The Woke Generation - Fighting Back

Post Reply New Topic

Isn't the definition of wokeness a heightened awareness of the various social injustices in society and becoming self-actualised in order to counter those unjustices with the hopes of resolving them?

That's what it was last time I checked. For conservatives social justice has become an opportunity to attack (among other things)

preventing suicide of LGBTQI people in highschools
preventing racism in highschools
preventing police mistreatment of black people
preventing discrimination in employment and workplace
preventing public health order to wear masks and vaccinate
preventing any real action against carbon emissions
preventing spending on health and education
preventing hate speech

I would agree. It is primarily a rightwing tactic of distracting people from a lack of investment in public services and the increasing polarisation of income since the 80s. In fact, appealing to their voters on cultural grounds and playing a reactionary identity politics game is how the right have consolidated their hold on power as Chomsky has shown. However, I think the left's identity politics has failed to adequately challenge the right's toxic discourse since it's embrace of postmodernism, which eschews any unifying or rational basis for organising a better world and a unified one.

Protest songs have had a long and rich history of being vehicles for social change, with artists such as Bob Dylan, Gil Scott-Heron and Marvin Gaye being some of most notable examples of this musical tradition.

But according to Don Letts, it has become increasingly difficult for artists to create protest songs due to what he calls the “woke” world and a fear of being accused of cultural appropriation.

Writing in the Radio Times, the film director and musician, most famous for his work as a videographer for the Clash, said: “For artists, the protest song is an increasingly difficult proposition. In a world so woke you can’t make a joke, trying to navigate the minefield of fake news, conspiracy theories and information overload is made even trickier by the fear of being accused of cultural appropriation.”

Letts said today’s apparent lack of protest-driven artists was also due to the musicians being “by default part of the business”.

A funny thing happened on the way to the emerging Democratic majority. Twenty years on, the co-authors of a hugely influential work on the subject acknowledge that their party took a detour.

In 2002, the political scientist Ruy Teixeira and the journalist John B. Judis published a book that struck a chord among liberals despondent over the success of George W. Bush, a president who was then so popular that he gained seats in that year’s midterm election.

“The Emerging Democratic Majority” took note of the demographic change pulsing through the country, and boldly predicted that the Democratic Party was poised to dominate American politics for the foreseeable future.

“Over the next decade, this bloc of voters is expected to continue to increase and, extrapolating from recent trends, could make up nearly a quarter of the electorate,” Teixeira and Judis wrote. “If these voters remain solidly Democratic, they will constitute a formidable advantage for any Democratic candidate. Democrats could suffer from an embarrassment of political riches.”

Six years later, the American public elected Barack Obama, an African American president whose rainbow coalition seemed to vindicate the thesis. A Time magazine cover from May 2009 pictured an elephant below the headline “Endangered Species,” capturing the feeling that Republicans’ demographic reckoning had finally arrived.

But it unraveled quickly with the election of Donald Trump, who not only discovered pockets of white working-class voters that few knew existed, but also appealed to more voters of color than anyone had expected.

Now, as President Biden sinks in the polls, Teixeira finds himself fighting against what he says is a caricature of his famous book. His Substack newsletter, The Liberal Patriot, delivers “no-holds-barred, reality-based analysis,” unafraid to take on what he calls a “race-essentialist” dogma that is dominating the Democratic Party.

There’s lots of nuance that gets lost in translation, but the narrative that a lot of people took from your book was that the Democratic Party would benefit from the inevitable growth of people of color, young people, this new cadre of voters who at the time seemed ready to join the party and put the Republican Party in the rearview mirror. And the narrative has been complicated since then, hasn’t it?
Well, it was even complicated back then. You fairly summarized what is a bowdlerized version of what we said. That was only part of what we were saying. Demographic change was inevitably shifting the political terrain. It did not make it inevitable that Democrats would benefit.

And even on this raw demographic basis, it’s not crazy that there’s a natural popular-vote Democratic majority in the country. However, that does not translate into political power. We very specifically said — and this is widely ignored — that for this majority to attain and exercise political power, you have to retain a significant fraction of the white working class. The country was changing, but it wasn’t changing that fast.

