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 problem, of course, is that "Awareness and acknowledgement of the true nature of society" can be interpreted to mean a thousand different things, some of which are more accurate and actionable than others.
I'm not fine with my hard work being dismissed because of my sex, ethnicity, or whatever other 'privileges' I had. When I see someone online speak about privileges, it's often being used as a cudgel to silence someone. It wears away at my empathy.
Posters on this site and elsewhere often assume anti-victimhood messages imply the speaker is a member a privileged class. They assume the speaker's identity based on the ideology they perceive. At the same time they're claiming a moral high ground and chiding their perceived opponent's lack of empathy.
The Baron Von Munchausen, pull yourself up by the bootstraps is especially relevant if you lack privilege. Yet, the would be saviors will assume that I'm not sufficiently aware of my own condition when I mention it. Where's the empathy in that? What could be less empathetic than incorrectly presuming someone's identity and telling them what is the highest social good for their actual identity? Empathy for the individual is dismissed in lieu of talking points about categorical identity.