I had the following conversation with someone last week. He is not university educated and works in a manual job. I will skip how we got to this point but from there I am only tidying and compressing this very slightly. Here’s how it went.
[Him]: "But what do you call a political system where the banks and housing and all the stuff like that are run in for the benefit of ordinary people and not rich people?"
[Me]: "Socialism"
[Him]: "No, just like banks and like energy companies and things that are just there to serve people, what do you call that?’
[Me]: "Socialism"
[Him]: "Nah, that can’t be right, I hate the left."
[Me]: "Why?"
[Him]: "Because they want to give children drugs to try and change their sex against their parent’s will and that’s child abuse, and because they want open borders and then just anyone at all can come and live here and that’s nuts."
In case you have missed it, there is a little mini-debate going on in the US left and it is about this issue. The long and short of it is that Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez said on a podcast that "Woke One was crazy" (quoting someone else) and a number of people have since written essays attacking her for it.
The relevance of this for our society is immense. Almost everyone identifies the fact that the public right across western democracies is in a foul mood and is demanding change. The fact that the change that is at the forefront is a sort of hard-right ethnic nationalism is in large part to do with the left’s ability to alienate ordinary people.
I’m not going to go through why identity politics was always going to have this outcome because I covered it extensively here, but basically if you have a politics which is orientated around what divides us (focusing on our separate identities) rather than what unites us (our role as citizens in a shared national project) then your politics is destined to fragment more and more.
And as it does, more and more people will be on the wrong side of the divide you are creating. Plus because ‘woke’ was largely a social media fad it was inevitable that it would develop a culture of shock and provocation, because that’s what social media does best. Now you’re provoking everyone not in your identity group, and now everyone hates us.
All those people who were kept out of the conversation didn’t have the vocabulary to say ‘my voice is being silence by this exclusionary elite narrative which removes my agency and social belonging’, but they felt it
Nor am I going to repeat that this isn’t even really a left tradition at all but a liberal one. This whole idea of ‘expressing your true self’ and ‘being true to your essence’ (or whatever) is decidedly not from a left tradition but really traces back to the 1960s counterculture in west coast US, which is exactly where ‘woke theory’ as we now know it emerged in academia.
This is a middle class hippie-libertarian ideal, not one rooted in the left tradition of structural inequality. It is far too lifestyle orientated; far too much of it was purely performative for people who already agreed with you and very little was about engaging and outreach. It excluded people who didn’t have the university education to join in with the complex theoretical language set.
In fact quite often engagement or outreach was viewed as fundamentally wrong. If you ever suggested that people outside any given identity group should be included in the conversation, you quickly found out that this was simply ‘silencing the voice’ of the identity group concerned. Purity was everything.
The result was exactly what you’d imagine – all those people who were kept out of the conversation didn’t have the vocabulary to say ‘my voice is being silence by this exclusionary elite narrative which removes my agency and social belonging’, but they felt it.
And it overwhelmed everything. On the left, if you tried to move the conversation on a bit to other topics, you’d quickly find it proved difficult. You could raise housing as an issue which unifies a lot of people – but you could be certain that this would quickly become ‘the oppression of marginalised people of colour in our housing system’ or ‘why we must deconstruct the patriarchal home’.
It wasn’t just that chunks of the left couldn’t stop talking about identity, it’s that when anyone else tried to talk about anything else it would have identity welded on top of it, again often in exclusionary or provocative language. At times the need to make everything about identity was positively fetishistic.
Two other aspects made this worse. First, because ‘woke’ was largely a performative online business that meant it was exactly like all other performative online affairs, which means those who take arguments to extremes were rewarded, so arguments and statements got wilder.
The other was the moral self-certainty involved. This was a side issue for me but the idea that you and you alone are awake and able to see truth was always a morally dodgy proposition. What it led to was a conviction that anyone who didn’t buy into your version of truth was not moral and so whatever was done to them was justified – and thus ‘woke’ became punitive.
When you have moral certainty wedded to doctrines which can’t be questioned and where apostates are punished, you better be a religion because otherwise you’re a cult (or at least you’re acting like one). And that is what this all felt like from outside – a self-contained, self-satisfied cult which had no interest in you, held extreme views and punished anyone who held a different view.
What is so painful about this is that these were all important issues. Race, gender, policing and crime, immigration, sexuality – there are lots of serious social failings which we need to tackle. Me Too and Black Lives matter and the Defund the Police movement and even the open borders people all raised serious issues or questions and in many cases urgent action was needed.
That has been the defence of Woke One in the aftermath of the AOC comments – that these things were important. The problem is that no-one was claiming they weren’t, we were just warning that the manner in which these causes were being pursued was highly counterproductive.
The left needed to do big things in an era of oligarchy and climate change but the oligarchy sponsored Pride and the climate has no identity so we squandered all our political capital on who was allowed in which toilet
So we don’t in any way need to lose the social purpose which motivated ‘woke’, but that is just a corollary of saying that woke didn’t need to be what it turned into in the first place. It didn’t need to be obscure, aggressive, punitive, exclusionary, often extreme, always provocative.
But in the end this debate over whether Woke One was crazy or not is just the same error again. It doesn’t matter whether we think it was all justified, whether we’re all quite happy with ourselves, the real world data is conclusive. The more the left has spoken in a woke accent, the more we’ve lost votes among anyone who isn’t university educated.
And that was ill judged because in reality while Woke One had a serious cultural impact, it achieved very little in political terms and the backlash against woke is taking us further back than where we started. In the end it didn’t work.
That’s where I came in with this. Unlike quite a lot of those who’d identify as woke, I have many friends and acquaintances who did not graduate from university. I have always been deeply aware of how the ways we were talking were influencing them. The left needed to do big things in an era of oligarchy and climate change but the oligarchy sponsored Pride and the climate has no identity so we squandered all our political capital on who was allowed in which toilet.
That is the fundamental problem with Woke One. I can give you all the theoretical deconstruction of its practices and theories that you want but in the end it’s biggest outcome was to make it harder for the left to get things done because we alienated a large part of the coalition we needed to put together if we were to have a chance of power.
So I’ll leave you all to decide for yourself where Woke One fell on the crazy scale. I’m going to stay focussed on the fact that it didn’t work but did manage to make people hate us. We don’t have the time to make a mistake like that again.