There’s this permanent inner tension I have, and that I think anyone who likes to think of themselves as thinking about things has. On the one hand, there’s a desire to wall myself off, to fully live a dreamy life of art and letters, focusing egoistically on the cultivation of the self, reading books, traveling to beautiful places, enjoying excellent food and drink, studying languages, writing fiction, working out, all the stuff that makes myself better, but does little for the world. On the other hand, there’s a desire to be, in some way, socially committed – to engage with current events, forge connections with others, participate in the polis writ large or at the very least my chosen community, participate in the grand discourse in whatever forms it may take. But then you look at the discourse, and…
“Woke 1 was crazy…”
No Alexandria, don’t say that! You just activated all the world’s most annoying people!
And they took Ms. Ocasio-Cortez's invite. As is to be expected, lots of online self-identified leftists immediately snarled at the betrayal of core principles, and variously chalked this up to her position of privilege, or even more annoyingly, for her “liberalism” and failure to properly lead the Long March. They were joined in by establishment liberals (at the New Republic, the Guardian, etc.) who secured their sinecures somewhere between 2012 and 2024 by being as annoying as possible, while ticking the right number of intersectional boxes. The right responded variously with a mix of histrionic demands that the Dems apologize for their countless misdeeds against the civic spirit, or darkly claiming (e.g. at Fox News, the Federalist) that this regrouping constitutes an attempt to usher in class war (if only…). Glenn Greenwald, a man whom I agree with on a great deal and who has done a great deal for American journalism, responded with his usual level of histrionics on Substack:
“The so-called ‘Woke 1’ period is not something to laugh off. It was a repressive and destructive mob rule which unjustly destroyed careers and requires a reckoning.”
(credit where credit’s due, his essay does have a number of very valid points and is worth reading, even if there’s also a lot that’s pretty questionable – “[AOC] wanted the NYPD defunded in full, and nothing short of that would be sufficient.” Got a source for that bud?)
But I’m still not sure what anyone means by Woke 1. I had thought it meant the liberal politics of the 2nd Obama Administration and the early Trump administration, the early rumblings of BLM in the wake of the murders of Michael Brown and Freddie Gray, the response to Gamergate, trans bathroom controversies, pussy hats, and all the rest. Back when they were called “SJW’s,” and they were blamed for Trump 1 in the same way “woke” was blamed for Trump 2. But apparently, we’ve memory-holed all of that. Because people seem to use it to refer to the évènements de Mai ’20, when the protests went mass starting next door to my old digs in South Minneapolis, and smug “we believe in science” yard signs showed up across liberal America, and the Biden years, when ugly corporate-Memphis infographics of fat disabled minorities told us about proper terminology. Wouldn’t that be Woke 2? Or wait, I’m lost, if that’s Woke 1, then are we in Woke 2 now? I’m so confused.
Apparently, the word “woke” has its origins from Lead Belly talking about the Scottsboro Boys, and has had purchase among black militants for decades, but I only became aware of it in 2016 or so – I had to look, I thought I learned it from that Meek Mill song, but that was in 2018, and by then it had already become a familiar pejorative among the right.
But, really, it’s something of a floating signifier, having transmogrified from its original meaning as a call to stay aware of injustice and inequality – a completely unobjectionable stance, essentially that of Clark Kent – to mean anything and everything. You could say that it’s grounded in identity politics, but then again, the conservative criticism is just as grounded in identity politics, just of a different sort. An old friend and I had a bit of a game. Look in the Daily Mail, and see what they’re calling “woke madness” this week. Zero-percent alcohol Heineken was a particular favorite.
“Political correctness gone mad.” – Alan Partridge upon being told he can’t smoke at the petrol pump, 2002, because this was called PC culture in the ‘90s, and the more things change the more they stay the same
At most, you can call it a vibe, a stance towards the world. You know the slogans and phraseology – black lives matter, love is love, queer joy, Pride is a riot, check your privilege, defund the police, prison abolition, no human is illegal, unhoused, birthing persons, defund the police, intersectionality, time’s up, believe all women, trans rights are human rights, lived experience, land back, problematic, cultural appropriation, microaggression, toxic masculinity, black bodies, abolish ICE, decolonize (X), cancel (X), (X) spaces, (X) voices…
Tedious to even type out.
