The word ‘wokeism’ is trite and ought to stay dead and gone. Let the use of it be considered historical, if not archeological.
Concerned citizens in France blame U.S. campuses for ‘woke’. Concerned citizens in the U.S. blame French Theory for ‘woke’. This blame game is sterile and allows for no progress to be made towards eradicating the precise evils on both sides of the Atlantic that are obfuscated by the buzzword ‘woke’.
‘Woke’ is a panicked stand-in for the contemporary developments of liberalism. The reactive right cannot name those consequences because it cannot bring itself to condemn liberalism, resorting to the self-deception that ‘woke’ is now a rough synonym for ‘liberal’, which supposedly has nothing to do with ‘classical liberalism’ anymore.
These contemporary developments are rooted in the pervasive ‘libérale-libertaire’ ideology identified by the untranslated sociologist and philosopher Michel Clouscard as ever greater permissiveness for the consumer and ever greater repression for the producer, following the American model of mass consumption governing both morality and politics.
Around the same time, the theorist Guy Debord described in his eponymous book the emergence of a ‘society of the spectacle’, arguing that ‘the spectacle is the main production of the current society’ and that ‘experienced reality is materially invaded by the contemplation of the spectacle’, to the point that ‘truth is [but] a moment of the false’.
‘Everything is permitted, but nothing is possible’
The 21st century mal du siècle in France can be summarized by Clouscard’s maxim that ‘everything is permitted, but nothing is possible’. This is notably a sound explanation for the spread of the trans phenomenon: raised in neglect, despair and without perspectives to influence the material world around them, young people turn both to the most essential self-scarification possible and to the emulation of a victim complex which they are told or can tell will get them attention.
The reactive right is like this. ‘Woke’, which it invented as a slur, is literal wishing away, ritual conjuration, a rain dance for society to get better all without any concrete action. Nobody on the left claims the mantle of ‘woke’, except to take the piss at reactive ‘conservatives’ who stand for nothing and have nothing to propose towards the concrete conservation and edification of their countries. They will complain endlessly as a grift, medicating concerned citizens with the conviction that they are heard and represented in the media.
As the apocryphal Bossuet quote popularized in France by Eric Zemmour and Jordan Bardella goes: ‘God laughs at those who complain about the consequences while cherishing the causes.’
The proof of the slur ‘woke’s’ uselessness is that mass indifference to and aversion toward ‘woke’ policies has done nothing to prevent their enforcement in the first place; therefore, the mass appeal of anti-woke content will likewise do nothing to counter these policies.
In the U.S., and therefore throughout the collective West, the right is in power, yet many on the right behave as though it is not—often because acting this way is their fond de commerce. Let those who endlessly complain but never verifiably put their skin in the game beyond discourse be recognized as such and set aside when serious political efforts are undertaken.
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