If You Don't Know, I'm Certainly Not Going to Tell You!

A goodly number of people on the left, let alone in the Democratic Party, were severely shaken and demoralized by Trump's victory, and I have to admit that I'm one of them.  I find that I have little to say about it, because I don't have any good ideas on how to combat him other than the obvious: support the ACLU and other organizations that have fought him in the past and are ready to fight him now, speak out on specific matters when possible.

Unfortunately, some of the commentators I've looked to before are in disarray, not just from the US version of the center (what is considered "left" in the mainstream and the far right) but to some extent from the actual left. It's no surprise that many people are looking for someone to blame.  I've got a little list myself.  Nor is it a surprise to see a lot of lashing out, almost at random, and as I've seen so many times before, a favored target is The Woke or whatever symbol of infantile leftism is current.  As I've already argued, "woke" is a meaningless epithet, like "politically correct," "CRT," "cancel culture," or "DEI."  All those terms can be defined in meaningful and useful ways, but that's not how they're being used.

I think it's fairly obvious that Kamala Harris didn't lose because she was too "woke."  Supporting horrific Israeli atrocities and dumping on those in her own party who oppose them, cozying up to billionaire donors, and embracing the Cheney crime family don't constitute "wokeness" in any sense the term is being used -- rather the opposite, I would think.  No matter where on the political spectrum you imagine yourself, ignoring or endorsing those tactics is siding with reaction.  That's happening a lot right now, on immigration (where there has never been much daylight between MAGA and the Democratic Party establishment anyway) and birthright citizenship for example. The political scientist Corey Robin has written some very good things on this, but on Facebook rather than on Twitter/X or his own blog; if you use Facebook, I'd recommend following and reading him there. 

But here's a good example of that lashing out.

I don't recall "the left" ever making such a decision.  The only time I heard that line during my half-century working at a Big Ten college campus, it came from upwardly-mobile students of color, who weren't leftists. But yeah, you know, maybe I missed the announcement from Woke / PC Headquarters.

Another possibility is that the "left" (again, not the Kamala Harris campaign or the Democratic establishment) tried to educate people but did it badly.  I've written along those lines for a long time, but there too I was addressing not the left but what I call the Culture of Therapy, which has a lot of power in universities and in the corporate world (also not the left).  Much of the Sixties left went into inventing the culture of therapy, which could mean that there's a deep affinity between radical politics and therapeutic authoritarianism.  That possibility is supported, I think, by a response to the post above, which also has roots in dogmatic left hostility to any political activism outside the labor movement.

This is MAGA-level incoherence and rage, I think.  Shirtless continued:

If "sustained gaslighting campaigns, outright lies," etc. don't work, why has the far right - which relies on those tactics -- gotten as far as it has?  Why did Trump win in November?  I pointed out to Shirtless that pretty much every successful advance in human affairs has been denounced as insane, utopian, bullshit, what have you: the extension of the franchise beyond white property-owning males; the abolition of slavery; religious freedom; allowing various national groups to immigrate to the US; the 40-hour work week and the 8-hour day; social safety-net programs; abortion and contraception; allowing blacks, women, and gays in the military; same sex-marriage, and more.  On the other side, genuinely insane projects like colonizing Mars or planets outside the solar system get a respectful hearing from people hostile to transgenderism.

Shirtless accused me of "survivor bias" in my choice of examples.  That was a clueless or deliberate dodging of the point, which is that his original claim is falsified by many cases, so what made the difference?  I certainly agree that the Culture of Therapy isn't the right approach.  I submit that while top-down measures were sometimes used, several of my examples (such as the 40-hour week and the 8-hour day) were genuinely popular at a grass-roots level and were only considered insane by elites and their toadies.  In other cases, such as increased acceptance of gay people and of same-sex marriage, change occurred because while we are a minority, we are embedded in society at large.  As we became more visible to our friends, families, and co-workers, it became harder to demonize us. The same has been true of "interracial" marriage, and is true of transgender, an even smaller minority but one that is connected to the majority.  Several lefty-liberal commentators argued that GOP candidates below the presidential level played down anti-trans positions in 2024 because their base knew trans people and didn't support the MAGA line.  But I'm critical of trans people and their allies who try to support their claims with misinformation.

(I believe that contrary to much of what I hear, transgender [not necessarily by that name] is intuitively plausible to most people, because most people think of sex/gender in magical terms.  That's apart from [or maybe related to?] the general confusion over sex and gender, which gives us "gender reveal parties" to announce the sex of a fetus, confusing "intersex" with transgender, the historical and transcultural popularity of drag, and so on.  It's no surprise that the Cultural of Therapy got transgender issues wrong: it's a bountiful source of misinformation and sloppy thinking.  But I need to do a separate post about all this.)

