8 Comments

Ideology is, in many ways, a lens on how to examine issues. Liberals look out for individuals: Identitarians look out for identities. I call the 'Wokism' Egosumism (Latin for I Am). The Woke are Identitarians. if Ideology is a lens on how to look at the world, and the focus of how you order society I would classify:

Liberalism seeks to empower individuals

Communism seeks to empower class

Fascism seeks to empower the state/nation

Egosumism seeks to empower Identities

Is this imperfect? Of course. None of those definitions are complete, but it's my dumb way of making sense of all the craziness.

Expand full comment

I think the contrast you're drawing with liberal individualism is exactly right. I would argue the best way to define "wokeness" is to contrast it with what it explicitly opposes. So my definition of "wokery" is that it is a full blown ideological take on questions of identity, and particularly race, that rose up in opposition to traditional liberal ideas of social progress. People routinely describe woke ideas as "illiberal," but it's is better described as "anti-liberal," since it defines itself as a root-and-branch rejection of core liberal ideas. As you say, it rejects the liberal focus on the individual, and notions of individual autonomy/responsibility. Instead it replaces liberalism's focus on the individual with a form of left collectivism, where social groupings based on identity cleavages are the foundational building blocks of the social order. Individual characteristics don't matter; identity characteristics do.

So when it comes to race specifically, wokeness rejects the liberal dream of equality, and the core liberal belief that color-blindness is, however impossible to achieve, a worthwhile ideal or goal. And it rejects the notion that racism is a sin of the individual, a defect of character. Instead, it sees pursuit of racially blind equality, and a focus on convincing individuals to root out their own prejudice, as a false promise and really a cloak for maintaining systems or racial oppression. Therefore wokery seeks to replace liberalism's humanistic belief in individual autonomy and responsibility -- we are each of us responsible for ourselves, and are responsible for our own actions -- in favor of an understanding of society as a zero sum competition of identities for political, social and cultural power, in which some identity groupings have attained power, and have over time used that power to fundamentally twist and corrupt society's institutions and to advocate a set of foundational myths, that are designed to perpetuate their hegemony over marginalized identities. Given the scale and extent of this institutional corruption, the only antidote to this oppressive imbalance is to radically reoriet society towards a Carnivalistic social inversion that -- in the name of long-delayed justice -- replaces the oppressors with the oppressed at the top of the identity hierarchy. Achieving this requires explicitly re-racializing the public sphere (albeit in favor of the non-white), using a yardstick of equity (rejecting liberalism's emphasis on equality) to condemn the current liberal order and push forward progress on social justice.

Anyway, something like that.

Expand full comment
Mar 17, 2023Liked by HistoryBoomer

The people who say "woke" is undefined might want to consider the usage of "fascist". And nowadays, "Nazi".

Yes, anything left or liberal will be used by the right-wing as a term of abuse. It happened with "Communist" (but-that-would-be-Communism was an old joke), with "Socialist" (Obama-is-a-Socialist nonsense), even "Liberal" itself. Yet those words still can have reasonable meanings.

The deeper point of Freddie's essay is the part where he discusses potential motivations behind the idea that this politics is un-name-able. That's very evident in some of the responses. It also means, intrinisically, that there will never be agreement by those adhering to such politics to use any term whatsoever.

Expand full comment
Mar 17, 2023Liked by HistoryBoomer

“Season 1 AND Season 8 of Game of Thrones.”

Can we give the man a standing ovation?

Perfect illustration of the uselessness of the term ‘woke’. I’m so pleased to see the term rendered null and void, I side strongly with Angel and TCW there.

PS my mint is still going gangbusters, slow roasted minted Greek lamb shoulder is on the menu this week 🤤

Expand full comment
author

This was such a nice message until the end.

Expand full comment

My preferred term is "Costanza politics", after the episode where George decided to do everything by opposites. A moral hierarchy that the opposite of the traditional moral hierarchy, so that whites are morally inferior to Blacks, men to women, cis to trans, Westerners to indigenous, etc.

Expand full comment

My first experience with "woke" (although it wasn't called that at the time) was when students at my alma mater protested vigorously to get a statue of Thomas Jefferson removed from campus. They argued that the statue was representative of slavery, because TJ owned slaves. But they took it a step further, and claimed that the statue made students feel "unsafe". And while I suppose you could argue a large amount of bronze is dangerous if it fell on you, that is quite a different thing than equating the mere existence of the statue to presenting a threat of violence to non-white students.

Ultimately, I think Carl is right that it's useful to have a word or phrase to describe what was happening. And FDB's "social justice politics" seems to fit like a glove.

Expand full comment
Apr 18, 2023Liked by HistoryBoomer

“Social Justice Politics” won’t work because “Social Justice Warrior” was the term first used by the New Atheists to describe the feminists who took over their movements, and then by gamers during “GamerGate”to describe the far-left moral busybodies who took over game journalism and later even game development.

Expand full comment