Will Anti-Woke Go Too Far? Here's my Answer.

I think the most important thing to ensure that anti-wokeism doesn’t go ‘too far’ is to maintain a truly intellectual critique of wokeness. Both the right-wing culture warrior version of anti-wokeism, as well as the new Democratic-aligned avoidance-based anti-wokeism, are ultimately rooted in a knee jerk reaction judgement of whether things could be deemed ‘woke’, while never truly engaging with the phenomenon on an intellectual level. As I’ve said many times, the problem with wokeness is that it is ultimately rooted in postmodern critical theory ideology, and ultimately in a worldview that I would classify as ‘critical anarchism’: critical because it uses (bad faith) critique as its weapon, and anarchism because it ultimately wants to deconstruct all existing social structures, without differentiation as to whether those structures actually serve a useful function or not, because their ideological theories tell them that all such structures are oppressive. Radical identity politics, cancel culture and the rest are all strategies in service of this overarching goal.

To maintain an intellectual critique of wokeness, and importantly, to resist lumping normal liberalism into wokeness and hence becoming subconsciously opposed to liberalism itself, we must be able to differentiate between critical anarchism and liberalism. For example, supporting gay marriage and accepting LGBT people is liberalism. Attacking family values and deconstructing gender is critical anarchism. Acknowledging that racism is still a problem that needs to be dealt with, while insisting that racism is a problem that lives within individuals and that individual responsibility is key to ending racism is liberalism. Saying that racism is ‘systemic’ and the only way to fix it is to discredit entire systems of education, law enforcement and justice, as well as overturning the entire paradigm of individual merit and individual-level fairness, is critical anarchism. Critical anarchism’s agenda has been soundly rejected by the general public across the West because it is offensive to our long-standing values. On the other hand, liberalism is still broadly popular, and we should aim to revive a version of liberalism that is completely free of critical anarchist influences. Building a robust critique of critical anarchism is the first step to get there.