Choosing Sides in the Wokeness Wars
Liberalism remains the best option
I haven’t written a post for “Eyes on the Right” in a while and assumed for much of last week that I would do one for today. But over the last few days, it’s become apparent that a major story this upcoming week is going to be the possible indictment and arrest of former president Donald Trump. I will turn to this topic in earnest for my Wednesday post, at which point we’ll hopefully know more about whether this is actually going to happen. In the meantime, I’m going to use today’s post as an opportunity to continue defining the work I plan to do here at “Looking Left.”
As chance would have it, I launched “Looking Left” in the midst of a surge of discussion about how to define “woke” politics. (Thanks Bethany Mandel.) In the midst of the mayhem last week, I offered my own terse and formalistic definition, focusing on the effort of young progressive-minded employees in prominent organizations to convince the (often liberal) leadership of these organizations to adopt their outlook and agenda. But I didn’t have a lot to say about the content of this outlook and agenda—or what makes it ideologically and strategically distinctive.
What’s in a Name?
Plenty of others have since written powerful and compelling statements that more fully flesh out the meaning of the term—most of them focusing on the tendency of woke activists to conceive of politics in personal terms and to see injustice as embedded in structures that need to be torn down or fundamentally reconceived by those who properly “center” the systematic oppression of various identitarian groups. I agree with all that and, unlike some, don’t see these different accounts as standing in contradiction to each other. It’s a complex development with many aspects.
At the same time, I recognize that efforts to analyze and critique these trends can get tripped up by two facts: first, that the term “woke” originated in the religiously infused struggle for black civil rights; and second, that Republicans now use the term to label pretty much anything emanating from the left that they don’t like. Both are good reasons to deploy another term instead. But what? The activists behind the trend appear deliberately to avoid giving their efforts a name, and they will likely object to anything that might be more descriptively accurate—like my preferred “antiliberal progressivism”—on the grounds that it carries negative connotations.
So what’s the solution? Honestly, I don’t much care. What matters is the underlying phenomenon, not the term we use as a shorthand to identify it. (I should note that this very statement rejects woke assumptions about the immense power of words and naming to affect radical political change.) That said, I do think there’s a good reason to opt for “antiliberal progressivism” instead of “woke” or “wokeness”: doing so connects current trends to historical antecedents that, it’s now possible to see, were earlier chapters in a single, episodic story of intrafactional conflict on the left.
This is the story of ongoing clashes, beginning in the early 1960s, between center-left liberalism and the more militant and politically radical New Left. As the decade wore on, these clashes unfolded mostly on university campuses, where protesting (and occasionally armed) students sometimes occupied offices and buildings, making extensive demands for reform. In most cases, the liberals who ran these elite institutions capitulated to the protesters, convinced that, even if their tactics were extreme, their goals were so admirable that opposing them would be shameful.
The same dynamic played out in more muted form during the era of “political correctness” in the late ’80s and early ’90s, and it’s a major factor in “wokeness” today. In each case, radical young left-wing activists demand reform within institutions and the liberals in positions of power capitulate to them. In some cases, these liberals may genuinely feel the activists are their moral betters and yield to them out of embarrassment. But these days the capitulation is just as likely to be an act of cowardice, with liberals acting out of fear of the bad publicity that can follow when an online mob forms to denounce the supposedly reactionary impulses of those at the helm of leading liberal cultural institutions.
Choosing Sides
I said as much in my launch post for “Looking Left.” But there’s another reason why liberals, especially over the last few years, have been so quick to fold in the face of antiliberal demands by militant progressives. It’s because liberals get caught in the either/or dynamics of polarized politics, thinking that any expression of criticism about their ostensible allies on the left invariably amounts to an in-kind contribution to advancing the political aims of their enemies on the right. This thinking runs something like this:
Yes, some of what the left-wing activists want is bad, defies liberal norms, and pushes pretty far into radical territory when it comes to race and gender. But the right is responding to this stuff by doing even worse things (including banning books, gutting academic freedom, and restricting free speech and other liberties). For that reason, it’s important we not criticize the left—because doing so empowers the right. Just look at what’s happened to Freddie deBoer this past week: He wrote a powerful Substack post criticizing the activists in the name of the left, and now he’s being quoted by right-wingers. We need to choose sides, and it’s not a hard call. We must stand with our somewhat wayward allies on the left for fear of empowering the fascism that’s making inroads all the time in the Republican Party.
I think the truth is pretty close to the opposite of this view: If the liberal center-left doesn’t stand up to antiliberal progressivism and refuse to capitulate to its demands within institutions, then those who disdain its influence will have nowhere to turn besides the right. That’s why liberals ought to do more to defend liberal ideals and norms where they hold power in civil society—because it will demonstrate that one needn’t embrace the right’s own antiliberalism in order to combat antiliberalism on the left.
Liberalism itself is more than capable of defending itself from opponents in either direction, as long as liberals summon the courage and rise to the challenge of doing so. It can do this most effectively by drawing crucial distinctions that comport more fully with the complex truth of things than the edifying homilies preferred by the right or the furious craving for moral purity that so often prevails on the left.
Yes, racism remains a problem in American society. But that doesn’t mean it’s our only or worst problem, or that it’s the only lens through which to understand and interpret the multifaceted, morally ambiguous story of our country’s past, present, and possible futures.
Yes, journalists sometimes make mistakes in what they cover and how they frame their reporting, falling far short of objectivity and inadvertently obscuring rather than clarifying our situation. But that doesn’t mean they should abandon the ideal of objectivity altogether and embrace the false simplicities of “moral clarity” (activism) instead of working harder to self-correct and more accurately explain the complications of an inevitably messy reality.
Yes, transgender adults should enjoy the same legal protections as other vulnerable minorities. But that doesn’t mean “gender-affirming care” (which can include radical pharmaceutical and surgical interventions) is the proper path forward for the rapidly growing numbers of teenagers who express discomfort with their sexuality and gender identity. Neither does it imply that the rest of us need to embrace the philosophically and biologically dubious assertions of many transgender activists about the thoroughgoing fluidity of sex and gender.
A Mean Between Extremes
Yes, but—that’s how liberals should respond to the excesses of the left. Not with silence, and not with an awkward passivity that cedes too much power to single-issue or intersectional activists who would like to radically transform American institutions, but with a resolution to do justice to the reality of a world shot through with clashing, contradictory moral claims.
The alternative will be a political contest between diametrically opposed, mutually exclusive absolutisms. Only liberalism contains the resources to forge an alternative path between the extremes, affirming the truth in what each side does and says while also rejecting each side’s egregious overreach.
We do need to choose sides. But hard left and hard right aren’t the only options.
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