You Can't Kill Woke Because You Still Can't Define It
Month nine (year 30? 50? 100?) of the Trump presidency, and already a number of books are coming out about how woke is over now thanks to the good work Trump has done to stamp it out, and given the timeline of publishing, any book that’s coming out now was probably written by February.
Holy shit, I wish I could write a book that fast. I’m sure they are comprehensive and studiously researched deep analyses of a complex social phenomenon. I’m sure they pass a much higher bar of rigor than they demand from the academic social sciences. I’m sure they’re not just hastily slapped together recycled reactionary grievance slop they rearranged to sound like brand new sentences.
But anyway, thank God woke is dead. Thank God references to the Enola Gay were removed from government websites because there is now zero tolerance for gay shit in America. Thank God American taxpayer money is being redirected to costly but necessary projects like saving Americans from gay crosswalks.
But alas, there is dissent in the ranks. Some are skeptical that woke truly is dead, or whether it’s lying dormant. The tweet replies on Piers Morgan’s book announcement in particular are a string of incredulous backlash: How can you say woke is dead when Zionism still exists? When media still exists? When there are still trans people? When there are still black people?
Quillette founder Claire Lehmann can affirm: Rumors of the death of woke have been greatly exaggerated. In an article on September 2 she argues that woke isn’t dead, it’s just shapeshifted into a new form: Communism.
I had to do a record-scratch double-take on this one because I was sure that blanket-describing everything to the left of Reagan as full-blown communism was what they’ve been doing this whole time, but nope. According to Lehmann, whatever the original woke was—she seems to define it as “left-liberalism,” which she further reduces to… trans people, just trans people, in sports, schools, public, anywhere—that’s all finished now, but what we now have is communism. And she justifies this by citing the existence of New York City mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani, who is brown, and a total communist, and also, she hints, maybe a terrorist?
She also, then, describes support for Palestine as being part of this New Woke. Which is weird, isn’t it? Because just earlier, we saw a guy who says Zionism is woke. And Palestine isn’t communist, though Lehmann groups it under that umbrella, and goes further to say that Alex Jones and Candace Owens are woke because they rail against globalist elites, and anyone who criticizes Wall Street elites is woke and communist too, because that’s capitalism. She also says fighting climate change is woke, just in general.
Uh-oh, do you feel it? Do you feel this same goddamn carousel spinning around again? Do you feel the madness setting in? Do you feel the urge to apply clown makeup and dance on the streets of Gotham? We’ve been here before, friends. We’ve always been here.
Woke cannot die because nobody can define woke, and nobody can define it because it doesn’t fucking exist. It is a word that people use to broadly group together every idea they don’t agree with, in order to package it as some sort of singular worldview and therefore describe the world as a simple binary.
Before you object—I know that “woke” used to mean something when it was coined by the African American community. I’m only referring to the word that was stolen from that community and now largely used as a pejorative weapon against it. It’s a different word, now, spelled and pronounced the same but with a different meaning. A homophone, at this point, like “light” and “light.”
I wrote an entire thing about this last year, before people were pronouncing the death of woke. I wanted to build a definition to springboard off so that I could write about the extent to which “woke” is or is not a legitimate issue. I could not find two sources that agreed with each other. Every “anti-woke” personality who claims authority on the matter has a different idea of what it is. I don’t mean they quibble on the details, I mean a completely different idea.
A lot of “anti-woke” people think the crux of it, if not almost the entirety of it, has to do with transgender people. And okay, I get it, a lot of these guys think that damn near every problem is caused by trans people. Matt Taibbi thinks that trans people are to blame for the quasi-religious obsession that techbros like Sam Altman have with AI, and the problems that AI is causing in society, because—get this, you’ll love it—the prefix “trans” appears in both “transgender” and “transhumanist,” and “The same utopian instinct to conquer nature is implicit in both ideas.”
But I digress. I found people saying woke means grooming gangs. I found people saying woke means hypocrisy. I found people saying woke means un-Americanism. Someone said Al Qaida is woke. Freddie deBoer says it’s Black Lives Matter, Critical Race Theory, and calls to defund the police. Richard Hanania says it’s essentially compelled speech and DEI.
What’s important to pull away here is that there is no authority one what woke is. On a lot of topics, you can refer to an expert to get a definition of something (and I understand that most anti-wokes will probably object to this, because trusting experts is woke). If you ask someone what, for example, the Stoics believed, or the Cynics believed, or the Jungians believe, or the Nazis believe(d?), or the Thatcherites believe, you’ll find subtle differences between the theorists involved but there is some core to it and you would defer to an expert to pin this down.
