I know it wasn't originally so, but nowadays it seems to be just thrown around as a generic insult.
That's the usual go-to, isn't it? Forcing your opponent to define the word woke to make them look dumb/hateful.
If we want to play semantics checkers, why don't we stick with the original meaning of the word, in which case being against only one of those things would be considered woke.
> Like, what do you mean by woke
The author is positing that:
"From the beginning, it was possible to be a socialist, the socialist, and culturally middle-of-the-road. It was possible to believe in seizing the means of production without being avant-garde on matters of sex, race, crime or war. That point has got lost over time, to the left’s immense cost
...
[a] political entrepreneur will notice the unmet demand for a culturally moderate-to-conservative socialism
...
A century or so after Das Kapital, some British dockers marched in defence of Enoch Powell, a Tory minister who had been fired for a speech against non-white immigration. The march wasn’t, and isn’t, peculiar. The conservatism of even the organised working class should not be news. Unable to come to terms with it, the modern left retreats into a sort of Ken Loach or Mike Leigh fantasy world, in which Christian and Muslim, native and migrant, blue-haired teenager and laid-off steelworker, are forever teaming up to fight the real Other, which is neoliberalism."
What the author is leaving out (and this is what makes it just a complaint, rather than analysis) is why the coalition formed. Instead, he just says "The mystery is why," and hand-waves it as "whatever the reason..." But it's the reason that's central to the issue. This didn't happen out of nowhere.
Some of the reasons are just arbitrary. It is just coalition arithmetic. There's an argument that it was racial politics that flipped the parties (cf. Carmine and Stimson, Issue Evolution (1989)). It's disputed, but it's less ideological than it is political calculus (at least in America). People want to win elections. Kennedy moved cautiously on civil rights. And then eventually, Nixon looked at a map in 1972 and turned it into strategy. Nobody sat down and reasoned from Marxism to racial equality, it's the side-effect of a two party system. You can say the same for why there are a lot of conservatives who are both fiscally and socially conservative, so much that being "fiscally conservative and socially liberal" became a meme and clarification.
The other reason is de-industrialization. In the 50s, if you were young and left-wing, you go to your union hall. The labor movement was a huge part of the ground operations for the Democratic Party. Fast forward to today. The same person would probably be going to college, in large part because manufacturing employemnt has been dropping for decades. The factory is not culturally liberal. That's the professional culture. The campus is culturally liberal. That's the professional culture. At the end of the day, we work, and these are real social forces that move people in certain directions.
That said, it's not entirely arbitrary. Robin Kelley wrote this book, Hammer and Hoe, and in it he talks about black communist organizing during the Depression. The gist is that the Communist Party thought it was just going to educate industrial workers on straightforward class politics, but what they got instead was black workers taking over and bringing their own institutions with them: the black church, spirituals as organizing songs, people reading Lenin and scripture in the same evening, and so on. The author of the FT article is being pretty narrowminded or is just simply ignorant, to talk about "moderate socialism" and ignore the history of black communism, which is as significant as it gets, at least in the United States.
So the fusion -- even if it's not necessary nor sufficient for left-wing politics -- makes sense, and extends beyond race. We're looking at a social phenomenon where groups of people are left out, either by not having money or being the wrong kind of person. And I think when we're talking about a "culturally moderate socialism", it's inevitably going to invite the question "Who gets to count?" I don't have any theories on whether this is 'good' or bad for socialism, and I'm not interested in debating pros and cons of leftist versus neoliberal theories, but that's where it comes from, and I think the author should at least bother to think about it before dismissing it as a "mystery".
They moved too far to culturally left issues (gays, trans, and immigration, in particular), to the point that they lost the factory workers who were economically liberal but socially conservative. Those people were made to feel that if they had reservations about gay marriage, or trans people in womens' sports, or immigrants in the numbers (and lack of documentation) that were happening, then they were viewed as moral lepers, incapable of redemption by anything short of permanent abasement for their views. There was nowhere for them to go that would represent their economic interests without cultural suicide.
Well, that didn't work out for the Democrats. Too many of their normal base of voters (the blue collar workers) turned their backs, and we got Trump twice.
https://www.axios.com/2026/08/12/aoc-democratic-socialists-2...
There are two parts - one which most of us would support (being against misogyny, racism, homophobia, etc) and one which most of us would oppose (defund the police, abolish ICE, trans women in sports, DEI quotas and promoting people because of their race or gender, etc).
Woke 1.0 lumped both of those buckets together and faced an appropriate backlash which resulted in Trump's reelection.
Having watched the past years unfold from outside the US and reading papers across the media spectrum I would assert that most of the work of smearing the meaning of Woke to include supposedly advocating for litter boxes in classrooms for furries, etc was work gleefully carried out by the US conservative right wing media.
> and faced an appropriate backlash
which was the entire purpose of relentless 24/7 Woke strawmanning.
they own all media, mate.
the goal of the right since Bismarck is to get the left to combine the pursuit of economic change with social change as a way of muddling the discussion and splitting the effort.
Woke 2.0 was when white liberals co-opted it and used it as an umbrella term for social justice in general, particularly in the context of online activism.
Woke 3.0 was when the right wing co-opted the term, as they tend to do with all leftist terms, and it became simply another pejorative. This is where we are now.
Even AOC is now running away from woke 1.0 and admitted that there was a lot of craziness. That says a lot.
If "woke 2.0" (although actually it would be 4.0) means embracing some kind of milquetoast neoliberal centrism that seeks to maintain the status quo of respectability politics, capitalism and American exceptionalism above all else, I'll have none of it.
People forget that Trump used to be a Democrat and a liberal and he was pals with the Clintons and congratulated Hillary Clinton when she became Secretary of State. None of these people are sincere.
And the Democrats fail not because "Woke 1.0 was a miserable failure" but because they alienate their base (which is actual leftists who do support trans people and defunding the police and the like) while the other side is willing to embrace even the most activist fringe of their base because that's never a risk for the right.