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Has the Right gone woke? Spencer Platt/Getty Images
The feminist writer Audre Lorde famously observed that “the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house”. She was wrong, though. Sometimes appropriating the master’s tools can come in very handy. Already accustomed to the sound of falling masonry, onlookers may not even notice who now wields the sledgehammer.
In recent days, commentator James Lindsay has been on various podcasts, claiming that the radical Right has been nicking the master’s tools — or at least, their make-up brushes. In his words, the Right has gone “woke”: cancelling their enemies, obsessed with identity politics, and conjuring hidden structural forces responsible for oppressing them. Attempting to prove the point, he has also revealed that last month he duped conservative Christian website “American Reformer” into publishing an amended section from Marx’s Communist Manifesto; an apparent counterpart to the hoaxes on progressive academic journals he co-authored with Helen Pluckrose and Peter Boghossian in 2018.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, all of this has riled denizens of the internet with chiselled jaws and flinty conservative opinions, outraged at the very idea of Volk-gone-woke. As any playground brawler knows, when an insult is hurled at them, the first line of defence is the “no, you are” reverse attack. Accusations that self-styled classical liberals like Lindsay are the real woke offenders have duly followed.
But is he right? The hoaxing of “American Reformer” shows little, since the amendments Lindsay made to Marx’s original text are so heavy — and in any case, the fact that both radical Right and Left hate many aspects of bourgeois liberalism is hardly breaking news. Those already familiar with Lindsay’s intellectual hammer-wielding with respect to postmodernism and critical theory might suspect that to him, everything looks like a nail. He is, after all, someone who can smell “neo-Marxism” in capitalism-friendly identitarian posturing of the most superficial kind, and who traces the alleged roots of irrational wokeism as far back as that famous “Counter-Enlightenment” figure, Immanuel Kant (albeit that he helpfully adds “This point is complex”).
The book he co-authored with Helen Pluckrose, Cynical Theories, although instructive about the way academics steeped in race and gender studies manipulate language in order to make various political power-grabs, is sloppy on some of the details. And it also posits a naïve dichotomy between, on the one hand, postmodernism and the idea that truth is relative, constructed through language (bad); and on the other, classical liberalism and the idea that truth is objective, accessed through free speech and debate (good). What seems to go unacknowledged is that, even in a perfectly liberal society, there would be many debates about reality that no amount of reason and evidence could ever definitively settle: most obviously, about the nature of moral and political reality itself. Background values are going to be relevant here, and there will be no simple rational adjudication between them.
True to form, on closer scrutiny, the positive arguments offered by Lindsay for the existence of the Woke Right also turn out to provide scant justification. There are two prongs to these: behavioural and ideological. The first says that members of the radical Right act like woke social justice warriors at their worst. Just like their Left-wing counterparts, they brim resentfully with a sense of grievance and victimhood, banging on about how straight white conservative males suffer under the status quo. They, too, favour free speech for friends not enemies, and “react to disagreement with name-calling, ostracism and bullying” as pundit Konstantin Kisin — also a fan of the Woke Right theory — puts it.
All of this perhaps sits as oddly with Nietzschean virtues of honour and nobility as the behaviour of feral Left-wingers does with their championing of kindness and empathy. But, still, such behaviour scarcely distinguishes the Right from any ill-disciplined online tribe who feels it is on a losing side. From Scottish Nationalists to feminists to Taylor Swift fans, the problem here is less likely to be substantive political allegiances than human nature and the dynamics of social media, bound to drive most people insane sooner or later.
Indeed, no better evidence could be offered here than the existence of the part-time internet troll James Lindsay, a man apparently obsessed with the idea of having sexual relations with the mother of every one of his intellectual foes. And as has been pointed out this week, classical liberals tend to get partisan when it comes to the free suppression of political enemies, most notably on the pro-Palestinian Left.
For me, “woke” is semi-synonymous with “enlightenment”, or perhaps Richard Dawkins’s “brights”, in that the label was originally intended by the self-applicant to lay claim to an understanding of a higher truth, which in this case happens to be coterminous with the Leftist consensus extruded by the universities and non-profits and such-like. It is adjacent to “politically correct”, but while political correctness simply implies that one has aligned one’s professed views with the views of those who possess power to police public debate, wokeness implies that the “woke” individual is actually a better person–more aware, more alert, more moral–for having acquiesced to the prevailing political orthodoxy. To be woke is to be exalted by one’s own sheeplike compliance.
Yes this. Woke is just another somewhat cultish group using an ideology to elevate themselves and denigrate others, to create in-groups and out-groups and satisfy tribal instincts. It’s interesting how wokeness came along just as traditional divisions of in-group and out-group, such as religious affiliation, nationality, race, and culture were being undermined for pure economic reasons. It’s almost like there’s an innate need, an instinct for humans to be tribal and understand the world in that fashion, and when the traditional methods of differentiating in-group and out-group are removed, people make up new ones to fill in the gap.
Of course the other side will use the same sort of tactics for the same reason. In any conflict, from common fights all the way up to organized warfare, people will imitate the tactics of their opponent in order to win the fight. If one side differentiates into in-groups and out-groups based on a political ideology, the members of the out-group will just make their own in-group in the opposite fashion. If you catch two eight year olds fighting, they will likely point at each other and say “he started it”, “no he did”. It may be hard to determine which of the children is right, but ultimately, one of them probably is, because two people don’t just start fighting spontaneously for no reason, even eight year olds. In historical reality, one side did come up with woke to designate their special status and higher level of awareness, and the other responded and did so awkwardly without any solid philosophy or ideology behind them, just a rejection of ‘wokeness’. Had the inventors of ‘woke’ been more level headed, they might have noticed that in a democratic society where leaders are chosen by popular vote, it is strategically stupid for any political minority to differentiate itself and define itself publicly in such a blatantly divisive way that invites the majority to respond in kind. It basically invites the formation of a numerically superior group in direct opposition to one’s own, thus the strategy is self-defeating in any real objective sense.
