|
> I'm still not sure what any specific user of the word "woke" means, beyond the Ami/UK right using it as an insult, but I can't tell if it's generic or specific, critiquing something or just telling supporters when to boo and jeer. Does the Ami/UK left still use it to mean "being aware of systemic prejudice", or have they also shifted? It is a mistake to think that negative uses of “woke” are an exclusively right-of-centre thing. Rather than repeat myself, I’ll just link to this comment I posted a bit over a month back - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42695516 - in which I cite several unabashed Marxists using the word negatively (including Adolph L Reed Jr, and the Trotskyist International Committee of the Fourth International). If you read Reed, he actually means something rather specific by “woke” - whereas classical/orthodox Marxism views non-class-based oppression (race, gender, sexuality, etc) as downstream consequences of class-based oppression, “wokeness” treats them as if they exist independently of class-based oppression, or as upstream of it, or as a higher priority than it Just the other day, Senator Mark Warner (D-VA) was quoted as saying, regarding his own Democratic Party, that “I think the majority of the party realizes that the ideological purity of some of the groups is a recipe for disaster and that candidly the attack on over-the-top wokeism was a valid attack” - https://www.politico.eu/article/us-senator-mark-warner-democ... - Warner may well be a moderate or centrist Democrat, but I don’t think it makes sense to label him as “conservative” or “right-wing”. He’s not a “conservative Democrat”, in the sense that there was such a thing a decade or two ago [edit: I made some comment here about him not being a member of the Blue Dog caucus, but I’ve removed it because what I was saying didn’t really make sense-the Blue Dog caucus is and was a House caucus, while Warner is a Senator] I don’t think Warner’s definition of “woke” is as precise as Reed’s, but essentially what he means by it is a form of progressivism which prioritises ideological purity over winning the battle for the median voter’s heart and mind |
Thanks for the detailed response; one of the previous times I said this here, the answer was snarky disbelief that I hadn't kept track.