The right-wing War on Wokeness has won over Seattle progressive Democrats... "because we can't afford to give the GOP any ammunition for the 2022 election."
Democrats, who are famous for "keeping our powder dry," are now concerned that their opponents may use the specter of wokeness against them unless they get out in front with hardy denunciations of wokeness.
In other news, Susan Sarandon is still responsible for Hillary Clintons loss to Donald Trump in 2016. And don't get me started on Dan Rather Ralph Nader! (I always get those two guys mixed up.)
12 comments:
Forgive me, but I do not understand what this post is about. I try to understand all your writing and I assume the intent was to be obscure, but I have no idea what the post means. Why Larry Summers used the term "woke" in a column, I just stopped reading. I have heard no friend use the term...
I wouldn't worry about it, anne. It's insider jokes wrapped in an insider joke.
Thank you.
Sandwichman:
Can I post at AB?
Bill, Yes, of course. It is a bit frivolous but may stir discussion there.
I do not get it. I thought it was because I am from down under
This alludes to very U.S. stuff. I'm not even sure other Canadians would get it.
On the matter of "wokeness," it is a term that essentially means the same as the older term "politically correct," which also came to be taken over by right wingers who did not like people who went around worrying about being "politically correct," a term that came out of the harder left, including both Maoists although originally Stalin. For him, people who were not PC were in danger of going to a gulag, if not straight to a cemetery.
To the extent Wokeness differs from PCness, it is that wokeness has more of an emphasis on issues such as LGBTQ ones, especially regarding trans people than the older one did, which referred to a variety of issues. It has also now been taken over by right wingers to bash liberal/leftists, and indeed I do not now know any of the latter who actually use the term anymore as a positive in the way it was used when it first appeared a couple of years ago.
Regarding the final paragraph, those were people who gave Hillary Clinton a hard time from the left during the 2016 election in various ways.
Thanks, Barkley. I would also remind EconoSpeak readers that there is a search doohickey up in the left-hand corner where you can discover an extensive stream of posts on the topic of political correctness, one of my pet research topics.
Unlike "woke," politically correct and political correctness have long histories with no particular party affiliation. Long ago, political correctness could have referred to politically expedient (as opposed to principled) or politically principled (as opposed to expedient). They were terms that embraced antithetical connotations. Political correctness was large, it contained multitudes.
I suspect that political correctness and politically correct became associated with Communist Party jargon because they used the terminology in their training manuals that subsequently became the focus of investigation by the congressional Un-American Activities Committee. Basically, being politically correct meant ensuring that public statements and publications conformed to the policies adopted by the Communist International, which of course could turn on a dime.
Before the Communist Party's obsession with being politically correct was exposed, political correctness could connotate a good thing or a bad thing. After the CPUSA was implicated in the term, it was only ever a bad thing.
Like all "vanguard" parties, including the GOP, non-CPUSA communist parties in the 1960s (mainly Trotskyist and Maoist) were concerned with presenting an image of ideological unity and advanced analysis of the political conjuncture, whether or not they used the p.c. phrase. From my perspective as not a party cadre, I recall usually encountering the term as one of derision aimed at the dogmatists.
People who are politically correct are considered to be telling people what words they may or may not use in their speech. People resent this because it feels controlling. They use terms to which they are accustomed to and feel comfortable with, and feel coerced if they are denied the right to do so.
"are considered to" does a lot of work in your comment, Jacques. Are there people who try to control speech and who exactly are those people? Were the media and conservative pundits being politically correct when they condemned Hillary Clinton for referring to a "basket of deplorables"?
You're correct, Sandwichman, using "considered to" in my statement was unscientific and imprecise. I should have said, "in my lifelong experience (I'm in my 50s) - over which I've raised the topic of political correctness with hundreds if not thousands of people of various political persuasions - I've found that, etc." Take the perspective for whatever it's worth, even if not much. I'm not making a moral argument as to whether people ought to feel there's an attempt at control, but only that the feeling does exist. I believe one should be mindful of this if anything but for political reasons. That conservatives are hypocritical is just par for the course. One shouldn't expect anything less.
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