Comment by UncleMeat
6 days ago
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.
This ties back to my idea that "wokeness" is an ideology that centers awareness, not solutions. Everyone in San Francisco is sufficiently aware that homelessness is a problem. Nobody really advocates for police brutality or shooting innocents as a positive good.
However, the debate constantly returns to the the question of how important these issues are on an imaginary scale that doesn't exist, instead of what we should be doing out.
Bob thinks police brutality ranks 9.8 on Bob's "importance scale". Sue thinks it ranks 7.6 on Sue's "importance scale". Arguing about the numbers and scales is completely irrelevant, and an excuse to attack someone else's position instead of proposing a solution you have to advocate for and defend. It is a strategy of taking the fight to the enemy.
I think it is reasonable to claim that there is a general bias towards awareness over material solutions among establishment liberals. I don't really think that this is "wokeness". I'd wager that almost everybody who uses the term would say that an activist who advocates for an extreme wealth tax and a ban on corporate landlording with money redistributed to the homeless is "more woke" than a mayor who funds homeless shelters to a degree but also regularly sends cops to clear out camp sites where homeless people are sleeping.
I agree with what you said, but I still think performance and moralizing is the central aspect.
In your hierarchy, I think most people would also agree that an activist blogging about using the world "unhoused" instead of "homeless" is more woke than the one advocating for the wealth tax.
Similarly, someone arguing for wealth tax and transfer on moral grounds is more woke than someone who argues the identical policy saying it will result in long term cost savings.
5 replies →