Defining ‘Wokeism’ — How It Has Permeated Society And How To Fight It
Some of the biggest critics of “wokeness” have recently lamented that conservatism is no match to take on the far left. It’s been said by the likes of James Lindsay, a well-known anti-woke advocate, that the only thing to counter wokeness is actually to double down on liberalism, therefore putting faith in metaphorical Mensheviks to stop the Bolsheviks.
Quite the game plan!
This argument recently appeared on a thread I got involved in on Twitter, responding to the questions of what wokeness is and where it comes from. Some claim it arises out of the failure of liberalism, not Marxism. Some claim it is Marxism itself. So let’s have a look at wokeness, what is it, and why is it so intertwined with Marxism?
Wokeness uses Marxism as a vehicle and as a means to an end. Wokeness is its own revolutionary movement, bent on destroying the past and present social order of nations. Wokeness, simply put, is anti-western, anti-Christian, anti-family, anti-meritocracy, anti-male, anti-straight, anti-nationalist, anti-traditional, etc. It uses the same political tactics, games, and levers of power as Marxism to terrorize its opposition into complete submission to the dystopian order it’s trying to create.
Chaos, a standard communist tool, is a key weaponized tactic to push the woke agenda, to quickly usher in and break the societal foundations and institutional structures that hold up modern American and Western society. It’s why woke activists are vehemently pro-crime, and a chaotic agent like George Soros is its primary advocate.
Unlike the main variant of Marxism, which emphasizes rallying the proletariat (which could mean the workers or the outright downtrodden) around a nationalistic, populist theme as seen in North Korea, Cuba or Vietnam, wokeness has a distinct identity hierarchy agenda attached to it. No two followers are equal, and someone is always more oppressed than their alleged ally. This has easily been distinguishable over the last few years when it comes to the woke version of social realism.
Unlike Marxist imagery that glazes the walls all over Pyongyang, Beijing, and Havana with their founders and its people working, woke social realism is what we have come to see every day online and through our entertainment consumption. Dylan Mulvaney adorns the cans of your favorite beer. Lizzo is featured in “athletic wear” ads, and Sam Smith takes over your award shows to sell satanism and gender fluidity to your families.
Meanwhile, George Floyd and other woke statues replace the statues of the founding fathers and other iconic American and Western figures. This is the hierarchy that wokeness pushes. Trans people, as we’ve seen over the last few weeks, have become the leading vanguard figureheads for the movement. Even as a trans terrorist slaughtered children, it only resulted in businesses and companies reaffirming their commitment to these vanguards of wokeness, or facing the violent, revolutionary consequences.
The biggest problem with modern conservatives and right-leaning people is that they approach wokeness as if it’s some basic, schoolhouse rock, bipartisan political disagreement amongst professional adults. Whereas they should be approaching it as a totalitarian ideological movement led by professional inmates that escaped their local mental asylum. It’s a movement that echoes the dystopian language seen in the Haitian/Khmer Rouge revolutions and is complete with all the radio Rwanda-like terrorism to terrorize their opponents.
This means it’s necessary to fight wokeness as people on the right like to brag about how they fought the communists in the 20th century. Brick by brick, tonnage for tonnage, blow for blow. As was the case during the Cold War. Yes, that means pardoning people like Daniel Perry, who are victims of Soros-backed wokeness. Expelling progressive agitators from state legislatures as Tennessee did. Boycotting and using bureaucratic tactics — as seen with Bud Light and in Florida — threw a wrench in the wheels of Disney that pushed wokeness onto kids.
At the end of the day, Marxism and wokeness are bedfellows who share the same tools to achieve their revolutionary goals. One for “economic justice” to settle class conflicts and the other for social justice to settle old ethnic and cultural scores of sorts. Both wokeness and Marxism pride themselves on redistributing their opponent’s alleged power, wealth, and privilege, but in the modern context, treating woke as its own new subset is better tailored to address different problems of the ever-changing hierarchy factions within the ideology. It also compensates for the obvious truth that wokeness is anything but anti-capitalistic.
Recognizing wokeness is just as much of an exegetical threat as communism was will give conservatives the push to make the necessary adjustments to tackle the problem.
