Left Is Not Woke

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The looming danger of an ephemeral enemy of the people – the “woke” – has been a financial boon to traditional print media. Indeed she stresses the numbers of white Americans who rallied behind the Black Lives Matter protests of several years ago, which would seem to disprove her central assertion.

Susan Neiman's aim in Left Is Not Woke is to remind the left of the importance of universalist values. Without universalism, there is no argument against racism, merely a bunch of tribes jockeying for power’ (108). Another thesis of Neiman’s book that runs alongside her thin genealogical argument is the idea that the “woke” reject the Enlightenment principle of universalism and thus cannot be truly leftist. For much of the last century, the Enlightenment—a loose movement of European intellectuals in the 17th and 18th centuries who emphasized individual reason over tradition and religion—occupied a privileged place in the origin stories of liberalism.And those tactics were grounded in the first volume of Foucault’s The History of Sexuality (1978), which queer theorist David Halperin found was ACT UP members’ “single most important intellectual source of political inspiration. By rejecting the Enlightenment’s universalizing claims, the argument goes, his work robs us of our ability to better the world.

I have attempted to reconcile the claim that the New York Times is “woke” with its active participation in the most recent “anti-woke” moral panic about trans people; its continued obsession with highlighting minor cases of petty theft and downplaying systemic wage theft; its history of sympathetic profiles of right-wing extremists ranging from Adolf Hitler in 1922 to the leader of the overtly white supremacist Traditionalist Worker Party in 2016; or its recent opinion piece excusing the public murder of a homeless man on the New York subway. Neiman rightly acknowledges that this “happens daily in the name of corporate globalism,” but corporate globalism isn’t “woke” according to Neiman. At several points, Neiman mocks other thinkers as “childish,” as lacking the “everyday wisdom we expect grownups to have.While the idea of intersectionality was intended to emphasize the multiplicity of identities under which we operate in different contexts, woke ideology employs those identities as multipliers of marginalization, thus further essentializing identity rather than complicating it. One can read this book in a single sitting, not just due to its length but because Neiman’s fluid writing carries readers along comfortably even as she courses through the likes of Schmitt’s political theology or evolutionary psychology. Second, viewing human relations exclusively through the lens of power dynamics strips any self-proclaimed liberation movement of its ideals and thus makes any such movement the moral equivalent of those forces against which it struggles. S. Department of Defense, Yale University, Jaguar Land Rover workers, and multinational investment management corporations BlackRock and Vanguard have in common?

Then there’s James MacPherson’s Notes From Woketopia: Laying Bare the Lunacy of Woke Culture (2021); Diane Bederman’s Bullies of Woke and their Assault on Mental Health (2022); ex-Marxist professor Michael Rectenwald’s Beyond Woke (2020); Carl Rhodes’ Woke Capitalism: How Corporate Morality is Sabotaging Democracy (2021); Brendan O’Neill’s Anti-Woke (2018); Mark Goldblatt’s I Feel, Therefore I Am: The Triumph of Woke Subjectivism (2022); and Tom Pickering’s The Evil of Silence: Woke Culture and the Mechanics of Tyranny (2021).It functions within language not as a descriptor with a clear delineation between what is and what is not , but as a reflection of the attitudes of the speaker.