Given his background, shouldn’t Dawkins be the one explaining all this rather than me, a professed Christian on an Internet site. Interpreting human behavior through nature and evolution is his thing, right? You’d think he’d notice this was going on and maybe point it out. Perhaps there’s no way to scientifically control for the human tendency to omit themselves in their analysis of human behavior. Perhaps the tribal instinct acts on a subconscious level that people, even really smart and well educated people, don’t easily notice and compensate for. It’s an interesting dilemma, one I personally resolve by regarding humans as flawed, imperfect creatures and trying to forgive them and sympathize with them even when I don’t agree, respecting everyone’s right to believe as they want and speak their mind without fear of reprisal, and never forgetting that I too, am just as flawed and just as likely to be wrong as anybody else.
Some nice insights there Steve. I think the process has been stimulated by the inevitable backlash against the attempt to impose globalisation upon a world that is clearly not yet ready for it – due to the proliferation of differing values and lifestyles.
Many people have sought succour in nationalism (hence MAGA and Brexit), while others have found tribalism more comforting, without really being aware of the even greater perils inherent in the breaking up of society into group labels. especially when identity politics and a victim culture are added to the mix
Indeed. Nationalism can be a bad thing if it’s excessive and accompanied by other things like militarism, expansionism, and geopolitical ambition. Japan has always been a highly insular society with a distinctive culture that prides itself on its unique characteristics. I believe that’s part of the reason the nation transitioned so quickly and effectively into a modern nation state. The only time it became a source of conflict is when Japan’s leaders tied that nationalism to territorial expansion. It brought them into conflict with other world powers. Now they just make really good cars and a lot of strange TV shows.
Internal conflict within nations between groups, regardless of whether the divisions are racial, ethnic, linguistic, or political in nature is basically always bad. It produces internal conflicts that governments can never adequately solve and eventually managing the conflicts ends up occupying most of the government’s time and resources. We have plenty of all of the above in the US but the founding fathers were smart enough to know that so they formed a government where power was spread out between states and government branches and gave them considerable leeway to fight out the conflicts among themselves politically rather than the old fashioned way. Even so, we’ve had one very bloody Civil War and the crime rate is sky high compared to every other nation on the planet. The dysfunctional USA you see today is closer to our historic average than the one that existed from 1941 to 2008.
I agree that both ‘politically correct’ and ‘woke’ grew out of good intentions, it is a sad fact that the terms have been hijacked by people with extremist political views and used to further their agendas.
Good intentioms? Maybe and maybe not. I am wary of any ideology that lays claim to being more ‘enlightened’ and uses that as an excuse to create a small group of select members based on rigid conformity to a narrow set of dogmas then declares their way to be superior, right, or more advanced. Still, the tribal instinct is a part of human nature. Their ideology is understandable and in many respects no worse than a lot of others. I just don’t like the stranglehold they have gotten over much of the media and academia. Having any one ideology dominate those fields is dangerous.
I’m not sure labeling any political view as “extremism” is helpful, even wokeness. It implies the existence of a mean political value that may be statistically accurate in some sense but may not represent in itself the views of many, or any, actual voters. It’s normative language that attempts to control the narrative and indirectly invalidate certain views and it helps drive further political division.
Steve, I generally agree with both your argument and your philosophy of tolerance, but your statement in the third sentence above did make me wonder how you square that with the tendency of organised religion to do just that. Given that you are a Christian, do you not find your position conflicted?
When I call myself a Christian I mean I consider myself a follower of Christ, nothing more and nothing less. I do not pledge allegiance to any faction, denomination, or sect. In other words, my answer is that I believe in dis-organized religion.
My theory is that tribalism and humans acting collectively is the legitimate source of the problematic behaviors in both cases. The actual message of Christianity urges people as individuals to love one another and forgive their enemies, to be humble not proud, to proselytize through the example of the lives they lead. Do people always follow the message? No. Do people acting collectively display consistent tribal behavior regardless of the quality of their excuse? Yes. If it exists, human beings can use it to divide each other into groups and persecute one another. This is true of every religion and just about everything else as well. Religion is not especially more guilty than race, ethnicity, etc. excepts in the sense that because it has been so universal to the human experience in history, it provides the most examples to point at.
We have centuries of experience with how religion can be misused and most people are aware of those lessons. On the other hand, too many people are oblivious that the secular philosophies and the various new age ideologies cooked up in the ivory towers of academia can be used in the same fashion and with similar results. Those ideas simply haven’t been around long enough to amass such a large pile of precautionary tales, but given what happened with the Nazis and in China and the USSR, they’re off to a good start. Hatred, violence, discrimination, persecution, pride, and all other vices have existed longer than religion and even if all religion goes away, they will remain. Humanity is the common denominator here.
‘Left progressives’ accusing ‘right populists’ of being woke, is just the lazy chess move of an army in retreat.
Following the Leninist creed of “accuse your enemies of doing what you are actually doing”.
I don’t want to be too hard on James because he did yeoman’s work over the past few years dissecting and educating people on Critical Theory and Marxism. He’s a man of the Center-Left that temporarily sought refuge on the Right so I can’t say it’s unexpected that he would tilt back to his political origins.
What is surprising is his fluid definition of Woke as Prof Stock notes. I always thought he had a very clear definition of “Woke.” That it meant one with an “Awakened Consciousness.” Someone with special knowledge or “Gnosis” to locate hidden power structures of oppression.
I do think there probably is a “Woke Right” but I don’t think the people he’s hoaxing really fit that definition well. His original definition of Woke Right was the “Right hand of the Left.” The people he’s hoaxing might be overdoing grievance and maybe even a little bit Hegelian, since they use the dialectic. But the Dialectic formula isn’t a modern invention, it’s just Platonism; a push/pull dialogue that moves the Overton Window back to the center.
At the end of the day he’s a Troll…and a good one at that but I wish he would stick to being a true intellectual because when he’s being a serious person he’s a next level thinker.
At the end of the day woke boils down to anything stemming from critical theory. I think he would agree with that. He’s also not a complete troll. Yes, he does do it, but the grievance studies affair and subsequent books on cultural Marxism aren’t trolling. Technically maybe the grievance studies were trolling, but from a much more academic approach.
The grievance study affair was a coherent exercise. His most recent troll was not nearly as well thought out.
I think he’s a world beater when he’s on. I just wish he wouldn’t force the issue.
Well said. You’re in strong form here, with your characteristic combo of fair mindedness and nuance.
