Interesting post! But I think it rests too much on a false dichotomy between MAGA and woke. I agree that MAGA is (clearly!) vastly worse. But that doesn't give me much reason to think that woke is "good, actually". I'd prefer for more woke folks to become a different (more classically liberal) kind of anti-MAGA.
For the most part, this isn't due to thinking that wokes are mistaken in their first-order views. I often directionally agree with them about specific injustices. But I think they make two higher-order mistakes which are more important to avoid:
(1) Wokism encourages systematic incompetence at cause prioritization, giving lexical priority to fighting demographic disparities (e.g. obsessing over race and gender disparities during COVID) over far greater problems that matter many orders of magnitude more (e.g. assessing lockdowns, vaccine challenge trials, etc.). This was the core criticism of my 'Woke Axiology' post:
(2) Their epistemic practices and discourse norms are *terrible*. Wokism encourages norms of cancellation, guilt by association, and a general unwillingness to fairly consider arguments for rival views. Because most people within any given ideology are still seriously wrong about a lot of important things, perhaps the single most important property for any ideology to have is to promote critical inquiry (or avoid dogmatism), so as to allow itself to be improved upon. Wokism fails dismally by this foundational criterion, and I think that alone is sufficient reason to dislike and distrust it.
The reactionary impulse is certainly one reason, but I think anti-wokeness can also be traced to a variety of highly persuasive philosophical ideas (persuasive, at least, to modern sensibilities). First of all there's a kind of basic empiricism, which questions the leap from everyday objects to "systemic" injustices and ineffable "power structures". Relatedly, there's the hugely popular methodological individualism which, at its extremes, rejects the idea of a "society". Such a naturalistic/scientific mindset also leans toward a kind of moral nihilism, according to which moral sentiment is a matter of irrational feeling and nothing more (and so social justice warriors simply lack self-awareness about the "true" source of morality). Closely related is the assumption of the superiority of cold rationality over passionate emotion. Plus the whole Nietzschean slave morality thing which ties all kinds of egalitarianisms to envy, although there are many other objections to inequality.
I think upon closer examination these ideas don't justify anti-wokeness as much as one might think, nor are they philosophically bulletproof. First, I can be a moral anti-realist while trying to end slavery nonetheless. Nor does that make me envious of slave-masters, even if I'm a slave myself. Maybe I just don't like human suffering. Second, empiricism doesn't mean doggedly prioritizing everyday objects like "tables" and "chairs"—empiricism simply grounds knowledge in messy sense-data (at least in the Carnap/Quine variety). It can be extraordinarily flexible and ontologically plural. And so if "power structures" help explain why certain categories become socially recognized or why certain groups systematically "lose", why not take power seriously?
And so on. I personally don't have the energy to quarrel with pure reactionaries or even with hateful deranged leftists, for that matter. But I do think there's a potentially large subset of anti-woke proponents who arrive at those conclusions through the sort of ideas mentioned above (perhaps through Jordan Peterson, etc), who aren't just status quo warriors, but who try in good faith to make sense of the world around them. I say this because I know many people who find wokeness disagreeable, and they do give decent reasons for their views, like the ones above. So, I think those interested in furthering social justice should take those ideas seriously, question them, introduce new perspectives, etc., and there's a good chance people on the "other side" will change their minds. Mayhe not woke entirely (that may not be good either), just a little more open to such ideas. Speculating about each side's hidden motives and emotions doesn't work if people actually have good reasons for the views they hold—and surprisingly often, people do have such reasons.
Indeed. To the people that have been reacting to my post (mostly analytic philosophers, Effective Altruists and internet rationalists, which are the majority of my friends and followers), I'd recommend reading more social science and social theory. As you said, the combination of philosophical naturalism, empiricism, and methodological individualism leads to a form of "economics obsession" that rejects any other lens for analyzing the social world (such as sociology or any other social science). Even if you cannot touch or easily measure an "structural injustice that is perpetuated by laws and daily practices", that doesn't mean it doesn't exist.
Nowadays wokeness is kind of the FC Bayern-München of preferred socio-political frameworks. While it's not completely hegemonic, it's powerful and entrenched enough that you need strong arguments to unseat it.
