Don't say "Woke"

Since right-wing politicos appropriated “woke” as a cudgel to bash all things left (Ron DeSantis thought he could ride to the presidency on this strategy), more thoughtful critics, many of them liberal or leftist themselves, have felt a need to apologize whenever they use the term and to acknowledge its limitations. Some have tried to come up with a better word or phrase.

After hearing Lawrence Summers, in an interview, refer to the “social-justice-proclaiming left,” I decided to start collecting these. Here is surely an incomplete list, in no particular order, along with who I think coined the term.

1. The Great Awokening. Matt Yglesias. This might be my favorite, with its historical allusion to religion.

2. Successor Ideology. Wesley Yang. It points to a world-historic intellectual paradigm replacing the Western enlightenment. Yikes!

3. Critical Social Justice. James Lindsey et al. Interested in how he and the coauthors of his book, Cynical Theories, arrived at this term? Read this. Lindsey waged a contentious social media campaign against “cynical theories”—which exposed him to the worst defenders of woke and seems to have unhinged him. He started out as a liberal but his interactions with rabid wokesters turned him into a Trump voter and got him thrown off Twitter.

4. Identity Synthesis. Yasha Mounk coined this term for his recent book, The Identity Trap, explaining the intellectual and historical roots of Woke.

5. Cultural Marxism. Chris Rufo. More below. 

6. Performative Social Justice. I’m not sure who came up with this apt term, but Bates College professor Tyler Austin Harper uses it his critique of woke from the left (it is loud but toothless and not redistributive) in an Atlantic article on campus radicalism.

7. Identitarian Moral Panic. Sam Harris. Harris also likes to add the suffix “-istan” to movements he hates: hence, Trumpistan and Wokistan.

8. Luxury Beliefs. Rob Henderson. This term covers the whole woke spectrum (and then some) that you might encounter on any college campus.

9. Third Wave Antiracism. John McWhorter. In his book Woke Racism,” the title of which could also be considered a term for woke. The book frames the phenomenon as a religion.

10. The Shadow Party. Ruy Tuxiera and John Judis, in their book Where Have all the Democrats Gone. Woke attachment undermines the Democratic Party's support. 

11. Racial Reckoning. For a while, everyone was having one of these. The Washington Post had a link to a standing Racial Reckoning page on its website for quite a while. And on June 11, 2022, the American Nurses Association Assembly, “took historic action to begin a journey of racial reckoning by unanimously voting ‘yes’ to adopt the ANA Racial Reckoning Statement.”  Why is everything a journey these days?

It would be interesting to look at the subtle and not-so-subtle differences among these terms and discuss how they reflect different critiques of the Woke Left.

I’m not doing that here, but for a revealing look at the difference between the anti-woke right and the anti-woke left, listen to this Free Press debate between Mounk and Rufo, the right’s anti-woke tribune who was whispering in Gov. DeSantis’ ear in the lead-up to his presidential run.

Rufo tried to get the world to use the term “Critical Race Theory” or CRT as a substitute for “woke” but then gender identity became more salient than race in Wokistan. More telling was “Cultural Marxism” which he used in his book, America's Cultural Revolution: How the Radical Left Conquered Everything, which tries to paint everyone left of The Donald as a woke radical aiming to destroy civilization. Mounk sees identitarians as a heretical element of the left that betrays its fundamental values and undermines its purpose.