departs from liberalism in any significant way is "woke right". You think collective identity is important, but don't build your politics around resentment? Woke right. You think the separation of church and state is an unworkable utopian idea that will lead to the birth of quasi-religions like wokeness? Woke right. You think that sometimes society does have a right to get between a man and his means of self-gratification, even though any particular instance affects only the individual in question? Woke right.
Like I said in the other comment, I wouldn't even mind people like Lindsay criticizing these beliefs, it's normal and good for liberals to attack threats to liberalism. The problem is he's doing it in a fundamentally dishonest manner.
Yes, I remember it being used as a self-deprecating joke by liberals like my parents in the '80s and '90s. I think it was used seriously among Maoists before that. The joke form carried the message "Of course we're not so illiberal as the old Maoists who would've used this sincerely."
I was very young at the very tail of that era, but in retrospect I notice people used it to launder the old-maoist policing through a layer of irony. Middle class UK academics in education were my only real exposure though.
I remember a lot of conversations that went like
It defuses the conversation passive-aggressively, reducing the whole thing to a joke-but-for-real though, and forestalls A from following up with "I'm serious though what's with all the fucking Pakis, are we really ok with where this is going?"
In 2014ish millennials did exactly the same thing with playing Cards Against Humanity and joking about how "tumblr's gonna get you for that," then a few years later the exact same people dropped the mask and switched to open confrontation once they felt powerful enough.
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I'd say "CRT" came into the mainstream around the same time as "woke," but either way you're right it's not a predecessor. It also has other problems of comparison, in that it's an actual academic "theory" that has been around since at least the 1960s. I should have either excluded this from the list or expanded on the comparison. I see the phenomenon as being very similar, in that "CRT" is a label that was coined by its proponents and true believers that, once it made contact with the mainstream, very quickly took on a negative valence due to the underlying thing that the label was describing.
My guess is that you remember correctly, and your memory is reflective of the types of people you saw speaking, i.e. I'm guessing you weren't always surrounded by progressive leftists. I wasn't in the room when a progressive leftist uttered the phrase, "I am a social justice warrior" for the first time or anything, but I remember long before these terms entered anywhere close to the mainstream, they were simply ways people among my milieu described themselves and their politics, which was just having basic human decency and empathy. Like the other examples, once these terms became more well known, the general populace, reasonably, associated the terms with the underlying people and things that they were pointing at, and as a result the terms rapidly became derisive.
A safer bet would be that I remember wrong. I rarely vouch for my memory, and this was all a long time ago.
I started off libertarian, and there always was a healthy 50/50-ish woke/chud split. I spent the majority of the GamerGate drama on the feminist side.
"Social Justice" may have been the self a descriptive term that progressives used, but "Social Justice Warrior" was always derisive.
The precise timelines on this thing is hard to nail down, obviously, but my memory is quite different. Leading up to that affair of reproductively viable worker ants (as a feminist, I didn't take a side, mainly just cringing at the utter nonsense spouted by fellow feminists like Sarkeesian. I did try to speak out against both falsely claiming and catastrophizing online death/rape threats, malicious Photoshopping and the like, but I quickly learned that well-meaning constructive criticism for the purpose of strengthening the movement is something SocJus considers evil when directed at themselves), there were plenty of people within my social group, including myself, who proudly called ourselves SJWs, because social justice is such an obviously and uniformly good ideology in the face of the pernicious social evils that permeate the world that behaving like warriors fighting for its favor is something anyone should be proud of. Some of it was performatively trying to fight against the (inevitably successful) attempts by outsiders to make it a term of denigration, and so perhaps my memory of the timeline is what's faulty.
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Even Wikipedia admits that
(after describing it as a "perjorative term and internet meme" in the first sentence, naturally)
A quick Google Books search by date (yeah, I know, but searching web pages by date is a lot more error-prone) also shows a positive use by the author of Doonesbury, a positive use describing a deceased activist, and a positive use in a book describing conflicts between different ideas of social justice, and only in 2015 does the perjorative use case appear in print.
And ... doesn't this make sense? "Social justice" is still used as a positive phrase by progressives. "Warrior" is much more mixed to the left, but it's not an utterly negative term there (e.g. the first two Wikipedia diambiguation hits are Native American groups), and it's a positive term in general: the Golden State Warriors were never in any danger of getting cancelled, the Wounded Warriors Project wasn't mocking its beneficiaries, and if you keep scrolling down that Wiki page you'll see dozens of proud self-applications of the word.
Personally, I thought the phrase SJW was pretty apt, because "applying attitudes extreme enough for war to social justice problems" isn't too far off from what the "No Justice, No Peace" crowd would admit to but is also a good summary of what I think was wrong with the movement. But IMHO the most typical right-wing perjorative use wasn't criticising extremism, it was just sarcastic about the juxtaposition of a violent-sounding name with the heavily keyboard-based "activism" it gets used to describe, so I can't say I'm upset that its use went out of fashion.
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I think they have a coherence by, as you say, deriving from the same ideological work. How would you think this is only among the ethnic movements? And while there are questions of priorities, committed activists for one are still generally positive about the others. Thats more than you can say about the "dissident right", and noone seems to have much of a problem acknowleding that as a thing that exists.
Every movement looks more coherent from the outside than from the inside.
But yes, there is some coherence, but it's still not enough to make it a fully coherent ideology.
edit: I think that actually one of the biggest friction points is not as much ideological as aesthetic and rhetorical - progressive African-American nationalism was traditionally a fairly masculine movement (fiery mustacchioed preachers, Black Panthers with their leather jackets, "the only position of women in the movement is prone" etc.), and feminism obviously chafes with that, not only directly but also generally leading to a more feminine aesthetic and rhetoric being adopted - which in turn makes young men, in particular, disaffected, leading them to manosphere guys or recently even Trumpism.
I'm trying to figure this one out, do they have something against missionary position? Is missionary the white man's sex position?
Laying on your back is supine, prone is how you shoot a rifle at a distant target.
Are they saying they want their women to be sexually available or crawling around with rifles?
Or is this a proto-Mixalot saying that he likes women to have butts so large that they have to sleep prone because laying on their back would be too uncomfortable?
It's a somewhat famous quote by Stokely Carmichael.
It's just a way to say "The role of the women is to satisfy men's sexual urges and nothing more", not more complicated than that.
