Towards A Post-Woke Synthesis

Which way, Western he/they?

Have you heard? There’s a vibe shift.

We’re at a fork in the road, two roads marked “anti-woke” and “post-woke”. I’m hoping we can avoid the reactionary trap and find the integrated post-woke synthesis.

Last week I was interviewed for the Doomer Optimism podcast, where we started exploring what it might look like to embrace old-school leftist values while rejecting the misguided cultural norms that have taken over leftist organising in the past 5-10 years.

A couple days later, I was interviewed on the Metagame podcast where I was able to summarise my position in just a couple of minutes. Here’s the essence of it:

“I come from a pretty far left political background – the Occupy Movement was where I first got politically activated. I’m just as motivated as I ever was around questions of freedom, oppression, liberation, and people’s ability to choose their own path in life. So I deeply care about the original founding values of the left. But some years ago I quit the movement. The actual lived experience of being in leftist groups is awful, it’s awful. It’s not a humane place for a lot of people – maybe especially an unpleasant place for me as a white man.

I’ve been quietly eager for us to get to the next step, where we maintain these values of equality and justice and care, but we extend the tolerance and generosity to all kinds of people. Religious people. Rural people. Old people. All people. Not just elite, cool, coastal, urban, queer people. When is the moment where we genuinely go for equality, instead of for these inverted hierarchies?

I’m cautiously optimistic that there’s a moment here, there’s a brief opening, where we get to shape the public conversation again. I started using this term “post-woke” as an attempt to crystallise a new conversation: if you have progressive values, and a deep distrust of progressive norms that took over in the last 5 or 10 years, can we collectively articulate a new posture to the world? Can we say, “hey we learned the lesson, sorry for being so disrespectful and antisocial, we were really trying to do something important, and we got some weird bugs in our cultural code.” Can we get to the next step?

Any moment there’s been some injustice, the desire for justice will co-arise with the desire for vengeance. That’s just natural. That’s part of what it means to be a human, you want to over-react. A sensible, mature group or society would be able to distinguish justice from revenge and say, we’re in the business of dealing out justice, and we are going to do everything we can to contain this revenge fantasy, instead of enacting it and valorising people for their vengeance.

So all of this is to say, I think the progressives have thoroughly lost the moral high ground, I want them to regain it, and a lot of that comes down to how we treat each other, how we have disagreements, how we encounter someone with different ways of seeing the world and meet them with respect and curiosity.”

---

If you know what to look for, this vibe shift is everywhere.

Here’s some recent writing from Starhawk, old school anarcha-feminist pagan Battle-of-Seattle leftist:

“The mood among progressives is more like that reflected in this Facebook post by Jackrabbit, an old friend who has been a political ally since we met at the Diablo Canyon blockade in 1981:

“I'm happy to have finally shed the burden of my membership in what has passed as the American Left. It is a bit disorienting, as it has been elemental to my identity, but it is also a relief to be free of the woke scolds and the social pressure to conform - unquestioningly - to a self-destructive agenda of diminishment and delusion.”

Molly Crabapple describes the political culture of the Left as “a censorious prissy culture, obsessed with academic terminology, easily parodied and repulsive to many, perhaps most.”

I've identified as a leftist since those days on the Liberal Lawn back in 1966. Jackrabbit expresses what I hear from many of my old friends and allies: that we often no longer feel a part of movements we’ve connected to and belonged to all of our adult lives. This is a very bad sign, if we want to build a movement broad enough and deep enough to actually achieve our goals. When people who have deeply invested in a movement no longer feel embraced by it, how can we expect to draw in new people and expand our reach?”

In my opinion, Starhawk is still pulling some punches, but if you can read between the lines, that’s a pretty damning critique of the current state of progressive politics.

This is becoming my new favourite genre: old school leftist makes no-holds-barred attack on the degeneracy of the contemporary left. Check this one from Catherine Liu interviewed by Chris Hedges:

“The liberals have become more authoritarian. They’ve become more repressive of dissent. They think the attitude of skepticism about their positions is fascist, is racist.

Let’s just say the whole problem of a technocratic managerial approach to inequality that they imposed on us through Diversity, Equity and Inclusion in the universities was something that we could debate. No! If you debate it, you are racist!

They blame a kind of leftism, people who are concerned with bread and butter issues, for the defeat of these candidates that have been promoted by a party completely captured by one segment of capital who are trying to show the American worker that they are idiots. They are racist, they’re anti-immigrant, they’re transphobic, they’re homophobic, they’re sexist!

These people who are supposed to be protecting our abilities to reason, research, develop knowledge that will enhance our understanding of politics, history, culture, and the American nation, they have completely abdicated their responsibility and yet they want to lead us.”

I highly recommend the rest of the interview, it’s so refreshing. It’s a great reminder that there’s still a strong contingent of leftist academics and organisers who are primarily concerned with the material needs of working people. They’ve been hounded into silence into recent years, but now there’s a vibe shift, you can expect to see a lot more of them.

---

So what now?

It’s been so long since I had a political home base. Honestly I’m pretty confused about my politics!

I can’t stand the petty authoritarianism and frothing tribalism that has taken over the discourse in recent years. So my social network has changed. I’m spending most of my time with people who think of themselves as “apolitical”, because these are the people who won’t ostracise you for your beliefs.

I’ve enjoyed taking a break from the political fervour that I had 15 years ago, but it’s also unsatisfying. I have talents, resources, and opportunities to shape the world around me. I think it is still worth organising for peace, for nature, for workers, for a thriving future that works for all. I don’t want to retire from the struggle.

I don’t know what the next step is for me. But I suspect the answer will not be found online, it will be in my local neighbourhood, in the the real material needs of the real people around me.

I’ll let you know what I discover.