“Woke Right” is an entirely bogus concept. The defining essence of ‘wokeness’ is neither ‘cancelling enemies, obsession with identity politics nor conjuring hidden structural forces’. It is Relativism…fad, ‘designer’ relativism – and particularly moral, cultural and sexual relativism. https://grahamcunningham.substack.com/p/the-madness-of-intelligentsias. It emerged from Western academia and its wellspring has always a desire for its cossetted, Ivory Tower pseudo-intellectuals to feel more ‘sophisticated’ than the rest of us backwoods people. Humanity’s huge capacity for groupthink has then allowed it to spread, like a virus, to tens of millions of the tertiary ‘educated’.
Thanks for saying so I didn’t have to.
”But is he right?”
I was going to stop reading there and give a little rant about how much I despise bad-faith actors and obnoxious people like Linsday who try to do the reverse psychology bit but who has no eartly idea what’s he’s talking about, lost as he in terminology and jargon and his own fraudulent bullshit. The article itself, though, exposes the complete weakness in his attempts to malign the Right and claim they are no different from the Left far better than I could.
Great article. Only issue I have is in believing woke is something mysterious or abstract and open to interpretation.
It’s just a word from AAV, or ebonics, to self-aggrandize themselves as being awake to their perceived oppression and victimhood. Like ”progressive”, it’s just self-description for an ideology and distinct way of thinking that is easy to trace back to source, but even most of its followers don’t know what it is, where it came from, or that they even have it. Tell them, and they’ll call you a far-right conspiracy theorist, as most have picked it up by osmosis, and lack of awareness of the 24/7 indoctrination they’ve been subjected to their whole life, and just think it’s the way things are. They’re often too innocent to recognize the devious, manipulative minds of psychopaths. Or too stupid and arrogant.
Woke, the New Left, progressives, democrats, none of that really matters. Most of them are have simply been coldly and calculatedly indentified and intellectually inpregnated by well known radical Marxists who knew the revolution they sought relied on doing just that and becoming host-parasites on society so they could ‘ politically educate’.people away from ”the media’s Western bias”. This quote right here is perhaps the greatest evidence that woke isn’t an accident and didn’t spring up from thin air, considering who it is talking about and the influence they went on to have (I’ve posted a link to the article below. ”In turn, the SDS positioned universities as bases of social protest, empowering the moral-political authority of young people who were not yet ideologically beholden to repressive bourgeois norms and values. It charged students and young workers with the task of political education toward the possibilities of social transformation.” That quote shows both the deliberate targeting of youth, the reason why they were seen as ripe for being targeted, and the imperative they were given once they were” Pure grooming of the young to carry out the directives you want. Anyone who’s watched a campus debate with right-winger involved, or Pro-Israel, knows how well that ploy worked. It’s the work of psychopaths in my view. The willful targeting and ‘educating’ of youth who aren’t yet indoctrinated in the Western way of thought.
Whatever the name, the underlying ideology is Marxism, just the intellectual evolution of it adapted for the modern world after expanding its remit from simply being concerned with proletariat V bourgeois to sex, race, and religion. And where all minority groups are roped into the revolution by convincing them they are an oppressed, subjugated victim class, and white male and white society that built up the West simply evil imperialists and colonialists out to hold them back.
It’s rebranded for the Western pallette, which wasn’t ready to start shooting political opposites in the temple and chucking their corpse in a pit, or carting them off to Siberia to be worked to death, or put in reeducation camps and drip fed psychological brainwashing techniques (they just call them ‘reeducation’ or ‘cultural sensitivity training. God these people are the grimest of the grim aren’t they?). They came up deplatforming, cancel culture, linguistic manipulation and perjorative weasal words like Islamophobe, and all the rest, but the murderous rage can be seen in any Leftists losing it video, post US election editions.
You can trace it from Das Kapital. The catechism style of the Communist Manifesto, which was a conscious – and highly successful- attempt at creating a cult along religious dogma lines for their ideology. To Gramsci and the Frankfurt School intellectuals expanding the bounds of oppressor and oppressed classes and the exile of its prominent professors to the US where they radicalized the New Left, particularly Marcuse in Repressive Tolerance, the first page written again, as a catechism imploring its readers to ‘no longer tolerate any voice from the Left’ in true, cold blooded, German totalitarian style. Then Rudi Dutschke, and the ‘long march through the institutions’, the deliberate strategy of gaining power in government and institutions and then indoctrinate from within. That’s basically it as for the most prominent intellectual progenitors of this awful anti-Western thought-virus. I’ve never given much sway to Jordan Peterson’s claim of the influence of ‘post-modernism’. The radical Marxists were totally ruthless and resemble complete psychopaths in their cold blooded, single minded, succeed at all the costs approach, and willingness to indoctrinate the young like the Nazis did. People like that don’t care for high mind concepts of the French intellectuals or debating whether morality is moral or absolute. They got a worldwide revolution to overthrow the Imperial Western powers to bring about. It’s mostly a German ideology. The same people that gave us Nazism, and the ideology that killed over 10 times more but somehow is seen as progressive and kind. Somehow Foucult doesn’t fit that mold for me. And the majority are just indoctrinated, herd following useful idiots or, in some cases well meaning but naive young people that truly believe if you’re not woke and don’t take a knew at BLM, or think the sun shines out immigrants arses, and open borders are a must, you’re a racist Nazi.
I wish everyone knew what woke really was and how it came about it. We can’t defeat woke until we properly understand what it is. Getting stuck on the definition of the world is missing the wood for the trees.
Here’s an article that shows the mindset of the architect of much of destruction that has brought the West to its knees and made it a shadow of its self. The guy behind the quotes above, and behind the ‘long march through the institutes. Which is near total in the West in most positions of government, media, and many organs of state. Even comedy.
It’s more than an ideology. It’s warped into a very dangerous and unhinged collective mental illness. And we need to be determined, and self-organized, and united to defeat them, just like they were, if we are to see the back of these nutters and create a same, mature society again.
https://jacobin.com/2024/02/rudi-dutschke-new-left-germany-internationalism-anti-imperialism
Your comment here is the most accurate and serious, all the others clearly underestimate the danger of this totalitarian movement, and you are absolutely right that it must be fought with absolute ruthlessness. I call it fascism for one reason – there is no difference between Nazism and Communism, they are just two incarnations of the same evil madness
How much of Lindsay’s stuff have you read or listened to? Your historicity is virtually identical so I’m not sure you should view James oppositionally.