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I think you're missing an explanation: whoever wrote that just didn't understand that "prone" is not the term for lying on your back. It's kind of like how people commonly (but incorrectly) use "biweekly" to mean "twice per week".
Anecdotally, off the top of my head I can only recall one word in my language for [prone|supine], and I don't remember which one it is.
Prone gets used 20x as often as supine, at least in English.
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I checked because you mentioned it and I had biweekly and semiweekly reversed in my head even though biannual and semiannual follow the same pattern and were saved correctly in my memory. I feel like a public school teacher may have done this to me.
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I think "wokism" is about as real as "the hippies" or "the dissident right", a bit more so from the institutional connections. I think this is sufficient for most complaints about wokeness.
But why would that be a conflict? Oh no, this terrible point of friction, weve adopted two styles that were literally made for each other. You just have the guys rioting and the (white) women shrieking at the monsters who dare stop them.
It seems like wokeness isn’t super popular among African American men- if they’re running left they’re going to prefer things like NOI or the black Hebrew Israelites. Conversely African American women are mostly woke.
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I'm not sure there were many people calling it that. In fact a large part of it's criticism consisted of pointing out it's incoherence and inner tensions.
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In this context, and being a believer in the concept of "ideologies are born to facilitate political struggles", wokism for me is the synthesis of black nationalism, third worldism and feminism that was created to improve the electoral odds and power of the Democratic Party, and then was wielded by the US Empire as an imperial ideology in order to make it easier to control the satellite states.
If we follow this definition of wokism, it is clear that it will lose importance the moment it will not be useful anymore to the US Empire (so never, for now)
It's more complicated than that. Progressive African-American nationalism, due to its status of as the main political expression of the largest minority of the most powerful country of the world (and an expression, moreover, that is well-suited for coalition building and forming a template for others), has had enormous cachet globally generally, with minorities all around the world considering their struggle to be equivalent to that of the African-Americans (including white minorities. Progressive African-American leaders, like Dubois and MLK, have been aware of the effect of publicizing repression against the movement on America's soft power and have utilized that to their advantage, so that American policies have at least as much had to do with navigating this threat as with any conscious imperial ideological designs.
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Woke is intesectionality. I may be cheating a bit in that people who came up with that term aren't among the most brief and clear writers, but at list euphemism treadmill didn't advance far enough for it to not be a term of self-identification anymore.
Yes, and the answer is pretty obvious if you first ask your self "what is socially conscious"? Is it possible to be socially conscious and think black people aren't being arrested more due to discrimination, or the system being set against them? Is it possible to be socially conscious that women don't go into tech as much as men because they don't enjoy the subject matter of the field as much, rather than because they're being discriminated against, or because the system is set against them? Is it possible to be socially conscious and think that trans women aren't women, and it's a bad idea to send them into women's sports, changing rooms, prisons, and domestic abuse shelters? If the answer to these questions was "yes", then you have you example of a difference between being socially conscious and being woke. If the answer was "no" then you have smuggled an ideology into the term "socially conscious", and that ideology is Woke.
Do you mind if I turn the whole thing on you, and ask you to elaborate on this claim? What do you think gets unfairly branded as "woke"? Can you show that it got to the point that no one knows what "woke" originally meant anymore? If it's increasingly a nebulous boogieman, would you say there was once a point it was not nebulous and not a boogieman?
This is an excellent distinction between the two and a fair appraisal. How do you explain the field of sociology consistently turning out socially conscious, but leftist graduates at a rate much, much higher than other fields of study?
No, I am happy to oblige. Considering that the term woke is now being used to describe civil rights era executive orders, I do think that this term has had a significant meaning creep since the early 2010's. In essence, when it was seldomly used as a self-descriptor for elements of the progressive left it had a much more firm meaning, as opposed to now, when right wing media uses it to describe just about anything from beer to green energy. Fox News alone has ~50 articles written in the last week about the topic. Almost all use in the last month of the word when broadening the search to all news sources brings up hundreds of results, almost all of them from right wing news sources or describing actions by the right.
Much the same way I would explain why a particular country ended up owning a particular plot of land some centuries ago. Maybe it was conquest, maybe it was a political marriage, or maybe it was some court intrigue. A fascinating question for those interested in history, no doubt, but little more. It can cast little light on whether or not the theories in question are an accurate description of reality.
Why? The laws in question seem to fit quite well into what various "intersectional" theories would prescribe, and so it seems fair to call them woke.
Have you ever talked to someone who holds an intersectional worldview? Your example immediately brought to mind a quote from the World Economic Forum conference that I covered a while back, where one of the participants says the following:
@aqouta mentions the Omnicause, and while it may be another derisive name for the phenomenon we're discussing, it's a handy keyword to search for examples of how the very same people will jump from climate change, to queer acceptance to free Palestine. In other words the critics are entirely right to point to everything from beer to green energy, because woke people themselves believe their cause is about all those things.
I see where you're coming from. Way back when, there was a small cottage industry in academia, writing tomes upon tomes about "neoliberalism", but the darnedest thing was no one could ever point me to a person calling themselves a "neoliberal". This was frustrating, because as an aspiring freethinker, I didn't want to just hear about why an idea was bad from it's critics, I also wanted to hear why it could be good from it's proponents, and make up my own mind.
So I get it, a spooky term for a nebulous concept is a red flag. However, when investigating these things I think it's important to ask why there are no people who want to apply a given term to themselves. In case of "woke" this is because it's just another iteration of a decades-long trend of a particular brand of progressive doing their best to prevent a label sticking to their movement and ideology, so they can avoid criticism. From cultural Marxism to Political Correctness, Critical Theory, DEI, and Social Justice, all the way to the aforementioned Intersectionality, and culminating in Freddie de Boer's, who's hardly a right-winger himself, rant - Please Just Fucking Tell Me What Term I Am Allowed to Use for the Sweeping Social and Political Changes You Demand.
We can again contrast that with "neoliberalism", which started off as a boogeyman, but which ended up being a self-descriptive term, when people got fed up of lefties beating up on a strawman, and founded /r/neoliberal. I don't have sources for this, but I heard the very same thing happened with the term "capitalism" which was Marx' very own nebulous boogeyman, but at some point liberals got fed up with him, and decided to adopt the term as their own.
