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Culture War Roundup for the week of January 20, 2025

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Is civil rights woke now?

I'm sorry, when did we start talking about civil rights, and stop talking about civil rights era executive orders? The only one your own article even talks about is Affirmative Action, which, from what I understand, was seen as an aberration by people who put it there, and was ultimately only justified by it's supposedly temporary nature. Yes, Affirmative Action absolutely is woke, and I have no idea how you pretend to be surprised by it.

Woke" was not in the prose of anyone in the 1960's.

How can this possibly be relevant? "Woke" is a label for a concept, and Affirmative Action is well within the bounds of that concept.

Pragmatically, the reason why intersectionality has been a rallying cry on the left this century is without it, it is a collection of moderate to small sized special interests when can be easily overruled. In a group, they are formidable and can vie for power through plurality.

Right, so the argument by implication, that there's something ridiculous about "woke" being about everything from beer to green energy, and that it's indicative of the word having no meaning, is thus refuted.

The number of people that would identify with that movement, or those that support it but don't identify with it that apply it to everything is a minority, albeit an incredibly vocal one.

Correct, and no one said otherwise. In fact, one of the core criticism of the movement is that the voice and power they are given is completely disproportional to their popularity, which is marginal.

interestingly, the right magnifies those voices as a rallying cry for their agenda.

Their voices, measured by the changes they are able to push through corporations and government, is already massive. The right is merely pointing out that those changes are happening, and a part of a particular movement program. They're not magnifying anything, they're shining light on it, which said movement hates as it prefers to operate in darkness (as seen by regular shedding of labels it came up with to describe itself).

Anyway, I digress, but appreciate the dialogue. I think the thing I am coming away with is that if a label is used more by the opposition than the group or initiatives it describes, it is more likely to have its meaning become nebulous over time. Especially if the word/words are short or need some sort of additional explanation of what it is. The more specific the terminology is, or if the term is adopted by those it is being used to describe, it does not seem to happen nearly as much.

For my part, I'm rather frustrated by the dialogue. I feel like my points are being ignored, and occasionally twisted into something I never said. As to your conclusion, it's strange that this is the one you chose to go with, when your own framing of the examples above contradict it. Even if Cultural Marxism wasn't "really" Marxism, the term was invented by people calling themselves Cultural Marxists. If self-description was keeping the meaning coherent, than the shoe not fitting could not have happened (although, in my opinion, it does absolutely fit, the similarities are glaring, and people ignoring them are being pedantic). Likewise, just because you weren't there, or don't recall, anyone on the left disagreeing with being called a Social Justice Warrior, doesn't mean it didn't happen. The 2015-2017 era Internet fora were full of the exact same conversations that you just started, except the term "woke" was substituted for "Social Justice Warrior".