Twilight of the Woke

Hegel claimed that wisdom about a historical period often comes only after it has ended. As wokeness loses sway, we can better see its effects on socialist politics.

A Pride-colored, heart-shaped sticker with a black power fist is displayed on a Chase Bank window on June 24, 2020, in New York City. (Alexi Rosenfeld / Getty Images)

BYDUSTIN GUASTELLA

JACOBIN
07.23.2024

Review of Left Is Not Woke by Susan Neiman (Polity, 2023)

Susan Neiman’s Left Is Not Woke is a wonderful little book. The kind more intellectuals need to write. Neiman’s prose is lively and refreshingly fearless. She does not rely on complicated sentences or passive voice to gloss controversy. She takes a stand and sticks to it. Nor does she suffer from the reverse-victimhood complex common to so many “anti-woke” writers. This is a book you can recommend to friends and family members, even those who disagree with her starting premise.

For Neiman, “wokeness” is not a project that can rightly trace its inspiration from the progressive political tradition. And while much has been made about the political liabilities of woke rhetoric, few critics of wokeness from the Left have offered a sustained argument for what defines the Left and why “staying woke” might be at odds with it.

Neiman’s argument, sustained over four big chapters, is that wokeness is not only alien to the principles of the Left, but antithetical to them. It’s an argument that has, expectedly, garnered her enemies — one reviewer called her book “a cringe-inducing screed.”

But far from a screed, Neiman’s writing is compelling and sensitive. Wokeness, as defined by her, is an ideology that reduces all groups down to the “prism of their marginalization.” By doing so, it makes an implicit claim about society as a set of conflicts rooted in power dynamics between rival groups (black versus white; cis versus trans; straight versus gay; and on and on). Neiman offers a provocative question at the start: “Which do you find more essential: the accidents we are born with, or the principles we consider and uphold? Traditionally, it was the right that focused on the first, the left that emphasized the second.”

Tribalism, Power, and Doom

The book is broken into chapters such as “Universalism Versus Tribalism,” “Justice Versus Power,” and “Progress Versus Doom.” In each case, she demonstrates how the logic of wokeness falls on the right side of the dyad.

For Neiman, to be woke is to hold a tribal worldview, one that says that the in-group (defined by skin color, or gender, or nationality, or indeed even those who identify as “progressive”) is “good” and the out-group is “bad.” This, she argues, is close to the worldview of German jurist Carl Schmitt, who views “the essence of politics as a permanent struggle between friend and enemy.” That kind of polarity may seem natural in all forms of democratic politics — after all, populist and socialist appeals rely on a narrative that splits the world between the people or the workers and the elite or the rich — but there is something very different about Schmittian “political theology.”

For one thing, it so happens that Schmitt’s ideas were an inspiration for Nazism, and Schmitt himself never renounced his support for the Third Reich. His “friend-enemy” worldview is built around the notion of horizontal, irresolvable, conflicts between irreconcilable groups (as opposed to a labor-capital dialectic that could be overcome through the abolition of wage labor). For him, all concepts in politics are reducible to the friend-enemy groupings. In this light, it is impossible to appeal to some higher objective or moral judgment outside of the dynamics of these groups. Schmitt “rejected universalism, any conception of justice that transcends a notion of power” and the very notion of progress. He embraced a vision of politics where the collectivization of enmity is the goal. It’s no wonder he considered democratic deliberation superfluous.Neiman offers a provocative question at the start: ‘Which do you find more essential: the accidents we are born with, or the principles we consider and uphold?’

To be woke is to be similarly allergic to claims of universalism and appeals to objective standards of goodness. Indeed, the falseness of universalism is revealed as the narrow perspective of “dead white guys.” Neiman shows how flimsy this logic is. She rescues Enlightenment thinkers, especially Immanuel Kant, from their would-be assailants by demonstrating that it was the pursuit of a systematic theory of justice — predicated on the belief in the universal human capacity for reason — that allowed these dead white guys to envision a society beyond the dark and archaic tribalism of Medieval Europe. It was from these very appeals that movements against slavery and for democracy sprang. The woke rejection of the Enlightenment, therefore, represents an unconscious embrace of a kind of Nietzschean power struggle. A reassertion of “my tribe versus yours.”

Relatedly, to be woke is to hold a nihilistic view of history. Perhaps Neiman’s strongest chapter, and most acerbic, is that in which she defends the very notion of human progress. “Progressive” she writes “would be the right name for those who lean left today, if they didn’t embrace philosophies that undermine hope for progress.” Instead, today’s woke crusaders present history as nothing but a parade of horrors. A nonstop slouch toward Gomorrah. Everything you think is good? The idea of human progress, reason, scientific advancement — even math — are all actually racist. It’s a paranoid worldview that makes people see even the most innocuous things as demonstrations of evil. A white male country music star covers a 1990s pop ballad written by a black lesbian? Here’s why you should feel badly about that.

Some of this nihilism, according to Neiman, was smuggled into the Left by Michel Foucault. Foucault’s theoretical works were widely embraced by those who confused his subversive style for radical substance. As Neiman notes: “Everything in his performance screamed rebel. He wrote books that glorified those on society’s margins: the outlaw, the madman.”

Still, what Foucault lacked was a clear moral foundation. He was totally opposed to normative judgements, and therefore eschewed a belief that society ought to be better. Noam Chomsky famously claimed that Foucault was the most amoral person he’d ever met. There is a lesson here about the performance of transgression substituting for political commitment. For Neiman, Foucault’s genius was to marry a radical style with a message that “was as reactionary as anything Edmund Burke or Joseph de Maistre ever wrote.”

Whither Wokeness or Wokeness Withering?

