I once sort of unknowingly signed off on a “job lot” of opinions and positions.. I was in an intentional group that evolved/devolved in a direction that I realized (sort of out from under me so to speak) wasn’t about individual liberty and freedom, and revealed itself to be quite a load of group think and authoritarian in nature. I was the only one that left that group and to this day they maintain the position that I have to embrace certain beliefs in order to be “part of the community”…(I moved away).
Learning how to maintain my personal liberal values AND find belonging has proven elusive for me given my personal experience.
I think part of it is that such a large part of the conservative/Right establishment has come to define itself as anti-woke and must now, to perpetuate itself, find more and more things to call “woke”. It is ironic because I think the fight against racism morphed in the same way and needed to keep finding things to call “racist”.
This is exactly right. A Culture War is never won; the side with the momentary advantage inevitably pursues an increasingly sadistic witch hunt until they overplay their hand and the momentum shifts—often violently—back to the other side.
Helen, thank you for this!! I read the book you worked on with Lindsey and Bogosian years ago and it gave me the understanding and tools to walk many of my friends off the woke plank. In the past couple of years I’ve come to find the anti-woke movement moving further and further right. Under the new administration and emboldened by the far and Christian right, the movement is becoming not only unrecognizable, it’s becoming everything I found concerning about woke in the first place!! It’s wild to me that I used to stand against anti-racism only to be called a racist and now that I stand against banning everything that concerns me I’m being called a communist.
It's a good essay. I would only add a few points. First, don't underestimate the power of different priors, especially when it comes to the primary motivations of individuals. Take Elon Musk, for example. It's clear that he's pretty much an absolutist civic libertarian (and economic libertarian, although this is less relevant), except when it comes to his own self-interest. The only qualification is that he only cares about free expression in the following order: America, the Anglosphere, the West, and the rest of the world.
Second, don't underestimate fear as a motivation. Humans devolve to the level of chimps in the face of authoritarianism directed against them in relatively short order. Although the response is not likely to be as aggressive as a group of chimps encountering a troop within the borders of their territory, it's comparable. There will be an urge towards groupishness and there will be an urge to consolidate said groupishness in an ideological sense. When threatened, humans have a strong urge for social cohesion and against taboos. There is some pretty good literature on Parasite Stress and the ways in which it creates nascent authoritarianism. The pandemic was very illustrative in this respect, especially in terms of the ways in which society rejected the vastly superior Great Barrington approach, which, before the pandemic, had formed the basis of all epistemologically-based pre-pandemic planning.
Third, don't take it personally if many people within the anti-woke coalition come to radically different conclusions to you on current events. What you see as authoritarian is their perception that they are responding to an existential threat. Who is right on the subject remains to be seen, but they believe the West has been subjected to state indoctrination through education for decades, and the Long March through the institutions is all but complete. They are probably right.
Let's look at an example. Marriage and the family. I don't think many Westerners would argue that women should stay in abusive relationships, but to what extent has personal freedom been prioritised over liberty (the balance of freedom and responsibility). The sensible approach, the one that prioritises the children over the married couple, would be to remain together and cohabiting if it's at all possible for the couple to institute a civil impersonal/business relationship, aimed at raising the children into healthy young adults.
We know that divorce is worse for children than losing a parent. Both parents could be free to discreetly date and have affairs, provided it didn't encroach on the home life. My point would that this type of discussion isn't even on the radar. For most of human history and in most human cultures it's a given that children are prioritised over their parents. In times of hardship, even in hunter gatherer times, adults went short of food whilst children were fed. But the Left has indoctrinated the culture to the extent that the kneejerk retort to these sorts of issues is the standard refrain about 'women being trapped in a loveless marriage'.
Sure, the practice didn't really begin to end in the West until about the end of the 19th century. But we have to ask the question- why? Because parents were already emotionally invested in their older children, and made a decision to prioritise them over a newborn with whom they had little attachment.
