By now, people are quite understandably confused
The Modern Left has no analysis of Woke, because it sees Woke as the natural order. It only has analyses of anti-Wokeism.
The Conservative analysis of Woke is that it is "anti-freedom," a form of petty gangsterism, or a weaponisation of victim groups. It believes this can be defeated by embracing the groups involved -- Blacks, trans, whatever -- harder than the Woke "grievance mongers." This is why the number of gay and non-White commentators on the Right is higher than ever.
The Dissident Right analysis of "the Woke" is a little deeper and more interesting. It essentially ties it to the Frankfurt School and what, they claim, is a chain of causation reverberating through the universities, from where it enters into a mutually beneficial alliance with Big Business. (Notice how this feeds into the old Neo-Nazi trope of Jews on the Left and Jews on the Right combining to subvert society.)
Here is the leading Dissident Right intellectual Paul Gottfried laying it out in a recent Chronicles article:
"[Marx's] historical materialism, however, was overhauled in interwar Germany, as the Frankfurt School and its Critical Theory came onto the scene. This new iteration of the left developed what has been called “cultural Marxism,” and it defined as a pressing socialist task the reconstruction of the bourgeois Christian family. This reconstruction was supposedly necessary to stand firm against the rampant spread of fascism. Among Frankfurt School theorists, attempts were also made to assimilate Marxism to a variant of Freudian psychology; and in Herbert Marcuse’s work, Marxist socialism was fused with the vision of polymorphic sexuality."
America's corporate elites then jump on board because why wouldn't they?!
If capitalists pour their money into Black Lives Matter, critical race theory, and LGBT, it is not because they are Marxists. Rather, they represent what Pedro Gonzalez characterizes as “the counterrevolution of the left.” Citibank, Disneyworld, Coca Cola, Pfizer, etc. belong to the privileged class in woke America, and it is the predominantly white working class who will pay by taxes for the woke regime in which our corporate giants are invested.
Yes, it's all a plot by the super rich to keep the hard-working (usually straight White) man down. Just wave off awkward data points:
Even the Biden administration’s proposed hike in corporate tax rates from 21 percent to 28 percent will likely impact wage earners far more than the upper 5 percent of the income scale.
And what are these evil billionaires doing it all for? Why, total equality, of course. They apparently can't get enough of that shit:
The end goal of wokeism is universal equality, which is to be brought about through a universal state. It opposes particularity, at least in the Western white world, and works to obliterate anything that is specifically Western. Indeed, wokeism offers the example of a thoroughly unhinged left that Communist governments and parties, as well as the Cold War in the West, all kept in check.
Ideas are like machines: the more complex they are, the more likely they are to break down, and the typical Dissident Right analysis of Wokeism is clearly a Heath Robinson monstrosity of contorted connections and tortured causation. It is self-evidently contradictory and Jewish intellectuals, like Gottfried, who push this analysis, may have unwittingly internalised centuries of Jewish oppression in order to do so.
But laughing at the DR's analytical failings doesn't answer the pressing question of what exactly Wokeism is. So, I'll do that here.
First of all, it is a loose, ill-defined, heavily emotionalised term, and is therefore probably dysfunctional to begin with.
But if we persist with it, we can probably say that it is the idea that certain marginal groups have to be protected from discrimination even to the point of overcompensating into "affirmation" and non-criticism. Thus Wokeism is quite stifling of free speech and comedy (which is why we haven't had any for the last 20 years).
But if we persist with it, we can probably say that it is the idea that certain marginal groups have to be protected from discrimination even to the point of overcompensating into "affirmation" and non-criticism. Thus Wokeism is quite stifling of free speech and comedy (which is why we haven't had any for the last 20 years).
But why is there a perceived need in the modern West to do something as counterintuitive as this?
It is for the exact opposite of the reason that the typical Diss-Righter says, namely the so-called attack on the family. Wokeism is not an attack on the family. It is instead a reaction to the decay of the family and an attempt to compensate for it.
It is for the exact opposite of the reason that the typical Diss-Righter says, namely the so-called attack on the family. Wokeism is not an attack on the family. It is instead a reaction to the decay of the family and an attempt to compensate for it.
The decay of the family can be expressed as falling marriage rates, increasing divorce rates, rising incelism, and plummeting fertility. All these factors are an expression of rising living standards and the economic security that all working class people have craved and striven towards since the Tolpuddle Martyrs got their come-uppance.
These factors create in formerly White, family-based societies the main client groups of wokeism, namely increasing numbers of non-Whites and the gender-confused. Gender-confused, in my view, not only includes LGBTQ+ people, but incels, single career women, and even the sexually promiscuous poor; although most of the spotlight seems to be on drag queens and transgenders, possibly because this is better trigger bait in our attention driven economy:
You haven't stopped thinking about Budweiser beer for the last two weeks, have you?
I have already written about how one of the key components of Wokeism, namely Anti-Racism, is just the "Gleichschaltung of the Low Fertility Society," namely a coordinating, unifying, or harmonising principle:
Each state, civilisation, empire, and political entity needs to find a principle of unity and harmony that addresses its own unique characteristics and thus strengthens it. This is exactly what "anti-racism" does for the West, which can be defined as a collection of interlinked societies that unwittingly promote low fertility through their common values of individual liberty and GDP prioritization.These latter values can't help but lead to falling birth rates (something that doesn't need to be explained in detail here), and this invariably leads onto mass immigration, which, of course, is highly socially divisive.
In a similar way, radical transgender inclusivity (and the general tolerance of sexual dysphoria/degeneracy that it is a proxy for) is also part of the Gleichschaltung necessary for a society based on the affluence and individual freedom that the masses have always craved.
In its essence Wokeism is a paradoxical expression of the popular will. The main political battleground will not be the question of whether to have it or abolish it, but simply how to modulate it and integrate it into the modern West.
In its essence Wokeism is a paradoxical expression of the popular will. The main political battleground will not be the question of whether to have it or abolish it, but simply how to modulate it and integrate it into the modern West.
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I see upperclass people vowing to woke and lowerclass people throwing a fit. thats all i need to know.
ReplyDelete"Wokism", at least with regards to sexual revolution stuff, was inevitable. Most conservatives after the 60s were Girondins who supported aspects of the sexual revolution but wanted to revolution to go no further. In so doing, they lost the internal logical consistency of the trads. If "conservatives" like Saul Bellow or Rush Limbaugh could violate traditional sexual norms in order to achieve self-actualization of their longings (by getting divorced and remarried 5 times) why couldn't gays get married or women go to med school and not have kids? It just took a few decades for the inertia from the pre-revolution days to wear off. Even David French, nominally an orthodox Calvinist, is guilty of this. He is a big "Game of Thrones" fan. Any real conservative would want that show banned as obscene. You can have the Hays Production Code or "woke", the middle ground is an illusion.
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