The anti-wokist is a dog

These anti-wokists are all moral abscesses, filled with the pus of human depravity. NOT ONE of them every argues for ending qualified immunity, NOT ONE. They demonstrate by their words and actions that they believe all those bullet-points, only in support of white people and cishet white males.

“Anti-woke” == “All Lives Matter” == “Black Lives DON’T Matter”

I mean, it’s obvious. There hasn’t been a single time that one of these broad class-based movements ever did right by oppressed minorities: it was always up to the minority group to fight for their rights themselves, and often those class-based movements were on the side of the baddies.

I’ll take a stab at defending Brooks, because why not.

“We shouldn’t emphasize what unites all human beings; we should emphasize what divides us.” OP says he doesn’t know what this means. I know exactly what this means. It means that, given the fact that we are all united by some things and divided by other things, we should talk only about the latter. “White people and black people are equally people: they are of equal worth, and harming one is exactly as bad as harming the other” is one sort of thing you could say. “White people and black people experience fundamentally different realities due to their social positions and one must keep this in mind at all times … and really it doesn’t matter if you harm a white person because their lives are so good anyway” is a different thing you could say. Both things can be true! But — or so the charge goes — woke people insist on saying #2 and think that saying #1 marks you as a bad person.

Is this charge true? YMMV, but to me it depends on the woke person. I’ve definitely known some people who are this woke. Haven’t you?

Not saying there’s an easy answer to any of this. There isn’t. Definitely not saying Brooks has the right answer. He doesn’t! But there is something not-wrong at the heart of what he is talking about.

One may not entirely endorse what John McWhorter has to say about Ibram Kendi. But (imo) McWhorter is on to something real that has gone bonkers in the discourse.

David Brooks’s ability to defeat straw men is truly impressive and well worth what he’s paid by the Times, Yale, and so on.

I think you miss the interesting part if you dismiss the “implausibly strong versions of ‘wokery'” that Mounk and others are reacting to. Those strong versions are the real deal, they challenge everything from conservatism to liberalism to Marxism, and they’re worth thinking seriously about.

You can say that the claim that free speech is a tool used to oppress the weak as really just a call for more free speech for the oppressed; or the claim that white people can not understand the experience of Black people as a call for listening to different points of view. But that just reduces the claims to common-sense liberalism.

I think you’re much closer to the mark when you say of the claim that racism is a permanent feature of American society: “It might be true, and if so, so much the worse for ‘American society’, which would need to be replaced by something else.”

I mean, if you’re right and “wokeism” is calling for the replacement of American society by something else, that’s probably going to get a lot of people riled up, and is certainly worth discussing.

But I think it merits more than the “nothing to see here, folks, move along” attitude that I see in a lot of anti-anti-woke commentary.

‘Politically correct’ is what rude people call it when they are asked to be polite; ‘woke’ is what inconsiderate people call it when they are asked to be considerate.

I’ve definitely known some people who are this woke. Haven’t you?

Nope. I thought they only existed in the distorted perceptions induced by the fever dreams of the right. Every time somebody pointed me at an actual alleged example, it turned out they weren’t saying the things they were accused of saying.

One may not entirely endorse what John McWhorter has to say about Ibram Kendi.

I’m going to explain how it makes me feel when I read sentences like that one.

My first thought was that I don’t know what John McWhorter has to to say about Ibram Kendi (I don’t even know who John McWhorter is), so obviously I don’t entirely endorse it. Why, then, am I being told that one may do this thing? Is that supposed to state the opposite of a position where one may not do this thing? How would I deal with it if I were banned from deciding not to completely endorse what John McWhorter has to say about Ibram Kendi?

On reflection, it occurs to me that the intended meaning of the statement might be something like ‘I’m not sure how much John McWhorter is right about what Ibram Kendi says’. Well, somebody who means something like that should consider expressing it more like that, both for clarity and because it sounds better. Anybody who finds themselves beginning a sentence ‘One may not entirely agree with …’ should reconsider. It probably won’t get up everybody’s nose, but it probably will get up a lot of people’s noses, not just mine. (Of course, sometimes the person making the statement might want to get up people’s noses! In that case, my advice does not apply.)

But (imo) McWhorter is on to something real that has gone bonkers in the discourse.

Having no idea what John McWhorter is saying, I therefore have no idea whether John McWhorter is on to something real, but I do know that one of the things that is within the bounds of possibility is that John McWhorter is the thing that has gone bonkers in the discourse.

I know I have seen Ibram Kendi mentioned somewhere before, and what I recall is that when I looked up what he was actually saying, it was reasonably sensible and did not justify the criticism being directed at him.

J-D: I googled and found this: https://www.npr.org/2021/11/05/1052650979/mcwhorters-new-book-woke-racism-attacks-leading-thinkers-on-race

McWhorter argues that certain strains of anti-racism and its adherents have effectively created a religion, and a zealous one, that stifles nuance and debate. His new book is called Woke Racism: How a New Religion Has Betrayed Black America.

There are people “whose devotion is less to changing lives for people who need help than showing that they understand that racism and especially systemic racism exists,” McWhorter tells Morning Edition.

“The idea is that you are to be fired” if you disagree or violate anti-racism’s norms, in McWhorter’s telling. “You are to be dismissed from polite society. You are to be sanctioned. You can’t be among us. You’re dirty.”

To this I would say: “yes, you should be fired, shunned, shouted out of polite society.” The thing is, McWhorter has a schtick: he tells white people that they’re just fine, just fine, don’t need to change, or at least, not much. Meanwhile, qualified immunity is still the law of the land and every Black man “fits the description.”

I mean, we have a recent example of this happening: MAGAts. And everything he writes above, with such alarm, I (and most of my friends, and most of the people on the blogs I frequent) practice with extreme prejudice. Yes, a MAGAt should be made to feel awful, to feel ostracized, to feel that they’ve farted in the cocktail party.

