You can't push back against a wraith
Why the Successor Ideology will not name itself
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A quick opinion, initially outlined in an article reaction last night and developed a bit further here.
Free to read. Because sometimes they are.
Here is the latest in a string of pretty good essays I've recently seen pondering the problem of the W word.
The issue, in short, is that participants in The Great Awokening (and some onlookers) complain that 'Woke' is a slur but refuse to name what has become the dominant cultural strain in (mostly) anglophone countries.
Freddie deBoer put it best in the title of this piece.
Where I stand here is that Wokeism is a confused collection of hyper-moralistic propositions, neither evidenced nor adequately explained, which relies heavily on enforcing social conformity by spreading fear.
You need to be living under a rock not to have noticed that questioning Woke claims about there being no racial justice or that men can actually be women often carries real penalties, including loss of livelihood, social ostracisation and de-platforming.
And, of course, the perennial slurs of racist and transphobe must now be costed in whenever one pushes back, even in casual social interactions.
My other objection is best expressed in Tara's piece when Professor Adolph L. Reed Jr paraphrases the view of Preston Smith on the leftish's abandonment of classical left objectives around reducing overall material inequality:
the ideal of racial democracy, which basically boils down to a genuine and more extensive ideal of opportunity, the measure of which would be that Blacks or people from other targeted groups would be distributed up and down the social and political and economic hierarchy in society in numbers that are roughly proportionate to the numbers in the overall population. Smith juxtaposes this to the ideal of social democracy, which I imagine you and most of your audience would be familiar with, where the focus is more on narrowing inequalities at the top and the bottom of society.
That's a reasonable synopsis of why I'm personally not Woke.
With that out of the way, like everyone else who notices it, there remains no better word to encapsulate the ideology.
We look for one and get no help from the Woke themselves, which might seem strange at first. But it's not strange at all.
Ever since Freddie de Boer's piece I've realised the power inherent in being a diffuse nameless cultural force.
Because you can't push back on a wraith.
There are several usefully non-snide labels for it - 'Successor Ideology', Tara's suggestion of 'Identitarian Moralism' (close to my privately coined Identity Moralism), Cultural Progressivism, but none of them trip off the tongue and land meaningfully with anyone who isn't immersed in understanding this culture.
Imagine saying to Mr & Mrs Miggins next door ‘I’m not really a fan of Identitarian Moralism’.
Practitioners are not going to name it because a diffuse 'all things to all people' quality gives it similar power to 'fairness' as an ill-defined term that enjoys very positive emotional valence.
The moment Wokeism has an 'official' name - like socialism or fascism or anarchism or libertarianism - it's vulnerable to critique that doesn't instantly render you a bigoted transphobic racist.
Criticise socialism and no one reflexively calls you a fascist. Express scepticism about libertarianism and you aren't de facto framed as a fan of dictatorship.
But as things stand, if you ain't Woke you're a bigot who doesn't care about making the world A Better Place for Marginalised People. On Twitter they’ll tell you that you’re ‘literally genocidal’.
This is its most powerful quality - the auto-problematising of any pushback.
Of course the pitchfork-bearers of Wokeistan don't need to - or even want to - name it because that would expose them to the inconvenience of defending against the kind of problematic inevitabilities highlighted by Adolph Reed.
That it's an elite power game, beloved of corporations and used to jockey for status in an emerging branch of Nice capitalism. Luxury Beliefs are the hand-me-downs for more casual observers who are simply afraid of not being current.
This dynamic is perfect for the Woke because it leaves it up to increasingly frustrated detractors to keep naming it and inevitably just coming up with rude names. I'm as guilty as anyone here. I am privately fond of thinking of it as 'Western Jihadism'.
In my own writing I call it Leftishism (and activists the Leftish) tipping a nod to some of its roots, while showing disdain (as a lifelong left-leaner) for its uninterest in class and material improvements for the most ordinary and least wealthy of us.1
To add to the challenge there's the fact that identitarians sometimes appropriate the W word for themselves, just as black people brilliantly did with the N word. So that it can be positioned as a choice between being nice or being a f**king tw*t, as a popular British comedienne recently positioned it.
It's probably best to stop trying to name Wokeism because it isn't just hard, it's designed that way.
Were I a participant in The Great Awokening I'd be very happy with the situation exactly as it stands.
They may often be wrong, but they often aren't stupid.
‘Ah, you just aren’t seeing that the marginalised are also the worst off so you see we really are actual socialists and you are just revealing your bigotry’ etc.
Western Jihadism seems like an accurate description, as converts to this new ideology (or new faith) often try to proselytize around them (with friends, family, on social media,...). For many of them, the end justifies the means.
Interesting piece, thanks.
Great piece. Wasn't "woke" originally a self-descriptor? I presumed it was a reaction to the Right's successful co-opting of "red-pilled".