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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.
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.
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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