You’re correct that Marxism is the strongest current in Wokeness. But Jordan Peterson has been largely correct about the alchemy of Postmodernism with Marxism. You could say Postmodernism is a variant of Marxism or even a form of Praxis. It claims to be Descriptive but in the West its been Prescriptive as in “Applied Postmodernism.”
The Marxists adopted Postmodernism as a technique to mystify people. Postmodernism as you note is just a form of Relativism that analyzes “Power Dynamics.” This allows Marxists to claim what they’re doing is just descriptive. They’re using it as a mechanism to launder Marxist concepts which are inherently about collective action not analysis.
Excellent post John (though it could do with an editorial clean-up). I’ve actually seen this process played out in Brazil, where what was effectively a crime lord and co-founder of the Foro de São Paulo (scheme to create a Latin American Soviet Union all the way to the US border) was released from prison and maneuvered into the presidency by a Supreme Court majority that is now running the country as a judicial dictatorship.
Yep
I find it ridiculous that we have not even purged ourselves from the woke yet and now there is already a criticism about the right gone woke?? I would say come back when all the Universities, the Institutions, the NGOs, the Media, the Arts, the Sciences and the Politics have been balanced out with conservative or right wing ideas, meaning in many years and then you can talk about wokeness on the right if it is applicable at all, but now this seems to me like a really fake argument and discussion that is just hiding the fact that we have a much bigger issue with the left than with the right, right now. Let me guess: The writer is on the left???
Anyone who talks about “the Woke Right” is draining the term of its semantic content. The term “woke” refers to a current Left movement. That some on the Right have shown certain similar moves or behaviors doesn’t make them “woke”, any more than a bear using its fangs makes it a lion.
Lindsay is lost, and shadow boxing him is wasted time.
Perhaps he knows what he is doing.
And more worrying perhaps Stock knows what she is doing as well. Confusing the issue to remove the possibility of even focusing on what Woke is.
A typical strategy of the Left.
And also of Unherd (stupid name) . Where are the contributors who identify and refute the dogmas of the Left? The truly Unheard.
The left for the last couple of years, at any rate since the notion of “woke” has been bent backwards on them and has come to be seen as a laibility, have been trying to claim that “woke” doesn’t really exist. They have been claiming that “woke” is simply an invention of right wingers.
This is just more of the same. The left has realized that the whole woke thing has been thoroughly rejected by the public at large and they are running from it. They will of course not run from the tactic, but they will as usual, stuff their same agenda into a new language bag. Manipulating the language is what they do.
Another thought provoking piece from one of the best modern thinkers of our time. An article I should probably read another couple of times before making any comment. However! It does strike me that any negative criticism of political thought or action can be accused of being “wokist ” cancelling or intersectional. What is maybe more important are the proposed prescriptions for the structure and operation of society. I confess I find those of the right very much more encouraging regarding the future for my grandchildren than those of the left.
To deal with wokism, one must understand wokism. Forget Left and Right. It is Globalists v Nationalists.
I would qualify that as ‘Cloud Cuckoo Globalists’ as there are strong arguments in favour of humanity’s eventual adoption of a “One-World” view. But apart from the corporations that are raking in fortunes by doing business in places with no Labour or Environmental regualtions and semi-slavery is the norm, the globalisation concept is completely impractical in a divided world with far too many diverse and often incompatible values and cultures. Maybe one day, but not for a very long time..
. . .funded by American billionaires.
Thanks to KS for taking on this thorny subject, which is basically political or cultural opponents accusing the opposition of adopting the very tactics (“go woke”) they’ve been guilty of.
The best outcome would, of course, for everyone to recognise this for what it is… and just stop.
I suspect the term “woke” will eventually fall out of fashion, but then be replaced by something else, since it seems to be inherent in human nature to adopt these strategies.
Earlier examples might include such terms as “cool” from the Sixties, or “U / non-U” from a decade or so later, but “woke” has typically become rocket-fueled with the internet; far more ubiquitous and invasive. In the end, it just all becomes deadly boring.
JL is a one trick pony. A key feature of left woke is that they own all the institutions. Find me a university, school, media organization, hospital ,….or even group of FB friends, clique running a small village in Canada….where a leftie get’s cancelled for being progressive; or a conservative for being not radically right enough on some cultural issue. It’s total bollox. Stop digging James and take. break…And KS stop talking about it. It;s not a thing. Deserves no oxygen or interest
As I have written here, Wokeism is a fully formed fascist at its core movement. They are not yet measuring skulls to determine the evil heterosexual men who should be removed from the gene pool, but they are moving in that direction with confidence. Anti-Semitism is just a seed crystal in a supersaturated solution. “The Right” is an audience shocked by the ferocity of the left.
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I like Eric Kaufmann’s definition of “woke”, understood as “the sacralisation of historically disadvantaged race, gender and sexual identity groups”.
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Write “Aryan race” or “Proletariat” here instead of the bold text and you will see something very familiar.
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PS. Eric forgot to mention “religion of peace admirers” 😉
Perhaps I am being pedantic here, but I have always associated fascism with an extreme right monopoly with a dictator at its head, while the more prevalent and deadly left wing equivalent is totalitarianism, which was very well explained by Orwell and describes most communist countries and those being transitioned in that direction, like poor old Brazil.
Democracy has saved Argentina, but let Venezuela down, as the defeated president simply refused to leave office and has begun hunting down the opposition leaders and their supporters. Hence the growing appeal of hard-line leaders who will protect their people against such abuses (at least until Lord Acton’s notion comes to fruition).
I believe that those distinctions aren’t accurate. I think you are conflating economic systems with governmental systems. Totalitarianism is where the country is run entirely by edict of the government.
Fascism is not necessarily a Totalitarian regime like the Nazis.Fascism is a system where the Commercial entities, Banks, Corporations, Industrialists, etc. are working as a part of the government to benefit both.
Much of the muddle in politics (or the economy or philosophy) is generated by the rhetoric used in arguments. Rhetoric being the skill of using language effectively to please or persuade – but not necessarily accuracy or proportionality.
It would be an interesting experiment (for language nerds) for a set of politicians (or economists, or philosophers) to have a debate where definitions of key words were agreed in advance and not allowed to be redefined in debate. Good luck with that. Grifters got to grift.