The ideologies that compete with wokeness are basically classical liberalism and the reactionary right. These attack two different elements of wokeness - its practicability and its basic moral foundations, respectively.
In this piece, you seem to mostly consider wokeness from the perspective of classical liberalism. Probably that's where your sympathies lie, as well. The problem is that you don't actually consider practical objections to wokeness from this perspective. You simply note that you consider wokeness more moral. This won't convince classical liberals who, for example, place a high value on meritocracy for practical reasons.
From the perspective of the radical right, it's even worse; you don't bother to give any arguments at all. In this case, maybe you just consider your perspective too obvious to argue for. From my perspective, I don't agree, but I'm sure the people who already agree with you won't complain.
I'd say that classical liberals, with their refusal to enact redistribution, actually don't really care much about meritocracy. If you want some form of luck egalitarianism, you need to ensure an equal starting point.
I think meritocracy is better fulfilled by "woke" measures that actually try to fix uneven starting points, such as disparities that are downstream of past racial injustice or structural injustices, by means of wealth redistribution and other things. This is what the section on Young and Mills was about. It attempts to move the broadly Rawlsian or classical liberal to the left, which is the hegemonic, dominant view in contemporary political philosophy.
In this piece, I refuse to engage with the radical right. I think that they have no argument for their positions if we live in a broadly liberal society with basic respect for liberty and equality for all. But I do provide some links to the stuff on the elimination of PEPFAR, which will kill thousands of people. They also put an anti-vaxxer in charge of health, etc. I think we should aim to move the Overton Window to the left and keep them out of politics.
It's hard to reply to your post in detail, because you don't spell out exactly which "woke" policies you support.
A classical liberal would reply to you that economic growth and redistribution are to some extent contrary goals, and a focus on economic growth produces better results for society at large. That's what I meant with that observation.
I think classical liberals would have similar critiques of other "woke" policies, and you would need to respond to those critiques.
This isn't just hypothetical. Classical liberals have written a lot of critiques of "wokeness" (maybe too many), so you could just read those and respond to them.
And people like Iris Marion Young and Charles Mills develop accounts of "woke values" that are compatible with progressive liberalism. Some broadly "woke" measures that would be included would be affirmative action, pretty wide-ranging wealth redistribution, a social safety net (for education and healthcare), and forms of social recognition that can also be incorporated into law (such as recognition for civil arrangements and marriage for people that might not conform to heterosexual couples LGBT+ and poly people, or otherwise the abolition of state-backed marriage).
I believe the classical liberal is broadly wrong, can be proven wrong, and that progressive liberalism is a better way forward. There's no moral reason why it's justified that the country or social class in which you're born justifies so heavily how your life prospects are going to be. This status quo is probably unacceptable even under classical liberal standards, since it violates meritocracy or equality of opportunity. People like John Rawls and other writers on distributive justice (Amartya Sen, Mathias Risse, Thomas Pogge, Richard Arneson, Brian Barry, Simon Caney, Robert Goodin, Liam Murphy, Thomas Nagel...) have written about this at length for about fifty years now. Even right-wing libertarians like Robert Nozick recognize the need for historical reparations.
But I'm both an advocate for an abundance agenda (see my analysis/defense of Abundance at https://themoralcircle.substack.com/p/pro-tech-vs-anti-tech-the-third-axis) and wealth redistribution. I don't think they're fundamentally incompatible, and that greater wealth can be achieved with both, given the diminishing marginal utility of money and many other considerations.
Overall, there's actually a large gap between most contemporary academic political philosophy in journals, which is actually pretty "woke" by popular standards, and what's going on in civil society, which is actually lower quality replies. If I wanted to provide just another argument to the pile, I'd write a paper in an academic journal. That's not the point of the post, I'm being much more "meta". I think the burden of proof is actually on the anti-woke to make better arguments.
First, I think it's great that while supporting broadly "woke" ideas, you're attempting to engage people who reject them. My sense is that most people on both sides of this divide have written the other side off, and largely just speak to an audience of people who agree with them on the questions that separate "woke" from "anti-woke". Perhaps it's very classically liberal of me, but I think it's wonderful for there to be more good faith dialogue across this divide.
