Quo Vadis GOP?

[Sheilbh]

I'd love it if it had a set definition.
Alas in reality:

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I agree - but I would point out that many years ago on here I made this point and said one test was whether anyone would actually self-describe as "woke" or if it was just a phrase used by others as a criticism. Basically thinking if it's a term you're comfortable using there will be a definition accepted by people applying it to themselves. I thought it was a bit like "fascism" in Orwell's essay - a term without meaning and basically used to signify something the speaker does not like.

I was told by several people that it absolutely is a term that people apply to themselves with a meaning, it's not just a term of abuse. So I think this is an area where things have, perhaps, evolved.

[garbon]

I'd love it if it had a set definition.
Alas in reality:

You cannot view this attachment.

I agree - but I would point out that many years ago on here I made this point and said one test was whether anyone would actually self-describe as "woke" or if it was just a phrase used by others as a criticism. Basically thinking if it's a term you're comfortable using there will be a definition accepted by people applying it to themselves. I thought it was a bit like "fascism" in Orwell's essay - a term without meaning and basically used to signify something the speaker does not like.

I was told by several people that it absolutely is a term that people apply to themselves with a meaning, it's not just a term of abuse. So I think this is an area where things have, perhaps, evolved.

Doesn't really seem that interesting to note how conservatives will torture terms. Well other than perhaps discuss why mainstream discourse allows that.

[Admiral Yi]

I'd love it if it had a set definition.
Alas in reality:

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In reality?  I don't think that's what it means.  Whatever you think it means is not that either.  The world is bigger than UK skinhead circles.

I came up with my own definition.  You could do the same if you wanted to.  Or you could adopt mine.  Or you could purposefully leave it vague to avoid criticism.

[crazy canuck]

I had the definition of woke in my signature, along with the description of how the word has been mangled by the right.

there are a few useful idiots who I am beginning to think are actually Russian trolls in this group.

Or the alternative is, they are just so ignorant that they have bought entirely into the right wing narrative. I'm not sure which one is more likely.

[Valmy]

We already had plenty of terms to describe what work means today. Politically correct, social justice warrior...whatever.

But why the term woke was used it obvious. It is a term that comes from black people, so easily elicits disgust and contempt and fear from our very racist society. So hence woke, great branding by racists for racists.

I fucking hate America so much. I try to extend grace to my country but we just keep doing the same old horrible shit decade after decade century after century despite constantly assuring ourselves that oh that was in the past we are better now.

[HVC]

I came up with my own definition.  You could do the same if you wanted to.

Is that actually useful though? Everyone having their own definition is just as vague as no definition, is it not?

[HVC]

We already had plenty of terms to describe what work means today. Politically correct, social justice warrior...whatever.

But why the term woke was used it obvious. It is a term that comes from black people, so easily elicits disgust and contempt and fear from our very racist society. So hence woke, great branding by racists for racists.

I fucking hate America so much. I try to extend grace to my country but we just keep doing the same old horrible shit decade after decade century after century despite constantly assuring ourselves that oh that was in the past we are better now.

I don't know, I bet if you asked right wingers slinging the word around derisively very few would know its origin.

[Admiral Yi]

Is that actually useful though? Everyone having their own definition is just as vague as no definition, is it not?

Then we would debate which definition more closely fits the data.

[Valmy]

We already had plenty of terms to describe what work means today. Politically correct, social justice warrior...whatever.

But why the term woke was used it obvious. It is a term that comes from black people, so easily elicits disgust and contempt and fear from our very racist society. So hence woke, great branding by racists for racists.

I fucking hate America so much. I try to extend grace to my country but we just keep doing the same old horrible shit decade after decade century after century despite constantly assuring ourselves that oh that was in the past we are better now.

I don't know, I bet if you asked right wingers slinging the word around derisively very few would know its origin.

Probably. But they know how it fucking sounds.

[HVC]

We already had plenty of terms to describe what work means today. Politically correct, social justice warrior...whatever.

But why the term woke was used it obvious. It is a term that comes from black people, so easily elicits disgust and contempt and fear from our very racist society. So hence woke, great branding by racists for racists.

I fucking hate America so much. I try to extend grace to my country but we just keep doing the same old horrible shit decade after decade century after century despite constantly assuring ourselves that oh that was in the past we are better now.

I don't know, I bet if you asked right wingers slinging the word around derisively very few would know its origin.

Probably. But they know how it fucking sounds.

Fox tells them it's bad, so it's bad. I just think it's that simple. When it's used as a blanket word for everything they think is stupid then it becomes easier to do so. The words change over generations, like you've mentioned above, but the basic impulse is the same.

