Left Is Not Woke

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Who cares, these critics asked, if the abstract idea of universalism is appealing when it is not actualised in the everyday experience of so many untold people? If an alliance of conservatives, liberals, and progressives is to succeed in fending off an increasingly undemocratic far right, lucid thinking is our only hope. In this, as with her discussion of power and justice in chapter 3, Neiman shows her Kantian disdain for any muddying of the purified ideal of universalism/justice with the messiness of the real world of flesh and blood humanity. You can change your choices at any time by visiting Cookie preferences, as described in the Cookie notice. In this nuanced and impassioned plea for universalism she has done a public service for readers of every political stripe.

Woke” is also allegedly indebted to Michel Foucault (because of its apparent focus on power rather than justice) and evolutionary psychology (because of its apparent cynical attitude towards altruism and belief that all human behaviour is selfish).Some on the left have been attracted to rightist thinkers by their critiques of liberalism, especially in the light of a growing awareness of the hypocrisy that undergirds much of Western history, wherein the same powers can proclaim human rights and commit the worst atrocities. Neiman’s defence of universalism is important and has been praised by Fintan O’Toole in a powerful essay in the New York Review of Books titled “Defying Tribalism”. If there are still holes in your knowledge of “woke” culture, you can turn to Joanna Williams’ How Woke Won: The Elitist Movement that Threatens Democracy, Tolerance and Reason (2022); Ralph Calabrese’s Toxic Femininity: Why Woke Women are Trying to Disable Our Youth, Minorities, and Civilization (2021); Kevin Donnelly’s The Dictionary of Woke: How Orwellian Language Control and Group Think Are Destroying Western Societies (2022); Stephen Soukup’s The Dictatorship of Woke Capital (2023); and D. Susan Neiman is a brilliant moral philosopher who takes on the challenges of wokeism, defined roughly as the reduction of human identity and moral status to the narrow axes of race, gender, and personal trauma. Let no one confuse what this book has to say with the tired right-wing denunciation of ‘identity politics.

Left Is Not Woke accuses some trendy voices of the left of a fatal self-betrayal: renouncing the very grounds on which the left has traditionally stood, the concepts and principles in the name of which it has fought its battles and advanced its ends, above all, universalism.In summation, I assume some unnamed leftists are exclusively intellectually indebted to evolutionary psychology, Martin Heidegger, and Carl Schmitt. Comparing him with Nazi legal theorist Carl Schmitt, who, according to Neiman, shared with Foucault “a deep skepticism toward any idea of progress,” she suggests that by rejecting the Enlightenment, the contemporary Left has embraced the intellectual tenets of fascism. When there’s the smoke of a thousand newspaper columns and a whole publishing bonanza over the dangers of “woke”, then presumably there is a fire of some kind.