That said, I do want to say a bit about how these issues look from a perspective pretty different from yours, and why this post doesn't move me from my more anti-woke sensibility, but instead reinforces some of my reasons for skepticism.
The idea that woke ideas are on the right side of history--that they're just the natural extension of slavery abolition, civil rights, gender equality and the like, is familiar. Over the last few years, especially with regard to Gaza, I've seen lots of facebook posts that made some version of the following point: "student protesters have always been right in the past, on civil rights, Vietnam, apartheid, etc., so if you find yourself disagreeing with them about Gaza, think again." But student protesters have very much *not* always been on the right side of history. Mao was very popular with student protesters in the 60s. More generally, throughout a good chunk the 20th century, lots of left-wing intellectuals in the west, *while being correct about the evils of Jim Crow*, were also supporters of the Soviet Union. And it's not just Russia and China. Even after the many, many failed socialist experiments of the 20th century, you still had prominent left wing intellectuals--Noam Chomsky, Naomi Klein, Joseph Stiglitz, plenty more--praise Hugo Chavez's leadership in Venezuela in the early 2000s, along very similar social justice lines to the ones you express here. These are all people who'd happily have condemned Stalin and Mao by that time, but who had still not learned to be adequately skeptical of socialist governments promising the kind of justice that Chavez did. Go back and look at his speeches from that time, and I think you'll find it extremely plausible that the sensibility that leads people to be "woke" today would have led them to support Chavez back then.
My point is that the social justice, egalitarian instinct can both lead to very good places--the examples you give--and to very bad ones, and so no particular "woke" political project in the present can be defended as a straightforward extrapolation from a spotless history of similar projects in the past. Nor do I think they can all be tarred with the brush of communism! I'm just trying to say that history is complicated, and that presenting it as if it's clearly and consistently on the side of the "woke" does more to undermine one's credibility than to make the case for being "woke."
Another example of what looks to me like a common blind spot of the "woke," and which your post seems to me to exhibit, is treating it as a very easy move from (1) some situation is unjust or unfair to (2) the government ought to intervene to eliminate the injustice. That framing ignores the possibility of tradeoffs, which lots of anti-woke types--especially those with what you call an "economics obsession"--think are ubiquitous.
E.g., throughout the post you return to the idea of equality of opportunity, and the thought that classical liberals aren't really living up to meritocratic ideals because they don't support the level of redistribution you'd need to guarantee equality of opportunity. I don't want to hang too much on the label "classical liberal", as that can cover quite a lot. But I think plenty of "anti-woke" types are fine with various safety net programs aimed at limiting inequality of opportunity. E.g., things like free public schooling, subsidized health care for the poor (in the US, medicaid), a progressive taxation system whose proceeds are in part used to subsidize the income of people earning low wages (in the US, the EITC), etc. In no country do programs like these get all the way to equality of opportunity, in that it's still the case that parental wealth/income is predictive of children's wealth/income. You don't come out and say full equality of opportunity, where there is no such correlation, is what we should aim for, but you also don't acknowledge any tradeoffs that might make people who agree that inequality is pro tanto bad willing to stop far short of getting all the way to equality.
To think about these tradeoffs, you might ask just how inequality is reproduced across generations. One of the biggest sources of intergenerational inequality in the US is family structure. Melissa Kearney's book, the two-parent privilege, is great on this. Kids that grow up in two-parent households do a lot better along all sorts of dimensions than kids that don't. Of course, it's hard to sort out causation--you can't randomly assign kids to one or two parent households--but I think the cumulative case for thinking a big part of the effect is causal is pretty strong. How could you correct for that? It's certainly not easy. You could try heavily subsidizing the income of poor single parents, but that comes with a bunch of drawbacks. First, there's the obvious point about incentives; subsidizing the income of poor single parents amounts to levying a hefty tax on marriage, and thus may make it more likely that kids grow up in single parent homes. And if part of what's missing from those homes isn't just income, but parental time/labor/love, that might be a bad tradeoff. Moreover, the level of subsidy you'd need to bring single parent families to income parity with dual-income parents would be huge, and would require taxation that itself comes with economic tradeoffs.
