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.
Can't really agree. Especially in the wake of the 2024 election, there's been quite a bit of discussion about wokeness on the left.
The trouble is that many people have decided that if you discuss "wokeness" and especially if you have a problem with some element of it, that means you're no longer on "the left".
Personally, I think the issue is mostly about behavior, and not specific ideas. "Let's all make an effort to move culture in a better direction" became "If you don't wholly endorse these specific changes we've decided are necessary, that makes you a bigot, you're not a true progressive, etc.".
When a lot of this was heating up during the pandemic, I encountered two very different kinds of people.
1. Those who generally agreed with efforts to improve the status quo and did what they could to help (started displaying their pronouns, tried to eliminate language that had deeply racist connotations, etc)
2. Those who would actively judge/shame/label you if you weren't 100% up to speed on every hot-button issue and hadn't fully implemented the desired changes
It's that 2nd group that tends to be the target of "anti-woke" sentiment, and that 2nd group tended to be extremely noisy.
> not because there actually exists a problem with wokeness but to try to gain political and social status with their political group
The other issue that I see repeatedly is a group of people insisting that "wokeness" doesn't exist or that there isn't a toxic form of it currently in the culture. I think acknowledging the existence of bad faith actors and "morality police" would do more for advancing the underlying ideas often labeled "woke" than trying to focus on the fakeness of the problem.
Maybe that group is made up of squeaky wheels, but their existence is used to justify the "anti-woke" sentiment that many people push.
For me, this boils down to a tactics issue where people are behaving badly and distracting from real issues - often issues those same people claim to care about.
> There will always be prigs. And in particular there will always be the enforcers among them, the aggressively conventional-minded. These people are born that way. Every society has them. So the best we can do is to keep them bottled up.
But who will morality police the morality police? (Paul Graham of course!)
Jokes aside, the difference between the 1) and 2) is the difference between progressivism and wokeism. But I think many here – as well as the article – miss the point by aiming squarely at 'noisy' humanities students, and not at the governments and corporations that leveraged their movements into this realm of the purely performative. That's not to say that there isn't scope for government and corporate interventions that actually make positive change to social justice outcomes. And there's also some merit to both online and meatspace activism causing many bad actors to consider their behavior (e.g., Harvey Weinstein, excessive force by law enforcement, wrongful incarcerations/executions).
IMO the priggishness is baked into American culture, which is descended from cranky puritans and literally defined itself as the most moral (police) force in the world after genociding the original inhabitants of the continent and setting up a culture for billionaires that leaves even qualified and talented workers increasingly insecure about housing and health care.
In reality "woke" has been a hugely convenient way for the US establishment to confine the Left to a ghetto of minority interests, especially about sexuality. Because if the Left rediscovered economic justice as a cause it would cross political boundaries and become a raging wildfire. (See also - Luigi.)
So now we have anti-woke for the wannabe intellectuals, and Q for the useful idiots.
Meanwhile Graham is more outraged - outraged I say - by how annoying feminism etc are than by election interference, raw milk drinkers, and the spread of lunatic propaganda about vaccinations and climate science.
Priggishness means self-righteous, performative morality. Can you give an example of this that is normal for US right-wingers? They certainly have plenty of daft ideas (e.g. anti-vax), but I haven't seen right-wingers being priggish about them. Priggish would be positioning themselves as superior people for living in an unvaccinated neighborhood or working for an anti-vax employer, or proclaiming that they will not date a vaccinated person, or vaccinating their baby in secret while posting the opposite on social media, or cancelling a public figure who gets outed as vaccinated, etc.
What if someone says "that was sexist" and let's assume it was. Then, complaining that s/he who said it, is too woke, can itself be priggishness? The morally right thing, in that community, might be to be anti woke.