Children are still being murdered in this scenario. It's hardly a case of selfless ancients vs selfish individualist moderns. Modern divorced parents don't want any of their children to go hungry (And it is more commonly fathers who give up on contact and renege on child support while mothers more often have custody)
I mean your implication here seems to be "sure they let some of their children starve to death but at least they were both present for the one they let live which is preferable to modern divorce"
I'm not arguing that- and in point of fact parents who engaged in such practices in the 19th century actually had more than four children to support, and it was a choice between family starvation and the death of a single child.
Anyway, my point was about the discussion, not the conclusions- and I did preface my original statement with the comment that nobody would expect a woman to endure an abusive relationship, by which I don't just mean physical abuse.
Here's the thing. Two parent families, at the community level, are more important than any other factor including wealth and parental income for determining the social mobility and income levels of children. Even quality of education and educational investment are less important than fathers at a community level, as demonstrated by the work of Raj Chetty.
Similarly fatherless boys commit almost all crime, between 85% to 90%.
I am not arguing that we should impose decisions on women. I'm not even arguing that we should stigmatise them. The evidence shows it's a community dysfunction which arises when the fatherhood rates of male teenage peer groups falls below an 80% to 60% level.
But we shouldn't lie to young women. We should at least tell young women if they choose to be unmarried rather than married when having kids, then they and their children are 15 times more likely to be subject to physical or sexual violence. We should tell them that, on balance, replacement fathers make terrible fathers, because they simply won't overrule the mother when she's being overprotective and not letting her children encounter low impact risks which might bring a few scabs and tears, but build children into healthy resilient adults. We should also warn them that very young women aren't particularly good at picking mates, because they haven't yet learned to distinguish confidence from competence.
And fathers matter to girls as well. They just have less impact on careers and social mobility because kids seem to mould themselves from available same-sex role models, but a father in the home significantly reduces the chances that a girl will become an addict, become homeless, engage in cutting or suicidal behaviour.
My point would be that it's more important that people in society are informed as to the empirical truth and potential risks, than making people feel better about potentially bad decisions they've made in the past, or giving them excuses to make bad decisions in the future.
We also rob people of mitigation strategies. For example, children with fathers in the home live longer for genetic reasons. Fathers in the home increase telomere length. But it highly likely that the frequent presence or visits of male siblings of the mother or father could potentially help restore these 5 to 7 years (pure guess) of lost life, and help avoid later life health problems which arise from related issues like hypertension.
The other issue was industrialisation. In a material sense, industrialisation eventually drastically improved the material lot of humans, as well as a whole host of other life metrics, like life expectancy, infant mortality and malnutrition, but the move from rural to urban disrupted community. It was worst in England, where the rapidity of the change even meant most food culture was lost, but in the preindustrial period there was an extent to which subpar fathers and husbands would be dealt with by the other men in the community, and quickly corrected, expelled or even eliminated.
Finally, there is the luxury belief level. The highest stable long-lasting marriage rates are found amongst wealthy conservatives, very closely followed by wealthy liberals and progressives. When the wealthy Left extolls they 'don't believe in marriage' they don't mean themselves. They still want to find an ideal husband or wife, have the picture book wedding and the two parent home in which to raise their kids. They mean they don't believe in marriage for the great unwashed, because they don't want to appear judgemental of other people's choices.
The problem is that the bottom quintiles of the economic spectrum need marriage far, far more than wealthy people, who have the resources and family to remediate divorce and single parenthood.
It's maddening to me how few people seem to realize that this is what democracy and freedom are supposed to look like. How can we have freedom to believe, think and speak for ourselves if we don't ally with people we disagree with to fight for our common right to disagree? I think similarly when I see people mock Republican infighting, when that infighting is precisely the hallmark of how a robust democracy is _supposed_ to work. That is healthy. A party where everyone marches in lockstep is not.
Finding common cause with people who find you condemnable and/or whom you find condemnable isn't something that needs apology or justification; it's literally the goal. At a deep philosophical level, it's how we discover our common humanity. But even at a strictly practical level, it's a basic ingredient of living peaceably despite massive disagreement. If you're not able to make such alliances, you're missing the point entirely!