Because if we don’t use social stigma, what else do we have to convince these people to get on with being decent human beings? It’s the very least we can do. I mean, when the shoe was (and remains) on the other foot, a Black man who insisted on his rights could easily get shot. McWhorter doesn’t want to admit this though, b/c it destroys his case.

I think there really is a bone of contention between more traditional liberals and woke activists. I’ll take a stab at it:

There are a number of things that for a lack of a better term function as civilizational technologies that are alleged to help modern societies, and especially modern multicultural societies function well. Some of these are legal fixtures, other wide social norms. A non exhaustive list would include things like: free speech, academic freedom, various job protections both formal and informal (a sense that a mechanic shouldn’t be fired from a job fixing cars if he supports the Green Party), religious tolerance, colorblind evaluation…

A woke activist is skeptical of these civilizational technologies because they often don’t conform to ideas about how they think of ‘social justice’. They point out the that powerful sometimes corrupt these things. They point out that the already downtrodden get trampled by bad side effects of these things. They generally seem to think that the world would be better if these things were (strong version) destroyed or (weaker version) drastically reduced in power. What they would be replaced with is subject to a lot of contention.

A non-woke liberal thinks of these civilizational technologies as more like a ceasefire or truce between warring parties. So instead of free speech always promoting the ‘right’ thing being spoken, they see it as making it harder for the truth to be censored during those times when the correct view is not ascendant. Religious freedom isn’t about finding out which religion is correct (they might all be wrong). But it is about the fact that many deeply religious people disagree strenuously with each other, and it would be best for the world for them not to feel that they have to be violent with each other or us. A perfectly calibrated and wise look at race might lead to better outcomes, but in practical reality teaching people to judge everyone on race ends up heightening racial strife rather than lessening it.

Wokism is rather idealist about future systems and fatalistic about current ones: it wants to focus on how perfect things could be if they were all in charge all the time. Liberalism is less so: it wants to remind you that often people who disagree with you also have power and might do so even other alternate systems.

I come down much more on the liberal side. I tend to believe that woke activists tend to have grown up fully under liberal protections, and assume that the good outcomes from that are natural to progressive systems and the bad outcomes they critique (sometimes rightly) are perversions that will only appear in the liberal systems.

“I tend to believe that woke activists tend to have grown up fully under liberal protections, and assume that the good outcomes from that are natural to progressive systems and the bad outcomes they critique…are perversions that will only appear in the liberal systems.”

I think there might be something to this. I also think there might be some substance to the view that people who come down much more on the (classical) liberal side of the argument exhibit the same blind spot. In other words, they’ve grown up inside a system within which a certain degree of truce is taken for granted and under which some of the same principles (a belief in the desirability of workplace protections, a belief in the desirability of freedom of speech, the idea that “academic excellence” is a thing, the expectation that if you build a better mousetrap it won’t just be bought up and poked into a hole, the expectation that if you do build a better mousetrap and that if it is bought up and poked into a hole, you personally have a moral right to profit from the exchange, and so forth) are subscribed to on both sides of the political aisle. Up till now they’ve been trained to enter into an ideological world in which something like a symmetry prevails and where both factions read some of the same books. Classical liberals are not used to a situation in which their hereditary collection of bedtime stories is cited and cherished and treasured as inspirational reading and enshrined on coffee tables and adopted as a lifelong guide by only on side of the political spectrum, while the other side at best doesn’t give the faintest vestige of a drat about any of it and at worst thinks it all ought to be flung on the fire as soon as possible and expunged lickety-split from the world. Classical liberals aren’t accustomed to this state of affairs, and their lack of familiarity with it doesn’t always serve them well. Or so I’ve heard it said — and I haven’t disagreed.

Imho the important thing to understand about anti-wokeism is that there are distinct right-wing, liberal and left-wing forms that don’t really have anything to do with each other.

they think that “woke” emphasis on race, gender etc detracts from the unifying identity that they wish to promote

Don’t some feminists, anti-racists, etc think that the Marxist emphasis on class detracts from the unifying identities they wish to promote? It seems to me many political movements seek to unify their social bases in opposition to opponents and I don’t think this thin structural parallel amounts to substantive overlap. Anyone fudging the difference between class and nation (at least in an imperialist power like the US) isn’t on the left.

I think there’s also a liberal critique of wokeness that doesn’t find it divisive at all but homogenising.

I think you could draw out the incompatibilities by going down Brooks’s although I don’t have time to do it thoroughly now. A socialist would endorse 2 (as you observe). Brooks (as a conservative) does not. A liberal might join Brooks in opposing 5 but left-wing radicals might be sympathetic. Etc.

This does seem true to me:

” there are distinct right-wing, liberal and left-wing forms [of anti-wokism] that don’t really have anything to do with each other.”

Are there also distinct right wing, liberal, and left wing forms of wokism?

I think “wokeism” is a set of attitudes more than a political program. And while I understand what Chetan Murthy is saying about qualified immunity, that issue is not, I would guess, foregrounded on the elite college campuses that Brooks is referring to. The reason it’s not is that the students’ energies tend to get focused, naturally enough, on matters closer to home, which often are of no or little general interest, such as whether the name of a particular dorm should be changed.

While Brian Leiter can be brusque, to put it mildly, I have a certain sympathy for his leftist anti-wokeism, and I agree (amazingly enough!) with engels that it doesn’t have much in common with other forms of anti-wokeism. Leiter continually denounces Ron DeSantis, the embodiment of right-wing anti-wokeism. While the opportunities for rhetorical “cross-pollination” or fudging that Chris Bertram refers to may exist, I don’t think they’re all that commonly taken up. That said, leftist anti-wokeists should be aware that they may sometimes unintentionally throw fuel on the right-wing anti-wokeist fire.

Bekabot—can you give a real example?

