Comment by aprilthird2021
5 days ago
Another point, he is very invested in keeping the economy and the widening gap between the rich and everyone else out of it.
One of the big catalysts of wokeness was of course, Occupy Wall St, borne out of the 2008 financial crisis. When the bankers get bailed out and you just go underwater on your mortgage, people start to get upset and want to change things. And organizing yourselves and drilling with lots of rules and getting on the same page with people you don't otherwise have any connection to is paramount when it comes to becoming a large enough, hivemind type group that can bring about collective action. But if he brought that up in this article, people who don't care about 8 genders and fringe social issues might start backing away from the "woke = bad" message
to my mind, Occupy Wall Street and "wokeness", as it is generally depicted, are generally opposing movements. although it may have started there, "wokeness" was not primarily driven by universities and people on twitter, the overwhelming majority of it was driven by corporations and the corporate media. for businesses, it was a new way to buy credibility through moral posturing, and for the media it was a new cheap form of outrage to use to try and hold onto their dwindling readerships. further, "wokeness" is generally divisive to the working classes and far less threatening to the generally mono-cultural capital-holders. even further, it's a very nice way to distract young activists away from fighting against class structures.
to me, it's almost like the corporate classes saw Occupy Wall Street, a very very rare occurrence of genuine class consciousness and protest in the streets of America, and they realised that they needed to neutralise it somehow, and "wokeness" was how they achieved that.