If you're
woke, you're left. If you're left, you're woke. We blur the terms, assuming
that if you're one you must be the other. That, Susan Neiman argues, is a
dangerous mistake. The intellectual roots and resources of wokeism conflict
with ideas that have guided the left for more than 200 years: a commitment to
universalism over tribalism, a firm distinction between justice and power, and
a belief in the possibility of progress. The woke may do some good in the short
term but without these ideas, Neiman argues, they will continue to undermine
their own goals and drift, inexorably and unintentionally, towards the right.
In the long run, they risk becoming what they despise. One of the world's
leading philosophical voices, Neiman makes this case by tracing the malign
influence of two titans of twentieth-century thought, Michel Foucault and Carl
Schmitt, who respectively mocked justice and progress and portrayed social life
as an eternal struggle of us against them. A generation schooled with these
voices in their heads, raised in a broader culture shaped by the ruthless ideas
of neoliberalism and evolutionary psychology, has set about changing the world.
It's time they thought again.
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