I have had a few clashes with the anti-woke right recently, but they were just on issues of objective fact. I usually ignore the frequent anti-Semitic stuff unless it directly involves Jews that I know and is based on falsehoods or obvious bigotry.
I'm more tolerant of religious fundamentalists than Helen because I think atheism is scientifically incorrect. Religion is an evolved survival mechanism (see Iain McGilchrist and John Vervaeke).
Most of what is wrong with "woke" is that it is a cult (an irregular spiritual force based on pathological psycholoyg) that fills the vacuum of religiosity in postmodern, secular culture.
More importantly idealists (usually) don't make good soldiers. This is a war against neo-communism. Tragic casualties are inevitable.
Wokeism is a socially gangrenous cancer that can't be cured with being nice and invoking Constitutional order, the rule of law, and all the other "classical liberal" stuff that Helen correctly reveres.
Reverence for tolerance, fair play and the rule of law comes into play AFTER a war against evil and sin is won, not during.
Those that hold to such classically liberals values have to recalibrate what they want to accomplish, which I think Helen and Iona are trying to do, but from an idealistic position.
Idealism is severely limited in war. Brutality isn't. To win a war, brutality is usually needed. Anything less WILL BE SEEN by the woke raving lunatics (sadists, sociopaths, Cluster B/Dark Triad types) as nothing more than weakness to be exploited.
Also, the unique nature of this conflict is that "woke" is like a social parasite that feeds off postmodern and techno-economic disruption and the resulting disintegration of liberal institutions.
Woke parasitism is like a gangrenous cancer that has to be hacked off the social body before it kills the patient. The procedure is inherently brutal, ugly and "not nice".
Without "soldiers" willing to do brutal, ugly things to hack off the woke parasites/gangrene, there won't be a patient still alive to reform liberalism* (by making it anti-fragile to disruption) and uphold Helen's revered, idealistic values.
A really good idea would be to come to agreement on what exactly "wokeism" is and what is the correct label for it - ie Critical Social Justice vs Cultural Marxism or Successor Ideology. There is a lot of disagreement about this, and that disagreement likely follows the same divergences as exist between anti-woke groups.
I'd say the main fracture lies between "good faith" and "bad faith" anti-wokeness where the latter are essentially alt-right people hoping to use the rollback of wokeness to roll things way-back to a pre-liberal state.
Woke = RACE GRIFTING (or "social justice" grifting in general)
Woke = Evil and Sin
-----
See the below link for one of the best deep dives into woke mental dysfunction and how it (woke, elite-leftism) correlates to Nazi propaganda I’ve read.
open. substack. com /pub/helendale/p/social-justice-word-magic-i-the-gleichschaltung
excerpt:
Selection for emotional dysfunction
There is a long-term pattern of the sickly (e.g. Antonio Gramsci), physically unfortunate (e.g. Rosa Luxembourg), sexually perverse (e.g. Michel Foucault), gender alienated (e.g. Judith Butler), and downwardly socially mobile (e.g. Karl Marx) being drawn into the politics of the transformational future, a politics that most profoundly categorises existing society as the problem. Such people are burdened by aggravating, painful, or frustrating constraints—so drawn to politics defining constraint as oppression and that promise a future liberated from such constraints.
Those who most beat their breasts about compassion and inclusion tend to be the most viciously judgemental, as they rage against constraints they find so burdensome and demand everyone else support their liberation. Sorting people by their opinions is a natural part of this moral project: both emotionally satisfying and, by generating a cohesive moralised in-group, operationally effective.
Of course, being able to indulge one’s emotions is part of the attraction in the first place. The sort of stoic emotional self-discipline that makes for effective social cooperation and coordination is—at least in peaceful, prosperous societies—eschewed in favour of (often weaponised) dis-regulated emotional displays that degrade the performance of people and institutions.
...