Unfortunately, having lived through the Engineering Age and the Accounting Age I find myself in the Marketing Age, where truth doesn’t really matter and it’s all about the way you spin it. So while your ambition is laudable ACH, you are trying to tie them down by eliminating their very freedom to spin – good luck in that endeavour! ;o)
Who really cares about finding a universally correct definition? Pointless intellectual masturbation really. A t**d by any other name would smell just as foul, I think Shakespeare said. Something like that.
Woke, in the actual real world that matters and actually has consequence, is the primary reason we now have hundreds of thousands of hairy cavemen primitive apes in this country running our streets involved in Jihad murdering people for ‘blasphemy’, or butchering/blowing up kids and yet you get called Far-right and attacked as Islamophobic for even pointing out the reality of a barbaric, disgusting ‘religion’ in the wake of those events. Woke has led to the ghettos they’ve created where they’ve taken areas over and driven everyone else out and managed to vote in ‘their own’ to start lobbying our parliament to change our way of life to suit them, pushing to criminalize us for insulting their peadophile madman cult leader. Or trying to overturn a proposed ban on cousin marriage, because they’re proud of it and their culture views it positively. Woke has led to all the tragic victims allowed to be gang raped and abused for decades with no help from the cowardly police, who didn’t want to be called Islamophobes.
Woke has led a whole political arm, and virtually our whole establishment, to instantly believe any criticism of Islam is Islamophobic, a crime, and they swarm, attack, reprimand, and/or launch propaganda campaigns created by the teams at the home office that already have canned PR responses in the cannon. Primed and ready for fire off to the media to control the reporting and narrative that gets drummed into the public at the next barbaric slaughter of our children and innocent civilians by some freak religion of peace follower thinking he’s winning favour with an imaginary, fictitious entity for doing so. All so that they’re corral our thought processed towards seeing their pet group in a favourable light not a negative one (imagine the depravity of these twisted, sick motherfuckers that while first responders are gathering the limbs and body parts of beautiful little angels they’re furiously gearing into action faster than emergency crews so that not one right-winger gets the chance to think in anything but glowing terms about the grave betrayal of the Islamification large swathes of our country, like my lovely little town, Luton). Another grotesque murder or atrocity will happen any time again soon, I give it two months, as it’s long overdue, all that ritual carnage and slaughter, and the wokes insane responses to it.
Even before I became a Copywriter and learned the first lesson of getting out of my own head, and firmly into the head of the person I’m trying to write to until I know them, their fears, beliefs, desires, heroes, villains, ambitions better than they know themselves in order to build a psychographic profile, I already knew to do that and to properly understand how and why people think like they do. I’ve been doing it for years with the Left and Islam. You can’t just guess, which is what many people here are trying to do. And you don’t have to.
Woke is not some trivial Gen Z lingo like ‘awks’ or ‘snowflake’. Call it semi-consciousness, or comatose if you want, it doesn’t matter any more than trying to figure out what David or Veronica means. It’s simply a label for a very real, very harmful, very destructive worldview that views the world in simple, easy to understand terms following a certain heirarchy. But far more instructive to watch their actions and the constant insanity and destruction they cause 24/7 due to being on so many positions of power.
Someone is always either an oppressor or victim, and then if a Wokey is not a victim, they become the savior for the ‘victim’. .
It’s deeply troubling to see how blase people are about an virulent, poisoned ideology that quite literally renders people mental ill, emotionally unstable, coaches them to feel weak/offended/victimized, either paralyzes the police/politicians from doing their job through fear, or mobilizing them with fanatical zeal into going way overboard solely based on whether they’re dealing with the victim group or the oppressor group.
Some black person in America started using ‘woke’ regarding their percieved systematic oppression and victimhood at the hands of the evil white oppressor group, and they started calling themselves that to signify they were awake to that social injustice. And then Marxists and white saviors moved in and enveloped them into the wider Leftist fold and adopted that word for themselves as they thought it had less baggage than Marxist/Communist and was cooler the more vanilla ‘Left-Wing’ or democrat, no doubt. Then sane people started referring dispragingly to them and using it as perjorative for the loony Left. That’s about it as far as the name goes.
“If you want to defeat your enemy sing his song.”
An album title by 1980s Scouse post-punkers The Icicle Works which I often think of when observing social and political conflicts in the social media era.
It’s like a rapid-fire dialectic with each side constantly trying to undermine, co-opt and turn the others own tactics against them.
The effect of woke, it’s essence and psychological patterns can easily be seen at any second turning on a MSM news show and watching the propaganda or hearing about another instant that is an affront to every part of your inherent decency and humanity, and makes you think the people making that decision have to be crazy.
20 years ago, when I first came across the modern Marxist Left, Cultural Marxists, Neo-Marxists, Woke Ideologues, just Woke if you like, whatever, it’s all the one, I immediate knew I had to find out who they are and what they think, and have spent decades studying and observing them in real time. I’m starting to feel like a bit of weirdo, as I thought that was normal thing to do. To self-educate and study things that are important or make you curious. I knew it was a thought-virus ripping through the Western world and changing society for the worse at a rapid rate, and that it had to be understood to have any chance of being thwarted and prevented from continually bedding in further. I knew how vice-like their grip on young minds was as all the schools/unis were woke even then, and the new generations would be lost and think it normal, like free and open debate, good arguments, logic, rationality, evidence, all never existed. And that they’d get worse and worse. I had, and still have, an emergency mindset around this as it’s a grave issue that needs to be opposed. I thought everyone did any the feeling it’s not right, we are being fucked by this people and their demented views, and the way they’ve become the dominant entity in the West.
And yet most people here have no idea what it is. Clearly. I’ve just read it’s globalism v nationalists. Or that’s it’s just a term the youngsters use on social media. Others are baffled. A lot have no clue.
We are talking about 99% of the Left-Wing turning into zombies and unthinking, braindead nutjobs operantly conditioned to respond to certain things in very predictable ways you know ahead of time every time, propagating a very fanatical anti-Western, Anti-British, divisive form of Marxism directly from famous Marxist radicals who never hid their agenda. It’s out there in the open for anyone who will look.. The evolution of the Left from the days when they had real injustice like the treatment of gays, black people, women, to where the battles have been won and now they simply create ‘micro-aggressions’ like a white person having dreadlocks or being complimented on their hair by a white person, or not liking what someone said even though completely innocent, or touching their braids in friendly way like they would with their girlfriends. Just pure hatred and racism of whites, and resentment.
