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Comment by forgotacc240419 | Hacker News Reader

There was a variety of causes that gained prominence ~2015 when Bernie Sanders came much closer to challenging Hillary Clinton than anyone expected. The Democrat party establishment picked the wishy washy meaningless bits out and focused on them while keeping away from the more challenging economic issues that would actually require their ideologies to adapt

I think what most people call "woke" is probably just a reaction to the obvious emptiness of many of the things politicians like Kamala Harris chose to focus on whilst ignoring more concrete issues. A lot of it was stuff there never was a solution for.

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It goes back even further than that.

There seemed to be a surge in 2011 too, when it became apparent that the Obama administration was going to let the big banks off the hook for the financial crisis.

I mean, that's part of it. The culture war is useful to both US political parties, because they both have a bourgeois class interest and need something to keep people invested in politics for the sake of their political legitimacy, but at the same time need to prevent them from gaining class consciousness or becoming involved in class politics.

Put another way: the culture war (as woke vs. anti-woke) divides the electorate, but in a way that lets them be parceled out between two factions of the ruling class, rather than aligning any of them against the ruling class.

Criminalization of homelessness is probably the most stark example of class warfare in society today. And agitation against these policies is absolutely called "woke" by the right.

The idea that wokeness is in contrast to class-based advocacy is not correct. The right will happily call class-based advocacy "woke" until the cows come home.

The right will call class-based advocacy "woke", but that doesn't mean that centrist Democrats are going to adopt it to spite them. Criminalization of homelessness is at its most vicious in cities with Democratic mayors.

Sure. The leaders within the Democratic party are not especially good advocates for the homeless. They are similarly not terribly good advocates for a lot of suffering groups. Despite all the hay about "defund the police", it didn't actually end up materializing as policy and we saw Biden explicitly reject it in a State of the Union.

It is not true that the establishment left is using "woke" advocacy to avoid having to talk about class. It is also not true that if the left stopped talking about "woke" concepts that the right would suddenly get on board with class advocacy.

This ties back to my idea that "wokeness" is an ideology that centers awareness, not solutions. Everyone in San Francisco is sufficiently aware that homelessness is a problem. Nobody really advocates for police brutality or shooting innocents as a positive good.

However, the debate constantly returns to the the question of how important these issues are on an imaginary scale that doesn't exist, instead of what we should be doing out.

Bob thinks police brutality ranks 9.8 on Bob's "importance scale". Sue thinks it ranks 7.6 on Sue's "importance scale". Arguing about the numbers and scales is completely irrelevant, and an excuse to attack someone else's position instead of proposing a solution you have to advocate for and defend. It is a strategy of taking the fight to the enemy.

I think it is reasonable to claim that there is a general bias towards awareness over material solutions among establishment liberals. I don't really think that this is "wokeness". I'd wager that almost everybody who uses the term would say that an activist who advocates for an extreme wealth tax and a ban on corporate landlording with money redistributed to the homeless is "more woke" than a mayor who funds homeless shelters to a degree but also regularly sends cops to clear out camp sites where homeless people are sleeping.

I agree with what you said, but I still think performance and moralizing is the central aspect.

In your hierarchy, I think most people would also agree that an activist blogging about using the world "unhoused" instead of "homeless" is more woke than the one advocating for the wealth tax.

Similarly, someone arguing for wealth tax and transfer on moral grounds is more woke than someone who argues the identical policy saying it will result in long term cost savings.

Why do you put more emphasis on the language than the proposed solutions. Is that to control the speech?

I'm not sure what you mean.

In my opinion, and many others, the type of speech is what wokeness is about. Particularly of the kind that are moralizing lectures explaining how Superior the speaker is.

Concrete solutions are far more preferable.

> most people would also agree that an activist blogging about using the world "unhoused" instead of "homeless" is more woke than the one advocating for the wealth tax.

Just wondering why you are allowing "homeless" to be used without retribution, but someone using "unhoused" is disparaged as woke. Seems like language policing to me.

Im describing what the definition of wokism is. I think it is performative and judgmental moralizing with a social justice focus. Using PGs language, this might be a social justice prig.

I would agree that wokeism does not have a monopoly on performative and judgmental moralizing. I suppose prigs come in different flavors. All wokeists are prigs, but not all prigs are woke. Im not sure what the central characteristic is of anti-woke prigs...

To the language policing point, I think think there is difference in views. One person might think it is important to police language because the words matter. Another person might say the words themselves are irrelevant, but the reasons for changing them foolish.

Sure. I'm not saying that a focus on language or whatever is the opposite of "woke." I'm just saying that it is a general sling thrown at left wing politics, not a thing that exists to distract from revolutionary class politics.

OK, first of all what criminalization of homelessness? Second, if I go to work every day and don’t smoke crack and pay taxes I would like my kids to be able to go to the park down the street so can someone please take a bulldozer and take all the tents and put them in the garbage. This is actually what normal mainstream people think in their minds and everyone that thinks I’m a monster is a a woke idiot.

You can think this if you want.

But this is exactly what I'm talking about. You are saying that people who advocate for leaving these tents alone are "woke idiots", so "wokeness" is clearly about class politics too.

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