Our institutions are dominated by university graduates, and these same status-and-social-leverage games play into bureaucratic pathologies of hoarding authority, restricting or delegitimising alternative sources of information, spending resources on themselves, frustrating accountability, and protecting themselves from the complexities of competence. Declaring the mass university model to be a toxic failure—and engaging in a
[----->>>] thorough purge
of all forms of activist scholarship—is necessary to preserve our societies as functioning, free, democratic, technologically-capable societies.
Woke people are the school bullies, jocks, and preppy kids of the past. Back then they were mostly right-wing. As leftism got more mainstream, being a school bully, jock or preppy got frowned upon. So while they rejected those labels, they still felt the need to bully people, so they decided to become bullies for “good causes” like social justice. South Park made fun of this phenomenon with the character “PC Principal”.
"The second issue is that there really is an illiberal anti-woke backlash going on"
Authors and intellectuals are frequently tempted to be edgy and ahead of the curve, which is what Pluckrose is doing here. I really do admire her and the other two heroes of Sokal Squared (Lindsay and Boghossian), but what she is doing here is complaining that eggs are being rationed while fighting the dangerous barbarian hordes at the gates. Despite the wonderful pushback happening in the US, the woke left are far too dangerous still in the UK, Canada, ... to declare victory and a return to calm normalcy.
I think it is still an open question whether wokism is on the wane where it counts, on the left, and it really does seem that all the left of center anti-woke did was enable the far-right, Trump’s election victory was aided by anti-woke ideas and rhetoric. "They're for they/them and he's for us". Is anyone looking forward to the blizzard of bullshit that will be coming at us for the next four years.
Have we achieved our ends? That is different for everyone. What I was hoping for was a Left more centered in rational thought, willing to allow dissent and debate and dedicated to practical reform. This has not happened, and I have given up hope that it will.
I don’t want to be associated with the likes of Chris Rufo, James Lindsey and Brett Weinstein. I watched Peter Boghossian go from someone I respected to a grifter profiting on ever more burn it all down rhetoric, until I finally unsubscribed from him.
The sad truth is that true liberals have always been a small minority and have always been steamrolled by radicals.
The woke left enabled the right when they refused to have meaningful conversations with genuine well meaning people and instead doubled down and retaliated. To not speak out against it would have been wrong and enabled the left. There was no winning, silent or not.. Sadly, they enraged the opposition, pushed away their own people , and opened doors for fascism to flourish. Speaking out against both is the only way forward, even though, I doubt it'll do any good considering we may be the minority.
The author doesn't provide any examples to substantiate her claim of a meaningful/significant authoritarian segment within the broader "anti-woke" category.
Also, as is typical of "liberal" persons (such as the author describes herself to be), she doesn't see the connection between certain false ideiological axioms/premises she subscribes to and the very "woke" ideology she opposes. The "woke" worldview, in many ways, is almost an inevitable logical and logistical endgame flowing from modern "liberal" persons.
I once sort of unknowingly signed off on a “job lot” of opinions and positions.. I was in an intentional group that evolved/devolved in a direction that I realized (sort of out from under me so to speak) wasn’t about individual liberty and freedom, and revealed itself to be quite a load of group think and authoritarian in nature. I was the only one that left that group and to this day they maintain the position that I have to embrace certain beliefs in order to be “part of the community”…(I moved away).
Learning how to maintain my personal liberal values AND find belonging has proven elusive for me given my personal experience.
I think part of it is that such a large part of the conservative/Right establishment has come to define itself as anti-woke and must now, to perpetuate itself, find more and more things to call “woke”. It is ironic because I think the fight against racism morphed in the same way and needed to keep finding things to call “racist”.
This is exactly right. A Culture War is never won; the side with the momentary advantage inevitably pursues an increasingly sadistic witch hunt until they overplay their hand and the momentum shifts—often violently—back to the other side.
Helen, thank you for this!! I read the book you worked on with Lindsey and Bogosian years ago and it gave me the understanding and tools to walk many of my friends off the woke plank. In the past couple of years I’ve come to find the anti-woke movement moving further and further right. Under the new administration and emboldened by the far and Christian right, the movement is becoming not only unrecognizable, it’s becoming everything I found concerning about woke in the first place!! It’s wild to me that I used to stand against anti-racism only to be called a racist and now that I stand against banning everything that concerns me I’m being called a communist.
