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Woke Is Just Another Word for Liberal

  
Via:  John Russell  •  last year  •  64 comments


Woke Is Just Another Word for Liberal
The “radical redefinition of society” that many of the so-called woke seek is simply that it lives up to its stated commitments. And one really could, I suppose, describe that as radical—the abolition of slavery, the ratification of women’s suffrage, and the end of Jim Crow were all once genuinely radical positions whose adoption redefined American society.

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T he conservative writer Bethany Mandel, a co-author of a new book attacking “wokeness” as “a new version of leftism that is aimed at your child,” recently   froze up   on a cable news program when asked by an interviewer how she defines   woke , the term her book is about.

On the one hand, any of us with a public-facing job could have a similar moment of disassociation on live television. On the other hand, the moment and the debate it sparked revealed something important. Much of the utility of   woke   as a political epithet is tied to its ambiguity; it often allows its users to condemn something without making the grounds of their objection uncomfortably explicit.....

....Mandel herself later offered this definition of   woke   on Twitter: “A radical belief system suggesting that our institutions are built around discrimination, and claiming that all disparity is a result of that discrimination. It seeks a radical redefinition of society in which equality of group result is the endpoint, enforced by an angry mob.” The right-wing pundit Ben Shapiro offered a   similar description .

I like Mandel’s definition because it makes the concept seem so reasonable that it requires a few modifiers and a straw man about mob enforcement to evoke the proper amount of dread in the reader. If you describe the   ethnic cleansing of Muslims in Eastern Europe   in the 1990s, you don’t need to add that it was “radical” to get most people to understand that it was bad. But

the claim that “American institutions are built around discrimination” is just a straightforward account of history. And if few of the people who are caricatured as  woke  would argue that all disparities result from discrimination, most of them would agree that many key disparities along the axes of class, race, and gender do. But either the history, policy, and structure of the American economy matter or they don’t.

To claim the reverse, that people who are rich or white or male are just better than everyone else—to object to “equality of group result” as a goal, as if it’s absurd to believe that people from across the boundaries of the  biological fiction of race  could be equal—reveals a prejudice so overt that it practically affirms the “woke  side of the argument.

The “radical redefinition of society” that many of the so-called woke seek is simply that it lives up to its stated commitments. And one really could, I suppose, describe that as radical—the abolition of slavery, the ratification of women’s suffrage, and the end of Jim Crow were all once genuinely radical positions whose adoption redefined American society.

Those transitions were only possible because, as Mandel’s definition inadvertently concedes, the ideology she opposes is grounded in fact. The United States could not have been created without displacing the   people who were already living here . Its Constitution   preserved slavery , which remained an engine of the national economy well into the 19th century. Among the first pieces of federal legislation was a   bill limiting naturalization to free white people . Yet not even all white men could vote at the nation’s founding—property requirements shut out many until around 1840—and universal white male suffrage (sometimes   including noncitizens !) was paired with the explicit disenfranchisement of Black men, even in some northern states. The nation was nearly rent in two because the slave economy and the social hierarchy it created were   precious enough, even to men who did not own slaves , that they took up arms to defend the institution of human bondage with their life. After the Civil War, the former Confederates reimposed white supremacy and subjected the   emancipated to an apartheid regime   in which they had few real rights, a regime my mother was born into and my grandparents fled. For most of the history of the United States, Black people could not vote and women could not vote; American immigration policy in the early 20th century was   based on eugenics and an explicit desire   to keep out those   deemed nonwhite ; the mid-century American prosperity unleashed by the New Deal that conservatives recall with such nostalgia was   stratified by race .

I could go on, but I think you get the point. These things are real; they happened.

To believe that the disadvantages of race, class, and gender imposed lawfully over centuries never occurred or entirely disappeared in just a few decades is genuinely “radical” in a negative way; to believe that creating those disadvantages was wrong and that they should be rectified is not. The idea that no one ever succeeds based on advantages unrelated to their personal abilities is likewise radical, and also ludicrous.

