The left will fail if it sees a Biden victory as a success. Woke ideology, embraced not by Biden but by his party, is not a winning electoral strategy.
70 million Americans voted for Trump. Of that group, "Trump underperformed with white men, but made gains with every other demographic. Some 26 percent of his votes came from nonwhite Americans, the highest percentage for a Republican since 1960*."
To understand the woke movement, expanding somewhat on Kaveh's classification of it as unfalsifiable above, is to understand that it is based on a different epistemology than modern liberalism. Kaveh's article suggests that Democratic leaders take the data provided by this election and use it to develop new hypotheses about how to best attract voters in the future. This is the hypothetico-deductive model upon which modern liberal inquiry is based.
Wokism is fundamentally opposed to this, arguing that reality is unknowable and that any accumulated "knowledge" is just power-knowledge used to perpetuate pre-existing systemic inequalities, thereby making the process described above categorically inadmissible. This is the enfant terrible of critical social theory and postmodernism.
Nikole Hannah-Jones and Charles Blow are in damage-control mode as two founding persons of the woke movement: Any white people who are committed to "doing the work" need to redouble their efforts. Millions of BIPOCs ignoring or rejecting the woke narrative is clearly a sign of the severity of the problem rather than the non-existence of it. Everyone, please, play your part: The financial and psychological stability of these two (as well as the Systemic Discrimination Industrial Complex) depends on it.
*From Matt Taibbi's Substack article, "Which is the Real 'Working Class Party' Now?"
That being said, I'm at a loss to understand what Kaveh Shahrooz is suggesting the Democratic Party and Democrats, more generally, do in terms of policy and messaging to mend their woke ways in order to appease those who are antagonistic to the principles of 'woke.'
So we understand what we're talking about, Merriam-Webster defines 'woke' as "aware of and actively attentive to important facts and issues (especially issues of racial and social justice)."
So, Kaveh Shahrooz, if woke ideology is not a winning electoral strategy, as you suggest, how should 'woke' political parties address "important facts and issues (especially issues of racial and social justice)?" Ignore them? Deny them? Oppose and obstruct them as do right wing parties?
A final note, Joe Biden, who raises 'woke' issues, appears to be winning the popular vote in the US by over 4 million.
I'm curious, Kaveh Shahrooz, what aspect of "aware of and actively attentive to important facts and issues (especially issues of racial and social justice)" do you reject or disagree with? What important facts and issues should we not be 'aware of and actively attentive to?'
You have provided a motte definition of woke above, but their bailey doctrine goes much further. This is not solely a straw man created by the right. In Ibram X. Kendi's own words, he wants to make a constitutional amendment that "“would establish and permanently fund the Department of Anti-racism (DOA) comprised of formally trained experts on racism and no political appointees. The DOA would be responsible for preclearing all local, state and federal public policies to ensure they won’t yield racial inequity, monitor those policies, investigate private racist policies when racial inequity surfaces, and monitor public officials for expressions of racist ideas. The DOA would be empowered with disciplinary tools to wield over and against policymakers and public officials who do not voluntarily change their racist policy and ideas.*”
The establishment of such a body (made up of formally trained experts, presumably like Kendi) under which all aspects of government would have to succumb, fits another Merriam Webster definition -- totalitarianism**.
It is Kendi's utopic version wokeness that Kaveh is writing about. The same mythic version that, thankfully, has tens of millions of Americans shaking their heads. The one that grinds the sharp edges of anyone's individuality into a fine dust to be neatly piled with all other members of their assigned group. I can't put it any better than Andrew Sullivan:
"My view is that there is nothing wrong with exploring these ideas. They’re almost interesting if you can get past the hideous prose. And I can say this because liberalism can include critical theory as one view of the world worth interrogating. But critical theory cannot include liberalism, because it views liberalism itself as a mode of white supremacy that acts against the imperative of social and racial justice. That’s why liberalism is supple enough to sustain countless theories and ideas and arguments, and is always widening the field of debate; and why institutions under the sway of Social Justice necessarily must constrain avenues of thought and ideas."
We should be somewhat skeptical of definitions, including Merriam-Webster (even Snopes confirmed the ridiculous and politically expedient edits https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/merriam-webster-barrett-sexual/). Confining the actual goals of social justice (good) with the way they are currently rammed down our collective gullets (bad) will leave us all confused and deluded/ranting, at least from the other side of the argument.