Keep going with this approach. Just restacked it.
Glad to see so many people against extremism in all forms.
Thank-you. I never liked being labelled. Like many people I’m all over the place in what I can accept and live with, and what is a personal hard no.
Helennnnnn, how in the blue tap-dacing baby Jesus was I not subscribed to you already.
(Edit: adding requisite facepalms because seriously 🤦♂️🤦♂️🤦♂️🤦♂️)
😨 AAAAH I wasn’t subscribed to Iona either! What the hell is wrong* with me!!!
(*I accidentally unsubscribed from everyone a few months ago, I can’t believe I’m still clawing my way back to all my peeps)
It's a good essay. I would only add a few points. First, don't underestimate the power of different priors, especially when it comes to the primary motivations of individuals. Take Elon Musk, for example. It's clear that he's pretty much an absolutist civic libertarian (and economic libertarian, although this is less relevant), except when it comes to his own self-interest. The only qualification is that he only cares about free expression in the following order: America, the Anglosphere, the West, and the rest of the world.
Second, don't underestimate fear as a motivation. Humans devolve to the level of chimps in the face of authoritarianism directed against them in relatively short order. Although the response is not likely to be as aggressive as a group of chimps encountering a troop within the borders of their territory, it's comparable. There will be an urge towards groupishness and there will be an urge to consolidate said groupishness in an ideological sense. When threatened, humans have a strong urge for social cohesion and against taboos. There is some pretty good literature on Parasite Stress and the ways in which it creates nascent authoritarianism. The pandemic was very illustrative in this respect, especially in terms of the ways in which society rejected the vastly superior Great Barrington approach, which, before the pandemic, had formed the basis of all epistemologically-based pre-pandemic planning.
Third, don't take it personally if many people within the anti-woke coalition come to radically different conclusions to you on current events. What you see as authoritarian is their perception that they are responding to an existential threat. Who is right on the subject remains to be seen, but they believe the West has been subjected to state indoctrination through education for decades, and the Long March through the institutions is all but complete. They are probably right.
Let's look at an example. Marriage and the family. I don't think many Westerners would argue that women should stay in abusive relationships, but to what extent has personal freedom been prioritised over liberty (the balance of freedom and responsibility). The sensible approach, the one that prioritises the children over the married couple, would be to remain together and cohabiting if it's at all possible for the couple to institute a civil impersonal/business relationship, aimed at raising the children into healthy young adults.
We know that divorce is worse for children than losing a parent. Both parents could be free to discreetly date and have affairs, provided it didn't encroach on the home life. My point would that this type of discussion isn't even on the radar. For most of human history and in most human cultures it's a given that children are prioritised over their parents. In times of hardship, even in hunter gatherer times, adults went short of food whilst children were fed. But the Left has indoctrinated the culture to the extent that the kneejerk retort to these sorts of issues is the standard refrain about 'women being trapped in a loveless marriage'.
Populist right opposition to divorce is generally far more about control over women than it is serious concern for child welfare.
This is, of course, a blatant lie. But some people can't defend their beliefs without such lies, so here we are.
In ancient times children were left to die of exposure if their fathers decided they were too much of a burden to feed.
Sure, the practice didn't really begin to end in the West until about the end of the 19th century. But we have to ask the question- why? Because parents were already emotionally invested in their older children, and made a decision to prioritise them over a newborn with whom they had little attachment.
Children are still being murdered in this scenario. It's hardly a case of selfless ancients vs selfish individualist moderns. Modern divorced parents don't want any of their children to go hungry (And it is more commonly fathers who give up on contact and renege on child support while mothers more often have custody)
I mean your implication here seems to be "sure they let some of their children starve to death but at least they were both present for the one they let live which is preferable to modern divorce"
I'm not arguing that- and in point of fact parents who engaged in such practices in the 19th century actually had more than four children to support, and it was a choice between family starvation and the death of a single child.
