Susan Neiman: 'The fact that 'woke' has become a slur in the hands of people like Ron DeSantis, Marjorie Taylor Green, and right-wing politicians across Europe should not prevent the rest of us from examining it'
, Marjorie Taylor Green, and right-wing politicians across Europe should not prevent the rest of us from examining it. Even when they decline to say it publicly, for fear of giving aid and comfort to the radical right, most progressives I know are deeply uneasy about the turn taken in Western cultural politics of the last few years.Whether you think woke is a curse or a blessing, you’re likely to share one assumption: woke is left, or far-left, or hard-left.
Woke emphasizes the ways in which particular groups have been denied justice, and seeks to repair the damage. In the focus on inequalities of power, the concept of justice is often left by the wayside. For ideas of justice, as Foucault and his heirs argued, are often used as smokescreens to disguise demands for power. Why not be honest, cut out the middleman and simply demand power for your tribe? Woke demands that nations and peoples face up to their criminal histories.
What distinguishes the left from the liberal is the view that, along with political rights that guarantee freedoms to speak, worship, travel and vote as we choose, we also have claims to social rights which undergird the real exercise of political rights. Liberal writers call them benefits, entitlements, or safety nets. All these terms make things like fair labor practices, education, healthcare and housing appear as matters of charity rather than justice.
The concept of universalism once defined the left; international solidarity was its watchword. What united striking miners and civil rights workers and freedom fighters was not blood but conviction – first and foremost the conviction that behind all the differences of time and space which separate us, human beings are deeply connected in a wealth of ways. To say that histories and geographies affect us is trivial. To say that they determine us is false.
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