If "woke" really was a term right-wingers invented out of thin air, that didn't describe anything real, I'd expect it to follow the same trajectory as "neoliberalism" or "capitalism". But the trajectory of abandonment observable in other terms like "cultural Marxism", "DEI", or "Social Justice" shows the term is pointing at something real that certain people do actually believe in, but don't want to answer for.
Is civil rights woke now? It was called civil rights by virtually the entire political spectrum for over 40 years, until now some on the right use the word "woke" to describe it and other measures they feel are beneath the DEI umbrella. "Woke" was not in the prose of anyone in the 1960's.
I have talked to several people who have an intersectional worldview and have a close friend who would fall squarely into that camp. In my opinion, intersectionality's usefulness varies, and the danger on the left is that it is the only lens some are willing and/or capable of using.
At the end of the day, it is a lens that one can put on and take off, which combined with other lenses, can paint a more complete picture of a situation, or demonstrate the role of identity groups in a social phenomenon. This generally is at the expense of individual experience, however, and one has to be careful that it is not used as weapon to silence others. When it is the only lens used, comments like the one you shared become the norm and every singe social interaction across the globe becomes the oppressed/oppressor narrative, disregarding all other factors.
Pragmatically, the reason why intersectionality has been a rallying cry on the left this century is without it, it is a collection of moderate to small sized special interests when can be easily overruled. In a group, they are formidable and can vie for power through plurality. The right in my opinion, does not have this level of fracturing in its base.
The number of people that would identify with that movement, or those that support it but don't identify with it that apply it to everything is a minority, albeit an incredibly vocal one, interestingly, the right magnifies those voices as a rallying cry for their agenda. Climate change in particular is also a dubious one, as it actually has a decent amount of support on the right. There was an 81 member Conservative Climate Caucus in the congressional session that just ended. That is just over 37% of all republicans elected to that chamber. So while I agree that climate change is a progressive goal, it has a sizable amount of support on the right.
Anyway, I digress, but appreciate the dialogue. I think the thing I am coming away with is that if a label is used more by the opposition than the group or initiatives it describes, it is more likely to have its meaning become nebulous over time. Especially if the word/words are short or need some sort of additional explanation of what it is. The more specific the terminology is, or if the term is adopted by those it is being used to describe, it does not seem to happen nearly as much.
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"Woke" applies to an individual or work for whom all of the following hold:
The first category is to exclude those who are socially conscious of issues that aren't just a scheme to enrich themselves, which is a key feature of woke thought, and covers the standard "diversity over meritocracy" complaint. Compare stealing offense; they take that which isn't being given to them because it improves their social standing to do so (this is bullying/political strategy 101).
The second category serves to indict so-called "reverse" discrimination as discrimination- the "I can't be sexist, I only hire women" thing (which is usually used as an excuse for unevenhanded treatment when those who interpret the law are unwilling or unable to address it, typically because of the above). Again, if this occurs but isn't intended as nakedly self-enriching at the same time, it's more morally neutral than it is when perpetrated with intent; seeking eradication denies opportunity for education (hardened hearts and all that).
The third category must exist for free speech reasons; after all, are you truly free to possess selfish, illiberal views if you at no point are allowed to voice them? Steven Universe [for instance] thus cannot truly be considered a "woke show" even though it (and its creators) arguably satisfy (1) and (2), because it's done well and actually has something to say; compare how Lolita generally escapes the "child pornography" category.
The same principles we used to be granted offense to, and punish, obscenity serve to similarly convict wokeism and its practitioners- intentional, anti-social, and without any other mitigating merit. (Which is why I borrowed the Miller test for this definition.)
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First, see who uses the word Woke. It is used by anti-Woke types to categorize practices and beliefs employed by upper class residents and aspirants to effect resource transfer from social actors that are not themselves sufficiently engaged in these practices and beliefs.
Said practices and beliefs are:
What results is that one party can declare themselves whole and distinct from another, define its own outcomes for itself and who is responsible for it, and demand the responsible party be the one to change in order to redress the disparity. Principally, it gives license to a a party to declare its own aggrievement and thus its place in the queue for restitution.
No one actually calls themselves Woke since 2022, but instead there still is an assertion that the above principles are inalienable states of reality. Go to MSNBC, Slate, Salon, and see how it is constantly asserted that whites are responsible for the poor state of blacks, even when whites do not claim any ownership or do anything to effect black failure. And wokeness, by being definitionally nebulous, allowed everyone to label themselves as such when trendy and shed it when not.
The defitional warfare employed by anti-Woke vs the 'woke' is precisely because the 'woke' party has shed its names multiple times as the logical incongruities of the various principles get associated with a concrete term, exposing the inability of the stated principles to mesh together in reality even without active actions by the opposition these principles define themselves against. Woke was previously Social Justice, which was previously Political Correctness. Given that being Woke has fallen out of favor so rapidly all the practitioners are now claiming they never advocated woke policies, yet in observed reality there is endless proof of the presence of DEI corporate policies, thinkpieces about lesbians being transphobic for not giving blowjobs etc from the early 2010still early 2020s.
Wokism is externalizing responsibility by fiat, and appropriating high valence moral principles to effect desired outcomes. What ends up happening is not that everything turns out to truly be racism), but that racism becomes so nebulously redefined that it does not matter anymore. If everything is racist, nothing is racist. Woke crybullying started reaching a stop when everything was being declared fascist, and more practitioners started realizing people were getting increasingly alright with being called as such.
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I have previously defined it here as briefly as possible, "Identity based progressivism, usually recent aggressive illiberal status seeking strains."
So, it would entirely depend on what you mean by socially conscious. If that entails identity based progressivism, they'd need to have a very unusual personality and probably a different strand of progressivism.
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In modern parlance its an ironic reappropriation of a word, now used to describe a hostile intolerance to differing arguments for a more fair, just, and prosperous society, all while cowering behind the words original meaning.
For example take Ana Kasparian revealing that she was sexually assaulted by a homeless person. Brain-rotted wokies tore her to pieces for disparaging homeless people, and called her racist for some unknown reason. One of her collogues quit because Ana wanted to be called a woman, not a birthing person. Or the 1619 Project by Nikole Hannah Jones, a Pulitzer winning piece of historical revisionism. Noticing its factual errors and/or flaws reasoning got you branded as a racist Nazi by the woke. Or the coverage surrounding the shooting of Jacob Blake, who was under arrest yet tired to flee in a vehicle with children before attempting to stab an officer before being shot. If you so much as pointed out what the video showed, you were called a racist. Its worth noting that Blakes shooting precipitated the attempts to burn down sections of Kenosha WI for some reason, where Kyle Rittenhouse shot 3 people on video, the lone survivor of whom said in court that Rittenhouse did not so much as aim at him until he pointed his own gun at Rittenhouse - who was obviously a white supremacist despite shooting only white people.
