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I am a longtime lurker on the site and wanted to pose a question to those that commonly post on the evils of wokeism. I have noticed that many posts seem to point to an increasingly nebulous boogeyman--one that could really use to be defined.
What is woke? What do you define as woke? Is there a difference between one that is socially conscious and someone who is woke?
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.
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'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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