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I know that maybe is a bit OT here, but I cannot wrap my head, after seeing communists argue on /r/wikipedia (that, as the wiki itself, is full of radical leftists arguing inside) about communism.
When I think how Marxism was gladly embraced by èlites in the West, and, after the fall of the URSS, the more anglocentric progressive one that took his side, it makes me think about the type of people that embrace it.
As Zagrebbi argue here https://salafisommelier.substack.com/p/a-robin-hanson-perspective-on-the Marxism is really the Platonic Realm of wordcellery!
All arguments, apart from being factually false, are reduced not on "policy" or "government", but on words, and how to define words, how to use words in a different manner, how words can be used in different ways, how different ideologies are different because "words" says so. A typical argument goes like this: "Communism is good because, unlike Fascism or whatever else, has a good objective. The objective is good because Communism say so. Different types of Communism are born from different interpretation of Communism, who are not all good (choose here if we are talking about Stalin, Social Democracy, Left Liberalism, Anarchism, Maoism etc) because they did not adhere to the ideal definition of Communism, and everyone who does not produce a good result has secretly bad objectives or it was a Fascist all along"
Obviously I am paraphrasing an hypotetical argument of an hypotetical communist, so I am really fighting against a non-entity here. But I saw enough debates that I could crystallise it in few phrases, and understand that the marxist galaxy today has been reduced to discussions about hypoteticals and fandoms, as if it was Fanfiction.net or Archive of Our Own. Gone are the immense volumes of marxist economy or revolutionary action, in autistic dissertation on good end evil. Or maybe not, and I do not have enough knowledge of historical marxist politics, maybe they were like this all along, but I refuse to believe that communists won for decades using this kind of reasoning.
It is not surprising why Wokism had an evolutionary advantage on post-URSS marxism. All of this autism is pretty ick, it works on Reddit but not on real life, because every normal person can smell with a bullshit detector that this lines are actively trying to scam you as a North African reseller on an Italian beach. Wokism is better as an ideology because it refuses, partially, to play words. Patriarchy and Europeans are not evil because machiavellian people have tried to derail the progressive project, and our objective is to clean it arguing that, no, whoever did something bad was actively trying to sabotage the Real Meaning of Patriarchy. No, they are evil because of biology/social constructs and they deserve suffering. Autistic screeching and wordcelism do not play well with modern political coalition and the Schmittian Friend/Enemy distinction, and they also makes the women have the ick and the supporters smells like Redditors!
Do you have a concise definition for "wokism" that you can share?
To be clear why I'm asking, I know I can read through Marx to understand Marxism, and even more, through criticisms of his works and even political actions based on his ideas. But there is no equivalent for "woke". Without a solid set of works to reference, the invocation of "woke" becomes a catch-all strawman for de jour leftwing politics, similar to "chud", "bootlicking", etc. for de jour rightwing politics. Useful for flaming; completely useless for having dialogues grounded in reason.
I'd say that the definition of woke is much better grounded than what leftist define as fascism or neoliberalism or even capitalism. It was beaten again and again including parallels with Marxism. Woke uses the same oppressor/oppressed dichotomy, marxist dialectic and interplay of Theory(Critical Theory) and Praxis (Activism) as old Marxist. They also use similar concept of consciousness as Marxists do with their class consciousness. The easiest way to make the parallel is that wokeness expanded on the concept of property/capital, which now includes other types of property that oppressing class possess. In the same way bourgeoisie possess the property of capital, white people possess the property of white privilege, men possess the property of male privilege and cishetero people possess the property of [cishetero]normativity.
But again, all these are high-level academic definitions and one can argue them. But this is far from the extent to which we are talking about. Wokeness is an ideology, even secular religion in similar way to let's say scientology. Woke people have their own ontology of what is man and a woman, what is justice, with their own prescriptions of how society should work with their own sins such as racism, sexism, transphobia, xenophobia or homophobia. On ground level woke people do not need to know the nitty-gritty details of how the ideology is developed. But it is the same with other religions - not all christians know bible passages by heart or know the main church doctrines. This does not prevent people to call them Christians as a useful descriptor.
To be fair, people who are violently anti-woke also have their own ontology of all of those things. Man is John Wayne, woman is kitchen appliance / baby incubator (/s).