But you can, perhaps, understand why one of the richest men in the world   would consider   the opposing idea—that where many people end up in life is the result of unearned advantages—to be a “woke mind virus” that should be eradicated. That kind of thinking leads to higher marginal tax rates for people with private planes.

Some people so deeply resent the implication that they possess any unearned advantage that, in Republican-run states all over the country, the same folks who were recently shrieking about   free speech and oversensitive snowflakes   are busy using the power of the state to ban discussions about factual matters that might hurt their feelings, such as   descriptions of racial segregation   in the story of Rosa Parks. The irony here is that by framing everything they don’t like as a symptom of pervasive oppression against white people or Christians that must be rectified by the state, they have themselves adopted the inverse of the logic they decry as “wokeness.” They believe that America’s demographic majorities are the   targets of broad institutional discrimination , which is unjust not because such discrimination is morally abhorrent but because it is targeted at the wrong people.  

Then there is the irony that the most zealous among the so-called woke and anti-woke form different denominations of the same religion, following high priests of racial salvation preaching parallel dogmas, one of which says that you need only read certain books or say certain words to attain salvation, and the other of which grants absolution to parishioners for their reflexive contempt for those they despise. Only one of them, however, has become the established church in certain states, deploying   the power of the state to enforce its dogma .

You need not adopt either faith. Accepting the reality of American history and the persistence of discrimination does not mean that every egalitarian proposal is correct, nor that every egalitarian argument should be heeded. It does not necessarily mean that we should ban the SAT in college admissions or never refer to “women” when discussing abortion rights. Calling something racist or sexist doesn’t mean that what you are describing is racist or sexist. Conversely, something that appears to be race-neutral can be implemented in a discriminatory fashion, or even adopted with that intention. But if you do accept the reality of our past, then you probably think we should try to level the playing field in some way. The merits of specific arguments or proposals are separate from that underlying principle. Whatever   woke   might mean, however, it is clear that the objections of the militantly “anti-woke” find the egalitarian idea itself to be worthy of contempt.

To say that traditional hierarchies are just and good, well, that’s simply conservatism. It has been since the 18th century. And to say that those hierarchies do not reflect justice and that people should be equal under the law—all the people, not only   propertied white men —well, that’s more or less just liberalism. But if you don’t like it, you’d probably call it woke.


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JohnRussell
Professor Principal
1  seeder  JohnRussell    last year

Great article.

BTW, the article image is probably too small for people to read. It is an image of the Supreme Court decision on Dred Scott stamped on its cover sheet with the word "WOKE".

 
 
 
JohnRussell
Professor Principal
2  seeder  JohnRussell    last year

The writer was very good at describing why liberals should not run from the "woke" description, but rather explain why woke is a good and logical thing. 

 
 
 
Tessylo
Professor Principal
2.1  Tessylo  replied to  JohnRussell @2    last year

I know anyone who criticizes wokeness and claims it's a bad thing is a moron and doesn't have a clue what they're talking about.

 
 
 
JBB
Professor Principal
3  JBB    last year

Yes, exactly! And like, "Liberal", is used as a slur by MAGA goppers...

 
 
 
JohnRussell
Professor Principal
4  seeder  JohnRussell    last year

Wokeness Has Replaced Socialism as the Great Conservative Bogeyman

...Seen from today, that moment looks less like a quirky cyclical trend and more like the passing of an era. “Wokeness” has supplanted socialism as the primary bogeyman among conservative politicians and pundits. The eclipse is   evident in Google search trends   and   Fox News time allocation , and it has also been on vivid display over the past week, as leading figures in the Republican Party and right-wing media have portrayed the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank as   a case of woke values undermining sound business practices   and diversity, equity, and inclusion supplanting the profit motive. Complaints about bailouts have been mostly the province of the left—which objects not to government spending but to helping the wealthy.

Part of this is because capitalism has won—or rather, it continues to win. Insofar as any real question exists about the merits of socialism versus capitalism,   the population has long since reached stasis on it . Though self-described democratic socialists such as Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez are still prominent in the Democratic Party, Joe Biden’s more moderate approach is what dominates the party now.

