We need a new word for ‘wokeness’

Let the television guest who has never had a brain fart cast the first stone. Bethany Shondark Mandel, co-author with Karol Markowicz of the new book Stolen Youth: How Radicals Are Erasing Innocence and Indoctrinating a Generation, underwent an online pile-on this week for struggling to define the word “wokeness”. When asked by Rising host Briahna Joy Gray, Mandel floundered before going silent and acknowledging that “this is going to be one of those moments that goes viral.” You can understand why — the woke left has been deluged with such annoyingly inconvenient questions for long enough that they had to find a way to fire back with their own version of “what is a woman?”

Yet there’s a more legitimate aspect of why “wokeness” is such a inapt term for what everyone seems to be talking about at the moment. And everyone really is talking about it — Republicans at all levels, from the voter to elected leaders, deploy it as a stand-in for everything wrong with the country. It shows up in speeches and television and serious policy documents alike: when Donald Trump’s former OMB head, Russ Vought, released an outline of recommended cuts to Joe Biden’s budget, the 104-page document deployed the word “woke” seventy-seven times. But what does it even mean?

As linguist John McWhorter explained in his New York Times newsletter back in 2021:

In 2012, people were using “stay woke” on Twitter with unalloyed pride. As late as 2016, you could find rosy-cheeked teens and twenty-somethings all but chirping “woke,” such as in this earnest little guide to the latest slang.

No more. These days, “woke” is said with a sneer. It’s a prisoner in scare quotes as often as not (“Why ‘wokeness’ is the biggest threat to Democrats in the 2022 election”) and typically uttered with a note of condescension somewhere between the way comedians used to talk about hippies and the way anybody talks about, well, rather than a word beginning with “a” you’ll find discussed, among other places, here, I will sub in “jerks.”…

We understand this when we see that the real wind behind its wings in the early 2010s was that “woke” served as a handy, nonpejorative replacement for “politically correct.”

I remember that term used straight, without dismissal and only a hint of irony, in 1984. A white college friend, very much of the left, used it with a quiet sprinkle of irony, but sincerely. (“Of course, you know this if you’re” — smile and two-millisecond pause, signaling “you know” — “politically correct.”) He meant that a certain complex of leftist beliefs — i.e., the ones called “woke” in 2012 — were obviously the proper ones for any reasonable person to have, that they signaled a higher awareness.

In a view like that, there is, inevitably, a certain self-satisfaction. And in some of those holding this kind of view, that self-satisfaction will express itself in dismissal and abuse of those ungifted with the third eye in question. The result will be resistance, much of it no less pretty, and this was why, just a few years after my college friend used the term, “politically correct” had become the slur “PC,” hurled at the left from the right and even from the center.

As use of “woke” exploded, its effectiveness as a descriptor diminished. Once the word served as a substitute for a particular form of political correctness, particularly with a focus on racial reckoning. Now, as author Chad Felix Greene has suggested, the word effectively means “Whatever the left currently thinks makes them sound like a good person to their friends.” It’s a word that is so broad as to encompass everything from complaints about our largest government institutions, our biggest corporations and our local neighborhood school boards and farmer’s market disputes on race, environment and gender issues. 

We’re solidly in blind men and the elephant territory now. It was one thing when “woke” was essentially a stand-in for “social justice warrior” or someone enraptured by the work of Ibram X. Kendi — now, it’s become an insufficient and increasingly meaningless term that does not encompass the aggressive insanity of, for just one example, the trans agenda targeted at minors and schoolchildren.

Once terms like these take hold in the world of politics, they aren’t changed overnight. But we have to acknowledge what “woke” leaves out. It is an insufficient term to capture the identitarian, decadent, terminal stage leftism at play here — think of other terms, such as Nieman Marxism, Big Karen, or Jonah Goldberg’s “kale foam.” “Woke” does capture a certain silliness about the modern leftist project — think of the Simpsons episode where Lisa meets a “Level Five Vegan” voiced by Joshua Jackson, who doesn’t eat anything that casts a shadow (and judges her for not reaching his height of consciousness). 

But it leaves out the part of this agenda that is a true break with the values that made the West the envy of the world — it’s too silly-sounding to be an existential philosophical threat, even though it is. There has to be a distinction between the people who just put the rainbow sign in their yard because everyone else does it, and those who truly want to cure the planet, starting with you.

Whatever term comes next, it has to capture the destructive decadence the left envisions here as its goal — a post-merit society, a great leveling achieved through inhumanity, erasure and actual maiming and butchery where the scars you bear are the price of the future. The cultural Marxism that drives the iconoclastic left came for the church, the neighborhood, the family — and now targets young children with a message that only by their wounds will they be healed. “Woke” is a fine word as shorthand, casual, absurd — and totally incapable of describing what the cultural left is engaged in today — a project of Ethic Cleansing that will not be ignored.