I agree though, generally, that the parallels are there (re: the content of your 1st paragraph) - but they'll be there for literally any ideology that posits that classes in society are arbitrary and not meritocratic. What makes this distinct from Marxism, to me, is that none of these things are centrally defined. It's a consensus-driven ideology, not a top-down prescriptive ideology. And there's quite a bit of infighting as well, which elsewhere I point out, kind of prevents it from leaving the fringes of the leftwing. Does Nancy Pelosi give a shit about transgenderism beyond the token "statement from the office of"? She certainly doesn't fight against it, true, but I don't think she's ever been claimed as an "ally".
There definitely woke things which are centrally defined and driven, especially if it is implemented withing government. These are things like hate speech laws, various DEI labor requirements etc. Additionally even oldschool Marxist were constantly infighting, especially in power vacuum before some faction solidified their power: think about bolshevisks vs mensheviks or Stalinists vs Trockyists etc.
As far as I'm aware, most of these are (1) self-imposed by HR departments and not actual regulation and (2) falling out of favor. The regulation that I'm most aware of actually pisses everyone off, which is "Woman-owned businesses", where everyone just registers their wife as the proprietor of their business and simply acts as a hurdle for building more housing.
I've not heard this specifically referred to as "woke" yet, because "hate speech laws" go back at least a century in the West, and "woke" only goes back to ~2012 at the earliest. Speech laws in general are abused by both leftwing and rightwing movements (in my personal opinion, I guess).
DEI measures have indeed made their way into government policy, they're not just being self-imposed by HR departments.
For example, in my country (Australia):
"Noting that the gender pay gap remained significant, the government announced a $1.9 billion package to improve women’s economic security. The sum takes in $1.7 billion over five years for increased childcare subsidies, as well as $25.7 million to help more women pursue careers in science, engineering and maths."
"The package also includes $38.3 million to fund projects that assist women into leadership roles."
https://www.afr.com/policy/economy/childcare-subsidies-make-up-half-of-new-spending-for-women-20210510-p57qjk
Some quotes from the relevant budget statement:
"The Government’s Boosting Female Founders Initiative provides co-funded grants to majority women-owned and led start-ups, and facilitates access to expert mentoring and advice. The Initiative, announced in the 2018 and further expanded in the 2020 Women’s Economic Security Statements, provides $52.2 million in competitive grant funding plus $1.8 million in mentoring support. The program commenced in 2020, with round one of the Initiative providing approximately $11.9 million in grant funding to 51 successful applicants. Round two closed on 22 April 2021."
And:
"To further grow the pool of women in STEM, the Government is investing $42.4 million over seven years to support more than 230 women to pursue Higher Level STEM Qualifications. These scholarships will be provided in partnership with industry, to build job-ready experience, networks and the cross-cutting capabilities to succeed in modern STEM careers. This program will complement the Women in STEM Cadetship and Advanced Apprenticeships Program announced in the 2020-21 Budget, which targets women to enter industry-relevant, pre-bachelor study."
And:
"The Australian Government is committed to supporting more women into leadership positions and to further closing the gender pay gap. The Government is providing $38.3 million over five years to expand the successful Women’s Leadership and Development Program. This builds on the $47.9 million expansion to the Program announced as part of the 2020 Women’s Economic Security Statement. This program funds projects such as Women Building Australia run by Master Builders Australia to support more women into building and construction. These initiatives form part of the Government’s response to increasing gender equality, extending leadership and economic participation opportunities for Australian women, and building a safer, more respectful culture."
https://archive.budget.gov.au/2021-22/womens-statement/download/womens_budget_statement_2021-22.pdf
That's from the 2021-22 budget statement, and the 2022-23 budget was no different:
"Further measures in the Budget are focused on helping women into higher-paying and traditionally male-dominated industries. To boost the number of women in trades, the Government is investing $38.6 million over 4 years from 2022‑23. Women who commence in higher paying trade occupations on the Australian Apprenticeship Priority List will be provided additional supports, such as mentoring and wraparound services."
And:
"The Morrison Government is making a further investment, building on the success of existing initiatives to improve leadership outcomes for women, by providing an additional $18.2 million for the Women’s Leadership and Development Program."