Anyway, my point was about the discussion, not the conclusions- and I did preface my original statement with the comment that nobody would expect a woman to endure an abusive relationship, by which I don't just mean physical abuse.
Here's the thing. Two parent families, at the community level, are more important than any other factor including wealth and parental income for determining the social mobility and income levels of children. Even quality of education and educational investment are less important than fathers at a community level, as demonstrated by the work of Raj Chetty.
Similarly fatherless boys commit almost all crime, between 85% to 90%.
I am not arguing that we should impose decisions on women. I'm not even arguing that we should stigmatise them. The evidence shows it's a community dysfunction which arises when the fatherhood rates of male teenage peer groups falls below an 80% to 60% level.
But we shouldn't lie to young women. We should at least tell young women if they choose to be unmarried rather than married when having kids, then they and their children are 15 times more likely to be subject to physical or sexual violence. We should tell them that, on balance, replacement fathers make terrible fathers, because they simply won't overrule the mother when she's being overprotective and not letting her children encounter low impact risks which might bring a few scabs and tears, but build children into healthy resilient adults. We should also warn them that very young women aren't particularly good at picking mates, because they haven't yet learned to distinguish confidence from competence.
And fathers matter to girls as well. They just have less impact on careers and social mobility because kids seem to mould themselves from available same-sex role models, but a father in the home significantly reduces the chances that a girl will become an addict, become homeless, engage in cutting or suicidal behaviour.
My point would be that it's more important that people in society are informed as to the empirical truth and potential risks, than making people feel better about potentially bad decisions they've made in the past, or giving them excuses to make bad decisions in the future.
We also rob people of mitigation strategies. For example, children with fathers in the home live longer for genetic reasons. Fathers in the home increase telomere length. But it highly likely that the frequent presence or visits of male siblings of the mother or father could potentially help restore these 5 to 7 years (pure guess) of lost life, and help avoid later life health problems which arise from related issues like hypertension.
The other issue was industrialisation. In a material sense, industrialisation eventually drastically improved the material lot of humans, as well as a whole host of other life metrics, like life expectancy, infant mortality and malnutrition, but the move from rural to urban disrupted community. It was worst in England, where the rapidity of the change even meant most food culture was lost, but in the preindustrial period there was an extent to which subpar fathers and husbands would be dealt with by the other men in the community, and quickly corrected, expelled or even eliminated.
Finally, there is the luxury belief level. The highest stable long-lasting marriage rates are found amongst wealthy conservatives, very closely followed by wealthy liberals and progressives. When the wealthy Left extolls they 'don't believe in marriage' they don't mean themselves. They still want to find an ideal husband or wife, have the picture book wedding and the two parent home in which to raise their kids. They mean they don't believe in marriage for the great unwashed, because they don't want to appear judgemental of other people's choices.
The problem is that the bottom quintiles of the economic spectrum need marriage far, far more than wealthy people, who have the resources and family to remediate divorce and single parenthood.
It's maddening to me how few people seem to realize that this is what democracy and freedom are supposed to look like. How can we have freedom to believe, think and speak for ourselves if we don't ally with people we disagree with to fight for our common right to disagree? I think similarly when I see people mock Republican infighting, when that infighting is precisely the hallmark of how a robust democracy is _supposed_ to work. That is healthy. A party where everyone marches in lockstep is not.
Finding common cause with people who find you condemnable and/or whom you find condemnable isn't something that needs apology or justification; it's literally the goal. At a deep philosophical level, it's how we discover our common humanity. But even at a strictly practical level, it's a basic ingredient of living peaceably despite massive disagreement. If you're not able to make such alliances, you're missing the point entirely!
I have had a few clashes with the anti-woke right recently, but they were just on issues of objective fact. I usually ignore the frequent anti-Semitic stuff unless it directly involves Jews that I know and is based on falsehoods or obvious bigotry.
