“How do you define wokeness?” Jake Tapper asked soon-to-be CNN late-night host Bill Maher, who appeared Tuesday in part presumably to promote that move. Tapper hosted a one-hour special interview with the longtime host of HBO’s Real Time, with most of the later attention given to Maher’s observations about the upcoming election cycle. (Karen wrote about that yesterday.)
The discussion of wokeness should get some attention too, because Maher comes closest to a coherent definition of it. It’s not just being liberal — in fact, Maher rejects the idea that it’s liberal at all, in either a classic or post-classic sense. It’s not exactly progressivism either, although there’s a lot of overlap.
Instead, as Maher responds, wokeness is mainly an obsession on identity politics to the exclusion of almost everything else. It’s a diversity fetish, except in the area where it matters the most:
TAPPER: “So you talk about the Democrats being so hemmed in by identity politics. The counterargument would be it’s always been identity politics, it’s just always been white people, so people like you and me didn’t notice. And now it’s just an effort at inclusion, which I’m sure theoretically you support.”
MAHER: “Yeah. I support it in fact. But, I mean, the Democrats sometimes can take it too far — or I would categorize liberal as different than woke. You know, woke, which started out as a good thing, alert to injustice, who could be against that? But it became sort of an eye roll, because they love diversity except of ideas. And that’s not really where we should be. I mean, they have a trail of very bad ideas, I would think, in wokeness.”
TAPPER: “How do you define wokeness? Because I hear people use the term all the time and it means something different to everybody.”
MAHER: “Again, I think it’s this collection of ideas that are not building on liberalism but very often undoing it. I mean, five years ago, Abraham Lincoln was not a controversial figure among liberals. We liked him. Now they take his name off schools and tear down his statues. Really? Lincoln isn’t good enough for you? You know, 5, 10 years ago, bedrock liberalism was we are striving to be a colorblind society where we don’t see race. Of course, we see it, but it doesn’t matter. That’s not what woke is. Woke is something very different. It’s identity — we see it all the time. It’s always the most important thing. I don’t think that’s liberalism. I mean, I could mention so many issues like that. I remember doing that show on HBO, comic relief for the homeless. And the idea then, again, among liberals, I thought, was for the sake of compassion, can we get these people off the streets so they have a roof over their heads? And now it’s like, ‘How dare you try to move the homeless? This is where they live!’ It’s like, again, you change the definitions and then you say I’m more conservative? I believe what I’ve always believed. You change these things and then you yell at me for it.”
Maher’s point about the moving goalposts is good on its own, but it’s hardly a new observation. The obsession with identity has distorted reality so much that even homelessness has become an identity rather than a social ill. For that matter, so has dysmorphia, which is why we see woke efforts to craft identities with 73 pseudo-genders rather than address the actual and addressable issues of dysmorphia, especially in children and adolescents.
But the worst of wokeness has distorted equality for all into top-down forced equity, dictated by an elite cadre of social martinets if not government itself. When identity is the primary value and victimhood its currency, then character and individual choice are punished and suppressed. That is far from classical or even post-classical liberalism; it is a fetish over immutable characteristics for the sake of the fetish itself. And since it puts materiality on a pedestal, it leaves no room for cohesion, compromise, or even debate. It creates a tribalism that can only be addressed by top-down division of labor and goods, distributed on the basis of all of the artificial identities that such systems produce.
It’s no small wonder that it plays out so destructively. It is by definition an ideology of division, and in fact it incentives continuing divisions as groups compete for identity primacy. We already see this in “intersectionality,” a process by which identitarian politics has already begun to eat itself, but unfortunately not without damaging social cohesion elsewhere. This creates incentives for never-ending forms of victimhood, which result in absurdities such as Abraham Lincoln becoming unpersoned, among others.
It also results in the demand to shut down any arguments against such systems as “hate speech” and/or “[fill in the blank]phobia.” That strategy has become particularly successful as of late, thanks to a media industry that has colluded with woke activists to preen about their own virtue. That has helped produce blacklisting of political voices and access to public squares on a scale not seen since the Red Square.
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