A Definition and Some Notes on Wokeness
Wokeness is the politics and culture of authoritarian inclusivity - inclusivity uber alles. Its practice is to identify, oppose, and rectify, down to the most granular interpersonal level, present and past, all exclusivity, discrimination, and bigotry against protected classes. Its goal is a society in which bigotry against protected classes has been extirpated - in liberal PMC habitats, if not universally.
Wokeness is not mere “anti-racism” in the Adolph Reed sense; it’s bigger than that, though he’s correct in saying it’s an instrument of class warfare. It’s anti-bigotry. It considers bigotry toward protected classes the ultimate sin and a toxic moral contamination that spreads through the use of forbidden words. Wokeness therefore is an obsessively cleansing practice of moral hygiene.
All purifying ideologies need their ruthless fanatical enforcers and wokeness is no exception. They are called wokescolds (a word I coined), they are myriad, and they’re indefatigable disciplinarians of the unwoke, antiwoke, and prewoke. Wokescolds are slurhunters, codebreakers, and dogwhistle detectors, constantly scrutinizing the discourse to expose and condemn obvious or hidden bigotry, and to chastise bigots, censor the offending text if possible (that damned first amendment argh!), and deplatform or cancel its creator. If bigotry is in a text, they will find it; if it is not in the text, they will still find it.
PMC habitats - including the greatest one of all, the internet - never lack for wokescolds; the supply is near infinite and therefore cheap. This is a fact not lost on content mills. Why the abundance? For one, wokescolding provides a righteous yet sadistic thrill and opportunity to not only advance in a media career but also to destroy enemies, including competing wokescolds. For another, literally any moron can do it. Really, because wokescolding is such shallow petty moralism, a wokescold need not (and almost always does not) know jackshit about politics, history, higher culture, art, theory. All these pig-ignorant wokescolds (almost always larval PMCs) know is a narrow and shallow sliver of pop culture - typically of whatever fandom they happen to have fallen into; Harry Potter was probably the most common one until recently but now it’s surely the Marvel Cinematic Universe - and that, and dedication, are enough to be a Top Cop for wokeness. This has gone on so long that the neoliberal media, always looking to exploit new efficiencies, has largely replaced actual film/tv/fiction/art critics with cheap and plentiful wokescolds.
Since bigotry manifests and spreads in discourse, and indeed is encoded into language, wokescolds believe language must be rectified. But where, say, Confucius (the ur-language rectifier) wanted to correct the deceptions and ambiguities that had slowly accumulated in Old Chinese - he wanted to, as it were, scrape the barnacles off his language’s hull - woke zealots are much more ambitious and radical. Think: Pol Pot, but for discourse. They want to completely purge language of all bigotry and exclusivity, and for gendered languages that means massive reconstruction. Hence, new Wokespeak abominations like “Latinx,” constantly pushed by CringeQueens like AOC.
To exclude is to be hierarchical. Thus wokeness, as authoritarian inclusivity, appeals to anarchists who, they never tire of telling us, oppose all hierarchies.
To exclude is cruelty, but to include is kindness. Thus wokeness appeals to the sort of liberalism that is a clucking, passive-aggressively authoritarian Momism, liberalism that insists people be NICE and respect the woke consensus that everybody overwhelmingly agreed to a while back (you don’t remember? well, it definitely happened). Correct politics is when you base everything on kindness and empathy - and also on safety, which is how wokeness neatly folds in to the other side of liberal Momism, the ultra-precautionary, pre-emptive Nanny statism that wants to cover everyone and everything, including language, in bubblewrap. The safetyism component is where the woke axiom that speech is literally violence isn’t just a risible, hysterical bit of doctrine but a crucial component of the larger politics, justifying all sorts of precautionary intrusions, informal gag orders, and a culture of prior restraint.
Wokeness thus unites two of the most energetic, busybodying strains of the left.
The key to understanding wokeness is not in the long historic debate over racism, but in the new radical debate about transgenderism. Validation is the goal, not tolerance and respect for equal rights.
Though wokeness steals the valor and vocabulary of the civil rights movement it is not interested in civil rights but in inclusion; it seeks not equal protection from the law but equity - a revanchist and Schmittian concept that necessarily justifies any double standard so long as it favors protected classes (cf., punching up and punching down). The CRM and indeed all social liberation movements prior to the late 2000s highly valued tolerance, a social agreement in which the majority agrees not to destroy the minority either politically, culturally, or physically. Wokeness is opposed to tolerance, and wokescolds despise it, not for the Popper’s Paradox reasons (or at least not primarily) they so often claim, but because tolerance mandates or at least heavily implies a right to dissent, to mock, to personally opt-out. Wokescolds cannot tolerate tolerance.