Biden victory is hard from decisive, and is based on comparably thin margins as Trump's in 2016. One could even argue that Trump would have landslided if it was not for Covid and record voter turnout (arguably due to mail-in voting), and outperformed, compared to 2016, in all enthic/racial and gender categories except white men (-5%). Instead of being stuck with Guardian definitions and simplistic categories, why not just look at things outside the inflamed rhetoric space? We might even see the other side aren't mostly mindless zombies nor raging racists, but mostly reasonable people talking past each other.
What would be a definition of 'woke' you would suggest? Or, perhaps, just stipulate one so that terms are defined. Kaveh Shahrooz didn't offer to define 'woke,' just used it as a pejorative.
Thanks very much for engaging with my piece. I'm really enjoying this debate.
I will just say that I did attempt to give a good-faith definition of wokeness on its own terms.
I have defined it as follows: "I believe the woke position boils down to something relatively simple: racism and misogyny are systems and patterns of relationships between individuals and institutions that lead to worse outcomes for historically-disadvantaged racial and gender minorities. Anyone who works to perpetuate this system is a de facto racist or a misogynist, regardless of his or her reasons for doing so. White people and men are racist and misogynistic, respectively, because of the positions of power they occupy. But ethnic minorities and women can also be racist or sexist if they make choices that prop up the patriarchal white supremacist power structure."
At this point into 2020 and Twitter turmoil, my tendency is to take 'what is woke?' to be a bit provocative and argumentative, since we all kind of know what is woke and how it differs from genuine leftists, but I will give it a benefit of the doubt and answer honestly.
How about left authoritarians with ideologically fundamentalist attitudes? The owners of the absolute truth and righteousness who feel it's their place to enforce it mercilessly, at the expense of people's careers and lives? Those who feel their opinion is the only right one and any disagreement, or even questioning it, ends in -ism or -phobia and is to be exorcised, mercilessly and without a question? Those that inflict mind-numbingly ahistorical revisionism, forced wrongthink lectures and struggle sessions on everyone else? Those who ignore science and replace facts and careful consideration with political and ideological positions, and remove any room for nuance and exchange of ideas? Those who feel morally and intellectually superior to everyone else, who virtuously pontificate on Twitter and congregate in mobs, whipped up by their own righteousness, to witch hunt the wrongthinkers? Those who break the most basic rules of liberal democracy and aim to dominate the conversation, via mobbing and intimidation, rather than good faith, genuine dialogue and persuasion?
Imagine an incarnation of religious fundamentalists and cultural gatekeepers, past and present, and replace what they are for/against (in case of woke, replace it with a historically uninformed, and therefore leftist uber-utopian slant), and the rest, like intolerant and authoritarian attitudes and behaviors, are literally indistinguishable?
The above is an extreme definition, yes, and those people are in minority, relatively speaking, but their predominance in the social and legacy media, academia and increasingly other societal institutions, is *not*. They have disproportionate power, where it comes to what and how we teach in schools and universities, dominating the public discourse, and increasingly not only policies but the laws as well, through organized pressure on politicians who capitulate willingly and soon parrot the same mindless tropes. They are still a small minority, and probably will always be, but are as politically active as they are ideologically possessed and intolerant of any questioning, and therefore wield a disproportionate power. And power and moral righteousness feels so good, as we know from religious fanatics.
None of the above are to be confused with genuine liberals and democrats, who are still, thankfully a huge majority, but have been disoriented and cowed into silence.
“To give a tangible example of our achievements, consider how the definition of the word ‘Nazi’ has been successfully broadened to include anyone who voted for Brexit, has ever considered supporting the Conservative Party or who refuses to take the Guardian seriously. Although this is a great victory for the progressive cause, it does mean that there are now more Nazis living in modern Britain than even existed in 1930s Germany.”
― Titania McGrath, Woke: A Guide to Social Justice
The only "explanations" we are currently offered about the ethnic vote going to Trump are "white adjacent racism" and "wish to ride on the coattails of white privilege" . How profoundly 2016-like. Does this sound even a little bit demeaning towards the actual humans who cast their votes?
Zero insight has been achieved, and entire 4 years since then were wasted on screaming at the heavens and shallow moralistic pontifications.
To quote Yasha Mounk: When America becomes majority minority, the Democratic Party is much more likely to sound like Andrew Yang than like AOC. (https://twitter.com/Yascha_Mounk/status/1324763545452556290)
70 million Americans voted for Trump. Of that group, "Trump underperformed with white men, but made gains with every other demographic. Some 26 percent of his votes came from nonwhite Americans, the highest percentage for a Republican since 1960*."