I'm more tolerant of religious fundamentalists than Helen because I think atheism is scientifically incorrect. Religion is an evolved survival mechanism (see Iain McGilchrist and John Vervaeke).
Most of what is wrong with "woke" is that it is a cult (an irregular spiritual force based on pathological psycholoyg) that fills the vacuum of religiosity in postmodern, secular culture.
More importantly idealists (usually) don't make good soldiers. This is a war against neo-communism. Tragic casualties are inevitable.
Wokeism is a socially gangrenous cancer that can't be cured with being nice and invoking Constitutional order, the rule of law, and all the other "classical liberal" stuff that Helen correctly reveres.
Reverence for tolerance, fair play and the rule of law comes into play AFTER a war against evil and sin is won, not during.
Those that hold to such classically liberals values have to recalibrate what they want to accomplish, which I think Helen and Iona are trying to do, but from an idealistic position.
Idealism is severely limited in war. Brutality isn't. To win a war, brutality is usually needed. Anything less WILL BE SEEN by the woke raving lunatics (sadists, sociopaths, Cluster B/Dark Triad types) as nothing more than weakness to be exploited.
Also, the unique nature of this conflict is that "woke" is like a social parasite that feeds off postmodern and techno-economic disruption and the resulting disintegration of liberal institutions.
Woke parasitism is like a gangrenous cancer that has to be hacked off the social body before it kills the patient. The procedure is inherently brutal, ugly and "not nice".
Without "soldiers" willing to do brutal, ugly things to hack off the woke parasites/gangrene, there won't be a patient still alive to reform liberalism* (by making it anti-fragile to disruption) and uphold Helen's revered, idealistic values.
* https://metarationality.com/stem-fluidity-bridge
A really good idea would be to come to agreement on what exactly "wokeism" is and what is the correct label for it - ie Critical Social Justice vs Cultural Marxism or Successor Ideology. There is a lot of disagreement about this, and that disagreement likely follows the same divergences as exist between anti-woke groups.
I'd say the main fracture lies between "good faith" and "bad faith" anti-wokeness where the latter are essentially alt-right people hoping to use the rollback of wokeness to roll things way-back to a pre-liberal state.
Woke = ILLIBERAL, postmodern, neo-communist totalitarianism.
Woke = RACE GRIFTING (or "social justice" grifting in general)
Woke = Evil and Sin
-----
See the below link for one of the best deep dives into woke mental dysfunction and how it (woke, elite-leftism) correlates to Nazi propaganda I’ve read.
https://open.substack.com/pub/helendale/p/social-justice-word-magic-i-the-gleichschaltung
open. substack. com /pub/helendale/p/social-justice-word-magic-i-the-gleichschaltung
excerpt:
Selection for emotional dysfunction
There is a long-term pattern of the sickly (e.g. Antonio Gramsci), physically unfortunate (e.g. Rosa Luxembourg), sexually perverse (e.g. Michel Foucault), gender alienated (e.g. Judith Butler), and downwardly socially mobile (e.g. Karl Marx) being drawn into the politics of the transformational future, a politics that most profoundly categorises existing society as the problem. Such people are burdened by aggravating, painful, or frustrating constraints—so drawn to politics defining constraint as oppression and that promise a future liberated from such constraints.
Those who most beat their breasts about compassion and inclusion tend to be the most viciously judgemental, as they rage against constraints they find so burdensome and demand everyone else support their liberation. Sorting people by their opinions is a natural part of this moral project: both emotionally satisfying and, by generating a cohesive moralised in-group, operationally effective.
Of course, being able to indulge one’s emotions is part of the attraction in the first place. The sort of stoic emotional self-discipline that makes for effective social cooperation and coordination is—at least in peaceful, prosperous societies—eschewed in favour of (often weaponised) dis-regulated emotional displays that degrade the performance of people and institutions.
...
