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PaperclipPerfector  7d ago (text post)   34950 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of January 20, 2025

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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.

I think you are being overly charitable here by calling it writ-large. The Fed and/or monetary policy has never been a part of the Social Justice movement, DEI or left wing itentitarianism. The purpose of the use of the word "woke" is to cause the audience to write off the Fed's actions and to spur anger and outrage. Despite the fact the fed has been a bipartisan neokeynesian entity since the end of Bretton-Woods. So it is being used as pejorative in a use case that doesn't match a single definition that has been provided on this thread. Which is my point--there was a time when the word meant something, but now it is used . In an earlier post, you mentioned the word Nazi being used in the same way. And I absolutely agree. In fact, when it is used today, it is most likely not being used to describe a literal Nazi.

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!)

Fair, but the term "social justice warriors" never saw the meaning creep that "woke" has seen. In my opinion, SJW is a pretty apt description of the movement. Cultural marxism also saw some meaning creep, but it did not get the traction in broader culture that "woke" did. Is this because it has more than two syllables and is more specific? I think that is likely.

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.

We could, and if you made that case I would completely agree with you. The word Nazi is overgeneralized to the point that its most common use today is "someone I don't like on the internet". Is that the official definition of the word? No it is not, there are incredibly few nazis today, and even those few on the far right in western countries largely do not fit the bill. But that is its most common use case and that is the point I am making with "woke". In your words, it is rapidly developing so it has not quite lost its luster yet, but we are closer to that point than we are to the start of it.

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. 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. 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.

Fair, and I expected some grief since I picked "the" hot button topic as my first post and asked for definitions to start with instead of leading with my own. Hopefully my willingness to converse on this and other topics over time will build trust. I appreciate the dialogue on this, as I learn much more when I am in the fray versus others. In full transparency, I am somewhere between a libertarian (this is been my political ideology most of my adult life, but I have been drifting a bit as of late) and a progressive (which I share many social goals with, but disagree on means). I got accused of being "woke" over the holidays by some right leaning family members and figured y'all would better be able to define what that meant. And you (and others), provided some excellent and useful definitions, which I appreciate.

I'll define fascism in next week's culture war thread to continue the dialogue.

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