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PaperclipPerfector  3d ago (text post)   21406 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of January 20, 2025

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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. Here are a few I found here:

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?

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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!)

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.

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.

But its primary use today (January 2025) is to tar and feather others, before finding out more about what is being described.

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.

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.

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.

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