Douthat: What It Means To Be Woke

   When criticism finally starts zeroing in on some crazy aspect of progressivism, one of progressive's go-to arguments is: that doesn't exist. Political correctness, cancel culture, Antifa--and, briefly, CRT--the ploy has been tried with them all. Another ploy: the term you're using is meaningless--or at least you don't know what it means. E.g. 'CRT' again...and 'woke.' 

   Generally the request for definition is a rhetorical ploy, of course. Whatever definition you give will be deemed incorrect. And it's not a serious question. So best not to play--just call them on their dishonest question. 

   Things like Woketarianism tend not to have pithy, perfectly precise definitions. That's not uncommon and not a problem. 

   Woketarinism is, perhaps, a little harder to define that most because it really is a sprawling, incoherent movement made up of individually often incoherent parts. It's a grab-bag of anti-liberal ideas all generally aiming to tear down the liberal order. So it's a lot.

   But if the difficulty of producing a definition were a problem, it would be more of a problem for the proponents of the view than for its opponents.

   And: 'woke' is their word. We just started using it because there was no better term laying around. Well, actually, there is: political correctness... But I guess we're not going back to that one.

   'Political correctness' was their term, too. But their view is crazy, so the term eventually took on negative connotations to match the reality. So they dumped it. Oh yeah: and then later said it had never existed... Now the same thing is happening to 'woke'...so eventually that will be dumped. And so on. A basically synonymous term is 'social justice.' That's rhetorically/tactically better, since it gets 'justice' in there. But previously they simply deemed their own position "correct," and that didn't help...so perhaps people will eventually see through 'social justice', too.

   Anyway: Douthat gets the position generally right, but leaves out the tangle of pseudophilosophy at its core--the postpostmodern mishmash of poststructuralism, postmodernism, critical theory, queer theory, radical feminism, etc.