While Neiman offers a great argument for rescuing the progressive tradition from the clutches of woke stagnation, she doesn’t explain how so many people on the Left came to fall for the ideology. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel’s metaphor about the Owl of Minerva flying at dusk suggests that understanding and wisdom arrive only after events have unfolded. Given the truckload of books published in the last two years that try to make sense of wokeness, we might be tempted to think that the twilight of woke is at hand. And yet the lack of an explanation for the roots of woke — where this ideology came from, why it caught fire, whom it serves, and where it might be going — suggests that maybe the thing it has not reached maturation. Maybe we still haven’t hit “peak woke.”

It seems obvious that, for at least a short period, wokeness had reigned supreme. It also seems as if that period has passed or is passing. The New York Times opinion section on May 17, 2024, declared: “Wokeness Is Dying, We Might Miss It.” Is it? Will we? If we understand wokeness to be a kind of public mania that gripped liberal democratic opinion for a period, it’s easy to imagine that the grip is loosening. But this only pushes the question back one level of abstraction. Naturally, we should ask, why did such a hysteria take hold in the first place?Karl Marx’s dictum that the ‘ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas’ might go some way to understanding what this phenomenon is really about.

One reason it’s so hard to make sense of the thing is that defenders of wokeness almost never substantially engage with critics like Neiman. Indeed, many of today’s woke sympathizers deny that wokeness is, or ever was, an identifiable set of influential ideas. Wokeness takes its self-conception as natural. Its advocates do not argue for their position, they merely mock.

Consider that, whenever a critic of some woke supposition lays out the case for, say, why defunding or even abolishing the police is a terrible idea (as Neiman ably does), former advocates of said idea will respond with a laugh that no one ever really cared about that, or that it was never really part of the woke agenda even if those same individuals were explicitly championing that cause as little as a few months prior. Bad faith or post-hysteria amnesia? It’s increasingly impossible to tell.

This bolsters Neiman’s point about the dangerous woke aversion to reason and argument, their knee-jerk reflex against persuasion. But, worryingly, it does make it hard to undermine these ideas. For, if they present themselves as natural, and if many people invoke “woke” arguments in a kind of organic, unthinking way, then we have left the realm of reason and entered — as Slavoj Žižek might say — the domain of pure ideology.

However, if we view wokeness as an ideological project, instead of a passing bout of social psychosis, then Karl Marx might be of some help. His dictum that the “ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas” might go some way toward understanding what this phenomenon is really about. Dominant ideas, and their peddlers, in every age, present their notions as part of the natural order of things, when really those ideas serve the class interests of the peddlers themselves. In that regard, wokeness must serve a very useful function in contemporary capitalist society, which means it will be much harder to leave behind than it may seem.

The story of how exactly it serves that function has yet to be adequately written. It probably has something to do with the immense (and immensely wealthy) “nonprofit” sector and the revolving door between large influential corporate foundations, the Democratic Party, the media, and the government. A self-reenforcing circuit that surely operates in ways similar to the military-industrial complex. Or, as Tom Holland has argued, it may be a bizarre Christian mutation for an increasingly unbelieving elite in desperate need of a way to satiate a religious impulse, in its rhetorical commitments to empowering the powerless. Still, the fact that the affinity between wokeness and capitalism has been more often remarked upon by the political right, should be a source of shame for the Left.

Can Woke Get Worse?

Perhaps the most powerful part of Neiman’s book is also its most worrying. Neiman brilliantly demonstrates the affinity between wokeness and the thought of Schmitt, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Foucault. These are the thinkers that offer us a real glimpse into the profoundly cynical worldview of wokeness. And she shows how these theorists — conductors in the “symphony of suspicion that forms the background music to contemporary Western culture” — lack any coherent argument for how society ought to be organized. While they are gifted critics of liberal hypocrisy and modernity, their failure to offer a convincing alternative, or even orientation, marks them as contemptuous of any pursuit of the common good. If Foucault, Nietzsche, and Schmitt are indeed the not-so-secret inspiration for the opinion makers and ideologists of our age, we’re in trouble.

As bad as wokeness is, what’s next could always be worse. If Foucauldian-Schmittianism wrought havoc on the Left, this “mind virus” is likely to cause even more trouble if its tenets become widely adopted on the Right. Consider that the major impulse of wokeness was a kind of reflexive pity for victims. Often, this pity was misplaced, and real economic victims (like poor white men) were scapegoated as the holders of privilege by well-heeled activists.

Yet the “victimology” mindset can go both ways. If the woke have insisted that characteristics like a person’s skin color, or their gender, or whatever else, marks them as fundamentally different in a grand metaphysical way and have made that point central to political appeals, then what happens if the Right takes up the charge by simply reversing the friend-enemy polarity? They will say to young men that their loneliness is not a function of “toxic masculinity” but instead the result of women’s claims to equality. And they will say to poor whites, who are adrift and frustrated, that they don’t need to “abolish ‘whiteness’” — instead, they should embrace it. We already see this beginning to happen — a reversal of the Left’s hard-fought victory in the civil rights era.

What is common in these appeals is that neither the injunction to destroy one’s whiteness or masculinity, nor the injunction to embrace those features, appeals to any higher order common good. The game is all horizontal. The woke shift has already established that democracy, equality, and progress are just concepts used to mask power. They have already dispensed with persuasion in favor of hyperbolic injunctions. The Right could very well do the same.

We should be worried about the fact that the woke paved the way for a hard right in more ways than one. Not only has particularly outlandish woke rhetoric offered right-wingers a set of increasingly easier political layups, their mocking rejection of patient democratic persuasion offers them a playbook for how to do political combat in an age of ideological nihilism.

We may yet see an even colder winter of tribalism to come.

CONTRIBUTORS
Dustin Guastella is director of operations for Teamsters Local 623 in Philadelphia.