The second thing we didn’t anticipate was the eventual effect of professional-class hegemony in the Democratic Party — that it would tilt the Democrats so far to the left on sociocultural issues that it would actually make the Democratic Party significantly unattractive to working-class voters.

It’s a huge liability for the Democrats, because the people who staff the party, the people who staff the think tanks, the advocacy groups, the foundations, the staffers, they’re all singing from the same hymnal to some extent. They live in this liberal cultural bubble, particularly the younger members.

Can you give an example of that?
Sure. Go back to the 2020 Democratic primaries. It was remarkable the extent to which things that were alienating to the average voter, particularly your average working-class voter, were gaily promulgated, with no apparent second thoughts about how it might appear to people outside the bubble. Things like open borders; basically, let’s decriminalize the border.

You had a lot of stuff about mass incarceration, but almost nothing about crime.

In the aftermath of the George Floyd murder, there was a distinct, almost inflection point in the intensity of this professional-class hegemony on race, to the point where it became completely routine for people in and around the party to talk about white supremacy, systemic racism, how America has always been a benighted country and still is, we haven’t made any progress, everybody who is white has work to do in terms of discarding their racism.

You write about something you call “the Fox News Fallacy,” which you say is “blinding Democrats to real problems.”
The basic idea is when one of these criticisms appears — like, Democrats are allowing the intrusion of race-essentialist ideology into curriculum and teacher training — the first reaction is to deny it and just to say it’s simply a racist dog whistle to constituencies who aren’t that happy about the way the country has changed.

The same thing goes for crime. I mean, who wants to be tough on crime? Well, no one could possibly want to be tough on crime except for people who want to put a lot of Black people in jail; whereas actually, this is a huge matter of concern for people across races, and particularly in poor Black and Hispanic communities. The idea that concern about crime and a desire to be tough on criminals is simply a reflection of a bigoted, reactionary type of politics is completely ridiculous.

The base of the Democratic Party in many ways is older Black voters who are quite conservative on a lot of issues. And those are the people who elected Joe Biden.
Right. And the extent to which this is completely ignored by the dominant liberal Democratic discourse, to me, is completely astonishing. Do they really believe that the Black voters who formed the base of the Democratic Party think like Ibram X. Kendi, or the leaders of BLM? Are they crazy?


What would you recommend the Democratic Party do?
Well, it won’t be easy. You try to be productive, you try to get the Electoral Count Act and associated reforms done. You try to get some sort of Build Back Better thing through Congress with Joe Manchin’s support, or you break it up into pieces that are popular and try to get them through.

The second thing is, whatever you haven’t done to try to get the country back to normal, do it. We’re fast approaching the end of this pandemic. A Democrat should be ready to reopen the country.

A third thing here that’s related to any elections: They’ve got to try to lift the ceiling on their support levels, which I think will necessitate some drawing of lines within the party, where you say, “No, no, we believe in being tough on crime. We think it is an absolutely atrocious idea to defund the police.”

You’ve got to win, and when you win, you’ve got to do stuff for the people who elected you. It’s not much more complicated than that.

I thought that the definition of wokeness is when they try to force a theme onto something that isn't there, and therefore it feels forced. It's like when people complain about movies being woke now, when themes are forced onto the stories that did not naturally support such themes for example. Or in school, why force social justice themes, in classes that are not about that...

So I though the defintion of woke, was not being for social justice, but for forcing into onto things that do not naturally support it.

There has always been wokeism in films, no one just complained about it then. People forget films have always changed as well and no one complained.

Anyone forget The Preacher's Wife or Sister Act or Jurassic Park and The Lost World?

Oh okay how do movies like Sister Act or Jurassic Park have woke-ism in them though?

But Sister Act wasn't preachy about the fact that it had a bunch of black characters and it wasn't preachy about a female character who played by her own rules. I always thought woke movies were ones that were being preachy rather than have a story that stood on it's own merits like Sister Act does.

Oh okay, I always thought woke films only counted as woke if they get preachy about their themes, rather than letting their themes stand out on their own.

Like for example, I thought the Charlie's Angles recent remake was woke, because they have lot of feminism themes, but they really preach them to the point where it keeps hitting you over the head with it, where as a movie like say The Descent (2005), or Set It Off (1996), have female characters, without being preachy about it and thereby not woke. But that's just two examples off the top of my head.