I’d rather woke politics win than conservatism. But I’d rather have a friendly forgiving plainspoken big tent civil libertarian socialist mass movement, personally. Trouble is, there is only woke and anti-woke. There is no escape.
“I’d prefer utopia, but if I can’t have that, I’ll choose the pink police state.” DeBoer in a nutshell. Like many of his posts, I saw this one being shared among conservatives who inexplicably find him to be an oasis of honesty and integrity on the left. But even this post, where he takes his fellow leftists to task for disingenuously refusing to define the word “woke” (or accept anyone else’s definition), is not really a criticism of dishonesty. It’s mostly a complaint that woke politics isn’t really left-wing politics at all, just the bourgeois posturing of spoiled rich kids building their brands. It’s not radical enough, in other words. Too individualist. Ordinary intelligent people, lacking the academic’s ability to rationalize, will look at the Great Awokening and say, “If this is what ‘not radical enough’ looks like, I’ll stick with the imperfect status quo, thanks.” Not our hero. Progress requires that he eventually endorse the direction the woke are heading in, however regrettably, since the libertarian-socialist cavalry are nowhere to be seen on the horizon. This is the sort of counterintuitive deep thinking that makes Andrew Sullivan tinkle in his pants with excitement at the thought of “unpacking.” Ironically enough, his “civil libertarian socialist” ideal is the sort of political stance that can only ever exist as a, uh, bourgeois eccentricity, not as a mass movement. Most of us understand that intuitively, but then again, most of us don’t proudly proclaim ourselves to be “fourth-generation Marxists.”