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"Woke Right" is just a terrible term. "Woke" was always a kludge term to describe cringe leftists, then it got made cringe in its own turn by boomers, then, finally, the most out-of-touch hermits, sheltering in the ruins of the IDW, finally heard about it. Then, they had a great idea - why don't we call our right-wing enemies "woke"? That will- guys? Is anyone listening? Guys?
Nitpick Nancy here. It was not always a kludge term. Woke was used as a self-identifying descriptor and signal among a significant number of people with ties to African American vernacular. It was enough people, with enough impact, and enough frequency to take off within progressive culture more broadly. Then, eventually, defined as a category of people to make fun of in the 2010s. The woke people -- as a group to make fun of -- may have always been used as a kludge to describe cringe progressives. This happened after the word gained popularity as a signal and identifier. Stay woke.
Konstantin does share some reasoning, but still reads like he wants to deploy "woke" as a synonym for bad. I don't think woke is a synonym for bad. It's a pejorative now, but that's not all that it is. There is (some) cultural significance, a bit of history, and meaning in its use that extends beyond a pejorative. Like Konstantin, I don't enjoy stuff like name calling, bullying centrists, or creating a culture of fear. However, woke right sounds down right grotesque to me. He must be stopped.
I don't think any of these are inherent to wokeness. If Konstantin wrote for Slate or the NYT he might feel less compelled to conjure up a new term for people he doesn't like, but interacts with frequently. He could call them far right and be done with it. He might even add in "extremist" at the end depending on how charitable he wanted to be with his framing. Lots of people call others far right. What's wrong with that? Twitter populists. Internet reactionaries. Contrarian right? Anti-Justice Warrior? Plenty of options.
Some of these fall more easily on my ears than 'woke right'. Doubt woke right catches on and enters common parlance. Remind me in 2 years.
I mean, it's the classic Freddie DeBoer progressive name cycle, right? Progs come up with some name for themselves that's a shifting, colloquial term, it's then used as a pejorative by conservaboomers (making it kludgy and cringe pretty much out of the gate), then progs deny that there was ever a core meaning behind the term when they used it. See also "SJW".
I see your point that it already existed in progressive circles, but these terms only get pinned down and reified once the boomer-right gets to them. The kludginess is inherent because those types don't really understand the social and memetic characteristics of progs and of different prog types. Compare, for instance, "bugman", "cuckservative", "chapo", and other terms from the internet-native right. These don't have the kludginess and don't go through the same cycle, because they were created on the right and designed to cleave online social reality at particular joints.
Historically, a great deal of American politics has been fighting over labels. Once these labels make it into mass politics, they quickly get reified as simply meaning "good" and "bad", and the conflict shifts to who gets to own the Good Label and hit their enemies with the Bad Label. Occasionally you really see how empty these labels are - for instance, in the careers of both Roosevelts, with Teddy jumping dexterously between identifications as the Good Label of his time shifted, and FDR redefining "liberal" to claim the Good Label while inverting its meaning. I suspect that boomers and other institutionbrained people these days are particularly bad at navigating this dynamic (compared to people from the newspaper age or internet natives), not being able to tell the distinction between label and meaning. That's how you get these very shallow and unconvincing arguments that "Democrats are the real racists" or "the hard right are the real Woke", scrabbling together a bunch of similarities meaningful and superficial, real and imagined, because the people making them are mired in the ostensible content of a label without understanding the meta-level dynamics at play.
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I disagree, the term is fine but the shoe has to fit. There at factions on the right that will, for example, dismiss someone's argument based on their heritage. It's just that they're not that big, and it's obvious it's not who the term is limited to.
Sure, but that's a bit too dry, technical, and easily correctable of a critique for me to believe that this is what all the drama is about. The label also seems to be applied to people who aren't such simplistic generalizers.
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