Isn’t theirs usually an ‘all things considered’ judgement rather than a prima facie attack on free speech? That is, all things considered, some speech is dehumanizing and harmful to people so free speech isn’t an all things considered good in every instance.

The ‘implausibly strong’ forms of wokism are…what? Things that somebody has said in a tweet? What are these, and who advocates them?

Does anyone remember that racists used to get fired without much comment? Am I imagining this? I remember this happening when I was much younger, and it was not such a big deal. They were fired as newscasters or sports reporters and so on by liberals. In the 1970s. And it happened without much comment. Unfortunately, I don’t remember enough to find these incidents on google.

It’s possible that what changed things wasn’t the excess of wokists so much as the racism critique seemed to become more of a widely-held view, and then Trump and others started to be more openly racist. As far as I can tell, what happened was that open racism started to become more common, and there were more narratives on the internet that people began to be persuaded by that offered an alternative view—that perhaps racism and sexism and the inferiority of certain people could be proved by science, and we should not ‘silence’ those people. This made people who prefer space for racism to see themselves as the underdogs who had to fight the establishment.

I think Chris is basically correct, but maybe my historical recollection isn’t shared by anyone. I came across some discussions of ‘systemic racism’ in some writings by the American Catholic Church—maybe even by the Catholic bishops awhile ago. Nobody freaked out when these were made because they wasn’t a meaningful counter-narrative to tag these as suspicious concepts. They became suspicious concepts when a counter-narrative arose from the right.

I cannot figure out why some leftists have decided they have a stake in this counternarrative except that 1) Marx doesn’t talk a lot about race 2) they are white 3) they hope to capture some of the discontent of the young white people (usually males) on the right who might be engaged by the counternarrative 4) liberals pretend they are the main champions of justice for the oppressed, and sometimes use this claim unfairly against the left. There’s no overwhelmingly political reason for leftists to be anti-wokist.

OP, Brooks quote:

“Human relations are power struggles between oppressors and oppressed groups.”

The understanding of the eternal struggle of human history expressed in this sentence is off the mark and superficial, since it fails to identify the central dynamic that produces these inequalities.

E.g., Remember that a main principle used in colonialist governance was “Divide and rule”. Of course it’s a principle still in use everywhere from the US to Israel’s (i.e., Likud’s) managing of the Palestinian areas. The advantage of the “class-based” approach is that the relevant groups of “oppressor” and “oppressed” would be “the one-percent” (or less) and “the 99 percent” (everybody else). But that distinction, by identifying the contingent case of inequality based on money, also helps us to isolate the central nexus of the problem: the eternal struggle between the power principle and ethical principles, in the understanding of not only governance, but all areas of human interaction. We have seen that simply substituting rule by the managerial (or monied) class with rule by the working class (mutatis mutandis with ethnic, religious or any other way of identifying the groups), and simply thinking in terms of rule by groups and numbers, without solving the problems of power, will be ineffective, since, as with Russia and China, whoever assumes de facto positions of power, in the absence of constraints, tends to forget their original commitments and make continuance of that power its dominant interest over the maintenance of the rule of law principle, justice and enabling all attempts to right the inevitable abuses of power. So the ideal aim should be to attenuate the efficacy of the power principle in governance, and eventually to eliminate it altogether. And we know that exercise of power merely by groups with the necessary numbers, even determined by electoral vote and “the will of the people”, can result in the imposition of policies that are clearly ethically wrong and illegitimate, such as the allowing of slavery or wrongfully restricting the vote. Any political entity with a sincere aim of unification needs to demonstrate its legitimacy and attractiveness by ensuring that all its residents are equivalent with regard to the application of its laws, and that its laws protect, rather than violate, the ethical equivalence of its residents. We don’t currently have this anywhere, but people can show (or not show) progress toward this ideal without undue delay. Brooks’s sentence expresses (partially) a conventionally held belief that often constrains policy choices, but it’s retrograde.

While Brian Leiter can be brusque, to put it mildly, I have a certain sympathy for his leftist anti-wokeism …

Apparently, however, not enough sympathy to provide any hint at the beginning of an explanation of it for the benefit of readers who have no idea who Brian Leiter is.

Remember that a main principle used in colonialist governance was “Divide and rule”

Right. Or as Adolph Reed has observed: “anti-racism plays the same role in America today as racism did a century ago.”

I picked up a recent book on literary criticism by an American leftist and was surprised to find that (among other things) it was a screed against wokism. But what I was most struck by was the extent to which it focused on things that are entirely different from what non-academics think of when they think of the controversy about “woke.” For one thing, apparently what the “woke” are interested in, which the “real left” rejects, is continuing the Canon Wars. Which many of us may have thought were settled 15-20 years ago. The treatment of Black Lives Matter, for another example, was shallow to a degree this author would never permit himself in his purely political writing. I suppose I might take that as revelatory of what his academic audience expects, behind closed doors. What the argument is not, however, is any kind of discussion of student politics, except to the extent students demand Ethic Studies programs and the like. (In 2022!) At best it’s a teeny-tiny nibble at the edges of something like Rauch’s defense of the “marketplace of ideas.”

It seems like maybe the rest of us are left with Brooks’s and Mounck’s passionate intensity and strawmen on the one hand, and the usual general quasi-pragmatist, quasi-universalist muddle on the other. Back to Vonnegut: Be nice to one another, babies!

“and insists that the way governments treat their citizens should depend on the color of their skin”

One thing I should have added/emphasized: “wokism” doesn’t insist on this; it points out that it’s happening regardless of whether we want it or not, and that you can’t just ignore it and hope it goes away. Because it won’t. When for a century the Feds subsidized White housing and education, and (haha!) only as Black people started trying to get those things, the Feds stopped the subsidies, it’s more than a little misleading to say “oho, NOW you want the government to give Black people special preferences?” B/c WTF was the GI Bill, or Levittown, or FHA redlining?

