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As someone who has kept an eye on this forum for a long time now - ever since it was launched in the SSC days - but never cared to register, it may interest you that your appeal to the "courage (…) to stand up and speak the truth when it is dangerous" got me to register so I could post this reply. You… may not care for it. But it is meant in good faith, and I would be interested in your reply to the question at the heart of that reply.
You write:
My question is this. How, according to you, should a genuine radical progressive behave, if he does not wish to behave as a woke fundamentalist?
The problem is nothing new; I suppose the question is analogous to "what to do if you are a genuine socialist and find yourself in Soviet Russia". I would not have been a Stalinist, but neither could I ever see myself taking up the banner of a czarist White Russian; that would be akin to asking me to inject myself with the plague as a protection against cholera. There are many more evil positions than good ones, and too often seeking the converse of the evil ideology du jour will simply land you in a different quadrant of evil.
A haven for dissident right-wingers should be sympathetic to this point, I would have thought, as unless they are themselves ethical monsters they must often dwell on the precariousness of their own position, insisting, as they must, on the individual intellectual merits of positions which their opponents ceaselessly remind them were most famously endorsed by Nazis and slavers. And yet… and yet, banal as the sentiment is, it always comes back to the forefront of my mind when I read an articulate tirade against "wokeness". No matter how much sense the writer is making, there nearly always comes a point when they inch out of the motte and into the bailey.
So when you say: the problem of "wokeness", what makes it a "mind virus" and not simply a political paradigm you don't agree with, is not what it claims to stand for, but the underhanded tactics which have been used to advance them, and the moral cowardice which have allowed these tactics to proceed — I can agree, to a point. I think opponents of a given political view are biased towards see only the worst in their adversaries' behavior, but certainly you'd have to be blind, mad, or a liar to deny that bullying tactics, and worse, are routinely deployed by the modern Left, particularly online. Sure.
But suddenly it's no longer the medium being attacked; suddenly it's the message.
Here we come to the problem. I do, as a matter of fact, believe in the objective reality of human-caused climate change and the effectiveness of most vaccines. I believe - as a non-exhaustive list, presented in no particular order - in the moral abhorrence of racism, in every human being's inalienable right to shelter and healthcare, and in the moral imperative of LGBTQ rights and acceptance.
I don't see that any of the above means I have to endorse underhanded tactics, censorship, and witch-hunts if they happen to be in pursuit of goals adjacent to those - any more than a nationalist has to endorse Mein Kampf. And as a matter of fact, I don't. Surely I'm not alone. Surely it should be possible to find great treasures of anti-political-correctness manifestos written by people like me, who believe in all the fundamental values "wokeness" espouses, but rejects, absolutely, the defilement which is brought upon them by the use of unacceptable tactics, and denounces the moral cowardice of those who turn a blind eye to such abuse because they agree in principle with the perpetrators.
If such a movement - "Reform Progressivism"? - existed, I would be a card-carrying member. It doesn't yet. But it can, and it must. How would you treat it, if it did? Would you and your ilk accept us as respectable fellow-travellers in the fight for intellectual honesty and freedom of speech? I would like to think so. If you, personally say yes, I will unreservedly welcome that hypothetical support. But if that is so, I would ask that you keep your arguments straight, and refrain from randomly kicking the message when you have decided to fight the medium. If there is one key reason Reform Progressivism has not yet come into being as a coherent movement, it must surely be this worrying trend I see in exposes like yours, whereby it is taken for granted that what wokeness stands for is in and of itself unacceptable, quite apart from disagreement with its methods.
And perhaps that's how you really feel. Perhaps what anti-woke rightists hate most are still diversity, homosexuality, etc. in and of themselves, and they only take issue with the means because they hate the ends. I don't want to believe that, because I don't like to believe that those who rail against the other side's hypocrisy could be so totally hypocritical themselves, even in places like this. But be aware that this is certainly what most of us progressives tell ourselves as we ignore and defund and delete your anti-wokeness tirades, quite unread. If you want to prove that wrong, then you know what (not) to do.
Otherwise - by all means feel free to simultaneously attack cancel culture and trans rights, but don't bother to claim that you're fighting wokeness as opposed to extreme progressivism.
Thanks for the thoughtful reply.
Awesome! I'm flattered.
To be frank with you, I think most of these are truisms, behind which more thorny propositions are hiding. These more thorny proposition mostly involve the use of violence, or threats of violence, by the government against its citizens, to induce them to behave in a certain way that you believe to be generally beneficial. We do not necessarily disagree about what is beneficial; what I suspect we differ on is the intrinsic harm in the use of state violence against its citizens. For example,
I'm not attacking anyone at the moment. I disagree with progressivism, while I have disdain and enmity for wokeness. For example, I probably disagree with your position on "trans rights" (what exactly do you propose?), and on most of the topics you mentioned -- but I presume you hold those positions with an eye toward the betterment of the general condition of society, that you are open to changing your mind, and that you are interested in calmly listening to counterarguments. I also presume you hold those positions in good faith, and would continue to hold them even if it cost you something.
On the other hand, I do not have those same presumptions about woke zealots. What distinguishes them is a feeling of being entitled to be agreed with and obeyed, concomitant resistance to dialog, and a penchant for obsequious, opportunistic band wagoning.
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Thanks for this comment...its good to hear these perspectives.
You make a distinction between the medium and the message...but isn't the medium the message? Whether it be BLM and LGBT in 2010-2022 USA, the "woman question" and "serf's rights" in 1870s Russia, or the Jacobins in 1770s France; the superficial message may change, but the medium stays the same: the attainment of power through societal disruption, revolution, and chaos. It usually begins and ends in blood. In Dostoyevsky's Idiot and Demons there are conversations and confrontations in those books that could be ripped straight out of a 2020 struggle session.
But, if you must make a distinction between the two (and acknowledging that I am not the OP and he/she may have a different take): yes; I dislike both the medium and the message. I think racism is sub-optimal and is a "lesser" sin of envy, but not "abhorrent". Humans cannot have an inalienable right to shelter and healthcare because these things depend on other humans. Did Robinson Crusoe have a right to shelter and healthcare? (He did, as an aside, have a right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness). I think it is a moral imperative to restrict LGBTQ rights and acceptance (uh oh, there goes our shot at a pluralistic society).
In short, I fight both wokeness and extreme progressivism, if it is even possible to disambiguate the two.
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