"This includes $9 million from 2023-24 to 2025-26 to expand the successful Future Female Entrepreneurs program to develop and grow women’s core entrepreneurial skills. Funding will continue the successful Academy for Enterprising Girls (10-18 year olds) and the Accelerator for Enterprising Women, expanding it to include all women aged 18+, as well as adding a new Senior Enterprising Women program."
"To support women facing unique barriers to leadership and employment, the Government is also investing $9.4 million to expand the Future Women’s Jobs Academy and to support gender balanced boards."
https://ministers.treasury.gov.au/ministers/jane-hume-2020/media-releases/2022-23-budget-boost-support-australian-women-and-girls
You can undoubtedly find more of this in the recent budget statements. Governments love boasting about how much public money they have funnelled into gender and racial equity initiatives, and many of them cannot so easily be circumvented by those disfavoured by the policy since things like "the desire to become a tradesperson" is not transferable to your wife. In addition, I don't think this is a good argument:
The notion that blocking single men from accessing that benefit would have no distorting effect is a bit peculiar, especially in a society with a significantly delayed age of marriage and where many people spend significant portions of their lives outside of a romantic dyad. In this context, if men have to meet the criteria of having procured a wife to secure a benefit for themselves, it's certainly not irrelevant.
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Not the person you asked, but try this:
Wokeism is an ideology/secular religion dedicated to righting social justice wrongs. The fundamental theorem is people who are doing well must be exploiting the people doing poorly, somehow. Above all else, one must identify the underdog in any dynamic and side with them.
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Personally, I think that it’s an identitarianism form of Marxism. The idea being that those at the top of the hierarchy got their wealth, power, and positions by exploiting those who are not in the dominant group. So in the West, white people, particularly white men, got everything they have from either past theft and exploitation or current theft and exploitation. And thus the belief suggests that the way to solve this injustice is to take from those who have and give it to those who don’t.
FWIW, the opposite extreme ideology is easily dismantled as well: that the West in perfectly meritocratic and there is no need to study or even acknowledge power structures that affect and influence socioeconomic conditions. I suppose I could call this "right-wokism" and attack it as a strawman.
Woke, when I was first introduced to the concept from a leftwing perspective, would be the middle ground: an acknowledgement that arbitrary[1] power structures exist that continue to exacerbate adverse socioeconomic conditions. To be "awake", or "aware" of those power structures. It wasn't a call-to-arms, but more of a sly-wink of "Hey, be kind to one-another, because things don't have to be this way."
But now, woke as it's used from a rightwing perspective, is an extremism as you've described: that all socioeconomic conditions are due to perverse power structures that benefit only white men (self-victimization), and they are therefore thieves and exploiters.
My personal take, before anyone tries to paint me as a believer of a specific ideology, is not necessarily that government needs to play the role of dismantler of those power structures, but that it definitely should not continue to enable them to fester as open wounds in the social fabric of our society. E.g. don't test nuclear bombs near the indigenous peoples, but maybe also don't shoehorn social justice concepts into every bit of middle school curricula (just read a link from the Freddie de Boer post linked downthread).
[1] arbitrary, in the sense of an opposite of meritocratic
I know you said it is a straw man, but does anyone on the right actually believe approximately this? I feel like it would be more common on the other side to believe that the West was meritocratic, and should be meritocratic, but that overt and covert affirmative action is distorting things and making it harder for truly meritorious people to rise to their rightful place at the top.
I actually think that United States has already hitched itself to an economic system (capitalism) and a political system (classical liberalism) that by their nature tear down power just by existing.
In a truly free market capitalist system, a tiny start up can eventually topple a huge, established company. Competition and firms going out of business makes the system as a whole resilient, but at the cost of the fragility of individual firms. Just look at what the discovery of FM radio technology did to the AM radio giants of old.
That's incredibly upsetting if you're at the top, and don't want to eventually have your firm go out of business. This is why so many firms try to kick down the ladder, and eliminate fair competition through regulations and laws that make it harder for a new competitor to enter the fray and take them down.
I think that the hard part is getting all strata of society to embrace the creative destruction of capitalism. Most people are economically illiterate, and easy targets for bad economic thinking.