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In light of the stupid Elon hand gesture thing that still won’t die, let me offer a slightly different definition based on something I was just thinking about. A lot of what separates “woke” from run of the mill identity politics and/or ingroup-outgroup bias is the imposition of rules on the outgroup. This is where it takes on a somewhat religious tone ( slogans like “silence is violence” are analogous to the “convert or die” sentiment of the Muslim conquests or early crusades ).
What makes woke particularly insufferable is the rule creation mechanism. It doesn’t come from a canonical text, but rather, it’s an ever growing list of words or actions that were previously done by bad people. Racial slurs? – can’t say those, bad people used them a long time ago. Black facepaint? - can’t use that. Bad people did it a long time ago. Raising your straight arm at an angle above 90 degrees from the resting position? - can’t do that. You guessed it, because bad people did that a long time ago. Hell, you can’t even make the okay sign in some circles anymore because bad people did it on the internet. In addition, the rules are different depending on how “bad” your particular group is seen as being.
So, back to the Elon hand gesture. He’s not allowed to make it apparently. Why? Because it was done by the Nazis. It doesn’t matter that that is barely still in living memory. It doesn’t matter that none of his other actions are particularly Nazi-like. It doesn’t matter that it is a salute that comes naturally to humans and has been practiced by countless groups over the millennia. No, the gesture is verboten, now and forever. And unless you are constantly policing your actions and keeping up with the latest blacklists, you too will at some point do something that will mark you as an apostate.
"It's impossible to keep up with all the latest blacklists" being used as a justification for "actually the Nazi salute is fine" has got to be one of the most textbook examples of motte and bailey.
In what way? What is the motte, and what is the bailey here?
The Nazi salute was, notably, not unique to the Nazis. They have no particular historical claim to inventing it, or monopoly on it at the time, or exclusivity on the meaning of 'arm outstretched, slightly elevated'- hence the many defenses of Democrat politicians being photographed in a similar outstretch being 'well, you need to look at the video for context to see otherwise,' which is not coincidentally very similar to the context of if you add what Musk was saying to the context of the image (or video) of him. Context can remove the Nazi criteria.
It would seem to me that what makes a Nazi salute a Nazi salute is if it is done for, in alignment with, or in the context of Nazi activities. If it is not done in a Nazi format, it is not a Nazi salute, just a salute (or gesture), the sort of which 'well, you just need to look at the context to see otherwise' is a valid defense.
'You just need context to see this isn't Nazi' does not seem to be the defendable motte, but the more expansive bailey- and one strong enough to not require a retreat to 'actually the Nazi salute is just fine,' which is less defensible, and thus not a motte.
Instead, the motte-and-bailey seems to be more in the accusation side of things- where 'that is a Nazi salute' is the expansive claim, which is forced to retreat into a more defensible 'well, maybe it's not actually Nazi, but it looks bad so should be condemned regardless.'
Which, coincidentally, is a very similar argument structure to the 'the OK sign is a white supremacist gesture' craze of a few years ago.
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Heh. While I do think the raised-arm salute should be decriminalized (it really is a crime in Germany) because it's just plain silly to have laws against basic gestures like this, I do agree that it's a bit disingenious to pretend that it would be widely-acceptable in western society if only it weren't for the woke.
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Emphasis added.
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During the arguments over same-sex marriage in the aughts, the common metaphor was 'telling me that I may not eat cake because you happen to be on a diet'.
Many fundamentalist soi-disant Christians phrased that mechanism as "Abstain from every appearance of evil", which apparently meant
along with avoiding
(Stuff Fundies Like, March 2009)
Wire-rimmed or frameless (Jebs) are Republican coded now, leftists wear thick plastic frames (Maddows).
Unless they're round, John Lennons can be wire-rim without being right wing.
Remember to always carry both kinds for whenever you need to
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Those kind of fundies were a small minority of Christians who believed women in pants to be sinful being portrayed in the worst possible light by an ex member.
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I think there are many possible definitions that are equally good, because the term really represents a cluster of beliefs that are strongly correlated (in the sense that a big fraction of the people who believe in any one of them believe in any given other one). One possible definition that is perfectly serviceable is: the belief that
(1) there are various ways to partition society into groups of people, including but not necessary limited to "race" (as understood by Americans: "white, black, Asian, Hispanic, ..."), sex and/or gender (male, female, self-identifications that are taken by those who hold them to be of the same type such as nonbinary, ...) and sexual orientation, and the groups under each of these partitionings can be ranked by a quantity denoted as privilege (so you can identify the more and less privileged race, gender etc.), and
(2) there are certain important outcomes (income, incarceration or lack there of, occupation of high-status professions, representation in high-status media...), such that it is (a) it is normally the case that more privileged groups attain them at higher rates than the less privileged ones, (b) morally bad when/that this is the case, and (c) when this happens, the responsibility/guilt, and hence the burden of redress (by reparations, punishment or active redistribution of the object of the outcomes), lies with the respective most privileged groups.
Optional but extremely typical components include, firstly, that (2a) must not inform (1) - the ranking by privilege is predetermined and fixed (e.g. in particular white>Asian) and outcome orderings that disagree with it are considered irrelevant non-examples rather than counterexamples, and secondly the notion of "intersectionality", which basically says that you should intersect the partitions to assign blame and responsibility more narrowly (with the notorious intersection of "cis white males" at the top, and "trans women, particularly trans women of color" at the bottom).
I think this does a reasonable job of capturing the core, or at least a necessary assumption, of any belief or policy that is commonly labelled as "woke"; to the extent there are things that get labelled as woke without an obvious connection (ex: COVID policy, environmentalism), it is because they have high correlation with the above beliefs. This is not unusual: for a mirror image, consider for example how rejecting modernist government buildings is taken to be "right-wing" or even "fascist" (In fact I dare any progressive to define "fascism"!), or similar assessment about opposition to vaccines.