And yet there is a common political thread, of a sort. When I typed up that list, I noticed that the only concrete calls to action are so far outside legislative possibility that they can be glommed onto with absolutely no risk of buy-in, making them, like the other terms, mere vibes, reduced to a rhetorical style and lacking in substance. Everything boils down to individual identity, individual style, individual choice, what you buy and what you post, and this applies to the opposite just as much (more on that later). Meaning that the vibe found its most purchase in marketing and advertising – I’m hardly the first to point this out, but if a brand can say that black lives do indeed matter to sell sneakers, the term’s efficacy as a tool for liberation into question is called into question to say the least. Never mind the fact that these terms were easy to weaponize by bad-faith actors. Israelis saying that comparisons of Israeli actions to the Holocaust “appropriated Jewish trauma” and defining themselves as “indigenous” – yeah all of you can go fuck yourselves.
Even if there were policy changes outside of the legislative sphere, the only place where commitment to identity politics really took any form was in the places in which rhetoric is placed front and center – the arts, academia, and the media.
However, I have to say… Woke 1? These are places I have the misfortune to hang out in, and identity politics remains a central concern, and the verbiage remains a first principle. I am occasionally asked by a publisher what categories of marginalized identity I belong to. When these things carry such currency, it’s not at all surprising when the remarkably frequent Rachel Dolezal type comes to light. Even if the “vibe shift” that happened around Trump 2 tamped down these tendencies in marketing materials, culturally elite spaces remain beholden to a discursive style that claims the progressive mantle.
So if this rhetorical style is what… I guess?... constituted Woke 1, there’s the question of what Woke 2 is (if anything). And as far as I can tell, such a thing exists even less than Woke 1 did, and is constituted by some as a revitalization of identity politics and coded language after said ostensible vibe shift, to which I say, if you think Badbunny performing at the Superbowl constitutes social justice, you have no fucking business talking about culture, and I doubt you have any fucking business talking about social justice. Others seem to claim that Woke 2 is a focus on issues like housing affordability, Medicare for all, and ending material support for the genocide in Gaza, to which I say… wait those are actual policy proposals, the kind that require sustained effort, but which are fortunately also broadly popular, in which case… why saddle yourself with that now-toxic adjective?
All of which is to say I’m mostly lost in the mudfight. The more present I am, the more demands there are upon me to take up a culture-war position, and frankly, that all kinda sucks. I’m sure that for me, there were lousy opportunities lost, and lousy friendships not made, for failing to properly defer to whatever normative discursive style. Sorry I disagreed with your claim that criticism of labor practices in Dubai was racism, and also sorry I didn’t laugh at your attack-helicopter joke.
Because Woke 1 also has an Anti-Woke 1, who likewise have their rhetorical style… are you triggered, snowflake? I was going to list them out, but it’s just as tedious as the Woke 1 list. I don’t want to be too both sides-y – after all, the self-styled anti-woke camp are worse, and were always and unfortunately likely shall remain absolute fucking cretins, and I hope all of their sons wind up on HRT – but I can say that both sides alienate. In addition to the same obnoxious rhetorical style, they are just as online, and just as oversensitive – look at the pearl-clutching they did around Charlie Kirk’s assassination, or the way they responded to NFL players taking a knee… for a bunch of stoic alphas, they sure get their panties in a twist.
Because at its heart, these are just two rhetorical styles, and while their inspirations are political, their actions are not. The actual political operators quietly push forth their agendas – slashing taxes and finding yet more things to somehow privatize, and otherwise enacting the will of Silicon Valley oligarchs, removing any roadblocks that might prevent Peter Thiel from building a pederasty-based special economic zone. The rest is noise.
My solution? Absent myself entirely. Not from real politics, that’s genuinely important – and Abdul El-Sayed needs all the help he can, so get on that, folks – but absolutely from the silly BS. I will, occasionally, observe them as I would any other operetta. And AOC, I suppose, delivered that final aria, now that we can all look back. And yet from somewhere, I still hear Tamino playing his magic flute.