[HVC]

Is that actually useful though? Everyone having their own definition is just as vague as no definition, is it not?

Then we would debate which definition more closely fits the data.

Perhaps, but that seems tangential. Wouldn't debating the actual individual policies or beliefs be more beneficial than an umbrella term that can easily change even after a definition is painstakingly agreed upon.

[Josquius]

Is that actually useful though? Everyone having their own definition is just as vague as no definition, is it not?

Then we would debate which definition more closely fits the data.

That'd be great. Do that.
Go do a study on things that have been called woke. Work out some kind of way to score them based on the amount of times specific things are clearly called out and by who. From this come up with an actual definition of woke. Get the right to agree on it.
The centre and left would thank you for it.

[Admiral Yi]

That'd be great. Do that.
Go do a study on things that have been called woke. Work out some kind of way to score them based on the amount of times specific things are clearly called out and by who. From this come up with an actual definition of woke. Get the right to agree on it.
The centre and left would thank you for it.

Or alternatively I could observe how people on the left, typically concentrated at universities, deal with and think about culture war/identity politics issues and see if there are any generalizable tendencies.  That's the phenomenon  that I'm describing as woke.  The label is irrelevant.  I would prefer PC but the term has been supplanted.  What's interesting to me, and what I worry about, are the tendencies.

[Sheilbh]

Doesn't really seem that interesting to note how conservatives will torture terms. Well other than perhaps discuss why mainstream discourse allows that.

Well if it is meaningless or ceases to be meaningful and is basically only used by people to attach, then I think it allows you to call that out. It allows for clarity which is good for your own argument and communication.

And the reason mainstream discourse allows it to happen is because conservatives are part of discourse. They're not external to it, or discourse external to politics - they are participants shaping discourse. The question isn't why that is allowed but why their opponents aren't.

I think part of that is a slightly academic focus on precision ("well actually historically it meant this and it's a reference to that") which misses the point of communication and also a reluctance to ditch terms that have been turned in to an effective attack or have failed (I say reading a fabulous book talking about "assemblages" and "patches" of capitalism as a useful framework to "think and to play with" ). Whether it's "woke" or "defund the police" or whatever else there's more desire to explain why it doesn't mean what the attacker is saying - and if you're explaining you've already lost. As I say my own view is that because the "correct" use of these terms is used as a shibboleth and way of signalling to your own side not of communicating to the world. But I don't think we've seen conservatives for example dying on a hill to explain or defend "project 2025" - that became a successful attack line for Democrats and conservatives responded by killing it dead and moving on. They don't talk about it even if the underlying ideas (inevitably given what the document is) still matter.

[Razgovory]

On defining Woke, Musa Al-Gharbi said this

As Ludwig Wittgenstein observed, it is difficult to define even a relatively simple word like "red" in a nontautological way, such that someone who had no experience of "red" would be able to tell from the definition alone what "red" means, and go on to identify it well in the world (try teaching a child "red" by providing them nothing but analytic definitions, never once pointing to any concrete phenomenon in the world and designating it "red"). Of course, as tough as it is to define a relatively uncontested term like "red," defining a word like "woke" is much more complex. But as Wittgenstein likewise emphasized, a word does not become meaningless in the absence of a clean analytic definition. In fact, many of the most meaningful words in the English language are difficult to precisely define, as analytic philosophers have been demonstrating for centuries now. Consider "love," "knowledge," "justice," "freedom," "beauty." The fact that these terms cannot be defined cleanly and unobjectionably doesn't imply they're meaningless and should not be used.

  In a similar vein, cultural critic Raymond Williams referred to certain terms as "keywords": highly prominent but also much-contested terms for which debates over their meaning are inextricably bound up with the problems they are used to discuss.28 "Woke" seems to be a contemporary "keyword": insofar as it indicates a certain disposition toward social justice, then how one understands "social justice" will significantly influence how one understands, evaluates, and deploys the term "woke." Like other keywords, "woke" is mobilized by different constellations of social actors toward very different ends—and the struggles over its meaning are tied to broader sociocultural unrest.

  For words such as these, Williams argued, to simply choose a definition and run with it is to paper over important tensions. It is to render oneself a partisan in the struggles the word is bound up in—thereby reducing the scope of one's analytic gaze so as to exclude inconvenient realities. For those who would prefer to be chroniclers of, rather than active participants in, the culture wars, their most important task with respect to keywords is to describe their uses and explore how their meanings have evolved over time. Hence, we began with a brief recap of the history of the term "woke" (and the cited references can provide a deeper dive for interested readers). And throughout the rest of the text, the term will frequently appear within quotation marks, precisely to draw attention to its ambivalent and contested uses.