The criticism from leftists is that:
does not square with:
Either humans are capable of toppling non-meritocratic structures (e.g. ladder-pullers, by your example) in "free" market societies by design, or there is a "tragedy of the commons" and it's a first mover's race to the top that devolves to oligarchy or feudalism. My take is that there is no such thing as a "free" market, just like there is no such thing as objective absolute individual liberty. "Free" tends to be defined by whoever happens to be winning the market at that point in time. To that point:
are we going to ignore things like cartels and monopolies that exist in absence of regulations and laws? I'm willing to cede that there are bad actors who rent seek through regulatory capture, but are you willing to cede that there are bad actors that rent seek through market capture?
I certainly accept a weaker version of this claim.
We could talk about "really existing free markets" if you want, in opposition to the made up models of economists. Even so, my assessment is that above a certain threshold of "freeness", really existing free markets tend to do better than centralized or relatively unfree markets.
I'm not an anarchist - I don't think we should have no laws.
Ideally, I think we should have the minimum number of regulations and laws necessary to prop up a functioning and trustworthy market, along with things like pigouvian taxes and legal nudges to help the market avoid market failures.
I do think a lot of cartels and monopolies are only able to exist because they're propped up by government in various ways (i.e. drug cartels can often only exist because drugs are illegal, American tech monopolies in Europe are given a boost by EU regulations being so onerous it is hard for a small European tech company to comply, etc.) But I'll grant that some forms of these are not directly or indirectly propped up by government, and I'm not against light touch, effective regulation that minimizes the damage to society without radically limiting the speed of growth and innovation.
Agreed. Something something Boris Yeltsin visits an American grocery store.
Agreed.
Agreed.
I guess the nuance is what requires the most attention right now. On the regulatory capture side, probably healthcare. On the market capture side, to be "on-topic", maybe Visa / MasterCard - although regulation certainly plays a role there, their competitive moat is network effects. It'd be a bummer to see my "credit card rewards" kickbacks disappear, but I also know that all of my purchases are 1-2% more expensive (at least) because Visa and MasterCard have to have their cut.
One silver lining to rising costs of things is that I'm seeing more and more shops explicitly showing their payment processing fees, and offering discounts for cash again.
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There have been various attempts at defining "wokism", but for me the distinguishing characteristic is the set of tactics it employs and not just its goals.
Standard "wokism" is progressive or left-wing politics (often, but not always identitarian) plus anti-liberal tactics like deplatforming, ostracism, cancelling, refusing to explain oneself or try to convince one's opponents, etc.
There's two issues with this definition.
The first, is that certain woke tactics are technically within the realm of acceptable behavior. I dislike the tendency of "woke" people to break up friendships when they learn someone is a Trump supporter, but I also think people should be free to associate or not associate with whoever they want to, so I can't really point to them doing anything exactly wrong when they do that.
The second, is that such tactics aren't unique to progressives or the left. That's why I've seen a few failed attempts to rebrand some aspects of Trumpism as "right-wing wokism." Certainly, I'm no fan of Trumpism, and some of it is that it is not the committed, little-l liberal alternative to wokism, but just another anti-liberal form of identitarianism.
Pulling at this thread more - wokism isn't (strictly?) an ideology, but a set of tactics to bring about social change. I agree that many of these same tactics are being used - or have been historically used - by the right. And, might I add, for every tactic to bring about social change "the left" has that "the right" doesn't, there also seems to be one "the right" has that "the left" doesn't, e.g. evangelism.
That does make its comparison to Marxism interesting, though, if one views Marxism as an ideology to bring about revolutionary social change to end the class struggle under capitalism. But apart from self-described leftwing revolutionaries, I don't personally know anyone "woke" who desires revolutionary change rather than incremental change, because incremental change seems to have been working pretty well over the past ~60 years or so. Someone recently posted "capitalism, but nice" in this thread and that's pretty much the extent of "woke" that I experience. Otherwise we would just call them communists. But if we're saying that woke = communist then we're back to the original strawman position.
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I think that people should be free to do a lot of things which are bad, even specifically bad for social cohesion. You're free to say "I don't like Jews, so I won't associate with this Jew". I would still call it wrong.
We need to distinguish "break up friendships for a bad reason" and "break up friendships for something we can prove is a bad reason". If someone refuses to associate with you because you're a Jew, that's wrong. If someone refuses to associate with you because he doesn't like your attitude, that's fine. If someone refuses to associate with you because you're a Jew, and he lies and says "I just don't like his attitude", this is still wrong, even if you have no way to prove he's lying without looking into his head.
