Among anti-woke people, there is the trope that “woke” is a far-left ideology.
For example, the Lunduke Journal recently ran the headline: Jack Dorsey Keynote Cancelled After Protest Threat by Child Porn Enthusiast, Extreme Leftist
The protest threat Lunduke is referring to came from Drew DeVault, aka SirCmpwn, who has become quite infamous for his social (in)justice tirades, and then exposed as a lolicon hentai enthusiast. (Through his account on the website danbooru, he has been helping to add tags to pornographic drawings of children in anime art style. In one instance, he seems to have added the tag “happy sex” to a drawing of a 14 year-old anime character being penetrated. He was 23 at the time.)
Lunduke refers to DeVault, and others like him, as “extreme leftists” and “far left activists” repeatedly in his podcast. Other anti-woke people can be heard saying the same about “wokeness” on social media. Some even attribute it to Marxism. The reason anti-woke people like this framing, I think, is that they’re mostly right-leaning, centrists, or moderate leftists who see “far left” as a negative label.
We like to attribute negative labels to people we don’t like, even when the label isn’t accurate. I want to make it clear that being woke is not, in fact, related to far-left politics.
We could argue about what “left-wing” means, but let me take a different approach. What are the most left-wing political parties in Germany, such that one may call them far-left or extreme left? I think the answer is clearly the Marxist-Leninist Party of Germany (MLPD) and the German Communist Party (DKP). As far as I can tell, these parties are not woke. The parties actually pushing woke politics in Germany are center-left parties like the SPD and Greens, and the mainstream left-wing party The Left (Die Linke) which is now deeply split over wokeness.
One of the most solidly left-wing figures in The Left used to be Sahra Wagenknecht. In her youth, she was involved with the Free German Youth (a communist movement) and later joined the Socialist Unity Party (SED) i.e. the founding and ruling party of East Germany. After the fall of the Berlin wall and the rejoining of East and West Germany, she was elected to the national committee of the Party of Democratic Socialism, which was the successor of the East German SED. This party would later turn into The Left (Die Linke) of today. What did Wagenknecht do when The Left turned to wokeness? After long and arduous attempts at correcting the party’s course, she ultimately decided to leave and founded her own party, Alliance Sahra Wagenknecht (BSW) which is decidedly anti-woke.
Perhaps Germany is an oddity, I can hear you say. Let’s look at other places. In Canada, wokeness has been pushed aggressively by the Trudeau government. Is his Liberal Party a far-left one? If the Liberals are far-left, then what are Socialist Action, the Communist Party of Canada, or the Communist Party of Canada (Marxist-Leninist)?
(Yes, those are two different parties. I just learned about it and I’m laughing.)
To be fair, the Communist Party of Canada seems to be on the woke side as well. So it’s not like far-left parties are immune. But for instance I couldn’t find any mentions of the words “queer” or “transgender” on the entire websites of the Communist Party of Canada (Marxist-Leninist) or Socialist Action.
In the US, well, I hope you’re not going to argue that the Democrats are “far left” now. They obviously aren’t. And they’ve been massively pushing that crap. As for actually far-left parties, there seem to be a whole bunch that define themselves as communist or socialist (CPUSA, REVCOM, PLP, PSL, and WWP). Most of them seem to be woke to one or another degree, so again, it’s certainly not the case that far-left parties are necessarily unwoke or anti-woke (especially in the US it seems).
In the UK, it was actually the Conservatives under Theresa May that were about to pass a gender self-identification law, before feminists made a huge stink about it. Ultimately, the Conservatives became rather anti-woke, leaving wokeness to Labour and the Greens.
You could analyze more countries in this way and will almost certainly reach the same conclusion where ever you look. Wokeness dominates where liberal, center-left politics dominate. You’re not going to find much wokeness in North Korea, in Vietnam, or within the ranks of the CCP, trust me.
Whether someone is vulnerable wokeness seems to be a question of how much they subscribe to socially liberal or progressive causes. You don’t need to be particularly extreme in your left-wing politics to agree with things like women’s rights, gay rights, and anti-racism. These are completely mainstream liberal values, and wokism is like a cancer that latches on to them. It’s like a parasite feeding on the emphatic part of your brain. You don’t want to be a sexist asshole, a racist bigot, or a hateful transphobe now, do you? Then you better believe all these things, repeat all these slogans, and stop asking questions!
That is not to say, of course, that anyone who cares about socially liberal values will automatically fall for wokeness. I mean, this blog post is going to be published on a website called FeministWiki. The entire reason I ended up falling more towards the anti-woke side of this fight is that I got really into this thing called “radical feminism” about ten years ago. (I think it would be a bit better to call it Classical Feminism now, because many of the things that made it radical for its time are now widely accepted.) It was opposition to gender stereotypes that made me question the mantra “trans women are women” and opposition to sexual objectification and exploitation that made me clash with the “sex work is just work” people. I started to oppose elements of what is now called “wokeness” (before it was even called that) precisely because I care about universal human rights and dignity.
Sometimes, you just gotta sleep. Don’t be woke all the time. Insomnia is bad. Sorry, that’s a terrible pun, and there’s no deeper meaning behind it. By all means, do wake up to social injustices. Just don’t be stupid about it.