The point (again) is that SC(R)OTUS CJ Roberts can argue (along with Yascha) until he’s blue in the face that nonono there’s no racism/misogyny in American life. Or that it’s not widespread. Or not structural. The truth is that its widespread and structural and unless you actually attack it, it won’t go away. That’s all “the woke folks” are pointing out.

I don’t want to give the New York Times any money, but before their systems closed off the Brooks article I caught a glimpse of what he was writing about: the way that US universities discriminate against Jews and how this is all part of the great woke conspiracy.

I don’t really think that an article which opens with a false accusation of anti-Semitism (I assume this has something or other to do with the current Israeli campaign against US campuses) can possibly be taken seriously as a critique of a movement which claims to be struggling for the rights of historically oppressed groups.

But I like the title of the post. Whistle and they’ll come, all bloated with urine to scatter on the lamp-post of your choice . . .

Long before wokism and anti-wokism became a thing, there has been a similar discourse in German around the term “Gutmensch”. Gutmensch literally means “being a good person”, and somehow, rightwing and (pseudo-)leftwing nihilists teamed up to turn the idea of being a good person into something to be ridiculed. Like wokism, Gutmensch was a term that next to nobody claimed for themselves but once the discourse became started, any public statement in defense of ethical behavior could immediately be ridiculed simply by attaching the “Gutmensch” label to it. It is still a mystery to me why such a dumb trick worked so well but it’s important to recognize that it wouldn’t have worked if it had come only from the right. The contribution of a certain kind of cynical smart-arse leftist was crucial. I tend to think that they are nothing but nihilists and their leftism has become totally fake (and many of these supposed leftists have openly turned to the right in the meantime).

TM, maybe I can help:

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blockquote>“A new ideology aiming to place each person’s matrix of identities at the center of social, cultural, and political life”

It’s hard to understand what this even means.

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blockquote>
maybe I can help. When I was young I thought of myself as an American, with no hyphenation. I used to sneer at all those people who had hyphenated names, stuff like Latino-American, Iranian-American, Indian-American, Irish-American, etc. You see, I came to United States at age 4: My first language is English, and the only other language I know is French which I learned when I worked in France. I’m a child of the western Enlightenment , and an atheist. To think of oneself as an American and not one of those other identities is to think of oneself as being in the unmarked category — the category of just regular folks.

But it turns out that’s complete bullshit. Even going back to when I was a a kid and a young adult I’ve been profiled for being brown in this country — i just pretended it wasn’t happening. But eventually I realized that all those people I used to sneer at for their hyphenated identities were correct: and I shouldn’t think of myself as American, but rather a South-Asian-American. It doesn’t matter that My favorite cuisine is probably Thai And I don’t like Indian music or Cinema. It doesn’t matter that all of my cultural preferences are pretty much upper middle class educated American preferences. When the time comes for them to take me to the cattle cars, The truth is I’ll be black in their eyes. So I’d better embrace that identity now, and act on that, b/c by the time the jack-booted thugs arrive, it’ll be too late.

What that passage that you quote is saying Is that everybody should pretend that they’re all in the unmarked category, even if they are not. And what does it mean to not be in the unmarked category? It means that you’re treated by your oppressors as if you are not in that category. It’s got nothing to do with whether you want to be in it or not, It’s whether or not you’re treated that way.

Oh, and what is the unmarked category? It’s “White.”

I think Chetan Murthy @36 clarifies something important. You can see “woke” (yes, it’s a terrible term) as the recognition that racism is still with us, it’s worse than most white people acknowledge, and it urgently needs to be eliminated. That’s probably how 90 percent of “wokists” see it, and that’s probably what 90 percent of “anti-wokists” are reacting against.

In that sense, woke and anti-woke are the latest iteration of Black people demanding justice from society, and racists, conservatives, and complacent whites telling them to stop making such a fuss. Taken in that sense, I doubt there’s anyone in this conversation who isn’t completely woke.

What “anti-wokists” like McWhorter and Mounk are interested in (I don’t care what David Brooks thinks, frankly) are a collection of ideas that they see as illiberal. So, the idea that people are fundamentally and essentially divided by race; that racism isn’t an aberration from Enlightenment ideals, but actually a result of them; that the liberal democratic mechanisms of free speech and electoral politics aren’t solutions, but are mechanisms of oppression, etc.

These are powerful, challenging ideas, and a couple of years ago I went down quite a rabbit hole, reading Richard Delgado, Ibram X. Kendi, Derrick Bell, Robin D’Angelo, etc. And I stumbled on Mounk, McWhorter, and Adolph Reed, who seemed to me to address these ideas respectfully (at least in the sense of respecting their power) but very critically.

What I’m most concerned about is Chetan Murthy’s complaint that, “… Brooks/Mounck/McWhorter abstract away from the concrete, to something airy and theoretical; in the process, by removing the facts, they also make the arguments seem unrealistic and unreasonable.”

I’m concerned that he might be right, and all the intellectualizing is just a distraction from the important stuff. I know that personally I read way too much and do way too little. Still, I think that there are real intellectual disagreements happening that go beyond just people denying that racism is a problem.

I’ve never understood this “woke” controversy. The first time I encountered it (online or on TV, I’ve never heard it from anyone I know personally), I asked the Internet what “woke” means and got something like this: “Woke is a US slang term that means aware of and actively attentive to important societal facts and issues, especially of racial and ethnic and social justice.” Which seems fine and commendable to me. But as many Internet people actually use it, it seems to mean something else. My best guess is “jerk”, e.g. someone whose intent is to disparage others rather than reason with them. Which is a syndrome which can happen to any of us (or so I tell myself), but I wish people would use that term (or its synonyms) where it applies instead of “woke”, which seems to me a useful, albeit rarely applicable, word which means something different.

