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>>crbela+(OP)
I thought this was an interesting read. For me, it sparked the insight that wokeness parallels the rise and fall of the attention economics, with the premise that attention is the real bottleneck in social justice. It places an emphasis on awareness, and the solution is often left as an exercise to the observer.

Political correctness and language codes are not new. I think what was new is the idea that people could rally around the banner of awareness, and thereby avoid disputes about solutions. This is why many of these topics lose momentum once their followers get the attention and have to deal with the hard and less popular questions of how to fix something.

>>s1arti+5K
There was a variety of causes that gained prominence ~2015 when Bernie Sanders came much closer to challenging Hillary Clinton than anyone expected. The Democrat party establishment picked the wishy washy meaningless bits out and focused on them while keeping away from the more challenging economic issues that would actually require their ideologies to adapt

I think what most people call "woke" is probably just a reaction to the obvious emptiness of many of the things politicians like Kamala Harris chose to focus on whilst ignoring more concrete issues. A lot of it was stuff there never was a solution for.

>>forgot+Vi1
I mean, that's part of it. The culture war is useful to both US political parties, because they both have a bourgeois class interest and need something to keep people invested in politics for the sake of their political legitimacy, but at the same time need to prevent them from gaining class consciousness or becoming involved in class politics.

Put another way: the culture war (as woke vs. anti-woke) divides the electorate, but in a way that lets them be parceled out between two factions of the ruling class, rather than aligning any of them against the ruling class.

>>NoGrav+ep1
Criminalization of homelessness is probably the most stark example of class warfare in society today. And agitation against these policies is absolutely called "woke" by the right.

The idea that wokeness is in contrast to class-based advocacy is not correct. The right will happily call class-based advocacy "woke" until the cows come home.

>>UncleM+Xt1
The right will call class-based advocacy "woke", but that doesn't mean that centrist Democrats are going to adopt it to spite them. Criminalization of homelessness is at its most vicious in cities with Democratic mayors.

>>NoGrav+Rz1
Sure. The leaders within the Democratic party are not especially good advocates for the homeless. They are similarly not terribly good advocates for a lot of suffering groups. Despite all the hay about "defund the police", it didn't actually end up materializing as policy and we saw Biden explicitly reject it in a State of the Union.

It is not true that the establishment left is using "woke" advocacy to avoid having to talk about class. It is also not true that if the left stopped talking about "woke" concepts that the right would suddenly get on board with class advocacy.

>>UncleM+oB1
This ties back to my idea that "wokeness" is an ideology that centers awareness, not solutions. Everyone in San Francisco is sufficiently aware that homelessness is a problem. Nobody really advocates for police brutality or shooting innocents as a positive good.

However, the debate constantly returns to the the question of how important these issues are on an imaginary scale that doesn't exist, instead of what we should be doing out.

Bob thinks police brutality ranks 9.8 on Bob's "importance scale". Sue thinks it ranks 7.6 on Sue's "importance scale". Arguing about the numbers and scales is completely irrelevant, and an excuse to attack someone else's position instead of proposing a solution you have to advocate for and defend. It is a strategy of taking the fight to the enemy.

>>s1arti+wI1
I think it is reasonable to claim that there is a general bias towards awareness over material solutions among establishment liberals. I don't really think that this is "wokeness". I'd wager that almost everybody who uses the term would say that an activist who advocates for an extreme wealth tax and a ban on corporate landlording with money redistributed to the homeless is "more woke" than a mayor who funds homeless shelters to a degree but also regularly sends cops to clear out camp sites where homeless people are sleeping.

>>UncleM+fM1
I agree with what you said, but I still think performance and moralizing is the central aspect.

In your hierarchy, I think most people would also agree that an activist blogging about using the world "unhoused" instead of "homeless" is more woke than the one advocating for the wealth tax.

Similarly, someone arguing for wealth tax and transfer on moral grounds is more woke than someone who argues the identical policy saying it will result in long term cost savings.