Wokeness’s policy analogue is DIE. Its parent ideology is left-neoliberalism - what Nancy Fraser calls progressive neoliberalism. But its genealogy is much more complicated and syncretic. Wokescolds don’t see the un/anti/pre-woke as merely in error; wokescolds see the Other as fascist. Their cartoonishly expansive definition of fascism owes much to the Stalinist concept of social fascism, and their attitude to art is borrowed from the Soviets (Zhdanovite period) almost whole cloth, they just replace social realism with inclusivity. Where any decent aesthete will tell you that taste begins with discrimination, the wokescold is guaranteed to reply that discrimination is exclusivity which is fascism. Is decent art possible in a woke regime? Watch Netflix and Disney stuff from the last five years and tell me.
Of course wokeness is Orwellian! Duh! It’s totalitarian - it insists not only on total political, cultural, and above all verbal compliance but also Correct Thought and Attitude. You can correctly use woke newspeak (wokespeak), and always vote Democrat, but still have a “problematic” vibe, which is evidence of fascist thoughts below the surface, especially if you’re a ciswhitemale. Wokescolds consider such contaminated people salvageable only if they seem open and eager to be corrected.
But where Orwellian regimes are top-down affairs, wokeness gained power through simultaneous elite (Academe, bluecheck media, Democratic politicians) and grassroots (tumblr) efforts that, so to speak, met in the middle circa 2014 and cemented their cultural hegemony in 2017.
In the beginning was Political Correctness, despised by everyone except the academic left from which it came, and the corporate world which found it useful. PC was a New Left relic that had mutated and metastasized in Academe’s petri dish, and was just as embarrassing and annoying to intelligent left-liberalism as the Moral Majority was to intelligent Reaganite conservatism but less powerful and nowhere near as electorally useful.
The Moral Majority died as a major cultural and political player when Clinton beat impeachment. So, in its way, did PC. For a brief period, classic, tolerant left-liberalism (actually left-libertarianism) reigned culturally. Everyone was free. The heroic period of The Simpsons and South Park’s beginning reflected the cultural zeitgeist well.
Then 9/11 happened. Neocons revived PC not in name but in concept and transformed it into proto-wokeness. All neoconservatism’s enemies, anyone and everyone critical of the War on Terror and the Iraq War, were bigots - specifically, America-haters and antisemites. Less obvious at the time, but just as important in retrospect, was the neoliberal analogue to neocons’ proto-wokeness. By the early 2000s, some of the effects of 1990s trade policies had begun to show, and people were rightly angry. Neoliberals accused these critics, discontents, the victims of their policies, of - you guessed it - bigotry, of Sinophobia, of racism, of invoking the Yellow Peril, of “hating” the Chinese and Latin Americans to whom their jobs had been offshored and outsourced.
Meanwhile, though weird pockets of idpol extremist subcultures existed on the internet from the beginning, on sites like livejournal, usenet, and deviantart, these were contained if not totally isolated by the early internet’s Hobbesian climate. Trolls kept the proto-wokes in check - until they didn’t. What changed? The years 2006-2009 were a crucial period that set the stage for the Great Awokening that came later.
In that narrow four year window the first iPhone was released, and Facebook and Twitter were launched and both rapidly supplanted myspace as the internet’s favorite social media sites. Also, thanks to the disappointment of the 2006 Democratic blue wave, the antiwar movement died which left one less avenue for activists to expend their energy.
The internet had always skewed more middle class, especially PMC, and younger than the general population. Initially the domain of tech guys, libertarians were massively overrepresented Online until this transition period when, with new smartphones, radical liberals, shut-ins, resentful PMC narcissists, NEETs, and every social pariah in the Western world all were suddenly able to efficiently network through social media, reinforce each other’s most obnoxious traits, and gradually develop new levels of extremism - and so they did, on sites like tumblr and blogs like Shakesville. This was when over-invested identity politics, fandom, and political correctness combined and radicalized to form social justice.