Here's another anecdotal way inequality reproduces itself (in this case I'm more skeptical about causation, but run with it). It's often reported that children who grow up in houses with more books, where their parents read to them more, do better in adulthood. How might that inequality be corrected for? We can have free public libraries with kids' story times but let's be realistic--we already have that, and it doesn't get all that far. You could imagine a super-powered child services department that is going to check on each family to make sure they're reading enough to their kids, but that sounds a bit dystopian, no? I hope the image that's emerging is that you'd actually need a pretty intrusive, totalitarian state to eliminate lots of the sources of intergenerational inequality.
Maybe you think it's obvious that Western liberal democracies aren't making these tradeoffs correctly, and should be willing to sacrifice more prosperity and liberty for the sake of more equality. Perhaps. These are huge issues. The point I'm trying to illustrate is that I rarely see "woke" types directly facing up to the sorts of tradeoffs their preferred policies entail. Rather, things are presented as much more straightforward: there's an injustice, so we should eliminate it.
I'm older than you. I've been engaged in progressive politics for 5 decades. Woke is a big cul de sac for the left. Many of the ideas are stupid on their face. Regressive, authoritarian and achieving sfa for the most needy in the world. Musa al Gharbi reads it right as a social phenomenon and Helen Pluckrose right about the errors of thought involved. Sorry to be broad brush, the we're just being alive to injustice stuff gets tiresome. Yes, maga of course worse and Chris Rufo is a dufus.
Interesting post, but I really strongly disagree with almost all of it. It would perhaps be to verbose for to write all my disagreements on a comment (hanc marginis exiguitas non caperet), but I'll engage with the first section. Thing is, ideological capture cuts both ways. Consider my experience as a (through a dark) mirror of yours: when I was 14/15 and a bookish, bibliophile nerd, I got memetically captured by Marxism, which was pretty predictable, given the inclinations of my favorite teachers and the books they were suggesting explicitly or implicitly, and which I read. It took me more than 15 years to awaken from that dogmatic slumber. And I've seen this same story play out both with those intellectually curious members of my cohort and with the younger ones. Now I recoil in horror not so much at the wrongness of my beliefs and my dogmatic rejection of counterarguments (those are all too human mistakes) but at the moral callousness which the pursuit of the Greater Good can justify. I remember reading books about the Gulag, about the millions of deaths in China and Russia (and books coming from sources I had to grudgingly respect as 'with the right ideas and the heart in the proper place') but just blowing it away with 'Utopia justifies any bad practices along the way' (and Brecht is a master sophist who justifies this type of thought in his plays and poems very effectively). And even though I haven't managed to warm up much today to Utilitarianism (I have been too far misled by any 'Greater Good' doctrines to be able to allow for anything that doesn't put rigorous and stringent fail-safes against abuse and overreach by any system of thought), there's something really anti-Utilitarian in the classical forgiving view of the Left's excesses viz-a-viz the Right 'because they have good intentions'. But good intentions can lead to worse outcomes (and be all the more seductive because you share them with the perpetrators). If anything, given the total numbers, one should recoil with greater repulsion from a red flag with hammer and sickle than from a swastika.
I was also drawn to communism for like a year while at university (my university was heavily communist). Even though I was willing to discuss communism "as an ideal", I was never on board with any of their defenses of Soviet or Chinese communism.
I think I would like to distinguish between the woke, which is mostly about issues of feminism and race, from the tankie communists. And that we should also aim to keep defenders of Soviet communism out the political mainstream. I'd say, at that point, that the pendulum has gone too far to the left.
You were/are wiser than me. The distinction you make is pertinent, but in practice, those issues form a wide tent that overlaps and recycles discourse from one to the other (intersectionality, and the same manichaean view of some all out absolute evil, be it Patriarchy or White Hegemony that needs be destroyed). But I'd agree one can make a case for non socialist, non dogmatic woke, although I'd still disagree with most of its premises from a more classical, liberal pov.