The load-bearing part of the definition lies in the deontological moral judgement and imposition of obligation of (2bc) more than it lies in the categorisation of society in (1) and (2a) that you could perhaps call being "socially conscious" if you are sympathetic to it. Modern American alt-righters largely agree with the typical Democrat on (1~2a), and thus would arguably be equally "woke" if "woke" were about the "consciousness" part of it. You would not even be woke if you thought that black people are never depicted in a positive way in movies and were tremendously sad about this, but felt that it is immoral to compel or pressure white people to change anything about that. Someone who spends all day seething about the Pakistani rape gangs of Rotherham is, by all accounts, using a similar group analysis, and highly concerned with social issues that arise between the very same groups, but under a normal analysis they would not be "woke", as the moral obligation they want to impose is not on the group that they consider to do well on "important outcomes". (One may in fact count as woke if the beef is actually about making access to underage sex slaves more equitable.)
Given how frequently this question gets asked, I want to lob a question back at you: What gave you the impression that "woke" is nebulous or not readily defined, or that it has a meaning that is hard to distinguish from "socially conscious"?
Edit: Thinking some more about the correlate beliefs such as environmentalism, the easiest common thread to identify is probably something like a general sense that the more fortunate are morally obliged to make sacrifices for the less fortunate - affluent first-world industrialists should sacrifice for poor third-worlders who have to live off the land and are exposed to the weather, and healthy young people should sacrifice for the sick and elderly. This looks like a classical leftist sentiment; and because classical leftism has been so thoroughly taken over by the woke, it is unfortunate that the distinction between the two has become blurred in the eyes of its opposition. You can still identify distinct elements that makes some components of environmentalism, COVID policy and so on appear more "woke" than others, which is whenever the calculus of fortune and obligation is applied more at the level of (1)-like groups than at the individual, and whenever some kind of outcome score-keeping takes precedence over straight up redistribution. Carbon taxes, which hamper industry to fill social programme coffers, seem less "woke" than plastic straw bans, where the main feature seems to be to bring inconvenience to first-worlders in some vaguely climate-related way.
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My short definition is "a posture of extreme or exaggerated deference to identitarian sensibilities, or to the imagined shape thereof".
Wokeness is more of an attitude or posture than it is a list of doctrines that must be accepted. That posture is one of identifying supposedly marginalised or oppressed voices, and then assigning those voices epistemological and ethical priority over other voices. Wokeness is then what happens when you self-present on this basis.
I note explicitly that wokeness does not require actually listening to or acting consistently with the preferences of a supposedly marginalised group. It is the presentation of acting as if one is doing that. The classic example is 'Latinx'. This makes it more clear that wokeness tends to be a manner that privileged or educated people adopt in order to be seen by other privileged people. You don't say 'Latinx' to actually help or engage with Latino people, but rather in order to performatively display your sensitivity to Latinos. Latinos themselves are not the audience, and so their actual feelings can be ignored.
I think this element is helpful with regard to your last question - the difference between social consciousness and wokeness. Social consciousness is actually being aware of the feelings, concerns, and cultural norms of a particular social group. Wokeness is the performance of that awareness for the sake of intra-elite competition. Thus to pick a concrete example, a white person who goes to a majority-black church and understands their local culture, is accepted among them as a friend, etc., is likely socially conscious as to issues in the black church, but may not be woke; meanwhile a white person who goes to an all-white church but has a BLM sticker on their car and tweets about structural racism is likely woke, but probably not that socially conscious.
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We discuss this almost every week. Every time we do someone posts this article from Freddie Doboer.
No one's done it yet so let me be the first.
You wouldn't also happen to have any questions about race and IQ would you?
Are you sure you didn't mean this article?
Though I find it amusing that both seemed to have been taken down because Freddie didn't like how people took them, so... take that for what it's worth?
Doesn't matter in the former case, the remaining title and subtitle are enough.
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shortcut since he removed it: https://web.archive.org/web/20211108155321/https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/please-just-fucking-tell-me-what
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I'm not going to bother answering @Ancient_Anemone's question since naraburns has given a good one and asked the questions I'd want to. To answer before they actually substantiate their own claims would be to expend an asymmetric amount of effort, which is very common in this particular debate.
So I'll ask a question of my own to the board while I have the chance, since it doesn't seem worthy of a top level post: it seems like "SJW" disappeared when it became low-status like "woke" seems to be now. The very people who once proudly used it as a self-descriptor simply abandoned it. Why do we think that didn't happen with "woke", and instead there's an insistence that the term (when used by enemies) doesn't refer to anything?
I assumed that it has something to do with "woke" being very old and thus dear to progressives, but "social justice" is apparently very old too. Maybe because you can still claim "social justice" without the now-cringe "warrior" element while you'd have to abandon "woke" entirely? Maybe it's because "woke" is associated with black people and standpoint epistemology makes it easier to claim the anti-woke are ignorant? Is it really just that "woke" is more facially vague?
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Let me steelman the common progressive snarkcasm: 'it's when brown and gay people have jobs'.
Okay. Let's accept it at its premise. You start to notice things, when BIPOCs and LGBTQs are in positions of power. How they nepotistically hire across their own communities while demanding you open up yours. How well-connected they are in terms of shutting down dissent. How curiously over-represented they are in positions of forum moderation and-
Look, no one would say that a o'l boys network didn't exist just because they didn't write down the NO GIRLS ALLOWED charter. For the same reason, you can't say that there isn't a 'woke' social network that exists to further the interest of its class. It's not conspiratorial to point organizations that actively promote and advocate for it as a movement. They actually exist. It's written into their charters, their codes of conduct.
The word gaslighting has been severely abused by narcissists in the past decade, but if anything is that, this is it.
I don't think this is actually true. A lot of wokeness, maybe most of it, consists of people who aren't BIPOC or LGBTQ white-knighting people who are.
I know. I don't personally believe in that definition, which is why I steelmanned it.
But it's revealing that even this common deflection falls apart if you even spend a moment thinking about it. Adding allyship to this interaction includes those white knights.
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For our benefit, please provide an example of where you think the word "woke" was used as a "nebulous boogeyman" and explain how you think that nebulousness reflected an "increase" from previous use cases.
Because it seems to me that "define woke" is a question posed (mostly by trolls) all the time around here. I've never actually seen this community struggle, even a tiny bit, with what is or is not "woke."
"Woke" is a convenient handle for left wing identitarianism, broadly construed. It is often in tension with left wing materialism, so e.g. Marxists are often anti-woke leftists.