I'd probably limit wokeism to identitarian politics as well. Nobody gets cancelled for saying they don't think the workers need to own the means of production.
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Sorry this is low-effort, but the fact that woke has become a catch-all is a bit of a symptom of the style of discourse it describes. See Freddie de Boer on this effect. You're asking a fair question though.
Freddie's post sounds like ravings of exhaustion from having to fight a broad and deep set of ideological concepts that all have shared roots in 20th century social liberalism (feminism, civil rights, etc.), and his solution is to pigeonhole all those ideological concepts into a single overarching theory that can be attacked directly without having to get into the weeds and nuances of any individual ideology. But also, he says that it's not his responsibility to perform this abstraction, but that all of these separate ideologies must bring themselves under a single banner? For his convenience?
I don't see the appeal of his writing, either. This is the only snippet I've read, but I've stumbled across his name.
Edit: I've read more of his writing. This post seems to be written in an intentionally exasperated voice.
Consider the following analogy. We're planning to go out to eat. You suggest a restaurant, but I say I don't want to eat there. You suggest a second restaurant, I also didn't want to eat there. You suggest a third, I shoot it down again. At some point, it's reasonable to demand that I either stop declining your suggestions, or provide some of my own.
This is where Freddie is with wokeness. He says "woke", they say that's not good label. He says "identity politics", they reject that too. He says "CRT", that's also not accurate. The article isn't an isolated demand that they label themselves, it comes after his attempts to label them have been rejected.
This is actually worse because the woke are not a monolithic entity. If they had a clear leader, they could be reasoned and negotiated with. But because they're diffuse with no set leadership, woke group A is under no obligation to respect any deals made with woke group B, and there's no incentive to come to any sort of consensus. They won't be punished for defying their boss.
I mean I have to say thank you, because this is my point entirely throughout this entire thread.
Ask 40 contemporary social liberals what their top 10 concerns are and you'll get 400 different things that should be addressed.
I'm not saying this as some defense of the movement. If I'm being honest, I'm frustrated by that as well because I don't feel like there's meaningful progress to the things that I think matter most.
It's greatest "strength" is also it's greatest weakness.
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Who said it had to be a single theory? Freddie gave an example of teachers in California who want to make school anti-racist. What do we call that group? If you say CRT they will say it's an obscure legal theory not taught in high school, even when you read the supporting material and they straight-out say they are making policy decisions inspired by CRT.
There are several people out there who say there are not enough [insert non-white-male group here] in [industry, fictional story or type of art, etc.] and flat-out state that they are selecting for or wanting to select for said group. What is this group or idea called? Well it's certainly not "woke" because that word means nothing (yet somehow they know the meaning enough to parody it).
Whether all of these people have ever-so slightly different beliefs is irrelevant. The terms "Democrat" and "Republican" manage to lump enough concepts together to be useful as terms even if almost everyone in the set will disagree with at least one of the ideas/policies in the set.
Freddie is saying that it doesn't matter if they deny that they have a banner. If you're all standing really close to each other doing very similar things, you will be treated as a group even if you didn't come as a group. The exasperation is people are tired of the game where if you critique the idea they say, "What idea? I'm not suggesting anything other than being a decent person and teaching history!"
Freddie's title:
I guess maybe I'm being uncharitable by interpreting this as "Please associate with each other as a cohesive, organized political movement so I can attack the principles of your group rather than deal with the 17-headed hydra that is contemporary social liberalism". Maybe I shouldn't have use the term "single theory".
You and Freddie both are painting contemporary social liberalism as a monolith, with the implication that it's a coordinated effort with offices and political committees. Maybe there's a reason that it's so hard to wrangle these disparate movements together (and why they seem to cannibalize through debates on intersectionality):
This, but unironically.
Cherry on top:
I've actually seen the pendulum swing way harder in the past couple of years, with many more complaints of too many non-white male characters. It seems to be the consultants, focus groups, and corporate America that are guiding these decisions - not some National Wokism political action committee.
Not every social movement is equally amenable to a definition. The more top-down/theoretical/intellectual it is, and the less history it has, the more definable it is. Marxism in the immediate wake of Marx, for example, is easy to define: if you agreed with the empirical claims of Marx's writings and traversed more or less the same bridge from is to ought, you were a Marxist. On the other side of the spectrum, you have, say, early Vedism, with its decentralized networks of charismatic teachers, regionally delimited textual canons, abortive explorations of new spiritual/intellectual territory, and so on.