OMG. I cannot fathom the complete ignorance people have about woke, a.k.a, cultural Marxism, Marxism, Leftism, Communism, or the lack of research or study they’ve done.
Are people not horrified on a daily basis of what society has become and how it changed, and not figured it has most been caused by the ideology most people now called ‘woke’, but it has many names for the same ideology and secular religion that it is. Women getting braindamage fighting trans gender born-male MMA fighters or boxers. The thousands of kids simply falling prey to a collective hysteria and being butchered for life at ages below ten. Perverts allowed to put on make up and go and flash in women’s changing rooms and claim they’re women by self-indentification only. Politicians telling us men can have a cervix and give birth. or Prime ministers who can’t define a woman less than offend a minority group by speaking facts. A whole media and half the country ho don’t care about terrorist atrocities or the threat of an religion more dangerous than Nazism, and only policing the thoughts of ‘right-wingers’ in their aftermath less they think badly of Islam. I could go on all day.
Just what is you people think is going on? Mindblowing. Are you even seeing all this stuff, alot of you?
It’s just rendering me speechless. It like watching a game of pin the tail on the donkey with a load of paraletic drunks, blindly trying to find a target, in this case, what woke is, and keep missing, with the target being a great f**k off 50m x 50m wall right infront of their nose, to my mind.
The impression I’ve had is that it’s basically the left attacking the right (often slyly accusing them of doing what they are actually doing), while the right is mainly defending itself from those accusations.
What is slowly but surely destroying that is basic common sense – which may seem wokishly feely and emotional but is actually the strict application of rational principles and critical thinking.
Appropriating the language is an old trick of the Left. Stalin knew what he was doing when he labelled fellow communist Trotsky “right wing” as an insult before he had him murdered.
So it is today. The BBC. and others reach for the tag ” far right” whenever they need to describe someone or something of which they disapprove or which they do not understand.
When woke becomes a sufficiently toxic word it will be used in the same manner. In this and other ways, the Left never sleeps. It just waits for it’s opportunity to burrow deeper into society, always, always to society’s detriment .
I read about halfway through the article, before concluding that KS perhaps needs to define who, and ostensibly what, is the “Right” these days. As it seems the Right has only recently become synonymous with absolutely anything that gives even a wiff of not agreeing with the Left.
Arguments from the Right are not represented in Unherd (stupid name)
I would suggest, Katherine, that “rationality and debate” can indeed determine ‘woke’s’ real nature, by its very absence.
Honest people in all political spheres are open to discussion about issues, but when people come along proposing feelings based on emotion and with nothing rational and practical to back it up, and then try to shut down any criticism, they are very clearly what is meant by ‘woke’.
If you are confused about what woke is then read or listen to Jordan Peterson.
If you are happy with woolly thinking regarding ‘Left Woke’ and ‘Right Woke’, which of course only benefits the Left who love to hide their Ideologies in plain sight, then read articles like this one.
It is extraordinary how Unherd just follows the Left-consensus!
Almost as if they were a magazine of the unthinking herd!
Does anyone get the feeling Unherd is a con? It is full of articles conforming to the current Left-consensus.
This article is a good example. Waffle, all within that consensus.
It is not Unherd at all. Just herd-thinking of the Left.
Seems like a project to “re-educate” the Conservatives to me. They little by little introduce these sly little ideas from the left, and we, left free to debate them provide a running data log of how well the technique is working. We are likely stress testing tomorrow’s Progressive talking points.
There is nothing like
cage fightingnit-picking between academics to make the crowd rise to its feet with pulses quickened.My comment on this thread saying if you want to understand Woke, unlike the author of this article who just muddies the water, then listen to Jordan Peterson has been removed. What a bizarre website this is.
Peterson is, whether you like him or not, a very independent thinker. But not suitable for Unherd apparently.
Seems like a personality motivated hit piece, however well-written and maybe well-intended.
The right aren’t turning woke. It’s pretty clear to me they’ve just picked up the tools from the battlefield which were thrown at them and have thrown them back.
One fun example was the meme designed to look like a leaflet “Don’t let Trump cheat, demand voter id and paper ballots”
The Left Woke movement (i.e. the ‘progressive’, Left politics that have sought to undermine our western culture, identity and sense of self-worth) is rooted in pernicious political philosophies – particularly post-modernism and critical theory (which has evolved from its academic origins in 1930s universities in Europe into the evil Critical Race Theory and related prism politics that refract and distort the illuminating rays of our Enlightenment history today). The so-called ‘Woke right’ is not anchored in any such political theory; nor is it nurtured and spread through young receptive minds via the vast channels and networks of education from kindergarten to post-graduate university programmes, as captured by the ‘long march through the institutions’.
How to fight the insidious nature of the Left Woke agenda is a conundrum. It is a sad reality that you can only fight fire with fire – or nuclear threat with nuclear threat. This dynamic forces the Right into using weapons like censorship, cancelling, etc. as no other strategies or tactics will have any significant impact. It is a ‘Catch 22’ situation.
I can see no answers to it all. What a ghastly world we inhabit!
This a problem forever. The most despicable thing about evil people are that they force the good people into using the same means to stop them. For example we had to go to war and kill thousands to stop Hitler from killing.
Where does wokeness come from? Marx? Kant? France? All of the above. Wokeness comes from human nature, so one might say it came from East Africa 3 million years ago. Yes, The Right — whoever they are — can go woke just like any and all people can go woke. Still there is a useful generalization that might be made — a generalization as broad as saying that California has a nice climate — it is in the nature of conservative people to find identity politics distasteful because conservatives tend to consider the fundamental unit of any society to be the individual person, not the Identity.
No. “Woke” is the state of being that is not sleeping. The left appropriated the word, as they do with words, and declared that it then meant “one who is aware of injustices perpetrated by a white, racist, and male system.” Then they went about defining anyone who was NOT “woke” as racist, misogynistic, white supremacist and Nazi.