To understand the woke movement, expanding somewhat on Kaveh's classification of it as unfalsifiable above, is to understand that it is based on a different epistemology than modern liberalism. Kaveh's article suggests that Democratic leaders take the data provided by this election and use it to develop new hypotheses about how to best attract voters in the future. This is the hypothetico-deductive model upon which modern liberal inquiry is based.
Wokism is fundamentally opposed to this, arguing that reality is unknowable and that any accumulated "knowledge" is just power-knowledge used to perpetuate pre-existing systemic inequalities, thereby making the process described above categorically inadmissible. This is the enfant terrible of critical social theory and postmodernism.
Nikole Hannah-Jones and Charles Blow are in damage-control mode as two founding persons of the woke movement: Any white people who are committed to "doing the work" need to redouble their efforts. Millions of BIPOCs ignoring or rejecting the woke narrative is clearly a sign of the severity of the problem rather than the non-existence of it. Everyone, please, play your part: The financial and psychological stability of these two (as well as the Systemic Discrimination Industrial Complex) depends on it.
*From Matt Taibbi's Substack article, "Which is the Real 'Working Class Party' Now?"
Matt Taibbi and Glen Greenwald have been exceptional in the last few weeks/months.
The notion of 'woke left' is, of course a recent, right wing pejorative intended to deviantize a group of people. See https://www.theguardian.com/society/shortcuts/2020/jan/21/how-the-word-woke-was-weaponised-by-the-right.
That being said, I'm at a loss to understand what Kaveh Shahrooz is suggesting the Democratic Party and Democrats, more generally, do in terms of policy and messaging to mend their woke ways in order to appease those who are antagonistic to the principles of 'woke.'
So we understand what we're talking about, Merriam-Webster defines 'woke' as "aware of and actively attentive to important facts and issues (especially issues of racial and social justice)."
So, Kaveh Shahrooz, if woke ideology is not a winning electoral strategy, as you suggest, how should 'woke' political parties address "important facts and issues (especially issues of racial and social justice)?" Ignore them? Deny them? Oppose and obstruct them as do right wing parties?
A final note, Joe Biden, who raises 'woke' issues, appears to be winning the popular vote in the US by over 4 million.
I'm curious, Kaveh Shahrooz, what aspect of "aware of and actively attentive to important facts and issues (especially issues of racial and social justice)" do you reject or disagree with? What important facts and issues should we not be 'aware of and actively attentive to?'
You have provided a motte definition of woke above, but their bailey doctrine goes much further. This is not solely a straw man created by the right. In Ibram X. Kendi's own words, he wants to make a constitutional amendment that "“would establish and permanently fund the Department of Anti-racism (DOA) comprised of formally trained experts on racism and no political appointees. The DOA would be responsible for preclearing all local, state and federal public policies to ensure they won’t yield racial inequity, monitor those policies, investigate private racist policies when racial inequity surfaces, and monitor public officials for expressions of racist ideas. The DOA would be empowered with disciplinary tools to wield over and against policymakers and public officials who do not voluntarily change their racist policy and ideas.*”
The establishment of such a body (made up of formally trained experts, presumably like Kendi) under which all aspects of government would have to succumb, fits another Merriam Webster definition -- totalitarianism**.
It is Kendi's utopic version wokeness that Kaveh is writing about. The same mythic version that, thankfully, has tens of millions of Americans shaking their heads. The one that grinds the sharp edges of anyone's individuality into a fine dust to be neatly piled with all other members of their assigned group. I can't put it any better than Andrew Sullivan:
"My view is that there is nothing wrong with exploring these ideas. They’re almost interesting if you can get past the hideous prose. And I can say this because liberalism can include critical theory as one view of the world worth interrogating. But critical theory cannot include liberalism, because it views liberalism itself as a mode of white supremacy that acts against the imperative of social and racial justice. That’s why liberalism is supple enough to sustain countless theories and ideas and arguments, and is always widening the field of debate; and why institutions under the sway of Social Justice necessarily must constrain avenues of thought and ideas."
*https://www.politico.com/interactives/2019/how-to-fix-politics-in-america/inequality/pass-an-anti-racist-constitutional-amendment/
** "centralized control by an autocratic authority."
We should be somewhat skeptical of definitions, including Merriam-Webster (even Snopes confirmed the ridiculous and politically expedient edits https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/merriam-webster-barrett-sexual/). Confining the actual goals of social justice (good) with the way they are currently rammed down our collective gullets (bad) will leave us all confused and deluded/ranting, at least from the other side of the argument.
