Woke Like Me

I issued some throwaway remarks trashing “Left Is Not Woke” by Susan Neiman that surprisingly aroused a lot of flak, both pro and con. I had only read the first 30 pages and put it aside. Now I’ve read enough.

I should first confess that it is a work of philosophy (though I would say it’s just a polemic), not a field in which I am well-endowed. The Rutgers College library had these huge leather chairs. I tried to read Hegel’s Phenomenology of Mind in one of those chairs and fell asleep. I’ve never cracked Foucault, another writer discussed in the book, and I am not about to. It is easy to download his books for free, which I have done, but I’ve never felt motivated to go any further. My fields of interest and limited accomplishment were math, literature, and later economics. My reading in my old age is mostly non-fiction. History, political commentary, political economy. No philosophy, besides this dubious book.

A question that hovers over the opening of Neiman’s book is exactly what “woke” is supposed to be. Neiman herself confesses that it is an “incoherent” concept. I want to approach this from the other pole of the title. What is the Left?

The author tries to drum up some lefty street cred for herself at the outset, going against the grain of her argument, odd for a philosopher who later declaims against “standpoint epistemology” (the premise attributed to the “woke” that aspects of your background qualify you as an authority on certain subjects). Her background should not matter. I know lots of people with lefty street cred. Some of them are lunatics. Maybe I’m one of them.

In the U.S., the Left is primarily the followers of Bernie Sanders and “The Squad,” and of the squad-adjacent members of Congress. If you think the Left includes the Clintons, Obama, Hakeem Jeffries, or Nancy Pelosi, we are just on different planets, and there is no point in further dialog. Neither is the Left a scatter of self-proclaimed Marxist-Leninist grouplets. I have friends therein, some very brainy, but I’m sorry to say their groups don’t matter.

The U.S. Left used to feature Democratic Socialists of America, of which I am still a dues-paying member (though check with me next week), but DSA is working itself further and further into ultra-left sectarian irrelevance, in pursuit of Marxist-Leninist purity. If DSA’s National Political Committee (NPC) craps on AOC or Rashida Tlaib (which incredibly might happen), it will cement its resemblance to the MAGA/Republican super-majorities of state legislatures of states like Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Ohio, among others, with very disparate proportions of Democratic voters. Some comrades are properly insisting that any statement of endorsement or anti-endorsement must be the result of a national referendum of all DSA members, a referendum in which the ultra-lefts on the NPC would not have the ghost of a chance of prevailing, which they will therefore oppose. A true referendum would expose how little support they have in DSA.

The Squad’s members boast supportive national organizations such as Justice Democrats and in their own districts, the backing of many DSA members.

The Left is also, especially now, the campus encampments protesting Israel’s massacres in Gaza and brutalization of Palestinians on the West Bank.

Back in the day, we had huge anti-war demonstrations that lacked any strong message discipline, or any kind of discipline. The result always included hilariously clever signs, and always some betraying complete lunacy. The usual gambit by defenders of the war was to pick out the few crazies, the better to disparage the body, in the face of whose message they had no response.

We are getting that now regarding Israel and Palestine, though in this case there are very real expressions of anti-Semitism that can be found among the protesters. I put this mostly down to ignorance, the failure to understand the difference between a Zionist and a Jew. This ignorance is shared, unfortunately, by many Jews.

That is all secondary. The protesters are more right than wrong, warts notwithstanding. Dwelling on the warts is an evasion of the fundamental issues and a morally dubious political choice. Warts are a leading object of Neiman’s criticism of “woke.” She also cites a string of anecdotes that fail to fill out whatever “woke” is supposed to be. Applying it to any solid concept of the Left is not accomplished. And there is libel too. At one point she claims that “many of the woke celebrated the Hamas attacks” of October 7, 2023. That is simply untrue. A few, yes, but “many”? Rubbish.

Another leading left current, now mostly subsided, was the Black Lives Matter upsurge. Here some of Neiman’s criticism amounts to criticizing agitation for not being an academic presentation or a well-wrought policy brief. I’m not against policy briefs. I used to write them. They don’t bring people out into the street. Broadly speaking, BLM was a splendid, massive, multi-racial protest against police misconduct. Simplistic at times? Of course. But more right than wrong.

And finally, for the broadest idea of Left, we have the suburban “wine moms” and African-Americans in general who dominate the Democratic Party electorate. It could be argued they are mostly just liberals, not very left. I would agree that programmatically, they are not wedded to progressive objectives; they are fundamentally pragmatists. On the other hand, they are politically active and they are sympathetic with lefty goals, if dubious about their realistic chances.