In general, successful top-down movements are more fractious than successful decentralized movements. Or at least, they're more likely to split on clearly defined intellectual lines. As the new movement acquires prestige, the pressure to maintain a united front against outside challengers weakens, and the internal "attention economy" becomes large enough to tempt intellectuals to carve out a niche for themselves within it by attacking or reformulating the orthodox tenets. One clue as to the nature of wokism is that its internal fractures don't look like this. On an intellectual level, there's barely any disagreement at all. Most infighting is along personal lines ("Are this person's sins bad enough to warrant cancellation?"), or "intersectional" lines ("Should Asians call the police/make a stink when they're mugged by black men?").
My tentative one-sentence understanding of wokism is that it's a vulgarization of strands of left-wing thought dating from the 60's and 70's, (including CRT). In turn, what differentiated that era of leftism from the popular Civil Rights Movement was its institutional base in academia, which insulated it from both the particularism inherent to real-world politics and from the low level of abstraction demanded by popular movements. I haven't studied CRT in any depth, so this is a weak point of my argument, but loosely speaking I think what happened is that it replaced the concrete grievances of the CRM with a quasi-metaphysics of oppression, with new jargon to match (e.g., demonizing "whiteness" and "patriarchy" instead of "white people" and "men").
The dominant/marginalized, oppressor/oppressed dyads were raised to a higher level of abstraction in three ways. First, whites/men/straights were made into categorical oppressors, so that in no situation could e.g. black people be said to be oppressing white people, even where the dictionary definition of "oppression" would strenuously disagree. Second, with the aforementioned exceptions, any disparity between groups defined in opposition to one another was held to be reducible to oppression (by definition). For example, if deaf people have a communication disadvantage vis-a-vis hearing people, it's because society has made a decision not to accommodate them, which is oppression. Third, and related to the previous two, oppression was transformed from something that is done to something that is -- the animating spirit of Western civilization. Nothing is untainted by it. No branch of government, corporation, small business, or seemingly innocuous interaction between two members of the oppressor/oppressed classes has ever been totally free of oppression. There may have been some attempts in the past to fix this state of affairs, and they were laudable, but paradoxically, they were also completely ineffectual: oppression is alive and well. In fact, the need to combat it is (permanently) more urgent than ever.
Fast-forward to ca. 2012. Proto-woke has virtually taken over academia, old-school racism is dead, the highest office in the land is occupied by a fellow traveler, university attendance is higher than ever, and social media has appeared on the scene. The time is ripe for the left's intellectual capital to be cashed in for political capital, and for them to go on the offensive. The doctrinal innovations of the academic left are distilled into a few slogans, like "Racism = Power + Privilege" (i.e., you are racist if and only if you are white), which are opportunistically weaponized against political enemies, and abused for petty reasons like earning victimhood points/attention in order to increase one's social status, or settling personal scores. The energy of the movement is sustained by bringing down high-profile targets, which in principle can be any representative of the "mainstream" (anything normal), even if (in non-woke terms) politically inert, or any person, organization or symbol that stands athwart progress. The academic jargon is imported into corpo-speak to help put a respectable face on tribalistic malice -- e.g., any anti-white policy can be defended in the name of "prioritizing underserved/historically marginalized communities" or whatever. Markers of tribal identity emerge, like blue hair and that childlike, anodyne style of art. Encouraged by the stipulated universality of "oppression", new groups clamor for protected class status, using woke jargon to make their case to varying degrees of success. Not every wokester can, or has to, advocate for every protected class equally -- for the most part, they advocate for their own, if they belong to one -- but they almost uniformly signal at least lukewarm support for each other's causes as they come up, and borrow legitimacy from a shared verbal and philosophical pool. Woke-internal conflict is rare relative to the size and effectiveness of the movement; when it occurs, it's largely reactive, prompted by news stories that pit one protected class against another. Despite wokism's immense reach, its conflicts are mainly litigated outside the public eye. Such conflict as happens has a low intellectual caliber, because no framework was previously developed for managing disputes between protected classes, and it's too late to develop one that won't immediately succumb to the Schmittian hurlyburly -- on an abstract level, it's just "What happens when an irresistible force meets an immovable wall?" The woke recipe for critique, its philosophical core, is reduced to cartoonish simplicity, while its real-world ramifications are determined by historical/political/biological/cognitive contingency -- as seen in the reactions to transgenderism vs. transracialism, and the irrelevance of "theory" thereto. (I'm sure there was some theorizing post hoc, but by this time wokeness had outgrown its dependence on theory.) Etc. etc. etc. In short, the thing that came to be called wokeness metamorphosed into a fully-fledged mass movement. "Defining" woke is a category error, because it became messy upon contact with the real world. It's like trying to define a person.