There is no professor of wokeism; no degree, no field. Every person who says they know what woke means is equally authoritative on the matter.
I had people respond to my piece last year, The Real Origin of Woke, telling me “oh, but you’re missing the forest for the trees, woke is clearly just extreme progressivism!”
Sorry angel, not buying it. Sure, you can pull a lot of things together with that net, but a huge chunk of the stuff that gets popularly grouped in with “woke” is just bland mainstream liberalism. If you’re throwing in Islamism, that’s a far-right ideology that you don’t happen to agree with because it’s the wrong religion. If you’re throwing in climate change or vaccines, that’s an apolitical scientific consensus that you don’t happen to agree with because you don’t like it.
Every “anti-woke” essay that’s ever been published in general mainstream conservative grievance publications like Quillette or The Spectator reads pretty much the same to me. “Woke” is eternally this amorphous “other” that cannot be defined, but everybody knows what it means. And every anti-woke personality from all across the political spectrum, from deBoer to Hanania, will tell you that you’re either an idiot or insincere if you don’t know what this word means, even while they disagree with each other.
Anyway, the crux of Claire Lehmann’s Quillette piece is that woke was supposed to have died, but somehow it feels like it’s still in charge, because the right-wing are still really unhappy about a lot of stuff. To define woke, she links to a Wall Street Journal piece by Eric Kaufmann in which Kaufmann defines it as “an ideology of equal outcomes and emotional-harm protection for minorities,” but also cancel culture, the transgenders, and decline of respect for the Confederacy. So, another grab-bag.
Lehmann says:
Which brings us back to Mamdani. The son of a postcolonial academic and a filmmaker, he is, in every sense, the next generation of wokeness. He combines the cultural fluency of elite progressivism with the language of bottom-up economic grievance, bridging two worlds that rarely align. As al-Gharbi points out in his book, until now, wokeness has been largely an elite project, preoccupied with identity issues of race, sexuality, and gender, as opposed to economic inequality. But if this movement mobilizes the working class and the downwardly mobile middle classes, it will no longer be confined to the campus or cultural niches. On the contrary, it will ignite into a truly mass movement.
Congratulations, lady, you just discovered socialism! Focusing on economic inequality? That’s called socialism! It’s not a brand new type of woke that mutated out of the old one like a drug resistant bacteria that escaped Trump’s ban on naming ships after gay people. Mamdani didn’t invent it, you’ve been bitching about Bernie Sanders for a decade. It’s the exact thing that American conservatism was built on complaining about.
She pushes this idiot theory she has about how this supposedly brand new interest in wealth inequality has bubbled up from the existence of the internet and social media, and now the typical teenage layabout can see that celebrities exist, and so, anxiety about wealth inequality stems from ordinary people getting jealous about Taylor Swift’s private jet. Hilariously, Lehmann recognizes the steeply dropping rate of home ownership throughout the Western world, but rather than recognizing that this, in itself, is a problem, she instead seems to write it off as capitalism working as intended (I agree) and blames TikTok for teaching kids that they deserve a roof over their head. Entitled little shits.
The piece frames a discussion about and response to the so-called “Centre for Heterodox Social Science at Buckingham,” a British conservative think tank that looks like a higher-brow Prager U, and which seems to acknowledge that nobody knows what woke is with a hilarious manifesto they wrote to establish a Woke Studies field. They speak about woke exactly how we speak about the Dancing Plague of 1518—this weird illness that came out of nowhere a few years ago and ripped through civilization until Donald Trump mercifully cured it (bleach injections and ivermectin perhaps) and now we need to study its corpse like the bodies at Roswell.
Many questions have already been raised. Is wokeness a unique development of the 2010s, or do its roots lie earlier, in the 1960s or 1970s? Is it a recurring historical phenomenon, appearing in many periods, or something new? Do people adopt it out of self-interest and status competition, or from true belief and quasi-religious conviction? Did it emerge spontaneously, or was it the goal of a campaign of deliberate infiltration? Was it downstream of law, or of culture? We call for a range of scholars and scientists, diverse in methods and viewpoints, to shed light on this consequential development.
It's an extremely common phenomenon among academics who refer to themselves as “heterodox” that they dismiss out of hand so much of the already established research in their own field as “left-wing propaganda” that any new emergent phenomenon appears inexplicable and haunted. It so cute and on the nose that they don’t rule out conspiracy to explain it. “Why did everyone in Minneapolis get so angry in 2020? Demonic possession? Fluoride?”
