Thread by @highprogressive

Jeez, I thought leftists were supposed to be the ones with the long and convoluted answers.

https://twitter.com/VivekGRamaswamy/status/1637894301861437441

This definition is dumb for a couple reasons.

First, he says "you believe your identity is based on your race, gender, sexual orientation" like... yes? Those are fundamental aspects to your identity, and they're the ones most likely to affect the way that society treats you.

Secondly, he implies that power structures are fake by calling them "invisible." Sure, you can't *see* power, but it's exerted through the actions of people who operate in the system- and it very visibly manifests in the material disparities between different groups of people.

Later on, he laments that "we're not a meritocracy anymore." The fact that this guy thinks that we ever had a purely meritocratic system displays a stunning ignorance of very obvious things like historical racial and gender discrimination, which debunk this notion entirely.

Like, of course if you deny that there are historical inequalities which have lead to worse outcomes for certain groups of people, then of course "woke" people are going to look crazy. Why try to fix these inequities if they don't exist? It's obviously bad faith framing.

3rd, he talks about "white cis men" being at the top of the hierarchy of social power and everyone else being at the bottom. This seems to be a crude invocation of intersectionality, which doesn't even posit such a binary. You can be oppressed in some ways & privileged in others.

All in all, this is all probably giving way to much credence to believing that conservatives are being earnest when they try to cobble together a coherent definition for their chief buzzword.

I think Big Joel explained the conservative definition of wokeness best.