Interesting post! But I think it rests too much on a false dichotomy between MAGA and woke. I agree that MAGA is (clearly!) vastly worse. But that doesn't give me much reason to think that woke is "good, actually". I'd prefer for more woke folks to become a different (more classically liberal) kind of anti-MAGA.
For the most part, this isn't due to thinking that wokes are mistaken in their first-order views. I often directionally agree with them about specific injustices. But I think they make two higher-order mistakes which are more important to avoid:
(1) Wokism encourages systematic incompetence at cause prioritization, giving lexical priority to fighting demographic disparities (e.g. obsessing over race and gender disparities during COVID) over far greater problems that matter many orders of magnitude more (e.g. assessing lockdowns, vaccine challenge trials, etc.). This was the core criticism of my 'Woke Axiology' post:
https://www.goodthoughts.blog/p/woke-axiology
(2) Their epistemic practices and discourse norms are *terrible*. Wokism encourages norms of cancellation, guilt by association, and a general unwillingness to fairly consider arguments for rival views. Because most people within any given ideology are still seriously wrong about a lot of important things, perhaps the single most important property for any ideology to have is to promote critical inquiry (or avoid dogmatism), so as to allow itself to be improved upon. Wokism fails dismally by this foundational criterion, and I think that alone is sufficient reason to dislike and distrust it.
Compare, e.g., "It's OK to Read Anyone": https://www.goodthoughts.blog/p/its-ok-to-read-anyone
The reactionary impulse is certainly one reason, but I think anti-wokeness can also be traced to a variety of highly persuasive philosophical ideas (persuasive, at least, to modern sensibilities). First of all there's a kind of basic empiricism, which questions the leap from everyday objects to "systemic" injustices and ineffable "power structures". Relatedly, there's the hugely popular methodological individualism which, at its extremes, rejects the idea of a "society". Such a naturalistic/scientific mindset also leans toward a kind of moral nihilism, according to which moral sentiment is a matter of irrational feeling and nothing more (and so social justice warriors simply lack self-awareness about the "true" source of morality). Closely related is the assumption of the superiority of cold rationality over passionate emotion. Plus the whole Nietzschean slave morality thing which ties all kinds of egalitarianisms to envy, although there are many other objections to inequality.
I think upon closer examination these ideas don't justify anti-wokeness as much as one might think, nor are they philosophically bulletproof. First, I can be a moral anti-realist while trying to end slavery nonetheless. Nor does that make me envious of slave-masters, even if I'm a slave myself. Maybe I just don't like human suffering. Second, empiricism doesn't mean doggedly prioritizing everyday objects like "tables" and "chairs"—empiricism simply grounds knowledge in messy sense-data (at least in the Carnap/Quine variety). It can be extraordinarily flexible and ontologically plural. And so if "power structures" help explain why certain categories become socially recognized or why certain groups systematically "lose", why not take power seriously?
And so on. I personally don't have the energy to quarrel with pure reactionaries or even with hateful deranged leftists, for that matter. But I do think there's a potentially large subset of anti-woke proponents who arrive at those conclusions through the sort of ideas mentioned above (perhaps through Jordan Peterson, etc), who aren't just status quo warriors, but who try in good faith to make sense of the world around them. I say this because I know many people who find wokeness disagreeable, and they do give decent reasons for their views, like the ones above. So, I think those interested in furthering social justice should take those ideas seriously, question them, introduce new perspectives, etc., and there's a good chance people on the "other side" will change their minds. Mayhe not woke entirely (that may not be good either), just a little more open to such ideas. Speculating about each side's hidden motives and emotions doesn't work if people actually have good reasons for the views they hold—and surprisingly often, people do have such reasons.
Indeed. To the people that have been reacting to my post (mostly analytic philosophers, Effective Altruists and internet rationalists, which are the majority of my friends and followers), I'd recommend reading more social science and social theory. As you said, the combination of philosophical naturalism, empiricism, and methodological individualism leads to a form of "economics obsession" that rejects any other lens for analyzing the social world (such as sociology or any other social science). Even if you cannot touch or easily measure an "structural injustice that is perpetuated by laws and daily practices", that doesn't mean it doesn't exist.