Whose job is it to educate you?  There's no single answer.  I was an active educator on sexual orientation at my university for over four decades; I certainly see it as my job to educate others -- not only straights but other gay people. That often put me at odds with Culture of Therapy professionals, but in the long run I think I won against them in important areas, though I had no power to impose my views.  Numerous of our speaker volunteers told me that I'd influenced them on the born-gay question.  At first, they said, they thought I was just being mean (why?) but over time they thought it over and changed their minds.  As a white male, I also consider it my job to educate myself, and I am critical of those who want to put that burden on the Other.  I think that stance is connected to hostility to minorities who do try to educate them.

I'm skeptical of the very claim that the "left" abdicated its role in educating others in the first place.  I think it's an excuse for joining MAGA reaction, which always happens when the right wins an election.  I remember liberals sliding right when Ronald Reagan became president, for example.  I'm not optimistic about the next four years, and one reason is the liberals and leftists who are all too ready to make common cause with Trump.  There are a lot of them.  The rest of us can't rely on them.

I, A Woke, Found Me Here; or, All Things to All Persons

Last week I saw this definition of "woke" by Tyler Austin Harper, an African American academic I read sometimes on Twitter: 

An attitude prioritizing identities related to race, gender, and sexuality over class identities, and which reduces politics to ritualized performances of correct language use and self-examination that are designed to purge one’s inner bigot without requiring material sacrifice.

I understand where he's coming from, but he's wrong.

First, what he's describing here is what used to be called "political correctness," though that was as much of an aggravated misnomer as "woke" is now.  I wonder what it was called before that.  Despite its association with liberals and the left, a fixation on correct terminology over content can be found all over the political spectrum, and probably throughout history.  Today's American Right has its own totems, from "DEI," "CRT," "grooming," to "Merry Christmas," "There are only two genders," and "I'm from the government, and I'm here to help."  And while I understand his formulation, it's composed in language that only an academic could love, and a left-wing academic at that: MAGA would see language like "class identities" as paradigm wokeness.

Second, while he's describing a recognizable attitude, it certainly isn't what Leadbelly meant when he advised his listeners to "stay woke."  Nor, at the other end, is what the Guardian writer I quoted in my previous post on this matter meant by the term.

But woke is at its most powerful, and valuable, when it is lived and not mentioned. When it’s not viewed as a quality to be smug about. Martin Luther King Jr, Steve Biko and Angela Davis didn’t declare themselves activists – they didn’t have to, their actions defined them. Woke people know not to, and need not, describe themselves as woke. 

That's the beauty of such words, I suppose.  They allow you to deride and dismiss people you disagree with -- or think you do, since you don't have to listen to or understand their actual views; with luck, they don't understand their views either, they're just using different shibboleths.  I've often gotten pushback from people I challenged to clarify their positions, because they couldn't do so and didn't see why it mattered.  They thought I was being sophistical, or "showing off," though throwing around "woke" is showing off one's moral superiority if anything is.  I ask them about this when it becomes obvious that they are talking past each other, assuming that they mean the same thing by a key word ("woke," say, or "God") when they don't.  Using these words can produce an illusion of agreement, but it's only an illusion.  True, it's easy to get bogged down while trying to sort out what you mean or believe, but that doesn't seem any worse to me than flailing around in mutual incomprehension because neither of you knows what the other means.

Although Harper is correct to criticize the attitude he does, it's not as if he's the first to do so: he has plenty of predecessors who denounced "political correctness" for decades before him.  Since he's defining a part of the problem as if it were all of the problem, he's coming close to the irrational people Sartre criticized in his essay on anti-semitism, who "know that their statements are empty and contestable; but it amuses them to make such statements: it is their adversary whose duty it is to choose his words seriously because he believes in words. They have a right to play. They even like to play with speech because by putting forth ridiculous reasons, they discredit the seriousness of their interlocutor; they are enchanted with their unfairness because for them it is not a question of persuading by good argument but of intimidating or disorienting. If you insist too much they close up, they point out with one superb word that the time to argue has passed."  The "one superb word" in this case is "woke."

Someone tried to brush aside this problem in another context recently by pointing out that words change their meaning over time.  It's true, they do, but usually by adding new meanings that co-exist with old ones, which leads to the confusion I'm talking about here.  By "woke" do I mean merely "alert," with Leadbelly, or politically and morally enlightened, like the Guardian writer, or virtue-signalling, with Harper?  The most common meaning in the US today, I would argue, is none of these: it's the MAGA meaning of any and all opposition to bigotry and injustice, with (as with "political correctness") the smug assumption that their comfort with bigotry is itself truly correct and woke.  They try to sell their sloganeering as "common sense" rather than "woke," but "common sense" is another virtue-signalling evasion of thinking.  

