Today in American politics, even if you are solely interested in economic and foreign policy issues, it would still require Herculean luck not to come across the term “woke.” Woke has become the main weapon of the cultural war on both sides. It could be used to praise someone or to denounce them. A politician could be labelled “woke” by both supporters and detractors. But what does this term really mean?
History of “Woke” as a Term
As a term, the earliest prototype of this quite modern phenomenon are the Wide Awakes. The Wide Awakes were a paramilitary group, founded on March 3, 1860 in Hartford Connecticut. The paramilitary supported the up-start Republican party and, particularly, Lincoln. Its founders were law clerks who believed that a paramilitary group could be of use in the 1860 election. The group rapidly grew and attracted many Yankee/Northern youths. According to the National Park Service,
The Wide Awakes also helped get youth interested in voting by the uniforms that they wore: they were known for large pro-Lincoln torchlight parades, wearing identical kepi hats, capes made of enameled canvas, and carrying large kerosine lamps.
The Wide Awakes were a political curiosity in the North. Their uniforms and parades were quite popular in the North, however in the South, they were seen with suspicion and fear. Because the Wide Awakes never marched in the Southern United States, Southern newspapers could exaggerate the paramilitary part of the Wide Awakes and engage in fearmongering…
The connection between the Wide Awakes and the modern Woke movement is very thin, at best. The only convincing connection is with their names—awake and woke. I still say that it was a prototype because, just like the Wide Awakes, “Wokists” also hold parades, also have symbols (the black fist, the rainbow flag, and recently the Palestine flag), and a tribalistic mentality. Wokists, like the Wide Awakes, too, are a crucial part in the polarization of American politics.
The Wide Awakes were an explicitly Republican-affiliated group and though wokeism is not formally a Democrat-aligned movement. Those that self-identify as “woke” are almost uniformly Democrat or belong to a party even further to the Left. And the media outlets that promote wokeism (ABC News, CNN, MSNBC, New York Times) are also almost completely pro-Democrat.
Some Republican politicians try to join the Woke movement, to draw voters from it, but it never benefits. This is because the Democrats have firmly established themselves as the party of woke.
Modern History of Woke
Some accuse conservatives as being the inventors of wokeism as a political term in order to insult and dismiss progressives. Those who make these accusations are either lying or just repeating the opinions of someone else who is lying.
As early as 2008, there have been “StayWoke” hashtags. After 2014, woke grew rapidly as cultural/social issues became ever more dominant. Woke originally began as calling attention to racial injustices and was especially connected to the Black Lives Matter movement. Since the mid-2010s, the Woke movement expanded into other issues, like gender and sexuality. It should be noted that this was the time of peak popularity for extreme, culturally-leftist media outlets such as Vox and Buzzfeed. The mid-2010s, of course, was also the era of Obama. Racial politics was on a fast and strong rise in public schools, colleges, universities nationwide, and gender and sexuality followed soon behind. By this time, wokeism also gained near complete dominance in Hollywood.
Conservatives were not the ones who invented woke, but they certainly responded. The 2016 election was the major sign of this reaction. In 2020, covid made everyone stay home, making time for the internet. This was like pouring gasoline on an already-large fire which was the culture war. Things got even more heated up with the Black Lives Matter riots.
But what is it really?
Metaphysics, Motivation, & End Goal
I believe Paul Gottfried—paleoconservative political thinker and historian—has the right answer. Wokeism is the 21st century and Americanized version of the Frankfurt School. That is to say, wokeism is cultural Marxism. But Gottfried points out that it is also much more than that alone. Wokeism is also nihilistic. It believes that diversity and inclusivity are the highest values because they are destructive.
The ideal society, according to woke values, is not to be characterized by what it has, but what it doesn’t have. The ideal woke society is not male-dominated, not white-dominated, not Christian, not heteronormative, not gender binary, etc.
The reason why it is not actually constructive and solely destructive is because wokeism has no positive values. For example, wokeism says it wants “equality” in racial, gender, sexual matters, but it actually doesn’t. Wokeism’s politicians and advocates have no issue if a leadership committee is majority percentage female or even female only. They don’t care if it’s a black majority or black only, if it’s a gay majority or gay only etc. So long as it is not male/white/straight majority or only, wokists would not give a damn. They might even celebrate this by saying that it is proof of female excellence, black excellence, gay excellence, and so on. This is why wokeism’s slogans for equality, fairness, representation are only tools for destruction of Western civilization and nothing more than that.
