The so-called Woke One versus Woke Two debate unfolding in the media is nothing more than a charade. Nothing has changed. Runaway progressivism has simply run into more resistance than it ever has before.
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has become an unlikely voice in the effort to distance the left from its own recent past. Photo: Tom Williams/CQ-Roll Call, Inc via Getty Images
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“Woke 1 was crazyyyy”, New York City Councilman Chi Osse said in May this year, confronted with a 2021 social media post in which he had claimed that a “cis white man” should not be the next speaker of the City Council. Osse was not wrong in his diagnosis of woke as crazy, but with one important distinction: woke has not changed.
The best definition of “woke” is one rarely used. It comes from the English writer and Christian apologist GK Chesterton, who described the modern world as full of the Christian virtues gone mad.
The Christian Virtues Gone Mad
“The vices are, indeed, let loose, and they wander and do damage. But the virtues are let loose also; and the virtues wander more wildly, and the virtues do more terrible damage”, Chesterton wrote in his famous spiritual autobiography, Orthodoxy. Among his examples were the pitiless truth of some scientists and the untruthful pity of some humanitarians.
Woke, in other words, is the old Christian virtues gone mad: disconnected from one another, and therefore from the balance that once kept them in check. The result is virtues swollen out of all proportion, doing terrible damage in the process.
Imprudent empathy toward illegitimate, typically male, asylum seekers overrides legitimate concerns about the safety of women and children. Untruthful compassion leads otherwise normal people to advocate for the bodily mutilation of those struggling with serious questions of sexuality and identity. A blind sense of justice sees those who step out of line on these modern orthodoxies hounded mercilessly out of offices, universities and public life altogether.
For years, opponents have been reluctant to push back, not just because of the consequences but because doing so seems to attack Christian virtue itself. It does not. And the dam is breaking.
It is why Donald Trump was given another shot at the American presidency. It is why Reform UK has come so far in such a short time. It is why the firewall is crumbling against right-wing European parties like Germany’s AfD and France’s National Rally (Rassemblement National).
Talk of Woke One is nothing more than an acknowledgment, by those across the Western world who engaged in it, that the political landscape has changed. From their perspective, not for the better.
Osse’s line was picked up by Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the American politician, pioneer of woke politics and darling of the left. In a recent interview on ABC News, Ocasio-Cortez was questioned about views expressed by her Democratic Party colleague Francesca Hong, who recently lost the Democratic primary for the Wisconsin governorship.
In a 2020 tweet, since deleted, Hong had called for the American celebration of Thanksgiving to be canceled, on the grounds that it celebrates colonialism. Asked about it, Ocasio-Cortez responded with Osse’s “Woke 1 was crazyyyy”, kicking off the rebrand in earnest. Or so they would have the voting public believe.
There is no Woke One because there is no Woke Two. The same madness that saw doctors suspend the claustrophobic Covid restrictions for Black Lives Matter marches, and only for Black Lives Matter marches, has not gone away. The same madness that saw the German Goethe-Institut issue a “land acknowledgment”, paying respect to the Germanic and Slavic tribes that once inhabited the Berlin region, has not gone away.
Harry Potter author JK Rowling is no less reviled now than she was in 2021. If anything, she is more despised than ever for her stance on transgenderism. The only difference is that she now has more vocal support as people decide that they have been cowed for long enough.
Woke Is Alive And Well
While Trump has cracked down on it, affirmative action is alive and well elsewhere. Gender quotas remain in force in many corporate and civil settings across Europe, while discrimination along racial lines has deepened, driven by the two-tier treatment of native populations and foreign newcomers. In favor of the latter, to the detriment of the former.
If Woke Two is anything at all, it is little more than a sheepish admission that the heady days of the pandemic and its feverish lockdowns produced more than a little insanity among those of a progressive inclination. An excess that cost the American left dearly in the last presidential election, and one that is slowly pushing the European Union in the other direction too.
In what is perhaps an unconscious tribute to Chesterton, author Gad Saad has popularized the concept of “suicidal empathy”. That is, empathy unchained from reason and from a healthy sense of self-preservation. Or at least a healthy concern for one’s own dependents, whether that means a family, a community or a society.
If the 2010s were one big display of empathy, the 2020s are a great big display of civilizational suicide. A rebrand will not save woke, nor should it.