Two other changes have also pushed the socialism charge to the side, at least for the moment. First, after the initial pink scare of the early Obama years, both parties shifted their focus more toward racial politics, a dynamic that continues today. Second, the dominant faction in the Republican Party, embodied by Donald Trump and now Ron DeSantis, has abandoned its commitment to limited government, instead embracing a muscular role for the state—especially in   enforcing conservative cultural values   against the progressive ones labeled as “woke.”

Defining what conservatives mean by   wokeness   is, as the writer Bethany Mandel   learned the hard way this week , not easily done. For the purposes of discussion here, it also isn’t necessary. Many people use the term in different ways, to describe a general constellation of progressive ideas on race, gender, and sexuality, but what matters is the fact that they are using it, and using it somewhat indiscriminately. After all, most of what an earlier generation of conservatives called “socialism” wasn’t really socialist, either.

The term   woke   originates in Black slang and is popular in youth culture, both of which are helpful for understanding their interpretation on the right. The election of Obama, the nation’s first Black president, was briefly hailed as evidence that the United States had transcended race, a moment that was followed immediately by race reasserting its central role in American politics. The reaction to Obama included a huge spike in   white identity politics   (driven in part by rising immigration), openly racist rhetoric, and debates over police killings of people of color. Trump exploited this opportunity, making appeals to racial resentment one of the foremost elements of his campaign and presidency.

Although some characteristics of the wokeness discourse (including critiques of free speech, a focus on equitable outcomes, and critical race theory, the actual academic movement) are somewhat novel, much of the backlash to wokeness is just repackaged versions of old racial backlash (most notably the frequent use of   critical race theory   to mean practically any discussion of racism) or critiques of political correctness. Because woke vernacular, like support for progressive causes, is especially popular among younger people, wokeness has also become a battlefield for fighting old generational conflicts between the more liberal young and more conservative older generations.

In perhaps a more subtle shift, right-wing figures may be less inclined to complain about overweening state power because some conservatives have now embraced the possibilities of big government. One form this takes is support for entitlements. Paul Ryan, a dominant intellectual figure in the Obama-era GOP and a man who had   dreamed of capping Medicaid since his keg-drinking days , is now a lone voice in the wilderness. Donald Trump beat the GOP presidential field in 2016 in part by promising not to cut Social Security or Medicare, and that view has become mainstream. This year, leading Republican figures in Congress vowed not to cut them, either, which is probably good politics though it renders their budget-slashing aims basically impossible. Fiscal conservatives find themselves marginalized in the party.

But some conservative politicians and pundits have also warmed to the idea of using the state to punish their ideological opponents—just the sort of behavior they warned about under totalitarian communist regimes. Tucker Carlson, the right’s leading media figure,   endorses the use of the state   to harass the COVID-cautious. DeSantis, a former Tea Party stalwart, has reinvented himself as a lite authoritarian, eager to wield government power to tell private companies how to conduct their business. He’s not alone. Republicans across the country are seeking ways to bully companies out of environmental, social, and governance approaches, deriding them as woke. The irony is that in many cases these companies are adopting the trappings of progressivism not out of any deep ideological commitment but instead   because they see it as a business advantage .

Meanwhile, conservatives warning about censorship of conservative views have turned to   speech codes   and trying to force tech companies to host certain viewpoints at the insistence of the government—oxymoronically pursuing censorship in order to save free speech from wokeness.

“Socialism” has faded as a rallying cry because this conservative movement can hardly pretend to be horrified by big government, and it has learned that its voters aren’t especially interested in cutting spending programs, either, at least the ones that benefit them. Attacking wokeness fills that void—we might even cheekily call this the GOP’s   successor ideology —with an alternative that is malleable enough to apply to nearly any situation. But as the SVB story demonstrates, the malleability is also a weakness. If wokeness is an explanation for everything, it is also an explanation for nothing. Although it’s a good way to gather a range of cultural resentments, it offers little in the way of policy ideas to improve lives, even in contrast to vague promises such as trickle-down economics. No one has yet provided any explanation of what an anti-woke bank-regulation regime might look like—and no one will. This is an attack suited to a party that exists only to campaign, with no interest in actually governing.

