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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.
Joke's on you. I'm consider myself part of the rabble, and will probably always be part of the rabble, but I consider the current system promising me a share of power to be nothing but lies, so if a would-be aristocrat can make credible promise of restoring sanity, I'm more than happy to bend the knee.
The post above, however, discards "sympathizing with victims" as "just slave morality". In the scenario where you bend the knee in exchange for sanity, you're still sympathizing with at least one victim: yourself. Master morality as proposed by the post above ("reclaim the power from the rabble") leaves nothing for the rabble, and even the comfort of sanity is not guaranteed or promised.
Yeah, but I'm not the master, so that's allowed.
It doesn't leave any power for the rabble, which is absolutely fine, because like I said the claim I have any right now is a lie.
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See, this is the point of many of these ideologies that divide people into the groups and believe in some divine struggle. They need to portrait the enemy as very powerful and almost impossible force to counter, which puts them squarely into the victim category. But at the same time they need to provide some alternative and make their side of the conflict as powerful enough to overcome that adversity. It reminds me of the old joke:
It is 1935 and Kohn and Goldberg are taking a tram in Berlin. And Kohn sees that Goldberg is reading the latest issue of Der Angriff
Kohn: Hey, why are you reading that Nazi slop?
Goldberg: We are hounded all the time, our businesses are confiscated and I feel all powerless. This is the only place where I can read how Jews are awesome and how they actually control everything. It keeps my spirits high.
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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.
I had written this:
but hadn't yet posted it and more comments came in.
The Doonesbury use isn't purely positive, it's the (what I would call) "traditional meaning" (that I described above). Your link is to a compilation introduction which mentions "Rev. Scot Sloan, social justice warrior." Here's Scot Sloan:
"Reverend Scot Sloan's the name. Perhaps you read about me in 'Look' [Magazine]. I'm the fighting young priest who can talk to the young."
Guy introduces himself with his press clippings. He cares more about his image than actual social justice. That's (the old meaning I remember for) an SJW.
You're making me nostalgic for my childhood here. :/ In the '80s liberal bubble I grew up in, people like that were seen as "obviously grifting or at least on an ego trip" but treated with amused tolerance, "hey they are officially on our side"--see also the portrayal of Richard Henry Lee in 1776. My dad similarly always referenced Jesse Jackson in that way, with amused tolerance (and in Jackson's case even affection). Still, it's not something you'd really set out to be; an SJW in that subculture was a figure of fun, not someone respected. Another example would be Gilderoy Lockhart.
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This was almost explicitly the rationale for the people who called themselves "SJWs" back in the day, from my memory. It was that the position of Social Justice is so obviously and overwhelmingly correct compared to the mountains of social injustice that goes on every single day without people even noticing it that fighting for it as if you're a literal soldier in a literal war is not only justified, but virtuous.
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I suppose that fits since it covers the time when I wasn't aware of politics much / the tech to plug in to the American culture wasn't quite available to me yet. Though I'm not sure they're not picking up some extremely obscure examples here. I think I showed up on some New-Atheist forums in the early 2000's and that kind of language just wasn't there yet, and it was very noticable when these kind of people did finally show up (2008-ish by my reckoning).
Yeah, there's the problem - the compliment already contains the insult. "Warrior" will make you sound like someone who takes themselves way too seriously, to anyone who doesn't share your views on the importance of the problem you're fighting for.
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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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