Left Is Not Woke

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And because these norms were enforced not only through edicts backed up with the threat of violence but also through subtler means, these more insidious forms of power and control were able to hide in plain sight. There is much in here also to be enjoyed, including critical remarks about Heidegger and sociobiology (although also much could be contested).

As a result, wokeism conflicts with ideas that have guided the left for more than 200 years: a commitment to universalism, a firm distinction between justice and power, and a belief in the possibility of progress. This reactionary tendency has led to some prominent class-first leftists advocating anti-LGBT+ and racist policies, constructing red-brown alliances with right-wing groups that advocate the same purity logic reviled by Neiman, and descending into “ironic” traditionalism, hierarchicalism, tribalism and nihilism. It wasn’t an idea found in traditional conservative thought, which viewed history, at best, as static or circular, and, at worst, as a sad slow decline from a mythic golden age’ (92). Left is Not Woke is a frustrating book, rich in philosophical inquiry but with a strange lack of specifics that might clarify exactly who are the leftists she is criticising.

Susan Neiman is a brilliant moral philosopher who takes on the challenges of wokeism, defined roughly as the reduction of human identity and moral status to the narrow axes of race, gender, and personal trauma. This discussion of sociobiology is somewhat mystifying, as she makes no direct connection between it and “woke” politics.

She criticizes the “vehemence of woke arguments about the importance of pronouns,” for instance, without pointing to a single example of such vehemence (nor does she note the rising violence that LGBTQ+ people face in their daily lives).She urges them to renew the values articulated by Enlightenment thinkers: not to confine human beings by ancestry or biology, not to settle for merely replacing one oppressive regime of power by another, not to abandon the hope of genuine human progress. Indeed she stresses the numbers of white Americans who rallied behind the Black Lives Matter protests of several years ago, which would seem to disprove her central assertion. Had the reviewer read more carefully, he might have noticed the fulsome acknowledgement made to the youngest commentator, Samuel Zeitlin, whose suggestions were most helpful, and perhaps concluded that borrowing without acknowledgement is not the sort of thing I do. It is not an unfamiliar role for Foucault, whom Jürgen Habermas once denounced as one of the “young conservatives” of postmodern thought. It is true some contemporary leftists are so concerned with language at the expense of major inequalities that they forget the need for a politics of redistribution alongside a politics of recognition.

Elsewhere she has written movingly about the way in which German guilt about the Holocaust blocks the capacity to feel empathy for Palestinians now dying in Gaza. Neiman does not recognise the obvious issue: can we reliably determine if any proposed “genuine” universalism is “genuine” and not, say, a covert tribalism peddling universalist language? Such confusion between normative and descriptive claims (another legacy of Foucault) are hard to swallow for Neiman, for whom ‘there’s no deeper difference between left and right than the idea that progress is possible. Calmly but fiercely defending the principles of universalism and progress that once defined the left, she gives us a counter to the narrow tribalism that threatens to derail progressive politics.

Ultimately, she claims, this shift towards “woke” progressivism hampers the ability of leftists to articulate a coherent political vision and leads them into hopelessness.