The thing about “anti-woke” discourse is it seems so dumb. Take supposed tenet #3 above. It’s entirely obvious what this is directed at. It’s borrowed directly from Mark Lilla’s book of a few years ago. Lilla’s claim was that there is no valid experience a Black person, woman, disabled person, etc., can have, that cannot be described in words that make reference to neither (a) race nor (b) any experience a Black person, etc., could have that a white person could not have. Therefore, Black writers and critics who say the usual critical standards have to be adapted, in order to do full justice to everyone, are simply wrong, and are actively working against social solidarity. It should be obvious that what Lilla in fact does it claim some experiences can be simply invalid, simply written about wrong by the individuals who experienced them, and have to be vetted by members of the dominant groups before they can be approved as culturally acceptable.

If Lilla makes sense to you, you’re probably not going to like what you’d be likely to describe and condemn as “woke.” How a leftist can believe Lilla’s ideas about solidarity is beyond me.

Class solidarity doesn’t mean disciplining workers if they harass other workers on the basis of race? That’s just siding with the employer? Where’s the union in that scenario?

49: As always, there have been over time different usages of the term Gutmensch but it was initially popularized by a leftist (Klaus Bittermann) in 1994. A good summary is this article from the Gesellschaft für deutsche Sprache: https://gfds.de/gutmensch/

The negative connotation of the “Gutmensch” was directed at an allegedly excessively moralizing demeanor. And once you start looking for examples of “excessing moralizing”, you’ll easily end up targeting anybody who publicly takes a moral stand.
The criticism is not, as you say, that the intention may be good but the outcome is bad. It is really the demeanor that is being attacked.

Here’s a critical appraisal from 2011: „Mit dem Ausdruck Gutmensch wird insbesondere in Internet-Foren das ethische Ideal des ‚guten Menschen‘ in hämischer Weise aufgegriffen, um Andersdenkende pauschal und ohne Ansehung ihrer Argumente zu diffamieren und als naiv abzuqualifizieren.” (https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gutmensch#Unwort_des_Jahres)

I’m outraged and offended that TM called me a “smartarse,” a term which literally means clever but is used in a pejorative way—shockingly and disgracefully—to attack someone who says something intelligent (I can’t see who called anyone a Gutmensch here though…)

In case the above wasn’t clear: the insult “smartarse” seems to parallel “Gutmensch” almost exactly, except it refers to (affectations of) cleverness instead of virtue (pretending to be offended by any of this seems faintly ludicrous to me but okay…)

@“smartarse” seems to parallel “Gutmensch” almost exactly
not really as do-gooder seems to parallel ”Gutmensch”almost exactly and why do you guys ‘sink’ that Right Wing Racist Science Deniers feel this need to give people who care about the environment and the fight against the Climate Crisis and care about refugees and immigrants such a bad name?

BE-cause they ‘sink that ‘do-gooders’ are ‘smartasses’?

This tenet is interesting: “Human communication is limited. A person in one group can never really understand the experience of someone in another group.”

It throws me back to the Iraq occupation, when the overwhelming commentary on Iraq and what the Iraqis “want” was produced by peeps who couldn’t tell the difference between Sunni and Shi’ite, couldn’t speak Arabic, couldn’t tell you what some family in Basra would prefer for breakfast, and were overwhelmingly sure that Ahmed Chalabi was considered by Iraqis a sort of Charles De Gaulle figure. This came to a head in the elections of 2005, when the NYT, WAPO, and all other American media paid enormous attention to whether Chalabi was going to be the next president of Iraq, only to have to report that his party received 1 percent of the total vote. I think for a lot of young people, the dime dropped that mostly, the (mostly) white and rich governing class couldn’t find their own asshole with a map. That establishment is awful, awful hurt that the youth don’t even participate in the cult of Tom Friedman anymore. It is like the center doesn’t hold!

Since the salad days of Bush, of course, time has passed like a river. And those wokists who are opposed to free speech and wanna censor comics making race and sex jokes don’t even understand that free speech ends at the exact point that one has to support Netanyahu and the bombing and destruction of Gaza – instead, they insist on piping up! Luckily, the ivies, run by the same old establishment crew, know that on the one hand you have to defend free speech, and on the other hand supporting the Palestinian state is racism. These fine lines, the wokists just don’t get it!

engels @57 – Do you really want to standby that classically smartarse comment?

Btw, re the Godardian allusion and implied comparison of the post title, can you imagine the CIA making an an advert like that with “communism” in place of “intersectionalism”? Me neither.

*Sartrean (merde!)

Tl;dr can you imagine the CIA making a video like this about communism (the implied comparison of the post)?

This topic seems so simple to me. “Woke” is a term that comes from an old blues song by Lead Belly and means being aware of the pervasiveness of racism. It has been extended to also include other forms of bigotry including misogyny and homophobia and transphobia, but there is no world in which anti-woke criticism is anything more than endorsement of structural bigotry as right and proper ordering of the world. It is a face saving move that says “your pointing out of my privilege makes me uncomfortable as I realize it is unfair but don’t want to give it up.” It fundamentally misunderstands what Lead Belly was pointing out – that everyone should enjoy the fair treatment- not just the privileged.

When woke first appeared it abbreviated, “stay woke”, a summons to vigilant political consciousness, to collective accountability against identitarian herding on the basis of tradition and the counsel of elders. It was an identity. No one was permanently woke, rather it was a struggle session against the weight of societal tendencies to be quiet and look away.

The unwoke in that analysis consisted of everyone, political unconsciousness a vulnerability that stalked everyone, that anyone could slip into. “Stay woke” was a call to radical analysis beyond liberalism’s obfuscating technologies. It originated in African American social media, yes, but seemed to me explicit in its aspiration to a politics beyond identity. To date, one sees these divides inside of minoritised populations, pitting more radical groups against accommodationist and conservative hegemonies. Those idealists breaking for Sanders against the realists who stayed with the Obamas and Clintons.

It is the racists and their liberal co-workers who have foisted identity politics on “woke”.