Biden victory is hard from decisive, and is based on comparably thin margins as Trump's in 2016. One could even argue that Trump would have landslided if it was not for Covid and record voter turnout (arguably due to mail-in voting), and outperformed, compared to 2016, in all enthic/racial and gender categories except white men (-5%). Instead of being stuck with Guardian definitions and simplistic categories, why not just look at things outside the inflamed rhetoric space? We might even see the other side aren't mostly mindless zombies nor raging racists, but mostly reasonable people talking past each other.
What would be a definition of 'woke' you would suggest? Or, perhaps, just stipulate one so that terms are defined. Kaveh Shahrooz didn't offer to define 'woke,' just used it as a pejorative.
Thanks very much for engaging with my piece. I'm really enjoying this debate.
I will just say that I did attempt to give a good-faith definition of wokeness on its own terms.
I have defined it as follows: "I believe the woke position boils down to something relatively simple: racism and misogyny are systems and patterns of relationships between individuals and institutions that lead to worse outcomes for historically-disadvantaged racial and gender minorities. Anyone who works to perpetuate this system is a de facto racist or a misogynist, regardless of his or her reasons for doing so. White people and men are racist and misogynistic, respectively, because of the positions of power they occupy. But ethnic minorities and women can also be racist or sexist if they make choices that prop up the patriarchal white supremacist power structure."
Thanks for this.
At this point into 2020 and Twitter turmoil, my tendency is to take 'what is woke?' to be a bit provocative and argumentative, since we all kind of know what is woke and how it differs from genuine leftists, but I will give it a benefit of the doubt and answer honestly.
How about left authoritarians with ideologically fundamentalist attitudes? The owners of the absolute truth and righteousness who feel it's their place to enforce it mercilessly, at the expense of people's careers and lives? Those who feel their opinion is the only right one and any disagreement, or even questioning it, ends in -ism or -phobia and is to be exorcised, mercilessly and without a question? Those that inflict mind-numbingly ahistorical revisionism, forced wrongthink lectures and struggle sessions on everyone else? Those who ignore science and replace facts and careful consideration with political and ideological positions, and remove any room for nuance and exchange of ideas? Those who feel morally and intellectually superior to everyone else, who virtuously pontificate on Twitter and congregate in mobs, whipped up by their own righteousness, to witch hunt the wrongthinkers? Those who break the most basic rules of liberal democracy and aim to dominate the conversation, via mobbing and intimidation, rather than good faith, genuine dialogue and persuasion?
Imagine an incarnation of religious fundamentalists and cultural gatekeepers, past and present, and replace what they are for/against (in case of woke, replace it with a historically uninformed, and therefore leftist uber-utopian slant), and the rest, like intolerant and authoritarian attitudes and behaviors, are literally indistinguishable?
The above is an extreme definition, yes, and those people are in minority, relatively speaking, but their predominance in the social and legacy media, academia and increasingly other societal institutions, is *not*. They have disproportionate power, where it comes to what and how we teach in schools and universities, dominating the public discourse, and increasingly not only policies but the laws as well, through organized pressure on politicians who capitulate willingly and soon parrot the same mindless tropes. They are still a small minority, and probably will always be, but are as politically active as they are ideologically possessed and intolerant of any questioning, and therefore wield a disproportionate power. And power and moral righteousness feels so good, as we know from religious fanatics.
None of the above are to be confused with genuine liberals and democrats, who are still, thankfully a huge majority, but have been disoriented and cowed into silence.
Thanks for your explanation.
“To give a tangible example of our achievements, consider how the definition of the word ‘Nazi’ has been successfully broadened to include anyone who voted for Brexit, has ever considered supporting the Conservative Party or who refuses to take the Guardian seriously. Although this is a great victory for the progressive cause, it does mean that there are now more Nazis living in modern Britain than even existed in 1930s Germany.”
― Titania McGrath, Woke: A Guide to Social Justice
The only "explanations" we are currently offered about the ethnic vote going to Trump are "white adjacent racism" and "wish to ride on the coattails of white privilege" . How profoundly 2016-like. Does this sound even a little bit demeaning towards the actual humans who cast their votes?
Zero insight has been achieved, and entire 4 years since then were wasted on screaming at the heavens and shallow moralistic pontifications.