 
 
 
Vic Eldred
Professor Principal
4.1  Vic Eldred  replied to  JohnRussell @4    last year

The other side does get to have a word once in a while, right John?

After all you have the pronouns, the non-binary BS, the Conspiracy theorists and the newly minted "MAGA Republicans." 

So, let us use a word gifted to us from our brothers in the hood.

 
 
 
JohnRussell
Professor Principal
4.1.1  seeder  JohnRussell  replied to  Vic Eldred @4.1    last year
"MAGA Republicans." 

MAGA is a term your hero popularized, not Democrats or liberals. The adherents are so proud of it they wear hats proclaiming it. 

 
 
 
Sparty On
Professor Principal
4.1.2  Sparty On  replied to  JohnRussell @4.1.1    last year

You and yours are the ones who are keeping MAGA alive the last few years.    Free publicity for Trump as it were and he thanks you.

 
 
 
Tessylo
Professor Principal
4.1.5  Tessylo  replied to  JohnRussell @4.1.1    last year

How is maga newly minted?  It was coined by that fat turd about 6 or 7 years ago and his followers/enablers/supporters are magats.  

 
 
 
Tessylo
Professor Principal
4.1.6  Tessylo  replied to  Vic Eldred @4.1    last year

When don't you have your  word?

jrSmiley_78_smiley_image.gif

When does your turd hero ever shut up and when do you ever stop defending him?

 
 
 
Tessylo
Professor Principal
4.1.7  Tessylo  replied to  Vic Eldred @4.1    last year

So, are you claiming that it's 'our brothers in the hood' who coined woke?

I seem to remember someone posting some bullshit article to that effect.

jrSmiley_86_smiley_image.gif

 
 
 
JohnRussell
Professor Principal
4.1.9  seeder  JohnRussell  replied to  Sparty On @4.1.2    last year

regular_red_maga_hat_new_design_1_jpg-100532-250x250.jpg

notice the date

 
 
 
Sparty On
Professor Principal
4.1.10  Sparty On  replied to  JohnRussell @4.1.9    last year

Lol ... the triggered lefts obsession with Trump has keep MAGA in the news since 2016 ...... by the way .... that was seven years ago John.

Notice that date?

 
 
 
JohnRussell
Professor Principal
4.1.11  seeder  JohnRussell  replied to  Sparty On @4.1.10    last year

How about todays date ?  This is from the Trump rally in Waco, today. See that big sign? What does it say? 

There is another sign with the same thing on it on the other side of the stage. 

512

 
 
 
Drinker of the Wry
Junior Expert
4.1.12  Drinker of the Wry  replied to  JohnRussell @4.1.11    last year

And you and the press love giving him more publicity. NYC media promoted him for years and national media took over for a decade.

 
 
 
Sparty On
Professor Principal
4.1.13  Sparty On  replied to  JohnRussell @4.1.11    last year

Nice crowd.    

That must piss off Biden and his Bidenettes with the mini crowds he normally manages to eek out.    That is when he left his basement.

 
 
 
JohnRussell
Professor Principal
4.1.14  seeder  JohnRussell  replied to  Drinker of the Wry @4.1.12    last year

Donald Trump did not become the 2016 candidate because the media chose him, he became the candidate because people who wanted to take "their" country back chose him. 

MAGA   IS the driving movement and motive of trumpism, and has been for 7 or 8 years. Most MAGA brag about not watching or reading liberal media, so how can media stories on Trump  be keeping him alive as a politician unless they are being read on right wing media? 

Sparty claimed MAGA is only kept alive by liberals. There are literally two giant signs, or they might be large video screens, at the Trump rally TODAY that have MAGA blaring out on them.

You guys have no argument on this topic, so why not let it go. 

 
 
 
Drinker of the Wry
Junior Expert
4.1.15  Drinker of the Wry  replied to  JohnRussell @4.1.14    last year

Donald Trump has enjoyed extreme media attention most of his adult life.  If you don’t see the political advantage then you don’t know politics.

