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I don’t understand the seemingly widespread view that using the term “woke” is itself uncharitable/insulting/verboten when that term was originally promulgated by its adherents.

“What the New Right is skeptical of is liberalism.”

I strongly disagree: it is far less intelligent than that.

The new right is a creation of the right-wing elites: corporations and the very wealthy. They have literally hundreds of think-tanks, media, and foundations to create and spread their propaganda. They themselves do not believe in the ideas of the new right: those are strictly for the proles. They have created and support the new right simply to be more politically powerful, to increase their wealth.

The ideas of the new right can be simply characterized as “othering” and then “promoting us and persecuting the others”. They’re that stupid. But they still appeal to many who believe they can climb over the dead bodies of the others to fulfill their goals.

I read quickly Cowen’s piece until I got to this:

Many of the most beneficial changes in American history have come about through broad coalitions, not just from one political side or the other.

Ok, maybe, kind of. But then his example is not very good:

Libertarians such as William Lloyd Garrison played a key role [i]n anti-slavery debates, but they would not have gotten very far without support from the more statist Republicans, including Abraham Lincoln.

First, Garrison is not well described as a libertarian. He called himself a non-resistant. He was opposed to participating in the political system of a polity he saw as fatally infected by slavery, hence he opposed voting. His brand of abolitionism was important for its moral clarity about slavery, but he was both extreme and unrealistic when it came to the question of means. Lincoln, by contrast, was not an abolitionist when he ran for President in the election of 1860 (this is basic high-school U.S. history). He opposed the extension of slavery beyond where it already existed, but did not advocate its abolition. (That changed with the war and the Emancipation Proclamation, though the latter decreed the abolition of slavery only in the Confederacy, not in those border states that stayed in the Union.)

In short, framing the Garrison/Lincoln difference as one of libertarian vs. “more statist” makes little historical sense. Garrison was an agitator and journalist whose methods helped rouse consciences but in themselves would almost certainly never have led to slavery’s demise. Lincoln was a working politician who was always, until the Civil War actually broke out, open to the sort of compromises that Garrison denounced as evil. They were not really in a coalition because Garrison, to repeat, was an abolitionist who opposed participation in electoral politics, whereas Lincoln was, for much of his career, not an abolitionist and was very much involved in electoral politics. (Note there were a lot of abolitionists who did believe in participating in electoral politics, but Garrison was not one of those.) I don’t recall exactly what Garrison’s attitude toward the idea of ‘the state’ in general was, but calling him a libertarian is, I think, inaccurate or at least anachronistic.

On Cowen’s argument that the so-called New Right is more skeptical of elites than classical liberals: I don’t think this framing is quite right. Trump, for instance, stirred up and exploited popular resentment of elites but then proceeded to propose and get enacted large tax cuts for the wealthy. This suggests that elite-bashing is mostly simply a political tactic for the New Right, not a substantively held view, at least if we’re talking about economic elites (as opposed to so-called cultural elites). Far-right politicians are good at exploiting resentments, but how they govern once in power is a different matter. Trump’s policy agenda — as opposed to his rhetoric — was not really “anti-elite.” (See, e.g., Jason Stanley, How Fascism Works (2018), for further remarks on these lines. The book should have been called How Far-Right Politics Works, because that’s a more descriptively accurate title.)

What’s striking to me is Cowen’s implicit admission that, whatever happens to the Right, he is part of it. That near-universality of Republican identity politics is the crucial fact in understanding US politics and the likely demise of US democracy

https://crookedtimber.org/2022/09/05/republican-as-an-identity/

A. Lincoln’s semi-militaristic marching club was named the Wide Awakes. They did a stomp-like march. We’ve been woke for a long time.

In a sane world, after the Truss/Kwarteng debacle we wouldn’t hear any more from “classical liberals” for a hundred years.

Lurker, I’m not denying the meaning (if not necessarily the referent) has changed somewhat, I’m just dubious that, when that happens, a word can become taboo.

“ Let me conclude with an interpretive maxim: it is impossible to be coherently hermeneutically charitable to an outlook that is, itself, essentially hermeneutically suspicious in outlook, insofar as that locks you into being charitable-and-uncharitable to any view – e.g. ‘Wokeness’ – you are seeing through the eyes of the person you are attempting to be charitable to.”

I think whether this is true in every case depends on whether it’s possible to be coherently charitable-and-uncharitable to yourself. If you can, then you can be ccau to any group that’s suspicious of yourself. Say, if you define “humility” as the virtue of being consistently suspicious of yourself, and charitable to anyone suspicious of yourself (rather than charitable pure and simple). This seems to be the position taken by centrists like Cowen who identify themselves as “liberal but charitable to anti-liberals.” Their mistake is going from “criticism of me must always be taken seriously” to “criticism of anybody who shares an attribute with me (because they’re essentially identical to me” must always be taken seriously. This is what people often mean by “class traitor,” etc., etc.

Can you even be coherently suspicious of yourself? That’s the question. If Cowen could, presumably he’d ask himself whether his public writing is coherent, and find that it isn’t, and change. Since it’s obvious he can’t, he projects the suspicion onto other people who (he thinks) share his attributes.

That could probably be clearer with more caffeine and a bigger comment box.

The term ‘woke’ derives, I think, ultimately from the esoteric traditions, but its meaning has been distorted and trivialised so much that any continuity with the esoteric terms has been lost.

LFC @6:
I would say that ‘fascist’ and ‘far right’ express different meanings, but neither of them is descriptively very accurate wrt the phenomenon we are all trying to understand. There seems to be a unified phenomenon manifested these days “increasingly” in many different parts of the world, although the most virulent ones seem to arise out of the European cultures. But I have not seen any accurate description of unifying properties, or rather any unified understanding of a possible single objective phenomenon. (What unifies the lists of Eco, Snyder, Stanley, etc.?) So far the best I can do for a label is the rather unspecified “primitivism’, but I’m not satisfied with it. Cassirer developed a notion of ‘mythical thought’ perhaps to try to understand what might be the phenomena in question. It’s difficult to describe the derangements of logic (involving not just the formal inferences, but also what Brandom calls “material inferences” involving referential content, e.g., causal relations) that characterize the maladaptive conventional intelligence of (what is for now, until they “awaken”, in the esoteric sense) the Republican electorate. (How is it that all these ordinary people out in the rural areas, e.g., can not recognize as utter rubbish the verbal emissions of GOP politicians specifically?) I would however conjecture that the phenomenon is a logical, rather than a psychological. one. The conditions for meaningful debate do not exist at this point. (BTW, I think a similar problem arises for the term ‘authoritarianism’: I don’t think it accurately enough describes the conventional understanding of what governance is and ought to be as held by the current Republican electorate.)

JPL @18
Thank you for the comment; I don’t have much to say right now, but am thinking about it.

I guess @17 is addressed to me, and cleverly hints that I’m making up wacky lies about Cowen. I think it’s not in doubt that Cowen considers himself a classical liberal and that his charity to anti-liberals involves the fact that they criticize attributes classical liberals tend to share with what in America we call liberals. I’m almost certain I’ve seen him use the “(classical) liberal” label with respect to himself, though maybe that was a long time ago. But I guess I’m not as charitable as you are, as I don’t assume things I don’t immediately agree with must be “wacky”.