Neiman gives most of the game away, qualifying her entire polemic, as follows:

“Woke movements deserve praise for making many people aware that even for genuine universalists, universal was more often colored white than brown, gendered male rather than female, presumed straight rather than gay. It also brought the evils of colonialism to the forefront of Western historical consciousness.”

Evidently we’ve gotten too much of a good thing.

We do see some wacky stuff labeled as Left, like protests over the use of tacos in school cafeterias as “cultural appropriation.” That is not “the Left” as I have described it. At DSA conventions, clapping in response to a speaker was criticized as an offense to those with sensitive hearing, or to those who couldn’t hear at all. Instead you were supposed to “twinkle.” My general advice, if you want to communicate with ordinary folks, don’t be weird. Stay on the big issues. Be like Bernie.

No small part of the book elaborates on woke as practiced by the Right, by corporations, by the New York Times, even by God help us Donald Trump. But there is woke and what could understood as the anti-racism of neoliberalism. Neiman wants to claim identity with critiques of the latter by the likes of Adolph Reed and Walter Benn Michaels. I’m a fan of both and I don’t buy it. Reed and Michaels are firmly focused on the corruption of anti-racism by pro-capitalist forces. Neiman’s implied targets, when they are specified at all, are more diverse than justified, with a lot of hippie-punching.

At one point Neiman has to reach all the way back to the Black Power breakup of the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee orchestrated by the execrable Stokely Carmichael in 1966, which brings us to Race.

Neiman’s favorite epithet for the woke is “tribalism.” In her book this is cast too widely to have racist connotations, but the thread connecting that terminology with anti-anti-racist politics is obvious enough. In general tribalism is proposed as the new governing rubric of the Left, associated with the abandonment of universalism, with an obsession with victimization, with identity politics.

Neiman associates the tribalism bit with fascist thinkers, such as Carl Schmitt. She might have noted that the anti-tribalism polemic is the standard weapon of the U.S. racist Right, going all the way up to the Supreme Court. It’s the pretense that race neutrality is anti-racist, in contrast to efforts like the Voting Rights Act to combat the institutions of Jim Crow. This theme has resurfaced with a vengeance over the past five years with canards about “Critical Race Theory.”

Another thematic slur in Neiman is directed at the so-called “postcolonial woke,” connected in her introduction to protests against Israel in defense of Palestine. In light of the epochal, global savagery of U.S. and other imperialisms, it ought to be difficult to overstate criticism. Here as on all other admissions of the virtues of Woke, Neiman likes it both ways. She knows imperialism, but you’re going about it wrong.

Following Reed and Michaels, I’ve been nearly as critical of identity politics as anyone. I agree, as R&M suggest, at bottom anti-racism as often practiced is a mode of attack on class politics. I would add, perhaps they wouldn’t, that substantive anti-racism is the reverse. That is my take on the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, provoked by R&M’s analysis. The multi-racial, mass BLM movement was class politics because an injury to one — African-Americans — is an injury to all — to the working class.

Neiman strings together some nutty episodes and tries to project that onto a broader “Left” tendency. But a look at the actual left, as described above, does not support her indictments. She has anecdotes, but no social analysis. Philosophy is not the right tool for this job. Her preoccupation with Foucault is not relevant. Foucault is invisible as far as the U.S. Left has been concerned. Nobody reads Foucault or any of those other characters (Derrida, Deleuze, etc.). People hardly read anything but their phones.

I feel obliged to say a word about pronouns. At first the preoccupation with them seemed trivial to me. But they are not trivial to those who may be constantly referred to in ways that offend them. Why would anyone want to made a virtue of the right to offend in this way? What is the retrograde political implication of referring to someone as “they” instead of he or she? Why be an asshole?

If Neiman really wants to establish lefty street cred, she should highlight and promote the most prominent Lefts doing and saying the most important things, not squatting vulgarly outside the universe with petty complaints. The morbid symptoms are not the point. Neiman is not in an operational sense Left. She begins with a reasonable definition of Left, then walks away from it in what follows. She’s just a kvetch.

You can’t be Left and condemn all existing Lefts, just as you can’t deny the authority of the Pope and really be a Catholic. I was put off when Lawrence O’Donnell on MSNBC once claimed he was a socialist. You can’t be a socialist and reject all efforts towards socialism. Then you’re just a utopian. Or a philosopher.