Our institutions are dominated by university graduates, and these same status-and-social-leverage games play into bureaucratic pathologies of hoarding authority, restricting or delegitimising alternative sources of information, spending resources on themselves, frustrating accountability, and protecting themselves from the complexities of competence. Declaring the mass university model to be a toxic failure—and engaging in a
[----->>>] thorough purge
of all forms of activist scholarship—is necessary to preserve our societies as functioning, free, democratic, technologically-capable societies.
...
WOKE COMMUNO-FASCISM
clarification:
Woke = ILLIBERAL, postmodern, neo-communist/neo-fascist totalitarianism, merged with the corporate-state.
Gordon Hahn explains how neo-communism and neo-fascism are aligned under the postmodern corporate-state:
https://gordonhahn.com/2021/04/29/the-new-american-communo-fascism-and-its-postmodernist-roots/
gordonhahn. com /2021/04/29/the-new-american-communo-fascism-and-its-postmodernist-roots/
Woke people are the school bullies, jocks, and preppy kids of the past. Back then they were mostly right-wing. As leftism got more mainstream, being a school bully, jock or preppy got frowned upon. So while they rejected those labels, they still felt the need to bully people, so they decided to become bullies for “good causes” like social justice. South Park made fun of this phenomenon with the character “PC Principal”.
I agree, I tend to think it’s too late now to bridge this gap but spot on.
Not really.
"The second issue is that there really is an illiberal anti-woke backlash going on"
Authors and intellectuals are frequently tempted to be edgy and ahead of the curve, which is what Pluckrose is doing here. I really do admire her and the other two heroes of Sokal Squared (Lindsay and Boghossian), but what she is doing here is complaining that eggs are being rationed while fighting the dangerous barbarian hordes at the gates. Despite the wonderful pushback happening in the US, the woke left are far too dangerous still in the UK, Canada, ... to declare victory and a return to calm normalcy.
Woke in Australian was imported just like political correctness by Murdoch's goons for target practice. It sounds like you've drunk the Kool aid.
“…The big divides right now are among those care about what is true and those who prefer emotionally resonant narratives that suit their agenda”
Brilliantly summarised.
I think it is still an open question whether wokism is on the wane where it counts, on the left, and it really does seem that all the left of center anti-woke did was enable the far-right, Trump’s election victory was aided by anti-woke ideas and rhetoric. "They're for they/them and he's for us". Is anyone looking forward to the blizzard of bullshit that will be coming at us for the next four years.
https://unherd.com/2025/02/the-left-wont-let-go-of-woke/
Have we achieved our ends? That is different for everyone. What I was hoping for was a Left more centered in rational thought, willing to allow dissent and debate and dedicated to practical reform. This has not happened, and I have given up hope that it will.
I don’t want to be associated with the likes of Chris Rufo, James Lindsey and Brett Weinstein. I watched Peter Boghossian go from someone I respected to a grifter profiting on ever more burn it all down rhetoric, until I finally unsubscribed from him.
The sad truth is that true liberals have always been a small minority and have always been steamrolled by radicals.
The woke left enabled the right when they refused to have meaningful conversations with genuine well meaning people and instead doubled down and retaliated. To not speak out against it would have been wrong and enabled the left. There was no winning, silent or not.. Sadly, they enraged the opposition, pushed away their own people , and opened doors for fascism to flourish. Speaking out against both is the only way forward, even though, I doubt it'll do any good considering we may be the minority.
Rough time to be a liberal. Vengeance is enticing; but that sweet, sweet haterade is also pure poison.
The author doesn't provide any examples to substantiate her claim of a meaningful/significant authoritarian segment within the broader "anti-woke" category.
Also, as is typical of "liberal" persons (such as the author describes herself to be), she doesn't see the connection between certain false ideiological axioms/premises she subscribes to and the very "woke" ideology she opposes. The "woke" worldview, in many ways, is almost an inevitable logical and logistical endgame flowing from modern "liberal" persons.
lol you know Helen helped write the book that launched the war against woke right?
This is an open letter to JL, right?
Did you see Rectenwald's debunking of JL on the "woke right" nonsense?
https://mrectenwald.substack.com/p/the-woke-right