Elite liberal media played its part. With Obama’s victory came the professionalization of the amateur blogosphere, the blogification of professional online journalism, and the homogenization of liberal and left-liberal magazines - and a desperate need to produce cheap content that could be shared by social justice warriors on Facebook and Twitter. Salon was among the first to discover proto-wokescolds could cheaply produce tons of content - shrieky, subliterate, politicized cultural takes. Venture capital founded several sites more or less based on the Salon model, each more shrill and scoldy than the last, which collectively had the effect of manufacturing a more extreme and ruthless audience of sjws, real True Believers. Suddenly there was an army of sjws so puritanical they cancelled everyone, even earlier, less extreme sjws. Many of these VC-funded sites died messy deaths when their sjw employees cancelled each other, often for the pettiest deviations from perfect wokeitude.
And so it went until the next major transformative period, from fall 2015 to spring 2017, when social justice became wokeness as Hillary Clinton was challenged by Bernie Sanders, was defeated by Donald Trump, and then came the spectacle of Charlottesville which conjured the specter of fascism, which in turn justified everything - including woke maximalism - in the name of anti-fascism. Neoliberal HRC’s enthusiastic adoption of wokeness was especially significant and pretty much launched the Woke Capital phenomenon - or perhaps better to say Hillary proved to Corporate America that wokeness was not just safe but profitable and politically shrewd. Since then, wokeness has been hegemonic, solidifying its position in PMC habitats, dominating pop culture. It’s now the west’s secular religion. And it’s not going away in my lifetime.
All authoritarian moralistic ideologies tend to resemble each other. No one is wrong or contradictory in comparing wokescolds to inquisitors, Victorian prudes, Stalinist commissars, Puritans, mullahs, etc. They’re all insufferable prigs who hate fun and especially hate humor.
Everybody’s a moralist but wokeness is a code of petty moralisms - shallow, superficial, personal - deployed by petty tyrants. Wokeness isn’t an honorable code abused by cynics; it’s a shitty code attractive to fanatics. Wokeness is as awful as it should and must be, and has the adherents it deserves.
There’s always been a wrecker element, a hysterical, ultra, illiberal social liberalism element - or has been since the 1960s - in politics, but it was contained by left-liberals until the invention of social media. Since roughly 2009, no sober adult left-liberal has even tried to stop sjws/wokescolds. Not that it would probably have done any good to do so then, and certainly not now, but also the reticence was strategic: wokeness triggers and infuriates the social conservative (chud) enemy, so let the kids run wild it was thought (that wokeness also triggers and infuriates normal people was not considered, or worse was considered but deliberately ignored). So for several years now there’s been absolutely no penalty within the liberal-left for going too far, being too woke, scolding too much, being too shrill. If you’re cringe and embarrassing, after all (so the rationale goes) then that is just proof of your good intentions. To adapt another fanatic’s words: extremism in defense of wokeness is no vice, and moderation in pursuit of social justice is no virtue.
Wokeness is like a religion. Most BernieBros and all dirtbag leftists agreed it was - until 2020; now they say it’s a trite analogy at best. Hostility to wokeness was another casualty of the post-primary grillpill period in which the decent left opted-in to Establishment Dem CorrectThink while it stridently affected to opt-out. Whatever they say now, BernieBros had been right about wokeness because they had seen it up close, daily, and frothing shrieking PMC checkies calling you a racist misogynist fascist monster tends to focus the senses.
Wokescolds are every bit as aggressively disciplinary as the old Moral Majority, every bit as hysterical and prudish as the PMRC. Every bit as imperious and annoying and nitpicky as a classic church lady (interestingly both the wokescold and the church lady stereotypically have blue hair). Like the Moral Majority they are massive hypocrites, and get away with it. Wokescolds hunt the sin of bigotry with equal fervor that Puritans hunted witches. Wokescolds hate the bigot as much a temperance crusaders hated alcohol and inquisitors hated heretics.
Judith Butler and Kimberle Crenshaw are wokeness’s prophets; AOC is its current pope. Its believers constantly proselytize, conversion is forced (on pain of unemployment), sinners are forgiven if they beg and self-abnegate enough, if they declare wokeness the Eternal Truth that Cannot Fail but only be failed.
Like traditional religions, wokeness promises an authoritarian structure and moral certainty. Unlike traditional religions, it promises no eternal reward. Perhaps this is why that, where traditional religions usually had happy followers, wokescolds rarely seem happy - or psychologically healthy for that matter. The only time a wokescold is kind of happy is when in a state of righteous fury, when wokescolding, condemning, shunning, cancelling.
Wokeness has all the vices and flaws of religion, but few of its virtues. It is like a religion without being - sorry to disappoint the situational literalists - exactly like all religions in every way. The point has always been that it functions as an ersatz religion for secular liberals.