With others above I see the primary function of denunciations of “woke” as signalling that one is adrift of majority opinion in one’s ethical and political convictions. It seems significant that against “woke’s” origins and associations, Jeremy Corbyn and Pope Francis (pale-skinned AMAB elders) are the high priests of woke. Against a contributor above, I rather doubt that CrookedTimber or any of its above the line contributors would be read as woke by anyone.

Anti-woke (see Rufo referenced above) is a preference for the parameters and norms of liberalism against the radicalizing tendencies of the far-left, especially where those bring in questions of social justice that had been successfully marginalized, ie “now you are going too far in your sympathies and solidarity,” or “I understand but the donors, focus groups and polling tether our imaginations to this slow reformism.”

The comment above “why aren’t you voting your cheque book” is astute.

Woke” is a term that comes from an old blues song…

When woke first appeared it abbreviated, “stay woke”, a summons to vigilant political consciousnes…

https://letmegooglethat.com/?q=genetic+fallacy

Also:

Think of ‘woke’ as the inverse of ‘politically correct,’* wrote Times columnist Amanda Hess in 2016. “If ‘P.C’ is a taunt from the right, a way of calling out hypersensitivity in political discourse, then ‘woke’ is a back-pat from the left, a way of affirming the sensitive. It means wanting to be considered correct, and wanting everyone to know just how correct you are.” Hess was not wrong. However, she failed to mention that her definition was created by and for white people, in direct opposition to the term’s original intent—a warning to Black people about white people. By co-opting and transforming “woke” into a beacon for self-congratulatory allyship, white wokeness had been reversed-engineered into the actual thing that Black people needed to stay woke about…

https://www.theroot.com/weaponizing-woke-an-brief-history-of-white-definitions-1848031729

Icastico @64

“Woke” is a term that comes from an old blues song by Lead Belly and means being aware of the pervasiveness of racism. It has been extended to also include other forms of bigotry including misogyny and homophobia and transphobia, but there is no world in which anti-woke criticism is anything more than endorsement of structural bigotry as right and proper ordering of the world.

The word “woke” has come to be used, at least sometimes, as a synonym for “identity politics.” That equation may be unfair or unfortunate, but it’s fairly common. And there are criticisms of identity politics that do not endorse “structural bigotry” but rather focus more on questions of political strategy and emphasis (rhetorical and otherwise). That’s a discussion/debate that’s been going on since well before the word “woke” entered everyday political discourse.

To cut a long story short:

Woke describes the attempt not to be a jerk.

Conversely anti-woke means being a jerk.

My grandma told me that some 45 years ago.

The word “woke” has come to be used, at least sometimes, as a synonym for “identity politics.” That equation may be unfair or unfortunate, but it’s fairly common. And there are criticisms of identity politics that do not endorse “structural bigotry” but rather focus more on questions of political strategy and emphasis (rhetorical and otherwise). That’s a discussion/debate that’s been going on since well before the word “woke” entered everyday political discourse.

As far as I can tell, what ‘identity politics’ means is ‘people raising political issues related to aspects of their identity which I would prefer they didn’t’. Nearly every political issue is related to some aspect of people’s identities. If I make a strategic or rhetorical choice to avoid raising an issue related to a particular aspect of my identity, I don’t refer to that as ‘avoiding identity politics’ because if I did that I would be raising the issue of my identity, and if I think somebody else is raising an issue related to an aspect of their identity in a way which I think is strategically or rhetorically ill-advised, and I try to discourage them from doing so by calling what they are doing ‘identity politics’ then it’s close to certain that my approach is in effect, even if not in intent, a bigoted one.

“The term first appeared in Marxist-Leninist vocabulary following the Russian Revolution of 1917. At that time it was used to describe adherence to the policies and principles of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (that is, the party line). During the late 1970s and early 1980s the term began to be used wittily by liberal politicians to refer to the extremism of some left-wing issues, particularly regarding what was perceived as an emphasis on rhetoric over content. In the early 1990s the term was used by conservatives to question and oppose what they perceived as the rise of liberal left-wing curriculum and teaching methods on university and college campuses in the United States. By the late 1990s the usage of the term had again decreased, and it was most frequently employed by comedians and others to lampoon political language. At times it was also used by the left to scoff at conservative political themes.”

In Germany, it entered the discourse in the early 1990s. In my recollection, it wasn’t always used as a pejorative, at least not within the left. It wasn’t the commitment to inclusive and nondiscriminatory language that was ridiculous. What was – and still is – ridiculous is the hysterical right wing reaction to it (German right wing governments are now officially banning gender inclusive language in schools in the hope of distracting from the poor performance of the education system they control).

But maybe that was already a further iteration of framing and reframing.

I’m wondering about this:
” ‘woke’ is a back-pat from the left, a way of affirming the sensitive.”

Because I have never ever even once seen the term used in that sense, in the circles that I frequent. Is this made up?

engels 76: Not sure whether you are trying to make a point. I would just point out that if I were asked to participate in that survey, I would probably conclude that there are no good answer choices. I would probably say that woke has a positive meaning, because I don’t like to leave it to the fascists to frame the political discourse, but still I would never use the term myself and I don’t know anybody who does.

It’s not surprising that most people don’t know what woke means. In Germany, the number would probably be even higher. That doesn’t prevent right wing politicians from agitating against wokism on Musk’s platform, because that audience understands them all right.

I don’t want to get tangled up in etymology (or defend an NYT opinionator who was linked by someone I linked to). I was making two main points:
-you can’t determine the current use of a word by analysing its origins
-several, mutually hostile political tendencies are critiquing “wokeness” for different reasons
I could add that all these debates tend to get a bit overblown as off of the internet most people don’t seem to know or care either way.

“Nearly every political issue is related to some aspect of people’s identities.”