Now, that the public has made a mockery of them, BLM has imploded into graft and greed, and the progressive “wokes” are taking a beating, they are desperately trying to spread the term out. Now, they are trying to say that those who they designated as “not woke” racists and evil Nazis are, as it turns out “woke” too. In fact, they say, we are ALL woke, it’s a human nature thing.
It’s idiotic and it’s pathetic. Don’t play into it. Woke isn’t some academic term passed down through the centuries. It is not a standing philosophical principle that applies to us all. Convincing us that it is, is the Leftist agenda. Woke means not asleep….PERIOD. It is the left that tried to make it mean something else…not Kant.
This way madness lies
Woke Left. Woke Right. Why not Woke Center?
My own definition of “woke” is “the authoritarian pseudo-progressive usurpation of liberalism”, its primary manifestations being:-
Anti-White racismAntisemitismEncouragement of the male transvestite infiltration of female spacesAdvocacy of the sexualisation, drugging and mutilation of children.
This is not to say that other definitions of “woke” don’t serve the purpose equally well. Right-Wing Hippie’s offering is pretty good in this regard.
“When I use a word,’ Humpty Dumpty said in rather a scornful tone, ‘it means just what I choose it to mean — neither more nor less.’’The question is,’ said Alice, ‘whether you can make words mean so many different things.’’The question is,’ said Humpty Dumpty, ‘which is to be master — that’s all.”― Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking Glass
Who is Woke? Why, everybody and anybody of course, if you don’t like ’em.
Perfect
You can’t be overly hopeful that more than a tiny subset of readers is going to be able to follow these scrupulous distinctions, Kathleen. Keep in mind that wherever you are on the political spectrum, you’ll find yourself embedded in a group that stretches across too broad an I.Q. range to speak in a single narrative voice. So of course any quest for logical consistency is just as likely to end up linking ideas and people from different parts of the spectrum, at some appropriate evidence-gathering level, as it is to discover links between different levels within the (supposedly) same political identity. Isn’t this the real reason why Lindsay finds it so easy to identify the ‘symmetries’ that permit inferences arbitrary enough to permit “neat,” albeit superficial comparisons?
Classical liberalism has always acknowledged that the criteria for distinguishing truth from falsehood are contestable; and the fundamental problem of epistemology has always been how to get supposedly ‘objective’ truth into the craniums of individual knowers without relativizing it in some fatal way. True liberals also recognize that the antidote to propaganda isn’t counter-propaganda but anti-propaganda, a claim that’s surely defensible in spite of the fact that some people who call themselves liberals engage in what are undeniably propaganda wars.
In connection with understanding ‘woke’ as “the sacralisation of historically disadvantaged race, gender and sexual identity groups,” don’t you think the strikingly medieval character of identity politics is also worth noting? Any thirteenth-century Thomist accustomed to placing gods and angels on top and demons and Satan on the bottom would find the woke’s hierarchies of virtue and victimhood instantly recognizable. For the woke it’s as if the Enlightenment never happened: all that matters is where one is situated in the hierarchy, which is exactly the kind of thinking liberals (at least the smart subset of them who actually understand what they’re doing) have historically tried to put behind them. Surely the real problem with the racism the woke insist is everywhere is that it’s a subset of prejudice; and the ethical problem with prejudice is that it doesn’t allow individuals to speak for themselves. Since identity politics erases individuals in just this way, the true grievance liberals and conservatives alike have with wokeism is its total incoherence.
While it doesn’t take much investigation to find at least some incoherence at every point on the political spectrum, it doesn’t follow that the environments in which incoherence is detected resemble each other in other respects, never mind that they’re all the same. This is the grievance we have with Lindsay and his (suspiciously convenient) scattershot approach to inference. ‘Facts’ can be enrolled in incompatible narratives–both creationists and evolutionists acknowledge the reality of species diversity, for example, but explain it in different ways; and while I’m sure Lindsay would claim a respect for facts and evidence, the real issue with him is what his facts are evidence of.
Why do my comments get posted and there is no option to reply to them?
Too unherd for Unherd (ridiculous name)?
Clarity in writing would improve your message, if there is one.
In interviews with Lindsay I have seen he seems to want to make the distinction between those who play the identity game and those (like him and people he advocates for) who want to play the reason, argument and data game. In doing so he seems to made a false similarity between the left and right by describing them both as woke in this attempt to introduce new rules into this academic engagement.
He’s a secular left-liberal, forced into an alliance with the Right over wokeness, suddenly realising that his erstwhile allies don’t care for his leftism, secularism, or – worst of all – his liberalism, which they are beginning to intuit (correctly in my opinion) is what got us here in the first place.
“chiselled jaws and flinty conservative opinions”
That’s pretty good writing. Well done!
If the definition of ‘woke’ keeps shifting, the word eventually becomes meaningless. If this is the goal, I support it.
It is the goal, only because it has come to be seen as a negative shadow over the left. So they now wish it would just go away, and the way to accomplish that is to spread it out so thin….”We are ALL woke…” that the negativity is diluted and the word dissapears in this definition.
Don’t embrace this. It is not a victory, it is the enemy slipping away in the dark leaving us to wonder what words will they appropriate next?
Always enjoy Kathleen’s version of things. This is no rxception.
I’m not sure the intellectual definitions of ‘woke’ are relevant to most people, interesting though they may be. The idea of ‘sacralisation’ of various causes may have more in common with that word’s other meaning: a fault of the vertebrae that causes lower back pain. ‘Woke’ to many people has come to mean irritation brought on by things such as political correctness, feminism, genderism, transgenderism, the pursuit of different sexual orientations, et cetera. Being anti-woke is to be seeking relief from all this ‘lower posterior’ pain and all that is associated with it. ‘Woke’ as a good idea is dead in the water.
The “Woke Right” might have an identitarianistic component, too, but at least it takes it’s own side in the argument…
This article is a sobering reminder that both ends are prone to this sort of thing: just because the social justice warriors are very, very wrong, that does not mean all those who oppose them are right. Critical race theory is a mad conspiracy theory, but conspiracy theories are popular across all spectra of opinion: they save having to think. They are almost always wrong.
https://www.thomashobbes.co.uk/2019/06/28/the-long-march-conspiracy-or-accident/
‘Woke’ is a very particular belief system, opposing crudely defined identity groups, along with self-satisfied ideas that the old hierarchies of oppression these groups comprise are being overturned via rhetoric and gestures alone – some would say neo-racist neo-sexist rhetoric and gestures.