Nowadays wokeness is kind of the FC Bayern-München of preferred socio-political frameworks. While it's not completely hegemonic, it's powerful and entrenched enough that you need strong arguments to unseat it.
The ideologies that compete with wokeness are basically classical liberalism and the reactionary right. These attack two different elements of wokeness - its practicability and its basic moral foundations, respectively.
In this piece, you seem to mostly consider wokeness from the perspective of classical liberalism. Probably that's where your sympathies lie, as well. The problem is that you don't actually consider practical objections to wokeness from this perspective. You simply note that you consider wokeness more moral. This won't convince classical liberals who, for example, place a high value on meritocracy for practical reasons.
From the perspective of the radical right, it's even worse; you don't bother to give any arguments at all. In this case, maybe you just consider your perspective too obvious to argue for. From my perspective, I don't agree, but I'm sure the people who already agree with you won't complain.
I'd say that classical liberals, with their refusal to enact redistribution, actually don't really care much about meritocracy. If you want some form of luck egalitarianism, you need to ensure an equal starting point.
I think meritocracy is better fulfilled by "woke" measures that actually try to fix uneven starting points, such as disparities that are downstream of past racial injustice or structural injustices, by means of wealth redistribution and other things. This is what the section on Young and Mills was about. It attempts to move the broadly Rawlsian or classical liberal to the left, which is the hegemonic, dominant view in contemporary political philosophy.
In this piece, I refuse to engage with the radical right. I think that they have no argument for their positions if we live in a broadly liberal society with basic respect for liberty and equality for all. But I do provide some links to the stuff on the elimination of PEPFAR, which will kill thousands of people. They also put an anti-vaxxer in charge of health, etc. I think we should aim to move the Overton Window to the left and keep them out of politics.
It's hard to reply to your post in detail, because you don't spell out exactly which "woke" policies you support.
A classical liberal would reply to you that economic growth and redistribution are to some extent contrary goals, and a focus on economic growth produces better results for society at large. That's what I meant with that observation.
I think classical liberals would have similar critiques of other "woke" policies, and you would need to respond to those critiques.
This isn't just hypothetical. Classical liberals have written a lot of critiques of "wokeness" (maybe too many), so you could just read those and respond to them.
And people like Iris Marion Young and Charles Mills develop accounts of "woke values" that are compatible with progressive liberalism. Some broadly "woke" measures that would be included would be affirmative action, pretty wide-ranging wealth redistribution, a social safety net (for education and healthcare), and forms of social recognition that can also be incorporated into law (such as recognition for civil arrangements and marriage for people that might not conform to heterosexual couples LGBT+ and poly people, or otherwise the abolition of state-backed marriage).
I believe the classical liberal is broadly wrong, can be proven wrong, and that progressive liberalism is a better way forward. There's no moral reason why it's justified that the country or social class in which you're born justifies so heavily how your life prospects are going to be. This status quo is probably unacceptable even under classical liberal standards, since it violates meritocracy or equality of opportunity. People like John Rawls and other writers on distributive justice (Amartya Sen, Mathias Risse, Thomas Pogge, Richard Arneson, Brian Barry, Simon Caney, Robert Goodin, Liam Murphy, Thomas Nagel...) have written about this at length for about fifty years now. Even right-wing libertarians like Robert Nozick recognize the need for historical reparations.
But I'm both an advocate for an abundance agenda (see my analysis/defense of Abundance at https://themoralcircle.substack.com/p/pro-tech-vs-anti-tech-the-third-axis) and wealth redistribution. I don't think they're fundamentally incompatible, and that greater wealth can be achieved with both, given the diminishing marginal utility of money and many other considerations.
Overall, there's actually a large gap between most contemporary academic political philosophy in journals, which is actually pretty "woke" by popular standards, and what's going on in civil society, which is actually lower quality replies. If I wanted to provide just another argument to the pile, I'd write a paper in an academic journal. That's not the point of the post, I'm being much more "meta". I think the burden of proof is actually on the anti-woke to make better arguments.