Last Friday every member of the UN Security Council except two (US and UK) voted for a ceasefire in Gaza. Maybe that’s due some complex intersection of French, Russian, Ghanan, Japanese, Brazilian, Maltese, etc nationalisms I wasn’t aware of or maybe it’s just that the vast of people in the world can see on the basis of their shared humanity that what Israel is doing is profoundly wrong.

‘Most Britons’ don’t know much about anything, really.

They voted for Boris Johnson.

If you’re British, don’t think you’re so special. General ignorance is the normal human condition.

Most Britons’ don’t know much about anything, really. They voted for Boris Johnson.

14 million Britons voted Conservative in 2019 (from a population of 68 million).
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/election-2019-50779901

the basic meaning of a word is so much in dispute, it’s better simply not to use it

Maybe but imo there’s an important US cultural phenomenon of around the last decade that no one really denies took place (aka the great awokening) that it’s useful to have a word for. I also think PC, cancel culture and identity politics are real and obvious things even if people disagree about their definitions and merits.

Most important political concepts are impossible to define uncontroversially because they’re so fought over: liberty, democracy, fascism, socialism, etc.

I wouldn’t disagree with that, although knowing the origin of a word seems relevant to me especially when its current use is unclear and contentious, as is clearly the case here. Anyway, my contention is that if the basic meaning of a word is so much in dispute, it’s better simply not to use it and to be very skeptical of anybody who does use it.

It’s commonplace for a word to be used differently by different people, even when there’s no political controversy attached. I was reading recently about how the word ‘shallot’ is used in different parts of the English-speaking world to mean different vegetables. A practical implication of this is that if one person asks another to buy shallots and they both understand the word in the same way, then communication will be facilitated, whereas if they both understand the word in different ways (but don’t know that), then communication will be hindered.

I did investigate the origin of the word ‘shallot’, out of curiosity, but my findings had no practical application.

Sometimes when people want to communicate with other people they do so directly by using words which they understand as referring directly to the facts they want to communicate. If that’s what you want to do, then what’s important is not knowing the etymological origins of the words you’re using, but knowing whether the people you want to communicate with understand those words the same way you do. If they don’t, you should either try to use different words or else have a preliminary exchange to establish agreement about how the ambiguous words are going to be used in this particular context. For example, if somebody’s going shopping for me and I want them to get shallots, but I’m not sure how they understand that word, I can say ‘spring onions’ instead, or I can say ‘You know what I mean by “shallots”? Some people call them “scallions” or “spring onions”. They’re the long green things, not the things that are shaped more like garlic and which are labelled in the shops here as “eschallots”.’

Sometimes when people want to communicate with other people they do so indirectly and allusively, using words not to refer directly (or not only to do that) but to evoke related associations. A lot of the time this is what people are doing when they use the word ‘woke’. There’s not much (if any) difference in the explicit factual content directly communicated by ‘Nobody’s going to tell us we should be considerate of our inferiors’ and ‘This is where “woke” goes to die’, but the first is likely to produce direct associations which may be unwelcome and the second tries to avoid them. This is why I would expect people who talk like this to respond, if asked what they mean by ‘woke’, by saying something along the lines of ‘Everybody knows what I mean’. It’s true, in a way: I do know what they mean, but I also know that if I point it out they’ll try to deny it.

engels: “an important US cultural phenomenon of around the last decade that no one really denies took place (aka the great awokening) that it’s useful to have a word for. I also think PC, cancel culture and identity politics are real and obvious things even if people disagree about their definitions and merits.”

I disagree with most of this. It’s almost 100% right wing culture war framing. Cancel Culture is an Orwellian propaganda term that in common usage denotes pehnomena that have nothing to do with actual canceling (e. g. online criticism as cancel culture) while phenomena that might reasonably be described as cancel culture (e. g. the pressure on pro-Palestinian groups at US universities and elsewhere, the pressure an Academic Freedom in general in fascist governed states like Florida, the right wing book banning in the US) are, in common usage, not being referred to as “cancel culture”.

Another example, “identity politics”, which might be a useful concept if it were used coherently, but that is rarely the case. Any meaningful and coherent definition of identity politics would acknowledge that it’s nothing new, there have always been forms of identity politics, and no particular political movement has a monopoly on identity politics. But it is seems that you, for one, do not care about any coherent usage of this and other terms. So I would rather not allow you to frame the discourse.

TM, I don’t think “usually” is true at al but I’m sure it happened in some cases (which might be a reason to doubt the unifying potential of “wokeness” instead of denouncing the apostates…)

Chris, sadly not as I’m a borderline Millennial Marxist and have never met Macnair (probably our closest irl degree of separation is that I attended some of Cohen’s seminars 20+ years ago).

engels@80 links to a Mike McNair article that redbaits intersectionality as “Stalinism,” while not actually defining “Stalinism.” In this article near as I can tell one meaning used at times is, “Stalinism” is class collaborationism falsely justified as historical necessity for stages of development. It may even be true one source for such thinking was the rationalization of cross-class collaboration in the Popular Front.

But I am quite sure that complaining the wokists are class collaborators is not going to persuade anyone. The whole point of intersectionality is to justify class collaboration on the basis of identity. Also, the Popular Front was pro-labor while modern woke ideologists are anti-labor in general, not just anti-Gompers. The old struggles against craft unionism don’t count as solidarity for some reason (too embarrassing to avow?) I don’t think redbaiting ever convinces a reactionary or right-winger.

That’s especially true if “Stalinism” is conflated with Robespierre’s and Marat’s sans culottes or Red Guards tormenting professors. In the metaphysics of conservatism, that’s the Mob, an eternal principle of Evil. The anti-wokist I think sees themselves as the Lafayettes/Mirabeaus or the Lius/Dengs, if not the Bourbons or the GMD. The fact that the anti-wokist, just like the professional wokist, is in rational terms a member of the petty bourgeoisie (with a few not so petite) but not the worker they pretend to be is irrelevant. When it comes to actual policies and programs and personnel, they are resolutely opposed to a Popular Front that includes labor and Communists as their rivals.

