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After lurking here, I find myself relatively confused. You're the first person I've seen attempt to disambiguate between progressivism and wokeness. What is the difference between wokeness and progressivism, in your mind?
Basically what @hydroacetylene said. The thing that defines "progressives" is a belief in capital-P Progress. While the woke/identitarian types are almost always progressive, progressives are not necessarily woke.
Well, then progressivism is dead.
Any visions of bright future belong to the past and cheesy yoghurt commercials, the only promised things are various versions of apocalypse and only motives left are fear, hatred and revenge.
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Usually, "woke" just resolves to meaning "Progressive expect too much".
It's more that some people are very invested in the concept not having a label, because once it's identified it's unpopularity becomes impossible to deny.
This is why all the self applied labels from "Cultural Marxism" to "woke" are quickly abandoned when the opposition gets a hold of them, and are refraamed as slurs that are supposed to mean "you just don't like the left", or in this case " progressives expect too much".
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All woke is progressive but not all progressives are woke, and many are slightly confused by it.
I tend to see really focusing on oppression categories, critical theory, and victimhood as a big differentiating factor. To use the abortion example that kicked this off, nonwoke progressives think banning abortion is bad for women, but don’t hold the idea that there’s an actual literal patriarchy pushing it.
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Progressivism is the ideology of the PMC centre-left in the Anglosphere. You can see a certain commonality of thought, as well as an unbroken lineage of individual progressives, back to the turn-of-the-century capital-P Progressives like Teddy Roosevelt and Bob La Follette. The key constant ideas as I see it are:
Society is improving over time both materially and morally because of technocratic elites making correct decisions. We should strive to be on the right side of history.
Planning is possible and desirable.
Educated people should rule. Decisions which can be reduced to technical questions should be left to appropriately-qualified technical experts, decisions which have an unavoidable political component should be made by people with a broad education in morally correct thinking.
Education is good. More education is better.
There is too much economic inequality in the US c. 1900 or 2000. Slightly less economic inequality would be better, but not so much equality that the upper-middle-class can no longer enjoy an upper-middle-class lifestyle. 1950s US or modern Scandinavian levels of inequality are fine.
Separately from the inequality issue, real material deprivation (starvation/homelessness etc.) is very, very bad and we should try to eliminate it, first in our own countries and then globally.
Political violence (including war between countries) is very, very bad and we should try to eliminate it. (Lots of intra-progressive disagreement about the best way to do this)
Highbrow art is a public good and should be subsidised. Lowbrow art and the preferred intoxicants of the working class are corrupting and should be banned if possible. (Also lots of intra-progressive disagreement about what is possible)
Traditional religion is bad.
Bigotry is bad. (Lots of intra-progressive disagreement over which discrimination is bigoted and which is justified - pre-WW2 progressives being pro-eugenics is the most famous example)
These ideas are culturally universal and good people all over the world are already American progressives, even if they don' t know it yet.
Because Marxist socialism never managed to build a mass working-class movement in the Anglosphere, Marxism in the Anglosphere is a weird sub-sect of progressivism. (This isn't true in Continental Europe, where most countries had nominally Marxist parties with mass working-class memberships organised through the unions.) There is clearly a correlation between weird sectarian progressivism (including, but not limited to, being a Marxist in the Anglosphere) and weird lifestyle experimentation such that Orwell as able to say, correctly, that
and still be mostly correct a century later. (He also includes teetotallers and vegetarians in the list in other writings). But most progressives wear suits to their boring middle-management job and listen to NPR/Radio 4 while commuting from their suburban homes where they raise 1.6 children in a monogamous traditional family.
Wokism is the specific hobby-horse that organised progressivism has taken up in the 2010's.
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Categories in politics tend to be very ambiguous with very loose boundaries, so this is definitely tough to disambiguate. I don't blame anyone for just using "progressive" and "woke" as shorthands for each other. I personally do try to disambiguate, as someone who considers himself a progressive but who is also very much anti-woke, and not in the "they're just taking good ideas too far" sense but rather in the "their ideas are fundamentally broken and few costs are too high to stop them" sense.
I'd say it comes down to what I consider to be the core of "progressivism," which is, pithily and too reductively, the drive for "progress." Which obviously means different things for different people in different contexts, but I think most people would agree that it means moving forward, not just moving in some direction. But it's also incredibly easy to accidentally, despite all of one's best well-meaning good faith efforts, to move in some direction one finds convenient or attractive for whatever reason, and then just convince oneself that it's "forward." History is littered with examples of people causing immense amounts of pain, suffering, and misery while doing just that.
So for progressivism to actually live up to its name and not cause disaster as has been seen throughout history by many movements, it has to have and encourage the use of tools and methods and such to help reorient itself constantly, making sure that the direction we're pushing for is actually "forward" in some meaningful sense. Given what we've learned through science throughout human history and especially the past few centuries, it seems obvious to me that one of the most important tools for accomplishing this is open dialogue with oppositional forces - encouraging the people who hate my ideas to do their darndest to actually counter them using the strongest tools at their disposal. And to always emphasize my own skepticism when I find myself convinced that those people's ideas are evil or stupid or have been debunked, because I'm susceptible to biases as much as everyone else, and that bias is basically the easiest one to fall into. Only then, can we see what remains standing as the ideas and direction we can go to while being at the very least not completely unconfident (actual confidence is possibly always out of reach in this context) that we're moving "forward."
"Wokeness" goes directly counter to such tools, not just not encouraging them, but often actively suppressing them, deeming such speech as "harmful" and both pre-emptively shutting down such speech and retroactively punishing people who have engaged in such speech. In my mind, one cannot achieve meaningful progress through such methods except by dumb luck, and the odds of achieving meaningful progress through dumb luck seem very low.
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All wokeness is "progressive*", but not all progressives are woke.
*regressive
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Not the OP. But if I have to make a clear distinction - oppression olympics and victim mentality. Aka crybullying.
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