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I subscribe to Freddie De Boer, who has a popular substack. Although an avowedly old fashioned socialist, he spares nothing in criticizing the woke progressives. This is what he wrote today about liberals:
"Liberalism has in recent years sloughed off whatever remaining status it had as a coherent political project - an effort by temporary…
I subscribe to Freddie De Boer, who has a popular substack. Although an avowedly old fashioned socialist, he spares nothing in criticizing the woke progressives. This is what he wrote today about liberals:
"Liberalism has in recent years sloughed off whatever remaining status it had as a coherent political project - an effort by temporary allies to join together despite philosophical differences to achieve a specific and material purpose. Instead, liberalism now functions ontologically, as a form of Being, and specifically of Being Good. The quintessential 2022 liberal is someone who does not want to achieve anything, but rather to be something - an ally, a friend to the movement, one of the good ones. Achieving is beyond the point; the point is to occupy a space of existential goodness. For people like Hobbes, politics is not a thing you do but a thing you are. And what Hobbes is, naturally, is a guy who already knows the answer to every question. In reality, politics is amoral, being right has absolutely no inherent function in the world, and achieving actual moral ends requires precisely the kind of compromise that Hobbes sees as below his exalted station, but no matter. Being Good is Being Good."
FYI the Hobbes referred here is Michael Hobbes, a contemporary talking head, not Thomas Hobbes! But the observation applies to much of the liberal progressives. It also suggests that the woke movement is much hollower than it might first appear?
I do hope you and Freddie De Boer are correct about the longevity of the woke.
It's un-nerving that I find myself again in common cause with radical Leftists like Freddie or Jacobin magazine. And yet I do agree with them that the focus on racial and sexual "privilege" is just another tool for our ruling class to maintain their very real class privilege. I shared politics with commies and socialists 30 years ago, and now I'm once again sharing a political space with radical socialists. :-) Funny.
Once you realize the "new" culture was is just "old" class war in disguise, it makes a lot more sense.