This can be confusing because "woke" is predominantly what was once called "cultural Marxism" (e.g.)--before that phrase got memory-holed into an "anti-Semitic conspiracy theory." Cultural Marxism, in turn, is the application of "critical theory" and redistributionist tendencies to "social capital" instead of monetary capital. This is one reason Marxists are often at odds with wokists; Marxism is a modernist and materialist philosophy, while wokism is postmodern and sociological. Classical Marxists will tell you that cultural Marxism is not even Marxism at all... but they still typically vote for the same people and policies.
One way in which "woke" may be somewhat evolved beyond cultural Marxism is that it seems to have incorporated a decentralized ethos impossible prior to the advent of social media; what counts as "woke" today can change rapidly depending on what is trending and who is getting cancelled. While "purity spirals" are evidenced in e.g. classical Marxist circles, "woke" (plus tech) seems to take this to unprecedented levels.
How would you define "socially conscious?" I am definitely conscious of the social issues that consume wokist thought, and yet it would clearly be a mistake to identify me as "woke," because I am not a left wing identitarian. Most people who are obsessed with issues of race or gender, and who regard those differences as central to all political questions, are left wing identitarians, but some are right wing identitarians, and those are not "woke" either--that's the "alt right"--or, better, the "identitarian right."
I wouldn't mind too terribly if the word "woke" went away, but in my experience the only people who would benefit from having it go away, and who really want it to go away, are left wing identitarians, and "left wing identitarian" is admittedly something of a mouthful.
I appreciate your thoughtful response. As others have mentioned, a similar, but less pointed question came up last week, and several of the responses seemed to be incredibly open ended, as these discussions tend to go, (ex communism is when the government does stuff I don't particularly care for). That is my primary intention for asking this question more directly. To answer your question of some instances of this occurring previously here, here are a few quotes from last week's thread:
Here is the next one:
One poster even had the self-awareness to state the following:
The left wing identitarianism and the definition you provided is good and concrete, as I am more interested in what wokeness is, rather than what wokeness does. Once we get into the latter, I feel that we get caught up into identity politics in a way that is not that dissimilar to the thing that that is being derided in the first place. After all, in a banal sense, wokeness is to the right what capitalism is to the left: the source of bad things and an object of scorn.
To me, wokism or calling things woke is a catch all term that someone right of center calls a social activity or value that someone left of center espouses. For instance, I don't think I have ever heard in person or seen online someone left of center that uses it to describe an action or an ideology. When the term is used, it does the following things in the process:
I would define socially conscious as the ability to identify differences in race/ethnicity, class, religion, etc, in addition to individual differences. Generally in the last 20+ years, that generally results in moving toward left wing ideology. The field of sociology being probably the most prescient example. How many right of center sociologists do you know?
It does sometimes get used that way, but I don't know why you would elect to espouse the least clear and useful version of the word as the archetype of the concept. Most people, right or left, are kind of stupid, and when they say political things they are mostly just signalling virtue by parroting something they heard somewhere. Children use words they can't define, sometimes properly, sometimes not; this does not actually muddy the underlying concepts.
So I can't figure out why you're in one breath complaining about people using the word in vague or merely pejorative ways, and in the next breath saying that, to you, that actually is what "woke" means. Any time you see the word in the wild, just substitute "left wing identitarianism" and it should be pretty easy to see whether the person speaking is using the word meaningfully, or just as an empty sneer. In the examples you pulled for me, I don't see any use of the word "woke" as a "nebulous bogeyman." The first two are pretty clear and direct criticisms of left wing identitarianism and the political activities of left wing identitarians. The third is just one person admitting that they aren't sure what "woke" means, precisely, but they can see what it has accomplished.
Then you haven't been paying attention (or maybe you're just late to the party). "#StayWoke" was a pretty early example of hashtag activism, circa 2012. The Wikipedia entry on "Woke" has a 2018 picture of former U.S. Representative Marcia Fudge holding a shirt that says "Stay Woke: Vote." The term itself originated back in the mid-20th century and was very much tied to the identity politics of black Americans, and its circuitous path to "viral hashtag meme" generalized rapidly to leftist identity politics generally. None of this is mysterious, and every news article out there complaining about the vagueness of "woke" ignores the well-established history of the meme in an attempt to muddy the waters of discourse, exactly as the political left has always done with words that capture its essence and expose its ridiculousness.
If that is your definition, then no, "woke" does not mean "socially conscious." To be "woke" requires a particular political attitude toward those differences; the ability to identify them is not sufficient, for the reasons I already outlined. Specifically, the identitarian right is definitely able to identify such differences, and is definitely not "woke."
I defined it that way, simply because that is the way it is most commonly used. The most common usage of any idea would be by definition archetypal, would it not? But yes, that usage would be "dumbing down" any sort of academic understanding of the word being used.
That is why I appreciate your definition of "left wing identitarianism" as a suitable replacement for "woke". It is much more descriptive and is less likely to be misused, mainly because multi word descriptors are harder to massage into extraneous meanings.
Those are good examples, but I can provide hundreds if not thousands of counter examples where it is folks right of center using the term to describe progressive or anti-racist ideas, policies, goals or activities. Furthermore, if we look in the last 5 years or so, this is almost exclusively the case. If there has been a muddying of the waters of the term since the mid-20th century or even 2018 to now, would that not be by the folks who are constantly referencing, writing and talking about it and not those who have nearly ceased using the term?
Fair. I think you have made a good point here.
I don't think so. In your previous comment you suggested two examples of people using "woke" as a mere sneer, when in fact those were both perfectly coherent criticisms of left wing identitarianism.
I suspect you might, and yet so far you have failed to even provide one clear example. In particular, I would be interested to see an example of someone using the word "woke" to describe something, anything, that is not at all plausibly left wing identitarianism. Like, someone taking a bite of pistachio ice cream and then saying, "ugh, disgusting, this ice cream is so woke." That would be pure pejorative, and is probably too much to ask, but so far the closest you've gotten is an example, not of someone using the term as a pure pejorative, but using it to describe left wing identitarianism without apparently knowing a better phrase than "woke" to describe it.
The term hasn't been particularly muddied in the last 5 years, it has just been used to accurately describe the ridiculous policies that result from left wing identitarianism. The absurd response (your response, here!) has been to try to argue that it doesn't mean anything in particular at all, and that it is just an empty smear. But it's not; it's a word that left wing identitarians used to describe themselves, and so it became a pejorative because left wing identitarianism is (it seems to me, and many others) objectively terrible.