First, I think it's great that while supporting broadly "woke" ideas, you're attempting to engage people who reject them. My sense is that most people on both sides of this divide have written the other side off, and largely just speak to an audience of people who agree with them on the questions that separate "woke" from "anti-woke". Perhaps it's very classically liberal of me, but I think it's wonderful for there to be more good faith dialogue across this divide.
That said, I do want to say a bit about how these issues look from a perspective pretty different from yours, and why this post doesn't move me from my more anti-woke sensibility, but instead reinforces some of my reasons for skepticism.
The idea that woke ideas are on the right side of history--that they're just the natural extension of slavery abolition, civil rights, gender equality and the like, is familiar. Over the last few years, especially with regard to Gaza, I've seen lots of facebook posts that made some version of the following point: "student protesters have always been right in the past, on civil rights, Vietnam, apartheid, etc., so if you find yourself disagreeing with them about Gaza, think again." But student protesters have very much *not* always been on the right side of history. Mao was very popular with student protesters in the 60s. More generally, throughout a good chunk the 20th century, lots of left-wing intellectuals in the west, *while being correct about the evils of Jim Crow*, were also supporters of the Soviet Union. And it's not just Russia and China. Even after the many, many failed socialist experiments of the 20th century, you still had prominent left wing intellectuals--Noam Chomsky, Naomi Klein, Joseph Stiglitz, plenty more--praise Hugo Chavez's leadership in Venezuela in the early 2000s, along very similar social justice lines to the ones you express here. These are all people who'd happily have condemned Stalin and Mao by that time, but who had still not learned to be adequately skeptical of socialist governments promising the kind of justice that Chavez did. Go back and look at his speeches from that time, and I think you'll find it extremely plausible that the sensibility that leads people to be "woke" today would have led them to support Chavez back then.
My point is that the social justice, egalitarian instinct can both lead to very good places--the examples you give--and to very bad ones, and so no particular "woke" political project in the present can be defended as a straightforward extrapolation from a spotless history of similar projects in the past. Nor do I think they can all be tarred with the brush of communism! I'm just trying to say that history is complicated, and that presenting it as if it's clearly and consistently on the side of the "woke" does more to undermine one's credibility than to make the case for being "woke."
Another example of what looks to me like a common blind spot of the "woke," and which your post seems to me to exhibit, is treating it as a very easy move from (1) some situation is unjust or unfair to (2) the government ought to intervene to eliminate the injustice. That framing ignores the possibility of tradeoffs, which lots of anti-woke types--especially those with what you call an "economics obsession"--think are ubiquitous.
E.g., throughout the post you return to the idea of equality of opportunity, and the thought that classical liberals aren't really living up to meritocratic ideals because they don't support the level of redistribution you'd need to guarantee equality of opportunity. I don't want to hang too much on the label "classical liberal", as that can cover quite a lot. But I think plenty of "anti-woke" types are fine with various safety net programs aimed at limiting inequality of opportunity. E.g., things like free public schooling, subsidized health care for the poor (in the US, medicaid), a progressive taxation system whose proceeds are in part used to subsidize the income of people earning low wages (in the US, the EITC), etc. In no country do programs like these get all the way to equality of opportunity, in that it's still the case that parental wealth/income is predictive of children's wealth/income. You don't come out and say full equality of opportunity, where there is no such correlation, is what we should aim for, but you also don't acknowledge any tradeoffs that might make people who agree that inequality is pro tanto bad willing to stop far short of getting all the way to equality.
To think about these tradeoffs, you might ask just how inequality is reproduced across generations. One of the biggest sources of intergenerational inequality in the US is family structure. Melissa Kearney's book, the two-parent privilege, is great on this. Kids that grow up in two-parent households do a lot better along all sorts of dimensions than kids that don't. Of course, it's hard to sort out causation--you can't randomly assign kids to one or two parent households--but I think the cumulative case for thinking a big part of the effect is causal is pretty strong. How could you correct for that? It's certainly not easy. You could try heavily subsidizing the income of poor single parents, but that comes with a bunch of drawbacks. First, there's the obvious point about incentives; subsidizing the income of poor single parents amounts to levying a hefty tax on marriage, and thus may make it more likely that kids grow up in single parent homes. And if part of what's missing from those homes isn't just income, but parental time/labor/love, that might be a bad tradeoff. Moreover, the level of subsidy you'd need to bring single parent families to income parity with dual-income parents would be huge, and would require taxation that itself comes with economic tradeoffs.
