Wokery is the scourge of the left

It's really quite embarrassing

When people want to illustrate how wacky and idiotic the left is, they often use examples of woke excesses as the key exhibits. For instance, on replying to a post on Substack about how to talk to lunatic leftists I received this response, having suggested they focus on the issues rather than personal insults:

Which issues exactly? Sterilising children or rapists in women's prisons? Or perhaps silencing women who question transgenderism? Or the problem of firing people who use wrong pronouns? How would you focus on those issues, enlightened Dave?

I consider myself to be on the left but I’m not woke, at least not woke enough to defend any of these supposedly leftist positions. I don’t have what this person would regard as leftist views on those issues, and neither I think do many others on the left.

If you go back to the original definition of wokeness, “alertness to racial prejudice and discrimination" or even the more recent broader definition, “awareness of social inequalities such as racial injustice, sexism, and denial of LGBT rights", then fine, there’s no problem with alertness or awareness. The problem is with certain policy positions that are identified as woke, like those around trans issues mentioned above.

Ideas such as giving children puberty blockers or housing men in women’s prisons sound idiotic to a lot of people, perhaps to most people. If they can be convinced that left wing politicians support those ideas that’s going to undermine any respect they may have had for the judgement of those politicians.

For many politicians these culture war issues have never been uppermost in their minds and consequently they’ve not devoted serious thought to them but have perhaps lazily been willing to defer to the activists. Or, more cynically, they’ve needed the support of the woke activists so have paid lip service to their views.

If you’re told that transwomen want to be treated as women that may at first seem perfectly reasonable. What’s the big deal? Who’s it hurting? Telling them they’re not real women just sounds cruel. But if you start to consider the legislation trans activists are demanding, like gender self-id, access to women’s groups, women’s sports, women’s toilets, women’s spaces and, if convicted of a crime and imprisoned, to be housed in a women’s prison, you start to realise things aren’t as straight forward as they first seemed. If you’re asked whether women can have penises you get into awkward logical tangles. Put some of these policies into practice and you get some pretty awkward headlines:

Prison bosses have defended the decision to send a trans woman rapist to be assessed in a women's prison.

How can anyone justify putting a male rapist in a women’s prison?

Labour leader Keir Starmer had said that 99.9% of women don’t have a penis, implying that 0.1% do, so perhaps that male rapist falls in that 0.1%.

Party strategists […] told Sky News Sir Keir would lose the general election campaign "on day one" unless he shifted his position on transgender rights.

Advisers have been telling the Labour leader since late 2021 to "deal with" the issue and explain to voters that "self-ID is not going to happen”.

Starmer has now defined women as adult females.

The last British Attitudes Survey found that whilst people are increasingly accepting of gay relationships and abortion, they’re not so accepting of transgender ideology.

The survey shows that the proportion of people who think someone should be able to change the sex on their birth certificate if they want has fallen from 53 per cent in 2019 to 30 per cent today. The proportion of people who ‘describe themselves as not prejudiced at all against people who are transgender’ has also declined from 82 per cent in 2019 to 64 per cent today.

The Scottish Government’s failed attempt to introduce gender self-ID appears to have lost the SNP and the Scottish Greens support. Did wokeness also lose the Democrats support in the recent election? Maybe pronouns in the bio is not so helpful. 

Democratic strategist Julie Roginsky says Democrats need to embrace common sense and learn how to talk normally to people.

I don’t think either Harris or Biden themselves were particularly woke, but like Starmer in the UK they went along with it to appease the woke faction in their parties. Biden didn’t need to say he was going to pick a woman to be his VP and Harris, in her run for the 2020 election, went with the vibes of the time, believing she needed to appeal to woke Democrats by outwoking her opponents.

At least by 2024 she had realised wokery would lose her more support than it might gain and she chose not to focus on her sex or ethnicity, although I still heard people saying she was doing just that. I guess they just assumed she must be, or had heard that’s what she was doing. The positions she took in 2019 were used very effectively against her, particularly her saying she’d use government funds to pay for gender reassignment for illegal immigrants.

Kamala’s for they/them, not you. The Harris-Walz campaign really should have distanced themselves from that position, but they didn’t. Harris saying she was just following the law wasn’t enough, and Tim Walz’s gender-affirming care for minors policies in Minnesota didn’t help.

It’s been disappointing to see people I’ve respected and viewed as rational and reasonable backing Trump:

Let’s be clear: Trump is the anti-woke candidate. While I’m not in the business of telling people how to vote, it stand to reason that if you agree with my premise that the problem with wokeness is not a single issue but closer an every-issue, then the choice becomes more clear. A vote for Trump is a gamble to purge our institutions of wokeness and its pervasive influence.

I think Colin Wright and others who have taken a similar line are wrong. There are other issues. Wokery is not every issue, but in a sense, Trump is just as woke as the woke left, he’s just got a different hierarchy of groups, a different set of oppressors and a different set of oppressed, with himself sitting on top as the most oppressed of all holding up an “Orange Lives Matter” banner.

MAGA tribalism and woke tribalism are two sides of the same coin. Both seek to cancel their opponents. Both are illiberal. Cathy Young in Persuasion says:

Plenty of people who have spoken out against progressive illiberalism, speech suppression and identity politics—John McWhorter, Anne Applebaum, Sam Harris, Garry Kasparov, Nicholas and Erika Christakis, Steven Pinker, Christina Hoff Sommers—have not gone the pro-Trump or anti-anti-Trump route. Those who have taken that route, by contrast, are fighting illiberalism with illiberalism: championing freedom of speech while shrugging off a presidential candidate’s threats to muzzle journalists he dislikes, and denouncing the race- and gender-based identity politics of the left while casting their lot with people who rant against “childless cat ladies” and Haitian immigrants who eat their neighbors’ pets. Should Trump win, I think those among them who genuinely hope for a comeback of classical liberalism are in for a nasty surprise.

Wokery may well be a vote loser, but if woke ideas are correct the left, rather than ditching them, should figure out how to sell them to the public. There may well be some woke ideas that are correct (though I can’t think of any right now), so let those who think that state what those ideas are and give their best case for them.