"Woke" v "anti-woke" is boring and redundant... and dangerous

Smart, progressive, heterodox friends, let's quit it

I was in a debate with my dear friend James¹ the other night when, for the third time in the to-and-fro over his kitchen bench, he used a version of the phrase “The problem with the woke left is…” to criticise a point I’d made.

James and I have a very robust, loving friendship. The best kind. I am possibly his most left-leaning friend. He is a compassionate, incredibly bright centrist whose mind and heart I bounce ideas off regularly. As he does with me. Per the limp “woke” line, we offer this “safe space” to each other. At the end of our debates, often when James’ long-suffering wife declares “enough”, we hug and thank the other for the good faith challenging of our respective ideas.

It was on the third “woke left” reference, however, that I pulled him up.

Hey, could we please stop with the anti-woke and left-woke slings? I said. It plays straight into the hands of the fear-mongering, chaos-making extremist right. Are we such dupes? No we are not!

These weren’t the exact words. But it was the drift.

I didn’t take things further with James (we’d got the “enough” call), but I will here. Because I’ve had a similar conversation another two times since. And my concern has been simmering…

Who even is the woke?

Can you point to a person who identifies as woke in your orbit? In the sense of the word that now does the rounds? No, me neither.

The term “woke” emerged from the Black activist movement in the 2010s, meaning "alert to racial prejudice and discrimination". It was then adopted to encompass a broader awareness of social inequalities such as racial injustice, sexism, and denial of LGBT rights. At its core, being woke is to be alive to the humanity of others. TBH, I only became aware of the term myself (beyond hearing it in a few early 2000s rap songs) when conservative commentators in the US started using it as an insult to criticise anything they didn’t like.

To a very large extent, “woke” is a non-term that only exists to the extent its counter - anti-woke - does. A little similarly, Jean-Paul Sartre once wrote, “The Jew is one whom other men consider a Jew . . . for it is the anti-Semite who makes the Jew.” (Admittedly, semitism very much exists beyond and before anti-semitism; Sartre was referring to the stigmatisation of Jewishness.)

Sure, tedious “wokists” have existed. That is, there have certainly been folk on the extreme tilt of the spectrum who have pushed equity awareness and the catering to niche sensitivities to truly dumb extents. I’m thinking of the time the University of Manchester issued trigger warnings about clapping at events. Silent “jazz hands” were encouraged instead.

But would we even come across such ludicrous edicts - and wasted so much oxygen on them - if the anti-woke brigade hadn’t circled, underlined and broadcast them on their screechy podcasts and talk-back shows? The OTT pronouns kerfuffle - would it simply have been debated appropriately in some Canadian university boardroom and faded away if Jordan Peterson hadn’t strapped his bucking bronco to it? Would the Trans kids issue have been just one of many fringe subjects discussed in gender and parenting forums for a bit, before settling into a productive, helpful (to the kids themselves) calm?

The New York Times Matter of Opinion podcast argued recently that the woke “threat” has largely died off. What remains is the anti-woke screeching.

In Australia, I don't think woke itself ever took hold in intellectual debate (to the extent that intellectual debate exists in Australia beyond Twitter (X) spats between The Australian journalists and ex-ABC hacks). The pronouns debate never really flared; so-called TERFs² exist in the public eye to the same extent feminists do (hardly at all); and I’m not sure DEI registers in most Australian’s lexicon.

In fact, cancel culture in Australia has mostly, to my knowledge (and I’ve followed it quite closely), consisted of misogynist and racist entities or individuals being merely called out for their appalling behaviour. They are rarely cancelled (ie they are not erased or silenced) and tend to continue BAU. If anything, it’s people of colour, ethnic minorities and left-leaning voices that are cancelled. And this tends to happen in a self-conscious pandering to the anti-woke screeching right (witness the firing of journalist Antoinette Lattouf for her pro-Palestine tweets).

The woke “problem” has mostly been a reactionary anti-woke bandwagon campaign. Case in point: Two weeks ago conservative screecher Janet Albretchtsen wrote an op-ed for The Australian about ex-Neighbours star-turned-billionaire’s-wife Holly Valance’s recent anti-woke outburst. Valance, speaking on a UK podcast, accused Australia of being taken over by “woke stuff”, described 21-year-old climate activist Greta Thunberg as a “demonic little gremlin” and bemoaned Andrew Tate being “demonised” by said woke, um, demons.

Albrechtsen surmised that this was a sign even young people hate woke. She wrote:

“I say hooray for a former soapie star I’d never heard of sounding kind of normal.”

The cringe of it all.

Valance is 40. Not old, but hardly representing the youth of Australia. And she doesn’t really seem to know what she’s talking about from her country mansion in the UK when she refers to “stuff” of a woke vibe. And Albrechtsen’s reference to young people skewing right (and, thusly, against woke) is just wrong. Young men (globally and in Australia) are…slightly. But young women are skewing left…massively.

So boring.

As I say, there are many, many instances of overly self-conscious political correctness gone too far. Too many to list. And much of the push-back against, and debate about, politically correct extremes, cancel culture and free speech infringements have been invigorating and necessary. The initial spawning of the heterodox community was also fun and refreshing (many of the heterodox writers, such as

Bari Weiss

and

Jesse Singal

migrated to Substack after being cancelled for making sound arguments about “woke” extremism in mainstream media).

