Comment by NoGravitas
6 days ago
I mean, that's part of it. The culture war is useful to both US political parties, because they both have a bourgeois class interest and need something to keep people invested in politics for the sake of their political legitimacy, but at the same time need to prevent them from gaining class consciousness or becoming involved in class politics.
Put another way: the culture war (as woke vs. anti-woke) divides the electorate, but in a way that lets them be parceled out between two factions of the ruling class, rather than aligning any of them against the ruling class.
Criminalization of homelessness is probably the most stark example of class warfare in society today. And agitation against these policies is absolutely called "woke" by the right.
The idea that wokeness is in contrast to class-based advocacy is not correct. The right will happily call class-based advocacy "woke" until the cows come home.
The right will call class-based advocacy "woke", but that doesn't mean that centrist Democrats are going to adopt it to spite them. Criminalization of homelessness is at its most vicious in cities with Democratic mayors.
Sure. The leaders within the Democratic party are not especially good advocates for the homeless. They are similarly not terribly good advocates for a lot of suffering groups. Despite all the hay about "defund the police", it didn't actually end up materializing as policy and we saw Biden explicitly reject it in a State of the Union.
It is not true that the establishment left is using "woke" advocacy to avoid having to talk about class. It is also not true that if the left stopped talking about "woke" concepts that the right would suddenly get on board with class advocacy.
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OK, first of all what criminalization of homelessness? Second, if I go to work every day and don’t smoke crack and pay taxes I would like my kids to be able to go to the park down the street so can someone please take a bulldozer and take all the tents and put them in the garbage. This is actually what normal mainstream people think in their minds and everyone that thinks I’m a monster is a a woke idiot.
You can think this if you want.
But this is exactly what I'm talking about. You are saying that people who advocate for leaving these tents alone are "woke idiots", so "wokeness" is clearly about class politics too.
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