by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner
Ok, this is something I think about way, way too much. And I think I might have come up with an explanation for what troubled me about both “being woke” and the conservatives who want to burn our Western democracy to the ground because of it.
It seems to me that “being woke” is actually a catch all for a hodge-podge of different things that represent different ideas to different people. Rather than being some sort of set orthodoxy, “being woke” is an amorphous blob of ideas that are used, abused and twisted as needed by both sides to prove their points. (This is coming from someone who absolutely HATES using “both sides” for any reason.)
Or maybe we might look at “being woke” as a spectrum.
On one end of the spectrum is “classical college sophomore wokeism” that hates all “straight CIS white men” because they’re a member of the patriarchy that needs to be “slayed.” This is the wokeism that your typical rabid conservative podcaster rants about in ever growing heated monologues.
I’ve only rarely encounter this Hyper Wokeism outside of my time in college and I have to admit it is pretty fucking annoying. It’s annoying because its corrosive and causes the bedrock of any stable Western democracy — conservative men — to start babbling about how the US isn’t REALLY a democracy, but rather a constitutional republic and fuck you, lib. I suppose the case could be made that this form of Hyper Wokeism leapt out of its natural college campus environment because of social media.
On the OTHER end of the spectrum, there are things that conservatives CALL “being woke” that aren’t all being woke, but rather just normal life in a modern Western democracy — or a constitutional republic that aspires to be a democracy. Things like not being overtly racist or misogynistic are now used by Conservatives as examples of people being “woke.” Throw in the #MeToo movement’s abrupt and long-overdue change in expectations for men in power and the word “woke” is thrown around a whole lot in ways that are meaningless other than to jerk off angry white men who can’t find a job because they don’t have a college degree.
The issue is, even though “being woke” is a blob, conservatives mix and match different types of “being woke.” They actively conflate the different concepts associated with being woke for their own purposes, making everyone angry which is what they want — they want to destroy everything and the best way to do that is make everyone so mad that we don’t have any functioning politics. Conservatives hate government unless it’s doing things they like.
So, taxes for the wealthy can never be too low and taxes for the poor can never be too high. They have no shame and so they want to expand or contract government control depending upon which part of their fascist governing alliance we’re talking about.
Anyway, we’re fucked. Get out the country if you can.
