As an example I think people from the American political left to somewhere(?) in the middle see it as what it has been introduced as, that being looking past the status quo and instead looking at your own values, i.e. the morality of homelessness and not having a disdain for them but empathy for them instead.
and then on the other side it feels like the people on the American political right see it as what this website describes it as “ A self-righteously moralistic person who behaves as if superior to others.”
I think the divide has originated from taking unlikeable behaviour and labeling that as ‘woke’ (in bad faith of course) and some people have just bonded to that definition so much that they see it as that.
At least that’s what I’ve noticed online over the past few (bonkers) years
Many political groups do this: they identify some aspect of the opposition, preferably one that is easy to ridicule, and then repeat those accusations ad-nauseum. The complaints about, say, LatinX have far surpassed the number of actual proponents of it, which were a small number of people of the left. However, it still brought up again and again because it forms a useful image of what people are fighting against.
The trouble with this is that a groups idea of the “enemy” typically outlasts and often surpasses the actual enemy that idea is based off of. People on the right will write endless articles and videos about wokeness not because there actually exists a problem with wokeness but to try to gain political and social status with their political group.
The movements exist and they demonstrably stem from a common ideology
Naming a political tendency is not making a "boogeyman" out of it.
>The complaints about, say, LatinX have far surpassed the number of actual proponents of it, which were a small number of people of the left. However, it still brought up again and again because it forms a useful image of what people are fighting against.
Here's CNN Business casually repeatedly using the term in 2021: https://edition.cnn.com/2021/02/26/business/netflix-diversit...
More generally, the point is that there is something to "fight against", which is causing real harm, including to people I know personally.
For example, it's fundamentally behind the idea that Tim Peters somehow "used potentially offensive language or slurs" by literally writing "XXXX" to censor a word and then providing context to enable people to figure out what word he had in mind, because it was relevant to the conversation. (I know that this was ideological because they do this for the word "slut", but not e.g. for "shit" or "fuck".)
Or the idea that he "made light of sensitive topics like workplace sexual harassment" by... claiming that workers sometimes get "training" because a higher-up did something bad. (Or the idea that "making light of a sensitive topic" is even bad in the first place.)
Or the entire bit about "reverse racism and reverse sexism" as explained at https://tim-one.github.io/psf/silly . (Incidentally, Tim, if you're reading: you cede too much ground here. "Racism" isn't a term that activists get to define. Discrimination is discrimination, and it's morally wrong in and of itself; injustice in the surrounding social conditions simply doesn't bear on that.)
It's also responsible for the fact that prominent members of the Python community are still making hay about the supposed mistreatment of Adria Richards - who, as a reminder, eavesdropped on a conversation in order to take offense to it and then went directly to social media to complain because a couple of other people were being unprofessional (although mutually completely comfortable with their conversation).
And it's behind the entire fracas around the removal of the endorsement of Strunk and White as an English style guide from PEP 8, as a supposed "relic of white supremacy". (There are public mailing list archives. I have kept many bookmarks and have quite a bit of detailed critique that wouldn't fit in the margins here. But here's just one example of the standard playbook: https://www.mail-archive.com/python-dev@python.org/msg108879... )
Outside of Python it's also fundamentally behind the plain misreading of James Damore's inoffensive and entirely reasonable takes, and his subsequent tarring and feathering. To cite just one example that sticks in my head.