If Harper thinks that right-wing opposition to "wokeness" has anything to do with a sophisticated class analysis that rejects mere theatrical posturing in favor of a thoughtful, informed stance, he's tripping - but I don't think he took the actual right-wing stance into account.  While I appreciate his take to some extent, I see it as part of the problem, not a step toward a solution.

What Did You Do in the Woke Wars, Grampa?

This is another post I should have written long ago, but unfortunately it's still timely.

The derogatory use of "woke" in our public discourse shows no sign of abating, and Trump's victory probably ensures that it will be with us for a long time to come.  It's another depressing example of the Right's dexterity in seizing on liberal / left slogans and using them more effectively than their predecessors ever managed to do.

Remember "fake news"?  That one came from liberals and the Hillary Clinton campaign, and it was bogus at the time, for reasons the blogger emptywheel explained early on.  Used with some care, the concept might have had some use, but few people (especially in the media) use terms with any care, and it was really just an emotive slogan anyway.  The nominally liberal media that pushed it were in no position to cast the first stone.  Then Donald Trump and MAGA picked it up and ran with it, and here we are.

As for "woke," I always took it for another case of white hipsters adopting (or appropriating) African-American vernacular to feel cool.  When the Right adopted it, liberals and leftists delighted in showing that they couldn't define it, as if that mattered to the Right.  As Jean-Paul Sartre wrote of anti-Semites (quoted here), the Right "know that their statements are empty and contestable; but it amuses them to make such statements: it is their adversary whose duty it is to choose his words seriously because he believes in words."  The fun part was that liberals and leftists couldn't define it either.  They differed widely on where it came from: this writer who dated it to a 2008 Erykah Badu track was typical, but it was soon established that it was a lot older than that.  

Even then, few if any noticed that two meanings of the word were being confused.  The older one, exemplified by the blue singer/songwriter Huddie Ledbetter, who in a 1938 song warned "of the dangers of a racially prejudiced justice system and conclude[d] ‘best stay woke’."  In context, he was close to the literal meaning of the word: you're in a dangerous place, so stay alert.  That sense quickly expanded to the more metaphorical one of "awakened" or "enlightened," as in the Guardian article I linked to before:

But woke is at its most powerful, and valuable, when it is lived and not mentioned. When it’s not viewed as a quality to be smug about. Martin Luther King Jr, Steve Biko and Angela Davis didn’t declare themselves activists – they didn’t have to, their actions defined them. Woke people know not to, and need not, describe themselves as woke.

I noticed that most quotations from people like King didn't use the vernacular "woke," but "awake," and that makes a difference.  If white progressives used "awake," they wouldn't be allusively tying themselves to the Civil Rights movement, which I presume is the reason they use "woke" instead.  No matter who uses it, I object to the stance that someone is awake or enlightened, because it postulates that once you've awakened, opened your eyes, etc., you don't need to learn or think any more, and nobody can make such a claim. Right-wingers are also fond of this conceit, by the way: many social-media posts begin with the exhortation to WAKE UP, AMERICA! regardless of the political position of the poster.

In a fair-to-middling essay on the pejorative use of "woke," Nathan Robinson wrote:

If we are to make progress in having sensible discussions about the problems with contemporary social justice activism, we’re not going to get there with an imprecise “boo word” like woke. That leads in the direction of absurdity, like Tucker Carlson’s condemnation of “woke M&M’s” and a Wall Street Journal columnist suggesting that Silicon Valley Bank had “gone woke” by having a Black board member. I cannot imagine any sensible discussion in which the pejorative use of woke plays any constructive role. 

I largely agree, but I would add that the positive use of "woke" doesn't play any constructive role in sensible discussions of important issues either.  It's demagogic in the way Patricia Miller-Roberts warned against: it postulates an Us/Them division between people, based on the assumption that We are enlightened and have the answers.  This sort of self-stroking gets a discussion off on the wrong foot from the beginning.  True, people have epiphanic experiences that affect how they see conflicts and controversies, but such experiences should mean the beginning of hard rethinking, rather than its end. To quote Sartre again:

The rational man seeks the truth gropingly, he knows that his reasoning is only probable, that other considerations will arise to make it doubtful; he never knows too well where he's going, he is "open," he may even appear hesitant But there are people who are attracted by the durability of stone. They want to be massive and impenetrable, they do not want to change: where would change lead them? This is an original fear of oneself and a fear of truth.  And what frightens them is not the content of truth which they do not suspect but the very form of the true -- that hinge of indefinite approximation.  It is as if their very existence were perpetually in suspension. They want to exist all at once and right away.  They do not want acquired opinions, they want them to be innate; since they are afraid of reasoning, they want to adopt a mode of life in which reasoning and research play but a subordinate role, in which one never seeks but that which one has already found, in which one never becomes other than what one originally was ...