Here's another anecdotal way inequality reproduces itself (in this case I'm more skeptical about causation, but run with it). It's often reported that children who grow up in houses with more books, where their parents read to them more, do better in adulthood. How might that inequality be corrected for? We can have free public libraries with kids' story times but let's be realistic--we already have that, and it doesn't get all that far. You could imagine a super-powered child services department that is going to check on each family to make sure they're reading enough to their kids, but that sounds a bit dystopian, no? I hope the image that's emerging is that you'd actually need a pretty intrusive, totalitarian state to eliminate lots of the sources of intergenerational inequality.
Maybe you think it's obvious that Western liberal democracies aren't making these tradeoffs correctly, and should be willing to sacrifice more prosperity and liberty for the sake of more equality. Perhaps. These are huge issues. The point I'm trying to illustrate is that I rarely see "woke" types directly facing up to the sorts of tradeoffs their preferred policies entail. Rather, things are presented as much more straightforward: there's an injustice, so we should eliminate it.
I'm older than you. I've been engaged in progressive politics for 5 decades. Woke is a big cul de sac for the left. Many of the ideas are stupid on their face. Regressive, authoritarian and achieving sfa for the most needy in the world. Musa al Gharbi reads it right as a social phenomenon and Helen Pluckrose right about the errors of thought involved. Sorry to be broad brush, the we're just being alive to injustice stuff gets tiresome. Yes, maga of course worse and Chris Rufo is a dufus.
Interesting post, but I really strongly disagree with almost all of it. It would perhaps be to verbose for to write all my disagreements on a comment (hanc marginis exiguitas non caperet), but I'll engage with the first section. Thing is, ideological capture cuts both ways. Consider my experience as a (through a dark) mirror of yours: when I was 14/15 and a bookish, bibliophile nerd, I got memetically captured by Marxism, which was pretty predictable, given the inclinations of my favorite teachers and the books they were suggesting explicitly or implicitly, and which I read. It took me more than 15 years to awaken from that dogmatic slumber. And I've seen this same story play out both with those intellectually curious members of my cohort and with the younger ones. Now I recoil in horror not so much at the wrongness of my beliefs and my dogmatic rejection of counterarguments (those are all too human mistakes) but at the moral callousness which the pursuit of the Greater Good can justify. I remember reading books about the Gulag, about the millions of deaths in China and Russia (and books coming from sources I had to grudgingly respect as 'with the right ideas and the heart in the proper place') but just blowing it away with 'Utopia justifies any bad practices along the way' (and Brecht is a master sophist who justifies this type of thought in his plays and poems very effectively). And even though I haven't managed to warm up much today to Utilitarianism (I have been too far misled by any 'Greater Good' doctrines to be able to allow for anything that doesn't put rigorous and stringent fail-safes against abuse and overreach by any system of thought), there's something really anti-Utilitarian in the classical forgiving view of the Left's excesses viz-a-viz the Right 'because they have good intentions'. But good intentions can lead to worse outcomes (and be all the more seductive because you share them with the perpetrators). If anything, given the total numbers, one should recoil with greater repulsion from a red flag with hammer and sickle than from a swastika.
I was also drawn to communism for like a year while at university (my university was heavily communist). Even though I was willing to discuss communism "as an ideal", I was never on board with any of their defenses of Soviet or Chinese communism.
I think I would like to distinguish between the woke, which is mostly about issues of feminism and race, from the tankie communists. And that we should also aim to keep defenders of Soviet communism out the political mainstream. I'd say, at that point, that the pendulum has gone too far to the left.
You were/are wiser than me. The distinction you make is pertinent, but in practice, those issues form a wide tent that overlaps and recycles discourse from one to the other (intersectionality, and the same manichaean view of some all out absolute evil, be it Patriarchy or White Hegemony that needs be destroyed). But I'd agree one can make a case for non socialist, non dogmatic woke, although I'd still disagree with most of its premises from a more classical, liberal pov.