Woke

 I do not feel woke. What is woke? makes me feel even less so.

The events of 1792 have offered easy allegories for the political left ever since. Liberal heirs to Clermont-Tonnerre go on urging gradualism while the radical left, latter-day Jacobins, still tend towards (usually symbolic) defenestration over compromise. Yet through decades of conflict both sides of the leftist dichotomy have at least agreed on this much: Clermont-Tonnerre was right about the Jews. Political equality belongs to the citizen as individual, not to creed or colour. Now, though – if two new books are to be believed – all that has changed. There is, they say, a third entrant in the leftist internecine contest, a faction that places group identity above all else.

The political scientist Yascha Mounk appears as a modern Clermont-Tonnerre, a self-proclaimed liberal who defines that view as “the rejection of natural hierarchy”. The philosopher Susan Neiman hails from the Jacobin-descended left, the sort that blames America for the Cold War and wields “neoliberal” as a slur. Yet the moderate and the radical come together on this point: the left must hold fast to the universal values of equality and human rights, and reject the dangerous temptation to focus on group identities such as race, gender or sexual orientation.

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Sadly I think the most charitable reading of Left Is Not Woke is that it is a marketing gimmick wrapped around a cluster of thoughtful jeremiads. “Woke” attracts eyeballs, so that’s what leads. But the interesting part of this book – a persuasive call for sincere and responsible morality among the academic left, an Orwell in Spain for our times – didn’t need this culture-war fairy dust to be worthwhile.

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Belief in progress is necessary, but it isn’t sufficient. Mounk and Neiman’s arguments often turn on a false dichotomy, presenting a choice between their hopeful universalism and a dour, carping, doom-laden identitarianism that denies any true progress has been or will ever be made. But as soon as the conflict is stated so starkly, it’s obvious that a third option has been overlooked. Why can’t identitarianism also offer a bridge to a more hopeful future?

The model here is so obvious as to sound trite. Martin Luther King Jr – whom Mounk unconvincingly claims as a good old-fashioned liberal – was a hopeful identitarian. His famous 1963 letter from Birmingham jail worried that the “great stumbling block in the stride toward freedom” was not the Ku Klux Klan, but instead “the white moderate who is more devoted to order than to justice”. In his last speech, delivered in Memphis the day before he was shot, King spoke of hope, of the promised land he had glimpsed before returning from the mountaintop. But he also said: “the Negro collectively is richer than most nations of the world … That’s power right there, if we know how to pool it”. King saw racial solidarity as a tool to overcome discrimination. Identity can be strength too, not only liability.

Mounk and Neiman are convincing only so long as they focus their attacks on the sort of identitarian who denies that we could ever reach King’s promised land where the power of identity is no longer needed. This selectivity reveals that they have misidentified their target. The problem with modern identitarianism isn’t identity. The problem is hopelessness. And it’s a hopelessness shared across the contemporary left, from identity to environmentalism to economic injustice. Neiman and Mounk are correct to demand that the left break out of nihilistic doom-mongering. But they’ve made a strategic error by framing this point in the tired, misleading dichotomy of identity versus universality.

If the idea is that some groups are virtuous by virtue of its history, then it is a dangerous idea. Racism in all of its various forms denies virtue by virtue of a group's history. All that the wokeness described above does is make the groups it wants to protect all that more the target for racism.

This is not to say there is no systemic racism. It is the product of history. I think it is akin to the disparity of capital – those who were denied access to capital in the past cannot acquire capital now. It is not the fault of the victims, it is the fault of racists and inertia. Systemic racism needs to be dismantled because of the wrongness of its creators, not some blanket virtuousness conferred by victimhood.

sch 10/23