Much of what passes for public discussion involves trying to "own" the other side: saying or writing something that definitively schools, owns, destroys, shuts down the opposition.  Owning makes for catchy memes, but it usually turns out that the opposition, like a monster in a horror movie, is not actually destroyed but, now that your back is turned, is on its feet for another shot at you. People are always surprised by that, for some reason.

A better way (not the best, I'm open to suggestions) to deal with accusations of wokeness is to ignore them and move on to addressing substance.  I try not to be too attached to particular words, especially slogan-words.  The trouble with Nathan Robinson's call to stop using "woke" as a pejorative is that he issued it in his own avowedly left-wing magazine, Current Affairs.  That's like denouncing atheism in the pages of Christianity Today.  True, some on the left use "woke" as a pejorative, but if they all stopped today, the Right (and not only the MAGA Right) would continue to use it, happily confident that they were owning the libs.  As I've said before, fussing about the Right's provocations only tells them that they've hit their target; it's worse than ineffective, it's encouragement.

P.S. For more on "woke," see this, written several days later.

You $@#!&% Kids Get the #%&! Off My Mother#@%&* Lawn!

I keep worrying that I'm getting old, partly because I am, but you know what I mean.  These two tweets this morning from someone I follow, who will remain anonymous for now:

If y’all can name me five poor or working people that give half a fuck what [first name of prominent journalist] fucking [surname of prominent journalist] has to say about anything I’ll kiss your ass.

Got grown motherfuckers on the left "[first name of prominent journalist] you're being dishonest!!" Like the fuck did y'all expect? Quit pining for the approval of these limp dicks and damn sure quit assuming best intentions in their coverage.

These were in response to a Bernie Sanders tweet chiding the journalist for spreading misinformation about Medicare for All.  Now, my first impulse was to ask what I would have to do for them not to kiss my ass.  (First prize, one week in Philadelphia; second prize, two weeks in Philadelphia.)  My second reaction was that while they had a point -- one should have a decent skepticism about the corporate media and their works -- at the same time it is perfectly legit to point out when corporate media figures promulgate falsehoods about important issues.  I'm a working person, and I give at least a quarter of a fuck what anchorcritters with vast platforms have to say about such things, because thanks to their elite positions they influence what most people believe.

Imagine asking, say, who cares what Donald Trump has to say about anything?  No sensible person would take Trump's word on anything, or pine for his approval or assume best intentions in his ravings.  But I don't think Sanders was doing any of these things.  He was trying to correct misinformation that might, either directly or through trickle-down, affect poor or working people's opinions of a good system for providing health care in the United States.

My third reaction was, as noted, to fret that I'm getting old in a bad way (oh no, I'm sounding like my mother!), because it bothers me when people think that putting a bunch of fucks, motherfuckers, and shit into their discourse makes it somehow more persuasive -- or makes me pine for their approval, assume their best intentions, or believe that they're commentators I should take seriously.

This person doesn't always resort to naughty words in their Twitter output, so I've been trying to figure out why they did it here.  I listened to one of their podcasts once: it was heavily peppered with fucks. The participants were mostly male; the one (?) female joined in, but it was, like Chapo Trap House, basically a boys' club in manner and content.  So my first guess is that they think they sound Street, which incidentally is cultural appropriation: white kids trying to sound like black kids.

At one time saying "fuck" a lot could have been defended as breaking a taboo.  I remember how thrilling it was when Jefferson Airplane sang "Up against the wall motherfuckers," on a major-label album, but that was almost fifty years ago. And it's a lousy song.  Ditto for the Sex Pistols, forty years ago, though they did it better.  Certainly many people would still regard "fuck" as taboo, but not the audiences this person is addressing.  If anything, it's conformist, safe, boring. yet irritating. The two can go together: think of a mosquito buzzing around your head when you're trying to sleep.

I could probably overlook the fucks on the grounds that it's a generational thing, if not for all the British rock stars older than I am who also season their speech with fucks.  As the examples of Pete Townshend, Jefferson Airplane, Johnny Rotten and others suggest, this kind of talk is now old people talk: your grandma talking salty.  When certain people misuse "literally," I wonder what word they use when "literally" is the right word to use.  And when wannabe Internet celebrities talk nasty for street cred or fitting in with the cool hipster guys, I wonder what they'll do when "fuck" loses what is left of its obscenity.  It still has it in boy culture, of course, when somebody tries to be macho by saying "Fuck the Republicans," and that's not a sign of wokeness either.  It's the opposite of being edgy, bold, independent.  It's a way of showing you belong.  And much of the time it's a substitute for substance, as in the tweets I quoted here.