Woke isn't through with us
Reports of woke's death are being highly exaggerated.
Writer and Twitter pundit Ettingermentum recently started a new round of discourse on the failures of wokeness (or as the kids call it, woke 1.0). I remain skeptical of “wokeness” as a concept, mostly because it bundles together a bunch of things that aren’t entirely related, and in part because the concept remains almost entirely online. Despite what the media would have you believe, there just isn’t much hard polisci-type evidence out there that the things I would associate with wokeness have had much of an impact on things like elections or popular opinion.
Still, it seems hard to deny that starting late in Obama’s second term, a handful of distinct trends emerged on the liberal-left, and that at some point during Biden’s presidence there was a shift that made “wokeness” less salient than it once was. So what exactly are we talking about, then?
If I had to describe wokeness, I would say it’s characterized by a number of things:
1) Prefigurative political change through semantic engineering
Since the way we talk about our world reflects our attitudes and politics, liberals concluded that the reverse is also true: our attitudes and politics are governed by the way we talk about the world. And this, in theory, creates a political shortcut: instead of going through the ordinary procedures of persuading people or changing the incentives that incline them to think in certain ways, you can design an optimal language and simply demand that people speak it. This, in theory, will eventually change everyone’s politics…right?
This reasoning makes for a fun sci-fi premise in books like 1984, but it has two major problems. First, the strong interpretation of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis it depends on — that language governs thought — just isn’t something that modern linguists find plausible. Second, even if this approach could work, the level of control over popular speech you would need to persue it is (as 1984 demonstrates) comically implausible. The liberal-left was never going to be able to enforce a Newspeak so thoroughly that some political ideas would literally become unthinkable.
In my view a whole lot of activists tried to rely on this approach and met with predictable failure. Some trans allies, for example, would take an “it’s not my job to educate you” stance on advocacy and simply demand that people accept their pronouns. Obviously if you are uneducated on questions of sex and gender, or have not encountered the actually persuasive arguments on this question, then you are not going to capitulate to the demand to use someone’s pronouns correctly; and in fact, you are going to understandably resent the way strangers were trying to control how you talk for (from your perspective) no good reason.
Unfortunately, approaching political change as a language engineering problem is always going to create this kind of outcome. When politics, for you, is just about hunting down the infinite number of microaggressions embedded in our semantics and tweaking the rules of acceptable speech accordingly, your ambitions can be limitless and completely out of touch with the hard problems of actually getting people to adopt your language. Consider the infamous “Latinx” term that various academics and NGO comms guys tried to popularize. The idea of degendering language isn’t a bad one; in fact, I have argued for it as an alternative to enforcing a regime of ever-expanding gender identities. But there was basically no public advocacy campaign for this shift, and in fact a lot of people clearly had no idea what the x was for.
In fact, if you look at what is often considered the first English-language discussion of this term, the author — Cristobal Salinas Jr. — grapples with this issue directly. During his research he confronts the same problem over and over again:
A majority of the participants who first learned the term Latinx via social media stated that they were confused. Amanda said that she was “really confused” and that she “didn’t know what it meant. It was used for the Latinx community, and I was like, what does that mean? So, I googled it and I didn’t understand it at the moment.”
Unfortunately, Salinas does not come up with a real strategy for public education. Students report that their friends and family — the usual vector for language change — are not receptive to the shift, and instead of continued advocacy, the students seem to retreat towards like-minded friends in the campus bubble.
when referring to themselves within their home and families, they were identified as Latinas. When the students are in higher education and spaces that tend to be more inclusive, they self-identified as Latinx, to allow all individuals to feel comfortable with regard to their identities.
This is really where the discussion of how to get people to adopt the new word ends. Salinas concludes with precisely the error I described:
People create terms/labels to express their own realities, and we should not let terms/labels create ours.
From the fact that we use language to describe how we see and think about the world, Salinas concludes that language “creates” how we see and think about the world, and that we can therefore adjust it without adjusting the underlying perspective.
2) Irrational debate tricks
Since wokeness tempted so many people to see politics as a language engineering problem that did not require political persuasion, the latter often came to be seen as a pointless inconvenience at best and a reactionary indulgence at worst. There is of course truth to the fact that reactionaries often use debate to normalize controversies that were once uncontroversial; the classic example of this is Holocaust denial, which is why so many people refuse to debate the question as a matter of principle. It is also true that debating certain people can promote them and their platforms to a status of legitimacy they previously did not have. What made wokeness unique, however, was its tendency to overstate these dangers as a pretext for avoiding education and persuasion that they simply did not want to do.