 
 
 
Sparty On
Professor Principal
4.1.16  Sparty On  replied to  JohnRussell @4.1.14    last year
Sparty claimed MAGA is only kept alive by liberals.

Wrong and stop trying to put words in my mouth.    I said you and yours kept it alive since he won in 2016.   Are all the liberals here John?

Anyone who spent more than a minute here in that seven years would have seen that.

Stop lying John.

 
 
 
Tessylo
Professor Principal
4.1.17  Tessylo  replied to  JohnRussell @4.1.14    last year

The PD&D is clinical like I said before - it is one of the symptoms that will be written up in the DSM for psychiatric disorders of true TDS sufferers.

 
 
 
Sparty On
Professor Principal
4.1.18  Sparty On  replied to  Drinker of the Wry @4.1.15    last year

TDS has the tendency to destroy all reason with some folks when it comes to Trump.    I’m not a doctor but I call it brain rot.

 
 
 
JohnRussell
Professor Principal
4.1.19  seeder  JohnRussell  replied to  Sparty On @4.1.18    last year

Now that you have been shown to not have a point regarding MAGA, you just revert to making senseless proclamations about "TDS". 

 
 
 
JohnRussell
Professor Principal
4.1.20  seeder  JohnRussell  replied to  Sparty On @4.1.16    last year

MAGA is represented in large wording at Trumps rally TODAY. Are you claiming liberals are the reason?  LOL. You must never have observed the people who attend Trump rallies. 

20190618-Trump-Orlando-Rally-071-600x450.jpg

 
 
 
Hallux
Masters Principal
4.1.21  Hallux  replied to  JohnRussell @4.1.20    last year

I see Waldo!

 
 
 
Sparty On
Professor Principal
4.1.22  Sparty On  replied to  JohnRussell @4.1.19    last year

The TDS brain rot continues ..... sad.

 
 
 
Tessylo
Professor Principal
4.2  Tessylo  replied to  JohnRussell @4    last year

Yes indeed John, wokeness is just another CONservative boogeyman. 

Another that they are exploiting now is trying to eliminate the LGBTQIA+ community by banning Drag Shows and Drag Queens and pulling the liquor licenses of establishments that have Drag Shows and banning them from college campus and everywhere else they possibly can.

 
 
 
Drinker of the Wry
Junior Expert
4.2.1  Drinker of the Wry  replied to  Tessylo @4.2    last year
“Stay woke / N****s creepin' / They gon' find you / Gon' catch you sleepin'."
 
 
 
Sparty On
Professor Principal
5  Sparty On    last year

More liberal pretzel logic:

When the wealthy patronize shops and restaurants that offer low prices and fast service, their satisfaction comes at the expense of cashiers and dishwashers paid poverty wages. When we open free checking accounts that require maintaining a minimum balance, we benefit from the fact that banks can collect billions of dollars in overdraft fees from poor customers who struggle to meet these requirements—and who often end up gouged by check-cashing outlets and payday lenders.

So wealthy people are oppressing people by patronizing them?    Or are responsible for their lack of fiscal responsibility?

Crazy, wack-a-doodle liberal thinking.

 
 
 
Hallux
Masters Principal
6  Hallux    last year

As a term 'woke' was born to be maligned, I cringed the first time I heard it knowing full well that it would be used as a catchall to denigrate. However, over time it has morphed into a conservative 'wokeness' dressed up as 'anti-woke'. DeSantis is being 'woke' every time he uses the term as are his fans every time they cheer.

 
 
 
Tessylo
Professor Principal
6.1  Tessylo  replied to  Hallux @6    last year

The morons against it have no clue what it is.

You'd have to be a moron to be against decency.

 
 
 
Sparty On
Professor Principal
6.2  Sparty On  replied to  Hallux @6    last year

The term “woke” was coined to describe the latest “neo” version of liberalism.    Crazy and out of touch with most Americans.   It defines a tyrannical extreme of liberalism and doesn’t represent many liberals or most conservatives.

It’s a most excellently descriptive and accurate term for the kooks that worship at its altar. 