However, it always needs to be remembered that during times of adjustment (as we are in now, following the seismic #metoo and #blacklivesmatter moments), pendulums swing erratically for a bit before finding a sensible middle range of debate and understanding. And were it not for the fact that the right blows them up-and-out of all proportion, many woke incursions are explainable and adjustable. Kids on campuses did run too wide with the woke baton. But then kids on campuses always have run too wide with things; it’s what kids do and they eventually have their heads pulled in. The blunt application of Diversity Equity and Inclusion (DEI) policies has been problematic in the US in particular. But, the need for more diversity, equity and inclusion in the world remains. Google’s AI app Gemini coughing up Black Vikings and a Black Pope was (comically) problematic. But it would appear it was an over-adjustment to the current bias inherent in AI. And did not represent a global breakdown (per the right’s hysterical commentary), nor the end of civilisation, (per Elon)

The problem with woke is mostly the weaponisation of woke.

And the point I really want to make is this: We have to put down the weapon. Because it will only shoot us in the foot.

We must stop being lulled into the diatribe that portrays whack (“woke left”) outliers as representative of something larger than they are. (And we must stop platforming said whack outliers, which is what Fox News et al do every time they make another screechy mountain out of a dumb-arse molehill.)

And we must stop falling into the trope-ist trap that the right has laid of tarring anything that is attempting to redress inequality or decency with the tarnished woke!³ brush.

Those of us who wish to live in a society that constructively and intelligently debates and questions new ideas and attempts to steer humanity to good places can no longer reclaim the original intent of woke (horse well and truly bolted). But we can - and must- commit to not joining the anti-woke race to the bottom.

And to not join the binary framing, conspiracy thinking and attention pillaging such a race is based on.

Naomi Klein writes in Doppelgänger:

“In the Mirror World, conspiracy theories detract attention from the billionaires who fund the networks of misinformation and away from the economic policies—deregulation, privatization, austerity—that have stratified wealth so cataclysmically in the neoliberal era. They rile up anger about the Davos elites, at Big Tech and Big Pharma—but the rage never seems to reach those targets. Instead it gets diverted into culture wars about anti-racist education, all-gender bathrooms, and Great Replacement panic directed at Black people, non-white immigrants, and Jews. Meanwhile, the billionaires who bankroll the whole charade are safe in the knowledge that the fury coursing through our culture isn’t coming for them.”

Sadly, I’ve been watching many of the heterodox writers and thinkers I follow fall for the trap. Most emerged from the left (or centre right) of journalism or academia, but took to criticising (extreme) left policies and positions. Being critical of the left gave the crew at The Fifth Column and The Free Press a bunch of cred in the early days. They were that high-minded and committed to balanced reporting that they could bring down their own! But I feel they’ve since become rather too attached to their contrarianism. Attacking the “woke left” has become a (lazy) fun sport with algorithmic up-tick that garners Substacker respect from a crew of older, conservative intellectuals such as

Richard Dawkins

Andrew Sullivan

and Douglas Murray.

In many ways, it all reminds me of the snark culture from the early oughts. Sites such as Gawker.com and Jezebel.com set a dynamic intellectual tone for the times with their acerbic takedowns of popular culture and US politics (I was commissioned by an Australian magazine to go to New York to report on it and the rise of this new thing called Twitter in 2007). But a few years in, the acerbic tone (called “snark”) became the click-baity end goal and the culture ate itself up (very literally; the key voices in the space had a series of public spats with each other and eventually disappeared into the early vlogger-sphere).

I feel the heterodox crew now runs the same risk. I watch some of its community become a parody of the very thing they set out to counter (namely, silo’d, irrational, hysterical discourse).

Wonderfully, as I started writing this, a Guardian journalist asked Nick Cave if he was anti-woke (just the question makes me cringe). He replied:

“The concept that there are problems with the world we need to address, such as social justice; I’m totally down with that. However, I don’t agree with the methods that are used in order to reach this goal – shutting down people, cancelling people. There’s a lack of mercy, a lack of forgiveness…So it’s a tricky one. The problem with the right taking hold of this word is that it’s made the discussion impossible to have without having to join a whole load of nutjobs who have their problem with it.”

Indeed. We can be critical and keep speech open. And refuse to use the rhetoric and tactics of the most mindless, monomaniacal, dangerous operators going around.

Selling in progressive ideas is always a much tougher ask than tooting the status quo. And the so-called left are notoriously bad at storytelling and populism. I’ve covered this in this Wild chat here:

Plus the earnest fringes can get caught up in ideas that are problematic to the cause, like attaching an issue to an identity, which I cover in this Wild chat here:

The job of defending liberal, humanist, progressive, discerning ideas, and healthy debate, is hard enough as it is. Let’s not betray each other by name-calling inanely like a Trumpist.

Sarah xx

1. Not his actual name.

2. Today’s Wild podcast episode covers the TERF v feminist v Trans debate in some detail. Catch it here:

3. (screeched!)