Of Wokeness and Word Games

By Jeffrey Blehar

Friday, March 17, 2023

 

If you are notably online (it is not advised), then you might have been aware of a recent internet kerfuffle that erupted over a piece of ridiculous Twitter nonsense. (And no, I am not talking about how our own Dan McLaughlin loosened a pebble that somehow landslided into Jack White of the White Stripes writing a bizarre public tribute poem to his ex-wife’s negligible drumming talents. But that really was hilarious.) This kerfuffle is about how Bethany Mandel, co-author of the recent book Stolen Youth: How Radicals Are Erasing Innocence and Indoctrinating a Generation, was apparently caught flat-footed when Briahna Joy Gray over at the Hill asked her in an interview to define wokeness on the spot, and she fumbled for words.

 

Admittedly it would have been better to have a short ready-made answer to go. (She certainly has a longer one — an entire chapter of her book is devoted to her definition of the term, whether you agree with it or not.) For all I know she did, but even the most prepared among us fumble for their words on occasion, whether due to distraction, to brain-freeze, or whatnot (I have nearly 400 hours of podcasting under my belt providing ample evidence of this.)

 

But those mocking her for her “viral moment” are of course even more obnoxiously then treating it as dispositive proof that wokeness therefore cannot be defined, and in fact doesn’t even exist, at least not really. (Thankfully they have not yet insulted our intelligence by calling it an “obscure academic theory,” like critical race theory, although ironically enough it is very much a creature of academia in the humanities.) This is utter cant, and everyone understands it to be so even as we play these silly semantic games about a general phenomenon whose reality (and effect on our culture and laws) is as impossible to deny as a catastrophic weather event.

 

Recently, I have seen two competing definitions of “wokeness” emerge, one from the Right and one from the (dissident) Left. Both are worth addressing, as each has its virtues. The one preferred by the (notably effective) conservative activist Christopher Rufo is fairly short and to the point:

 

Wokeness is the belief that (1) all of society is currently and intentionally structured to oppress; (2) all gaps in performance between large groups illustrate this, and (3) the solution is “equity” — proportional representation without regard to performance.

 

This is an extremely solid thumbnail reduction, but it is a specifically political definition; a useful — because basically accurate — tool to be used in quickly explaining the political stakes of the worldview we are up against. It is an activist’s definition nonetheless, and in its necessary compactness misses a deeper understanding, in my view, of where wokeness really arises.

 

Thus I strongly commend to you Freddie de Boer, also writing today (unstatedly) in response to the “Mandel scandal.” The title says it all: “Of Course You Know What ‘Woke’ Means.”

 

There is such a school of politics, it’s absurd that so many people pretend not to know what woke means, and the problem could be easily solved if people who support woke politics would adopt a name for others to use. No to woke, no to identity politics, no to political correctness, fine: PICK SOMETHING. The fact that they steadfastly refuse to do so is a function of their feeling that they shouldn’t have to do politics like everyone else. But they do. And their resistance to doing politics is why, three years after a supposed “reckoning,” nothing has really changed . . . The conceit is that “woke” has even shaggier or vaguer boundaries than “liberal,” “fascist,” “conservative,” or “moderate.” And I just don’t think that’s true.

 

Understand that de Boer is a Marxist; his critique of wokeness comes from the materialist Left, from those who believe that basic economic and material quality-of-life issues are the primary arena for political struggle. But that only sharpens his insight — he understands his peers like few of us ever could.  He defines wokeness as (1) primarily academic in origin, (2) focused on the immaterial rather than the concrete, (3) paralytic in its analysis (all problems are structural, but change can only be on an individual level), (4) focused on feelings and emotions rather than dilemmas with real trade-offs, and (5) ultimately fatalistic (“America will always be cursed,” etc.).

 

The analysis is especially insightful because it explains something important that is usually unaddressed on the right: why wokeness as a totalizing worldview has such a powerful grip on its adherents. We casually joke about how it is the “new secular religion” but usually fail to go beyond that. De Boer does not; he explains why wokeness is such an alluring trap as politics beyond the mere opportunity for the plying of status-based grievances: By providing its own twisted form of moral absolution, wokeness also absolves its adherents of something that would otherwise nag far more at their consciences . . . the need to care about doing hard political work in the real world.

 

It is de Boer’s impatience with these sorts of naming games about wokeness that also resonates especially with me. You can prefer Mandel’s definition, Rufo’s, or de Boer’s, or none of them, but what you cannot deny is that all of them are clearly describing the same phenomenon. They are not mistakenly addressing different things. To quibble about this point or that, to argue the broadness or narrowness of the definition, is to cavil in the hopes that people will somehow be hornswoggled into ignoring a widespread and fast-moving cultural phenomenon overtaking American society, or be ground down by the tedium of petty objections into quitting the debate.

 

But the debate does not end merely because it has been quit. Wokeism is a proper term reasonably describing several related epiphenomena regardless of whether we are all in 100 percent agreement on how to exactly to define it. You do not get to escape discussion of the ideological tenets of a worldview — one whose planks can be adopted by its practitioners a la carte or in a complete bundle, but which always involves a central element of moral self-absolution at the expense of The Other — or the policies advanced in its name merely because its contours are blurry. It is real, it is here, and call it what you will, it cannot be ignored anymore.