 
 
 
Nerm_L
Professor Expert
7  Nerm_L    last year

Woke is an irrationally heightened sense of disadvantage.  Some are so woke that they exhibit paranoia of being disadvantaged.  Wokeness is based solely upon identifying disadvantage and justifies itself with amorphous claims of pursuing equality or equity.  Woke cannot achieve equality or equity because doing so would require imposing discriminating disadvantages on others.

Woke is nothing more than an attempt to turn perceived disadvantage into an advantage for obtaining an unearned benefit.  Being woke demands a discriminating attitude that favors disadvantage.  Only those who can perceive disadvantage can be woke.

 
 
 
Sparty On
Professor Principal
7.1  Sparty On  replied to  Nerm_L @7    last year

A creation of the participation trophy generation.

 
 
 
pat wilson
Professor Participates
8  pat wilson    last year

Woke is simply a state of clear awareness. Why people keep trying to make it all these political things is ridiculous.

 
 
 
Sean Treacy
Professor Principal
9  Sean Treacy    last year

It's amusing for starters because wokeness is a fundamentally illiberal belief system, in that  it's an attack on individual rights in favor of equality by race outcomes.  Woke is the antithesis of liberal. 

at people who are rich or white or male are just better than everyone else—

But east Asians are the most successful group in the country. 

o object to “equality of group result” as a goa

Well yeah. Because focusing on equality of a group is incompatible with liberal democracy.  

This whole screed is really nothing but strawmen. 

 
 
 
Sean Treacy
Professor Principal
10  Sean Treacy    last year

I think this from a few years ago sums up the situation much better:

One of the most effective ways to prevent criticism of an idea is to deprive people of the language in which to name it. Political propagandists understand this, which is why they are now objecting so loudly to terms such as “critical race theory,” “woke,” “identity politics,” and “cancel culture.” The point is not that these terms are imprecise in what they mean — they can be, as are many other terms in common use in American political discourse. The point is precisely that  they are understood to have a distinct meaning . The propagandists of wokeness want to prevent that meaning from being communicated among ordinary citizens who have long lacked the words in which to express things they see and know to be wrong....

The woke ideology, by any name — “anti-racist,” intersectionality, social-justice warriors, the “successor ideology” — certainly has distinct contours and characteristics that ought to be named. It is obsessed with identity — especially race, but the list of important gender, sexual, and other identities is nearly endless — and frames its analysis of virtually everything around group identities rather than individual humanity. It creates disparate standards based on different identities: If a person is part of an “oppressor” class, they can be criticized for things that are permissible to those given the privileged designation of an “oppressed” class. It is bad to be “cisgender,” rather than recognizing that this is the word for how the human race has reproduced itself throughout its entire evolutionary history....

Fredrik deBoer — one of a number of newsletter-writing leftist contrarians who question the woke social orthodoxy — puts it bluntly enough that his language needs to be censored for this publication:

Please Just F***ing Tell Me What Term I Am Allowed to Use for the Sweeping Social and Political Changes You Demand

you don’t get to insist that no one talks about your political project and it’s weak and pathetic that you think you do

The same people say there’s no such thing as political correctness, and they also say identity politics is a bigoted term. So I’m kind of at a loss. Also, they propose sweeping changes to K-12 curricula , but you can’t call it CRT, even though the curricular documents specifically reference CRT , and if you do you’re an idiot and also you’re a racist cryptofascist. Also nobody ( nobody! ) ever advocated for defunding the police, and if they did it didn’t actually mean defunding the police. Seems to be a real resistance to simple, comprehensible terms around here. Serwer is a guy who constantly demands that he and his allies be allowed to do politics on easy mode, but he’s just part of a broader communal rejection of basic self-definition and comprehensible terms for this political tendency. Also if you say things they don’t like they might try to beat you up . Emphasis on try.

If you ask these people, are you part of a social revolution?, they’ll loudly tell you yes! Yes they are! They’re going to shake society at its very foundations. Well, OK then — what do I call your movement? You reject every name that organically develops! I’ll use the name you pick, but you have to actually pick one.

 
 
 
arkpdx
Professor Quiet
11  arkpdx    last year

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