‘Woke’ Is Not Another Word for Liberal

Image Source: Kings College London

Writing about the culture wars being fought in the pages of high-middlebrow publications like The Atlantic is, in columnist Sam Kriss's words, a little bit like astronomy (Kriss 2022). By the time any information has percolated through, it's been dead for at least a few billion years. The concept of “wokeness" has been a gold mine for pundits on all sides for about a decade, and, as such, is thoroughly exhausted; all of the interesting battles over it were lost on Tumblr by 2014. Adam Serwer’s recent column, “‘Woke’ is Just Another Word for Liberal,” then, is not frustrating because of how he misinterprets “wokeness,” but because of how he misrepresents liberalism, a term with concrete meaning (Serwer 2023).

The most recent wave of “wokeness” punditry was set off when Briahna Joy Gray, former Press Secretary for the Sanders campaign and current talking head for The Hill, asked conservative commentator Bethany Mandel to define the term. Mandel, who had just written a book on the phenomenon, failed to provide a comprehensible definition—not a hard task for such a nebulous word—and pundits pounced. Marxist Freddie deBoer identifies it as the language-based social justice politics that have annexed institutions from the New York Times to Wells Fargo (deBoer 2023); linguist John McWhorter describes it as a religious movement (Doubek et al. 2021). Wall Street Journal columnist Andy Kessler can be uncharitably read as blaming “wokeness” for the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank (Kessler 2023). Unlike Adam Serwer’s definition, each of these definitions attempts to highlight a specific (in these cases negative) trend. Serwer, on the other hand, attempts to castigate all sides by identifying what conservatives are attacking as “wokeness” as standard-issue liberalism.

Although he never specifies, Serwer is presumably referring to American liberalism, which, in contrast with its European variants, is less dogmatic regarding free markets and more open to egalitarian reforms. Still, the United States has never had a strong leftist tradition, and its liberalism descends from the same roots as foreign strains: it emphasizes the importance of political and property rights, equal treatment before the law, equality of opportunity, progress through reform, and limited state intervention in the market and private sphere. Many of the recent bills passed by Republican legislatures in the guise of “anti-wokeness” really are attacks on liberalism: the upswing in book bans threatens freedom of speech, and the horrific bans on essential care for trans children are direct attacks on bodily autonomy. However, to reduce the projects of those outside of the American liberal tradition to “high priests of racial salvation preaching parallel dogmas [to white supremacists]... which say that you need only read certain books or say certain words to attain salvation” is a gross mischaracterization. Yes, the DEI industrial complex is farcical, but serious thinkers aren’t reading Robin DiAngelo—and many of them aren’t liberals.

Much of the GOP’s “anti-wokeness” reaction is an opportunistic rebranding of their standard agenda, but that doesn’t mean that “wokeness” is an attempt to achieve “higher marginal tax rates for people with private planes,” as Serwer claims. On the first page of Critical Race Theory: An Introduction, Richard Delgado and Jean Stefancic note that “critical race theory questions the very foundations of the liberal order, including equality theory, legal reasoning, Enlightenment rationalism, and neutral principles of constitutional law” (Delgado, Stefancic and Harris 2012, 1). It would be laughable to gerrymander a definition of “woke” that does not include two of the founders of the field of Critical Race Theory, but that appears to be what Serwer is attempting. Rather than critically engaging with any serious side of “wokeness” discourse (not that many are worth engaging with,) Serwer is writing feel-good fluff for the median Atlantic subscriber.

To that end, the target of Serwer’s article is not the “anti-woke” right, but a left not limited to higher marginal tax rates. Just as he presents American history as having one correct, apolitical interpretation, he attempts to flatten politics to a narrow band limited to standard-issue liberalism valiantly battling standard-issue American conservatism. A left-skeptical reader can be assured about their commitment to justice if the “woke” edge of the possible is just American liberalism, even if this obscures the vast gulf between the ideology and actual activist demands. To misrepresent “wokeness” is understandable, given how little meaning the term has anymore, but to equate it with liberalism does a disservice to both words.

References

deBoer, Freddie. “Of Course You Know What Woke Means.” Freddie deBoer, Substack, March 15, 2023, https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/of-course-you-know-what-woke-means.

Delgado, Richard, Jean Stefancic, and Angela Harris. Critical Race Theory: An Introduction, Second Edition. NYU Press, 2012. http://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt9qg9h2, 1.

Doubek, James et al. “'Woke Racism': John McWhorter Argues against What He Calls a Religion of Anti-Racism.” NPR, November 6, 2021, https://www.npr.org/2021/11/05/1052650979/mcwhorters-new-book-woke-racism-attacks-leading-thinkers-on-race.

Kessler, Andy. “Who Killed Silicon Valley Bank?” The Wall Street Journal, March 12, 2023, https://www.wsj.com/articles/who-killed-silicon-valley-bank-interest-rates-treasury-federal-reserve-ipo-loan-long-term-bond-capital-securities-startup-jpmorgan-bear-stearns-lehman-brothers-b9ca2347.

Kriss, Sam. “The internet is already over.” Numb at the Lodge, Substack, September 18, 2022, https://samkriss.substack.com/p/the-internet-is-already-over#footnote-anchor-3-71503638. 
Serwer, Adam. “‘Woke’ Is Just Another Word for Liberal.” The Atlantic, March 21, 2023, https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2023/03/bethany-mandel-woke-interview-definition/673454/.