The above paragraph is meant to characterize "classical wokism", b. ca. 2012, d. 2024. (To be honest, I'm not sure how well it describes its heirs in 2025 since it's so much less visible now (unless you have an account on Bluesky, which I don't).) As time goes on, the ideas and organizational forms of the left will continue to change in ways that defy easy definition.
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If we must say that there's 17 heads and name each of them, that's at least in the direction of what Freddie and I are saying. The complaint is that first they deny that there's anything there, then that it's a hydra, then that the hydra is good. And of course once the conversation is over they will return to acting like the people who cried hydra are responding to literally nothing. If people see sky blue and cyan and aquamarine together, they're going to call it blue. Ain't nobody got time to go one-by-one with 100,000 ever-so-slight variations on a theme, and if you demand they must they will simply refuse. Republicans have been successful in painting the progressive left as obnoxious, and young men are swinging right despite having many left-wing views.
No, the issue is that you think these are requirements. Central coordination is not required; the only thing that's required is reasonably definable goal that a noteworthy amount of people would agree with and are or would cooperate towards. Many movements don't have leaders, or if they do most of their own members probably couldn't identify them. Was GamerGate a movement? Tea Party? 99%ers? BLM? Are all of those words useless and should be dispensed with?
Well yes, the artists (generally left leaning) started doing it, and people noticed. Said artists will happily admit in a friendly environment that it was a conscious decision to increase representation - the idea that people empathize more with their in-group and this is a good thing (except for white men).
In other words, college-educated people.
I mean, all of these are deeply different examples of movements that can't really be compared, apples-to-apples:
The reason I bring those up is that I do judge those "movements" based on more than just "what they're about". The actual structure of the movement is just as important. That's why we care about grassroots movements more than ones bankrolled by PACs - we at least believe that the former represents the will of the electorate, where as the latter is just astroturfing.
Is the implication here that anyone with a college education is woke? I have a laundry list of counterexamples... My point is that profit-driven individuals and organizations probably overcalibrated to what they thought would sell to their target demographics, rather than some conspiratorial effort to inject woke ideology into our economy. I mean, the opposite probably happened in the 20th century where a certain concept of masculinity was sold to the masses, and we ended up with a John Wayne generation despite all evidence pointing to John Wayne being a pretty poor role model no matter your political tendencies.
GamerGate: Leaderless movement where some Republican strategist came along after it started and made some remarks suggesting he wanted to capitalize on it for political gain, which the left ran with to claim him as a mastermind of a Twitter mob. Side note: I like to compare this to claiming Putin controlled BLM because he supposedly had some trolls online try to fan it to increase fragmentation in America.
Tea Party: Fair that I don't remember how much central planning, but to my recollection there was no leader, more comparable to current Trump protests where they say they're protesting on X date, please come.
BLM: My point in this was that said group that co-opted it was irrelevant to it being a movement.
The will of the electorate is what I'm talking about. If you can define a "will" and a group that possesses that will, you have a group that you can discuss. Leaders are irrelevant for this purpose. BLM is a group with demands, and I can support or rebut its ideas because they are definable enough to discuss. If BLM came along and said, "We're not a group because we came here independently and we're not trying to do anything (this claim is only made when trying to dodge criticism)" then people are free to call bullshit. If they don't want to be named that doesn't stop anyone from coming up with a name for them. If that name sticks then the lesson here is to get better at PR rather than whining that you should be uniquely immune to needing PR. Control the message or you will be controlled by it.
No, the implication is that it's disproportionate. The consultants and the marketers believed that their view was correct (primarily morally and secondarily financially, and the former biases to believe the latter) and BLM in particular gave them the opportunity to sell it to their bosses as profitable. Again, conspiracy and coordination are not required, merely enough people doing a similar thing at a similar time.
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