Blank statism is the essential belief at the bottom of most of it.
The features Lindsay observes are just features of political tribalism/ aspects of human nature as the article says.
I think that it’s a very poor idea to reuse an existing word that has definite and fixed connotations if effect at this moment, and attempt to use it to describe its ideological opponent.
There are better term carrying less baggage that will work. Ideological revanchism is actually much closer to what motivates the US right, whereas woke advocates were all about forging out in completely new directions identified by those who claimed the moral high ground by virtue of their supposed victimhood.
James Lindsay is tapped in the head.
My take on this is that said self-contradictory slur has arisen because the likes of C Kistin and Niall Ferguson are unrepentant neocons who may also back the current regime of mass immigration (certainly Prof Ferguson does there).
Either way, they thoroughly back the NATO axis where T Carlson and allies are critical to the point of rejecting kneejerk American interventionism. Beyond the east of Europe, the same goes for unquestioning US military support for Israel.
Those are the geopolitical stakes and I think there, J Lindsay should pin his own colours to the mast as the Trump administration comes in. At present, it’s really tedious hearing about 90s classical liberalism and how this is somehow a more nuanced ‘anti-woke position’ then simply saying ‘no enemies to the right’.
Everything is more nuanced than an idiot slogan like “no enemies to the right”—or left. Down with ALL bigotry and extremism.
This isn’t unique to left-right politics. It is a feature of revolutionary movements that they remove, or “cancel”, symbols or ideals of the structural forces they rebelled against. It’s not as if the right is suddenly adopting “woke”, they are simply inheriting the tradition of a counter-culture movement that is now an overwhelming majority in the government.
Looking at the original Communist Manifesto and Lindsay’s “edits,” I think I could similarly edit “Macbeth” and make it a farce, even a comedy. What he did as a far cry from substituting into Mein Kampf a word here and a short phrase there, and thus “owning” the opposition.
Why do my comments go into some sort of Unherd limbo? There is no option of reply. Does this happen to anyone else here?
Obviously you can’t reply to my comment directly. So reply above if anyone wants to.
I personally like feedback.
The debate is stupid. Lindsey has degenerated into standard academic practice of parsing abstruse terms to the point of nonsense. Woke-right is as meaningful as ‘conservative tankie’. It just adds nothing except misleading free associations.
Please, would someone with a kind spirit decrypt Kathleen Stock’s article for me (a simple soul)?
I have just been cancelled by you. Brilliant! A very “wokie” reaction from you.
“Though there are applications of a concept like “____” which are obviously wrong and do not hit the target, equally, there is no single objectively “right” definition. Rather…. “____” is permanently open to the possibility of new interpretations, partly in light of speakers’ background value commitments and the uses to which the concept is being put.
This statement can be made about any word in the dictionary. And yet, dictionaries exist, and for a good reason. Any word must be definable to be usable, even tho there can be misuses and evolutions of it.
In the case of “woke”, we all know what it has meant, but now that the silliness of its premises are becoming acknowledged, its supporters are trying to spread around responsibility for its reign of terror. “In a sense, aren’t we ALL woke?” No. No, it’s just you.
Whatever good intentions came with woke have long since dissipated. It’s unfortunate.
Also, Kathleen Stock alone is worth the cost to subscribe. Always a great read. Thank you Dr. Stock.
Both progressive leftism and the dissident right ultimately emerged from the disgust and hatred that our contemporary culture and society inspires, so it’s natural that they would share a lot in common.
Surely hatred and cancel culture are manifestations of the political extremes, not the vast majority in the middle ground?
All good Kathleen. Thank you. Basically lotsa nutters out there on left and right and poor me in the centre has no voice except to reply on Unherd. More than most of the world, when I think about it.
Gentlemen, why are you so frightened by my comments?
I wrote this not for readers, but for moderators, they hid my comments here twice
If we refuse to join the Uro it doesn’t mean we are afraid. Just think differently, that’s all. :o)
Woke is a term of derision employed originally by the right to refer to holders of ideas, such as people should not be killed just because their skin tone deviates from the standard somewhat, or that women should be treated with the same respect as men, that ran counter to their prejudices. It is a word, like n****r or yid or dago or paki, which by itself does not mean anything but is intended as a packaging for a venom that the speaker invests it with.
It was their word first. We have receipts.
Author indicates her preferred definition in penultimate para and that seems reasonable. What she correctly illuminates is elements of the Right display exactly the same psychological weaknesses as the Left-woke-ists. The same fixation on identity politics and cancelling opponents. The same infantile conspiratorial explanations. And very obvious snowflake tendencies too when challenged. But is this such a surprise – it’s the same narcissism ‘my truth’ B/S just from a different end of the spectrum.
It’s quite clear what ‘woke’ is: a device employed by the suburban graduate governing class to divide the blue collar classes along lines of race, gender and sexuality and thereby eliminate opposition to their plunder of the state. It’s nothing new, just Fabianism for the twenty first century. The ‘left’ Vs ‘right’ narrative is just as meaningless in this context as in every other.
Politics is always about class. It’s simply that your conception of the class system is a hundred years out of date.
In amongst the confusion your tendency to be quite supportive of a Marxist reading of political economy I find quite attractive. I’m just not sure you grasp that’s where you are sometimes.
Now for a chap who benefitted from an elite US undergrad education (as you have previously declared), you were clearly advantaged from a young age. Thus your flagellation of a suburban governing class seems to indicate some guilt at play.
There is no confusion in my outlook at all – although I can understand why it might seem that way to a silo thinker.
And it has nothing to do with Marxism. The idea that the value of an artefact is equivalent to the aggregate of its inputs is not ‘political economy’. It’s pure idiocy. It’s the greatest tragedy in history that so many people have died in the name of a notion that, had Marx ever gone shopping instead of leaving it all to Connie, even he would never have committed to the page. You mustn’t assume that, just because Kapital is a very long book, it contains any sense. It doesn’t. I know, I’ve read it so you don’t have to.
You will gain a much better understanding of the world by looking in the mirror than you will by reading the work of a man who so confused verbosity with insight.
You’re in your own world. Not with it at all.