> In the six years since Brown’s death, “woke” has evolved into a single-word summation of leftist political ideology, centered on social justice politics and critical race theory. This framing of “woke” is bipartisan: It’s used as a shorthand for political progressiveness by the left, and as a denigration of leftist culture by the right.
https://www.vox.com/culture/21437879/stay-woke-wokeness-hist...
That was written in 2020. Now, as Democrats fear a red wave in 2022, it seems they want to distance themselves from the ideas they embraced just two years ago, and some claim that "wokeness" is a fiction invented and used exclusively by the right, obscuring its true history: a term invented by BLM and used as "a shorthand for political progressiveness" by progressives themselves as recently as 2020.
(We might almost overlook that two other terms Democrats are also trying to distance themselves from were casually used in that quote: "a single-word summation of leftist political ideology, centered on social justice politics and critical race theory". Before right-wing criticism of these ideas became overpowering, they were all widely embraced by the left.)
And...it was confused, muddled, and largely inaccurate then.
> Now, as Democrats fear a red wave in 2022, it seems they want to distance themselves from the ideas they embraced just two years ago,
Even if the articles description of the use of “woke” as an encapsulation of leftism were correct, you would be making the common mistake of associating the center-right Democratic Party with leftism. Within the left, there is debate over whether supporting the Democrats is acceptable or counterproductive, and the Democratic Party itself is generally anti-leftist and pro-corporate-capitalist, though arguably not as strongly soa s the Republicans (arguably, OTOH, more strongly so, as the Republicans culture war positions compromise the advancement of corporate capitalism.)
> Before right-wing criticism of these ideas became overpowering, they were all widely embraced by the left.
The original meaning of both terms is still widely embraced on the left, even after they’ve becoming meaningless epithets in the mouths of Republicans. They’ve never been embraced by Democrats as a whole, and the Republican use of term (which generally is not attached to anything vaguely resembling a criticism) doesn't even refer to the same thing that people using the terms positively refer to with the term.
No, I'm recognizing that even the centrist New Democrats embraced woke/progressive ideas in 2020, or at least didn't dare to challenge them. Now they're distancing themselves from those ideas, so they avoid the terms as well. As Clinton strategist James Carville said: "Wokeness is a problem and we all know it."
> Even if the articles description of the use of “woke” as an encapsulation of leftism were correct
It is correct. It may not be how you use the word, but it is how many people, including Democrats, use the word.
Here's another example in which CNN uses the term to encapsulate the Green New Deal and open immigration along with Defund the Police and the culture war, while advising Democrats to distance themselves:
https://www.cnn.com/2021/07/12/politics/woke-green-new-deal-...
> it was confused, muddled, and largely inaccurate
Here you're just descending into insults instead of substantive debate, while dismissing contrary evidence without any reason. You might try to open your mind and realize that your opinion doesn't encompass or limit all human experience.
I didn't imply anything, I explicitly stated that the term “wokism” as currently used, doesn't refer to either an actual ideology, cultural phenomenon, or even a set of ideas or groups of people more connected than that they are things the dominant faction of the political Right disagrees with at the moment of the use of the label.
> Don't you agree that there's a relationship between having pronouns in the bio, reading Ibram X. Kendi, being "intersectional", believing words are violence, and sporting purple hair?
No, I don't. Believing (certain uses of) words are violence seems to be common across the political spectrum, though which uses of which words varies, purple hair is pretty orthogonal to politics (as is the more common feature used in this context, blue hair), intersectional isn't something a person can be, and while the first two things do correlate with political positions the Right opposes they (and the political positions they each correlate strongly with) don't correlate very strongly with each other. (In fact, that's a perennial complaint of the group that represents the intersection of those two communities.)