It's like... imagine you meet someone who wishes to restore Germany to nationalistic glory, in part by stripping Jews of citizenship, socializing the German economy, et cetera. And you say... "damn, fella, you sound like a Nazi!" And he responds, "oh, get out of here with your nebulous bogeyman terms. People just use 'Nazi' as an empty smear. Sure, maybe it was once used to describe certain political beliefs, but in the last fifty years, the most common usage has just been to tar your political opponents."
I don't know about you, but I feel like the appropriate response would be, "well, true, I would like to see fewer people using the word 'Nazi' as an empty smear. But it does have an actual meaning, and expelling Jews from Germany is kind of a key aspect of that. In fact, it seems like you don't want me to call you what you are because you know that this will probably help some people realize that they do not like your policies and do not wish to vote for you."
To be frank: I think your engagement on this issue is disingenuous. I think you are very much like a Nazi who is complaining about people misusing the word Nazi. Yes, there is a motte here: the word "Nazi" definitely gets used as a nebulous bogeyman! And yet when actual Nazis use that argument, I think it is reasonable to be very suspicious of their true motivations! Because the bailey is that it's more difficult to criticize a political coalition that is constantly shifting its identity in an attempt to evade accountability and criticism.
So it is with "woke." Are there problems with how the word gets used? Sure, that's reasonable. Does that mean that all or even most use of the word "woke" is just empty rhetoric? I have seen (and you have provided) no actual evidence of that.
Federal Reserve Fox Business host Charles Payne criticized the “woke Fed” for failing to raise interest rates to curb inflation. [Fox News, Your World with Neil Cavuto, 1/14/22]
Silicon Valley Bank Asman claimed the Silicon Valley Bank failure “was caused by adherence to woke beliefs and policies. The woke belief that you can just print money without consequence.” [Fox News, The Story with Martha MacCallum, 3/13/23]
Kym Worthy During a report on a man accused of setting his girlfriend on fire, Shimkus mentioned that “the woke Democrat DA in Wayne County Kym Worthy” wanted a higher bond despite her support for bail reform. [Fox News, Fox & Friends, 1/24/22]
There are many more in that source along that are used as as primarily a "sneer". Give me an example of it being used as a "sneer" before 2010--which I think you are going to have a lot harder time doing. Why? Because the definition has had significant "creep" since then, which is my point. What is more common us the use of the word as primarily a sneer, but a smaller amount of truth to deride that person, object, idea, or company. We even have beer companies self-styling as "anti-woke"
Furthermore, we have the labeling of green energy as "woke energy" when there is an 81 member Conservative Climate Caucus in the House of Representatives. How do you reconcile the two?
Wouldn't a political coalition be shifting for other reasons than just to evade accountability, but to adjust based on criticism, lack of performance or encountering unintended circumstances? I think
Now you have evidence of that. All use cases? No, certainly not. But its primary use today (January 2025) is to tar and feather others, before finding out more about what is being described. It is shorthand for something, someone or some entity that deserves our ridicule and opposition. In some cases, maybe that is warranted. Increasingly in others, maybe not. And this last bit in your response is an excellent demonstration of what I am talking about, and it looks like the person getting the pejorative treatment is me.
Thanks for those examples. I think they are okay. Certainly they are better than your examples from this space. What I would say I see happening in the "woke Fed" example is wokism getting generalized to leftism-writ-large, rather than applying to leftist identitarianism. It's guilt-by-association, basically. Not really a "nebulous bogeyman" but certainly a sloppy use.
The "woke Democrat DA" I would need to know more about. Leftist identitarianism often has a lot to say about criminal justice through a racial lens; was this such a case? I don't know. Certainly this could also be a sloppy case.
I think you're maybe underestimating the rapid timeline on the pejoration process. Circa 2010 it was "social justice warriors," not "woke." Before that, I'm not sure... "cultural Marxism" probably, though my memory is that was more of a 1990s thing, driven in large measure by Pat Buchanan. I think maybe the first decade of the 2000s was sufficiently focused on "Islamophobia" and "Islamofascism" that maybe we didn't have a dominant shorthand meme for leftist identitarianism then? (Right now, "DEI" seems to be rising to the top as the preferred nomenclature of leftist identitarians, which is why it, too, has become something centrists and rightists mock. Once it was just called "affirmative action," and that became a bit of a sneer, too. New viral memes meet cultural immune systems every day!)
I don't really get why you're so fixated on this. I've granted that it gets used as a sneer, sometimes. But you're insisting the sneer is the "real" or "primary" definition or use, and as far as I can tell that simply isn't true. "Woke" means "leftist identitarianism" and sometimes overgeneralizes to "leftism" and rarely overgeneralizes to simply "bad." What's surprising about that? We could say similar things about "Nazi" ("German national socialist" overgeneralizes to "fascist/racist/authoritarian" overgeneralizes to "bad") or any of a host of other political identifiers.
This is just false--especially here on the Motte. The primary use of "woke" today is to describe leftist identitarians in a single syllable. Personally, I don't blame anyone for feeling bad if they are leftist identitarians; on my view, they should feel bad, and should repent! So sure, right wingers and centrists and Marxists all probably say "woke" with a sneer, but that's because they find leftist identitarianism genuinely awful.
Look, you are a "new" account that fits the MO of certain ban evaders and known trolls. You show up saying you're a "long time lurker" and immediately pick a super common topic of discussion, on which the Motte has a much, much better handle than the wider world of so-called journalists writing on the topic. Then you steadfastly insist that the stupidest possible interpretation of "woke" is the "real" one, which is exactly the position woke people are taking right now, because the word has become an effective way to limit their political power--in the face of multiple well-considered explanations for why you're mistaken.
If you are not yourself a leftist identitarian, then I don't know why you would take that position--unless you are trying to make a particularly pedantic argument about language, in which case I would expect you to bite the bullet and also argue that "Nazi" and "alt right" and "Communist" and "Neoliberal" and the like are all just meaningless slurs, given their common deployments, despite the possibility that they once had analytic content. But you don't appear to have found that angle interesting.
Conversely, if you are a leftist identitarian, then several people have given you very clear answers to your question which defuse your complaints entirely; you would be better off learning from those responses, I think, than stubbornly sticking to the current dogma as promulgated by MSNBCNN.