How totally unsurprised I am that the signatories include half the authors in the book of whiny scientists/sex pests I reviewed (but never read).
But look, guys, if you want to give me a job with tenure, I’ve already solved this for you. I know what woke is. I can’t explain it as an external phenomenon, though, because, as I’ve hopefully now established, nobody can. It can only be explained via internal psychology, of you.
Actually, Claire Lehmann does a decent enough job of explaining it, herself, via attributes that she projects onto wokeness:
this worldview organizes reality into a binary of oppressors and the oppressed, assumes that social outcomes are driven by powerful structural forces, and assigns moral virtue to “dismantling” those forces.
That is exactly what “anti-woke” people are doing. Collapsing all of reality into a binary of “things that I agree with” and “things that I don’t.”
Or, I will grant you a more complex theory: Since wokeness is almost exclusively attributed to the left, and anti-woke liberals do exist, there are a binary of things you don’t agree with—woke is all the stuff to the left of you that you don’t agree with, and the stuff on the right is just the right. (People already on the right generally don’t think that there is anything “to the right of them” since “the right” is just what they call “the correct ideas” so everything on the right they don’t like is actually leftist. That’s why they call Hitler a leftist and deny the Southern Strategy and party switch, etc.)
When everything you don’t agree with is just one bloc of ideas with one common cause, driven by one common motive toward one common goal, then it is much easier to fight that thing.
The left does this too, about the right! I’ve always insisted, to great objection, that not everything on the right of center is fascism or Nazism. You can still fight it if it isn’t. You can more accurately fight it if it isn’t. “Woke” operates very similarly to the overdiagnosis of Nazism to right-wing positions. It’s a word that once had a specific meaning but is now broadly applied to everything.
For woke, this is how you get such a huge confusion of varying ideologies that you’re trying to shoehorn into the same phenomenon, even as they keep pushing each other out. It’s how you can get far-right people like Nick Fuentes calling far-right Trump woke for siding with Israel, and Trump calling Fuentes woke for siding against it. Pro- and anti-vaccine people calling each other woke.
I think, though, what’s fairly unique in the era of right-wing populism and Trumpism is that people have forgotten that they will always have an opponent, and that we kind of actually need an opponent. A liberal and a conservative major political party has been the tradition in Western democracies forever and they have mostly been able to work together from within a framework of norms, knowing this duality is pretty much inescapable. I’m not saying it hasn’t been really rocky.
The new mission under the Trumpist right is that everything they don’t agree with must be eliminated, permanently, and that this goal is possible. The illusion that this constitutes one thing, one single cancer, called “woke,” labors under two primary misconceptions: One, that everybody on their own side of politics has exactly the same list of grievances, and two, that there will ever come a day when they have no grievances.
And so you get this new disastrous and chaotic situation in the USA where a clueless billionaire is hired to unleash a teenage meme team crack squad into the federal government to cut out the cancer. But they can’t find it, because they can’t define it, and it keeps changing, because they keep finding new stuff they disagree with. So they keep cutting deeper and deeper, removing more flesh.
So now, what? DEI is illegal, transgender people are scared to leave their homes, universities get defunded if they teach that slavery was bad, companies aren’t allowed to change their logos, and you can get deported for having a tattoo. Woke is dead, right? But oh, no!! Now there’s a socialist running for mayor! Someone just shot a CEO dead in midtown Manhattan! South Park is making fun of Trump’s dick! Courts won’t unseal the Epstein files! Astronomers warn of a near-Earth object within the orbit of the moon! It’s woke! Woke is back! It’s alive, it’s mutated! Don Quixote strikes giant after giant but they just won’t fall! Lady Macbeth scrubs her hands until she sees the white of her knucklebones but they won’t get clean!
And so this absurd charade continues forever and ever. The anti-woke crowd see woke as a hydra that keeps growing new heads, but in reality, it’s a label they keep pinning to windmills because they’re afraid of having nothing left to break. I’m in favor of killing woke. Grow up and kill the concept out of your brain.
Hey by the way I’m writing a book about how reactionary geeks in the internet era got entwined with this anti-wokeness crusade and wound up accelerating the Western world toward Trumpism, shattering the precarious right/left truce and deciding to burn it all down instead. The working title is How Geeks Ate the World and I’m going to be dropping parts of the draft into this very newsletter as the project comes along—but only for paid subscribers. A new chapter is coming out this very weekend! So if you want to read along in real time, please consider subscribing. Otherwise I’ll be keeping you in the loop. Check it out here:
S Peter Davis
