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Notes -
We Won
On Sunday Morning, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez went on ABC's This Week and proclaimed, "Woke 1 was crazy". The immediate context was AOC defending Wisconsin DSA governor candidate Francesca Hong, and so a lot of people are clowning on her for handwaving away everything that happened in 2015-2022. To the extent that this is about who you should vote for in the Wisconsin governor's race, I agree with the criticism, but I want to take a step back and appreciate how far we've come.
Think back to remember how it felt in the dark days of 2020 and 2021. It was far from clear that the reign of terror would ever end. Every week another subreddit or Twitter poster was banned. Facebook was removing posts supporting Kyle Rittenhouse as a policy. "Abolish the Police" was treated as a serious (if aspirational) policy proposal. Above everything else, the worst part was the psychological damage, the feeling that the entire world was going insane; that it was just you and a few guys from a Harry Potter fanfiction forum spinoff who were capable of the miniscule amount of critical thinking required to know that removing Aunt Jemima's face from bottles of pancake syrup did absoutely nothing to help black people.
The fact that even the left-wing of the Democratic Party is campaigning on health care, tax policy, and Palestine instead of racial humiliation is a big deal. There is a temptation to equate "woke" (more specifically "woke 1") with generic liberal Democrat stuff, but that's not really true. Conversely, it becomes easy to overlook some of Trump's greatest accomplishments. Turning DEI and Critical Race Theory into curse words and ending affirmative action were huge. People said it couldn't be done, and then they were done so fast that everyone forgot by the midterms.
What she's calling Woke 1.0 was actually already Woke 2.0. Woke 1.0 existed on tumblr, it was Atheism+ and the invention of a billion insane genders.
These are non-achievements. Wokeism is still the law of the land. Policy is still based on it. Until you can get fired from university positions for being accused of being a communist, it isn't done. Until 13/52 is openly stated and policy is based on it being true and self evident, it isn't done. Until BLM is viewed the same as Kony2012, it isn't done. Until stating your pronouns gets you laughed out of a room, it isn't done. As long as people are willing to openly call themselves socialists, antifa, anti-racists and the like, it isn't done. Until Ibram Kendi, Kehinde Andrews, Priya Gopal and all such people are destitute, derided, and working in McDonalds cleaning toddler vomit from the ballpit, it isn't done.
Some would go even further and describe Woke 1.0 as the "political correctness" movement in the 1990s. @JeSuisCharlie recently touted the virtues of a film called PCU, which I haven't seen, although my understanding is that it satirises the political correctness trend on university campuses. See, for example, this clip, depicting a feminist caricature using the phrase "rape culture". This film came out in 1994. Given the lead time to write, produce, edit and release a film, this implies that "political correctness" was ascendant as late as 1992.
Which rather illustrates the point that wokeness is cylical, with periods of ascendancy followed by periods of dormancy.
...or the "New Left" of the 60's, or various far-left movements in early 20th century Europe from Spain to Russia, and and so on and so on, probably until the French Revolution, if not before...
While one can easily situate wokeness in a lineage with historic leftist/progressive movements, I think nineties political correctness (with its fixation on identity politics organised around race, sex and sexuality) has so much overlap with the wokeness of 2010s that it's fair to consider it a recurrence of the exact same ideology rather than an offshoot. Consider the use of the term "rape culture" in that clip: it's the exact same vocabulary, the exact same preoccupations. It isn't hard to find earlier examples of uncontroversially leftist movements which were explicitly not feminist (e.g. just pull up a quote about women by literally any Black Panther of note). My guess is that when we get woke
2.03.04.0, it'll be pronouns-in-bio, "we acknowledge this meeting is held on unceded Pawnee land" all over again. If the next ascendant thing in progressivism is something radically different (e.g. centred on class consciousness and wealth expropriation), then while it'll still be left, it won't be woke.Yeah, but I'm saying the 90's were themselves a recurrence. For example, this:
Was written in the 80's, and the obsession with identity seems to already have been in place, and the author was not the one who came up with the idea either.
In the other comment you put forward a hypothetical of Nazism being defeated, but not condemned in the same way we do it now. I think one of the effects of that would be what we're seeing here - the ideas periodically resurfacing under a new coat of paint, and the old iterations being forgotten.
That's a fair point. Which leads me to wonder – what's the absolute earliest ideological movement which could recognisably be characterised as "woke" in a way people in the 2010s would recognise as such?
The easy mode answer is for wokes to list off Martin Luther King, the abolition of slavery, Mary Wollstonecraft etc. I'm looking for the hard mode answer.
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