If you want to be reductive, you could just say it’s a matter of whose side you are on. Either you are with the Obamas, and the Clarence Thomases, and the Thomas Sowells, and the Eric Adams, because anti-racism is a separate problem that has to be addressed separately, or you are not.

engels: “Three currents of anti-wokeism: conservatives think it’s radical, radicals think it’s liberal and liberals think it’s illiberal.”

Is that an argument for taking these claims seriously, or should we rather suspect
that in each case, the “wokism” in question might be a figment of the anti-wokist imagination?

And when I look at specific representatives of these fractions, I see “liberals” like Bari Weiss and Pamela Paul, and “radicals” as portrayed in the inthesetimes article at 84. I just call them right-wingers.

the “wokism” in question might be a figment of the anti-wokist imagination

See charts here:
https://www.vox.com/2019/3/22/18259865/great-awokening-white-liberals-race-polling-trump-2020

I don’t understand the accusation of redbaiting (Macnair’s a CPGBer I believe).

I warmly recommend people scroll back and watch the intersectional CIA recruitment vid which has just appeared (and apologies for the repetition: I thought those comments were lost in the ether [inter?] or I wouldn’t have posted so many.)

https://crookedtimber.org/2023/12/01/the-anti-wokist-is-a-dog/#comment-827691.

To those who still think identity liberalism is just “not being a jerk” (or right-wing) I’d suggest looking at some of the critical references here:

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/identity-politics/

Anyway, happy winterval (to everyone who identifies as happy, and if you don’t: you are valid and visible.)

Sorry, just saw this

phenomena that might reasonably be described as cancel culture (e. g. the pressure on pro-Palestinian groups at US universities and elsewhere, the pressure an Academic Freedom in general in fascist governed states like Florida, the right wing book banning in the US) are, in common usage, not being referred to as “cancel culture”

I agree! But imo that means the right-wingers are misapplying the concept, not that the concept is useless. Ditto for free speech.

From the OP “The basic lesson is that Brooks, like other “anti-wokists” such as Mounck, attack implausibly strong versions of “wokery” in order to avoid having to take seriously the embarassing insights that they wish to deny.”

Yes. The entire anti-woke literature is one long illustration of the Motte-and-Bailey method (named The Two-Step of Terrific Triviality by John H here at CT). The motte is “some opponents of racism, sexism etc say silly/extreme things”. There are two versions of the bailey. The right-wing one is “Everything is fine, and will stay that way as long as rich, white, Christian men continue to run the show, and everyone else knows their place”. The supposedly left version, as mentioned in the OP is “Everything is terrible, but if we focus exclusively on mobilising the working class, all problems will be solved”. Here “working class” theoretically refers to everyone who relies on labour income, but is mostly implied to mean “white, male, manual workers”.

engels: “an important US cultural phenomenon of around the last decade that no one really denies took place (aka the great awokening) that it’s useful to have a word for. I also think PC, cancel culture and identity politics are real and obvious things even if people disagree about their definitions and merits.”

I disagree with most of this. It’s almost 100% right wing culture war framing.

Near the beginning of this discussion I made this observation (which I have also made before):

‘Politically correct’ is what rude people call it when they are asked to be polite; ‘woke’ is what inconsiderate people call it when they are asked to be considerate.

More recently, I made this observation:

As far as I can tell, what ‘identity politics’ means is ‘people raising political issues related to aspects of their identity which I would prefer they didn’t’.

From within that framing, the following possibilities seem plausible (although I’m not sure how they could be tested definitively): there has been an increase in the salience of requests for people to avoid kinds of rudeness and inconsiderateness which were once more generally excused, and of political demands related to some aspects of people’s identities which some (other) people would prefer weren’t raised. If these things are so, as they may well be, they could be what some people are referring to as a rise in ‘political correctness’, ‘wokeness’, and/or ‘identity politics’: but if these are the things we are talking about, they are good things. To take just one example, borrowed from comedian Stewart Lee, if ‘political correctness’ means people refraining from the use of election slogans such as ‘If you want a [CLANG] for a neighbour, vote Liberal or Labour’, then it’s a good thing.

and if I may?
@
‘anyone who is insufficiently terrified of Darth Putin’

Was that a joke about one of the utmost terrifying Monsters on this planet?
And by calling him ‘Darth Putin’ – making fun of Humans who take Putin very seriously as one of the utmost terrifying Monsters on this planet?

And I love jokes on the Internet BUT somehow
NOT about one of the utmost terrifying Monsters on this planet?

And why would somebody called ‘Engels’ joke about about one of the worst Rapture Capitalist on this planet anywhoo?
Because there are very naive Communists who still believe that ‘one of the utmost terrifying Right Wing War Criminal Monsters is
STILL
some kind of… ‘Communist’?

I don’t deplore those opinions at all (they’re mostly mine). I linked to those surveys because they document a transformation of American of political attitudes over the last decade, and contradict the opinion that the entire discussion of “wokeness” has no basis in reality.

working class” theoretically refers to everyone who relies on labour income, but is mostly implied to mean “white, male, manual workers”

A devastating critique of (off the top of my head) Vivek Chibber, Adolph Reed, Nancy Fraser, Norman Finkelstein, Ellen Meiksins Wood…

Nastywoman: I agree Putin’s bad, I just don’t think he’s going to occupy Germany (or Ukraine for that matter).
TM: fair enough, I haven’t defined or distinguished the terms I’ve used properly, but I have offered analytical references. Maybe we can say:
1 “great awokening” = documented liberalisation of Democrat voters’ attitudes
2 “wokeism” increasingly influential ideology, ambiguous target of criticism from a variety of incompatible sources, radicalised idpol, variant of/successor to liberalism
I think 1 suggests 2 isn’t entirely fictitious but accept that isn’t obvious.