  As an alternative to providing an analytic definition, essayist Sam Adler-Bell has argued that the term "woke" is probably best understood not as a set of substantive beliefs but, rather, as a communicative register. On this model, "wokeness" entails invoking "unintuitive and morally burdensome political norms and ideas in a manner which suggests they are self-evident."29 One tension in this definition, of course, is that it is perfectly possible for, say, a conservative Christian fundamentalist to insist on unintuitive and morally burdensome political norms and ideas while taking these as self-evident. However, it's not clear that we would refer to such a person as "woke." There seems to be something to the idea that "wokeness" may be less about what one believes than about how one articulates and seeks to advance these beliefs. However, it is also the case that not any belief could be construed as "woke."

Indeed, there are certain views that seem to be discursively associated with "wokeness" by both critics and sympathizers alike. Ticking through these may be useful to add some texture to our discussions because many who would now be hesitant to self-identify as "woke" may nonetheless continue to identify with some version of these beliefs—and may also view it as reasonable to associate these particular commitments with the term "woke." For instance, trans-inclusive feminism. People across the spectrum would likely find it uncontroversial to assert that someone who is woke is a trans-inclusive feminist—and that someone who is not a feminist or is not trans-inclusive would generally not be considered "woke." Several other such examples could be proliferated. For instance:

*  Identification as an "ally" with respect to antiracism, feminism, LGBTQ rights, and environmentalism—and an understanding of these struggles as deeply interconnected with one another.
An aesthetic embrace of diversity and inclusion that extends to honoring and accommodating trauma and disability alongside various demographic characteristics.

* A focus on identity, subjectivity, and lived experience—and on validating the expressed identities and lived experiences of oneself and others.

 
*  An embrace of, and emphasis on, self-care and self-affirmation.

*  Recognition and explicit acknowledgment of various forms of privilege, alongside a commitment to defer to minoritized populations whenever possible—especially in matters marked as especially salient to historically marginalized or underrepresented populations.

*  An embrace of the idea of "unconscious bias," which creates the need to "work" on oneself while also recognizing that many prejudicial impulses can never be fully transcended.

*  A tight focus on disparities between groups. In the event they favor the "more privileged" group, they are held as evidence of injustice. For instance, disparities between men and women that favor men are presumptively viewed as evidence of sexism (while those that favor women are unproblematic); disparities between racial and ethnic groups that favor whites specifically are taken as evidence of racism, and so on (if other racial or ethnic groups outperform whites on various measures, this is often ignored; the focus is on whites).

*An approach to identity that is, for lack of a better term, somewhat mystical. For instance, on the one hand race is held as a fiction in need of being abolished and transcended—but on the other hand, it is argued that virtually any social phenomenon should be analyzed and discussed in terms of race, and failure to do this is viewed as an unwillingness to be "real." Race is held to be biologically unreal but is nonetheless something that people are not permitted to change: "whites" who identify themselves with other races or ethnicities and minorities who attempt to identify themselves as "white" are both viewed as deeply "problematic." People must strive to understand the struggles of people from historically marginalized and disadvantaged groups, although to claim one deeply understands others' experiences, beliefs, or feelings is itself a sign of privilege or lack of self-awareness. Gender and sexuality are understood to be fluid, nonbinary, and socially constructed—yet it is held that people can also essentially be "born" gay or born trans (i.e., "born into the wrong body").31 Essentializing and stereotyping are held to be wrong, but people are also widely held to have something like "objective interests" on the basis of their race, gender, sexual orientation, and so on. Cultural appropriation is held to be wrong, but cosmopolitanism is also cherished.

  Here it bears repeating that the original formulation of the term in activist spaces indicated an orientation toward politics rather than denoting any particular beliefs: to be "woke" was to be aware of social injustice and committed to doing something about it. The more specific associations just described came later, and each association is contestable. That is, neither individually nor collectively are they viewed here as "essential" to being "woke." Indeed, this text eschews any kind of analytical definition (which would set out necessary and sufficient conditions), so it is beyond our scope to propose anything as "essential." The list is merely intended to provide some examples of the kinds of phenomena people seem to be talking about when they talk about "wokeness." It should also be underlined again that "woke" is not intended as a pejorative in this text. The discursive association of the aforementioned ideas with "wokeness" therefore implies nothing about their "rightness" or "wrongness." The observation on the "mystical" nature of beliefs about identity is likewise intended as a description, not a critique. As a Muslim, I don't necessarily view it as a problem to hold beliefs with these sorts of deep