This persuasion-averse sensibility was also manifest in a whole arsenal of debate tricks that woke folks used on a regular basis. The most famous one is the demand for what Matt Bruenig called identitarian deference: by claiming your status as an oppressed identity, or by claiming to speak on their behalf, ID allowed you to avoid advancing your position on the merits. Another was the presumption of bad faith: you prematurely declare that your interlocutor is being cynical, an allegation that undermines anything they say and any attempt they make to defend themselves. A third was just the appeal to outrage, usually through accusations of some sort of bigotry: the point here was not to make a serious case for bigotry, but to leverage the seriousness of the accusation as a way to shut down debate.
The woke have no monopoly on fallacious argumentation, of course. What defined wokeness was a preference for these particular fallacies, and the underlying rationale for using them. The liberal-left, in the late Obama era, became unusually skeptical of reasoned debate as they saw the way that the right employed it to normalize its ideas, and as they saw the way that the right (especially libertarians) accused people of fallacies as a rhetorical trump card. As often happens, however, the liberal-left reverse polarized against this tendency; and since then, the popular reliance on irrational debate tricks has become a serious intellectual crutch on the liberal-left.
3) Instrumental aggression
The liberal-left have good reason to be angry. And it is completely understandable, of course, for the oppressed to react to political attacks with anger and lashing out.
That said: it is perfectly obvious that a significant number of folks on the liberal-left have serious emotional regulation problems, inclinations towards sadism, personal grudges and rivalries, and clinical psychological disorders — diagnosed or undiagnosed — that incline them towards aggression. And that they are using liberal-left politics as an outlet for aggression. Their behavior is not productive, and it is not understandably reactive, either; its exclusive aim is to hurt or humiliate someone.
To appreciate what I am talking about, let me provide an extreme example. For about a dozen years now, a character who I will not name (for obvious reasons) has attempted to cancel a good 70% of the liberal-left. His specific indictment is that they are all participating in a vast conspiracy to promote the agenda of an infamous neo-Nazi named Weev. His efforts to cancel people largely involve finding new liberal-leftists who haven’t heard of him and showing them his extensive library of screenshots and posts on Reddit.
He also, though this is not widely known, is a diagnosed but unmedicated schizophrenic with symptoms of extreme paranoia. And in another context I might say obvious symptoms of extreme paranoia, I can’t here, because folks on the liberal-left constantly misunderstand his behavior. Time and time again, I have watched folks take this man seriously and defend his behavior, and it is only when he inevitably turns on them that they begin to realize that something is seriously wrong.
Here’s another example:
Once you start paying attention, it’s impossible to miss that a significant number of “woke” posters on the liberal-left are actually far right concern trolls trying to cause trouble. And the reason for this is simple: most people don’t pay attention to this. Wokeness has made the liberal-left so tolerant of interpersonal aggression that it’s become a massive weakness that the right actively exploits.
Most examples aren’t this extreme, of course. What they have in common, however, is that people who are not immersed in the Woke Lifestyle can see this kind of aggression for what it is. And when folks on the liberal-left tolerate it, or even encourage it, this completely undermines our credibility.
4) Hostile to the US working class
A month before the 2024 election, it became clear that Kamala Harris’s support among male workers — who are, of course, disproportionately workers — had become slippery. And only a few weeks later, the explanation became clear: Harris had abandoned economic populism for a vague defending democracy platform. Instead of refocusing her campaign on issues like the cost of living, however, the Harris campaign settled on a new strategy: call black men sexists.
When socialists argue that woke politics are hostile to the US working class, the standard parry has always been to argue that it is only critical of the white working class, and that black workers approve of it. But as the Harris campaign proved, wokeness isn’t just a weapon against white workers, or male workers, or straight workers, etcetera. It is a weapon against workers writ large, taken up by the bourgeoisie and its liberal allies to redirect class conflict.
Socialists have long drawn attention to the way that wokeness divides the working class against each other, but that has never been its major role. The primary function of wokeness is to lure us into the political project spelled out in point (1): to pull popular activism into the gravity well of language engineering and policing. That is a project you could invest your entire life into without even once wondering if people engage in reactionary behavior for reasons that are material. I think that, for example, you could make some very interesting arguments about how our linguistic distinction between organisms and the ecosystem they inhabit has contributed to climate change by making it feel like an external problem. That is something you could spend years researching and writing about, forgetting all along that we should probably do something about fossil fuels, too.
Unfortunately, I think the end of wokeness is wildly overstated. Liberals in particular still plainly think that political progress is just an exercise in language engineering. They are still in the grips of postmodern skepticism about rationalism, and their view of discourse-as-combat leads them to be tolerant of kinds of aggression that directly undermine their goals. And they are still, of course, more than eager to aim this brand of politics at socialists. It is good to see more people on the liberal-left express skepticism of wokeness in general, but unless they rethink these tendencies, something equivalent will inevitably return. We may be through with wokeness, but woke isn’t through with us.
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