I think you are being overly charitable here by calling it writ-large. The Fed and/or monetary policy has never been a part of the Social Justice movement, DEI or left wing itentitarianism. The purpose of the use of the word "woke" is to cause the audience to write off the Fed's actions and to spur anger and outrage. Despite the fact the fed has been a bipartisan neokeynesian entity since the end of Bretton-Woods. So it is being used as pejorative in a use case that doesn't match a single definition that has been provided on this thread. Which is my point--there was a time when the word meant something, but now it is used . In an earlier post, you mentioned the word Nazi being used in the same way. And I absolutely agree. In fact, when it is used today, it is most likely not being used to describe a literal Nazi.
Fair, but the term "social justice warriors" never saw the meaning creep that "woke" has seen. In my opinion, SJW is a pretty apt description of the movement. Cultural marxism also saw some meaning creep, but it did not get the traction in broader culture that "woke" did. Is this because it has more than two syllables and is more specific? I think that is likely.
We could, and if you made that case I would completely agree with you. The word Nazi is overgeneralized to the point that its most common use today is "someone I don't like on the internet". Is that the official definition of the word? No it is not, there are incredibly few nazis today, and even those few on the far right in western countries largely do not fit the bill. But that is its most common use case and that is the point I am making with "woke". In your words, it is rapidly developing so it has not quite lost its luster yet, but we are closer to that point than we are to the start of it.
Fair, and I expected some grief since I picked "the" hot button topic as my first post and asked for definitions to start with instead of leading with my own. Hopefully my willingness to converse on this and other topics over time will build trust. I appreciate the dialogue on this, as I learn much more when I am in the fray versus others. In full transparency, I am somewhere between a libertarian (this is been my political ideology most of my adult life, but I have been drifting a bit as of late) and a progressive (which I share many social goals with, but disagree on means). I got accused of being "woke" over the holidays by some right leaning family members and figured y'all would better be able to define what that meant. And you (and others), provided some excellent and useful definitions, which I appreciate.
I'll define fascism in next week's culture war thread to continue the dialogue.
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We’ve had several posters trying to get people to define woke in the past couple weeks — is this just the current meme again? It seems like there’s been a large increase in trolls and insincere posters as well.
Paul Graham released an essay "The Origins of Wokeness" a few weeks ago. If you're not familiar, he's one of the co-founders of Y-Combinator and a key person in kicking off the post 2005 tech startup scene. His early 2000s essays were sort of proto-rationalist.
https://www.paulgraham.com/woke.html
He's strongly anti Trump and a prominent figure in the tech scene. I'd guess that essay got enough exposure in the leftwing tech scene that people who were used to saying "woke is just being a good person" suddenly found that they needed better arguments.
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I can't speak for others, but the motivation for me was the constant use of the word "woke" in legacy media and with the incoming administration, with an ever broadening definition of the term. I also heard the word come up quite a bit over the holidays from right leaning family members who had trouble defining what it was other than it was something they didn't care for and wanted gone.
Admittedly, I am somewhere in the no mans land between libertarianism and progressivism, but don't have right leaning friends or family that are particularly thoughtful when it comes to culture war topics. I knew I could get a few good definitions here from those who are a bit more intellectual and y'all delivered. I appreciate the thoughtful responses and the efforts put into them.
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There is no greater troll than baiting out earnest replies on The Motte. Plus, if you ever stop replying to low effort bait posts this can be taken as a sure sign that justice has prevailed. Proof positive that The Motte will crumble under the weight of its many contradictions. Its depravity proven too much to bear for the wicked souls trapped within its walls.
While this small act of sabotage may appear to be a minor disturbance it lays the groundwork for a more virtuous future. Only afterward, comrade, can the real work of the revolution commence.
The point of the motte is to promote interesting conversation. If a troll post manages to be interesting enough to lead to a good conversation, I would say it made a contribution, even if unintentionally.
Thinking someone got the best of us by creating conversation in a place designed to create conversation is odd, a thought that could only occur to someone who thinks in-depth intellectual conversations is unfun. But in fact they are fun, and a troll running with glee about how he "really got us" by giving us a chance to do what we love is like a guy who hands out Harris/Walz fliers and thinks he's campaigning for Trump.
The motte isn't a springboard for political action, just a discussion space. If trolls think they're distracting us from "real politics" by making us talk to each other, I'm just reminded of -- and I rarely use this term -- losers like KulakRevolt, who think they're going to start a race war from their basement. We're not trying to change the world, just trying to change our minds through exposure to new ideas.
I don't like trolls because of their insincerity, but they certainly do serve a purpose sometimes. If they're pathogens, maybe we can think of them as part of the site microbiome.
I agree in theory but there's nothing left to be learned from the 500th round of "what is woke? Also, everyone that calls other people woke is evil, an idiot, or both."
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Are you in favor of the Bare Links Repository?
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This is vacuous. I could believe that trolls never lead to good conversation and I'd still have to assent to this statement!
Trolls lead to bad conversations, except quokkas here tend not to understand that. A conversation can be free of obscenities and obvious insults and still not be "good". I could go onto many forums and post "Star Wars is better than Star Trek" and get 100 responses. That would not be making a contribution.
We probably should gather a couple of responses to "what is woke", put them in a FAQ, and require that all posts about this must specifically acknowledge where they disagree with the FAQ. Otherwise, ban them.
Hard pass. That's how you get 'do the homework, scum' style dickwaving on reddit. Nobody has to engage with OP unless they want to, and sometimes it's enlightening to rediscuss settled subjects. Individual posters may not have thought about it before.
If we were getting hundreds of trolls a day and they were obviously killing the site, it would be different. Thankfully we're not there yet and can still (mostly) afford to keep this place a quokka reservation.
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Seems to be. I assume that the leftist prospiracy is working to muddy the waters on "woke" because it has become a useful cudgel for rightists, which is a pattern that has been repeated for a while now.
I haven't noticed this, myself, but I haven't been able to spend as much time here lately as I used to.
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I figured a lot of people who previously felt extremely secure and sure of themselves have had that upturned by the election of Trump, and now feel defensive, and if they aren't social media users (or don't want to taint their feed) they need to go somewhere they can talk to the other tribe, and there aren't a lot of those left these days.
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Here's a thread on the subject from last week, with a bunch of people offering their own answers to that question.
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