The Woke and the Restless

I would like to take this opportunity to congratulate all intellectual historians, particularly American intellectual historians:  ours is a “woke” discipline.

This will come as a shock to some of our Grand Old Men. Nevertheless, the people have spoken.

Well, one person.  So far.

The announcement was made via a Twitter thread, where all relevant discourse happens these days.

Here’s how it went down…

Josh Hammer, the opinions editor for Newsweek—which used to be one of America’s most reputable weekly news magazines (do we have those any more?)—opined thusly on Twitter:

“I’m sorry, when did the terms ‘Anglo-Saxon’ and ‘Anglo-American’ become problematic?”

That is a great historical question, and most of us in the field can probably answer it pretty much off the top of our heads.

TL;DR:  “Anglo-Saxon” as a term for white American ethnonational identity makes its major splash in the 1830s during Texas’s war against Mexico and continues in common parlance through the 1840s and 1850s as (white) America fulfills its “manifest destiny to overspread the continent.”  Importantly, “Anglo-Saxon” was a well-understood anti-Catholic and anti-immigrant designation. After the Civil War, thanks in no small part to the German ’48ers who fought so valiantly for the United States, “Anglo-Saxon” ceded some ground to “Teutonic,” and the two were used often as synonyms…until World War I, when Germans were demoted to “Huns” in American war propaganda, and the United States and United Kingdom fought as allies in a major land war.  The term “Anglo-Saxon” was especially beloved of the second Ku Klux Klan, precisely for its anti-Catholic, anti-Jewish, and anti-immigrant valences, and has continued to be used as a rather loud dogwhistle for self-appointed “race defenders” ever since.

In an ideal world, the opinions editor of a major American weekly news magazine would know this kind of thing.  But we do not live in such a world.

So I pitched the opinions editor of Newsweek, right there on Twitter.  I wrote:  “I am a historian of American thought and culture, and I would be happy to write a piece for Newsweek sketching the long history of this long-problematic term. HMU”.  (“HMU” means “hit me up”—often used in salacious contexts, but appropriate enough in this context.)

I checked replies this morning to see if the editor would take me up on the offer. He did not. Helas.

Instead, I got this feedback:  “History of American thought??? I have a feeling that I’ve forgotten more about history than you ever learned on your way to your woke PhD”

I find this reply fascinating, not because it came from a random 45^th-president-admiring Twitter account that is only two months old, but because of how it instantiates the ubiquity of the term “woke” as a right-wing insult against…well, against everything.

Much like the term “cancel,” the term “woke” has been pilfered from Black discourse (“stay woke”) and purged of any particular meaning. Instead, it has been adopted not just by internet trolls but by intellectuals on the center right and far right to denote every idea and thinker they hold in contempt without having to explain what is so contemptible about those ideas and thinkers.

In short, “woke” is used to signal an outgroup.

In her debut newsletter for Arc Digital, Cathy Young, a “heterodox” intellectual, recently wrote the following:

I think the pushback against radical left identity-based progressivism, a.k.a. “wokeness” or whatever you want to call it, is not only a virtuous cause but should be a high priority for anyone who cares about liberal values, in the philosophical sense of individual rights, civil equality, freedom of speech, intellectual pluralism, and so on. Liberals who argue that left identitarianism is either a positive, pro-social justice movement or a trivial non-issue are sorely misguided; this is a fundamentally illiberal phenomenon in every sense of the word.

Here, she uses the term “wokeness” to signify “radical left identity-based progressivism,” but acknowledges that “wokeness” is an empty term—it stands in for “whatever you want to call” the set of ideas or positions that Young finds problematic.  The words “wokeness” or “the woke” are just placeholders, the terms of opprobrium of the day.  You could quite easily substitute “political correctness” or “the politically correct” and the sentence would still be coherent to those who understand the lingo of right-wing outrage.

Indeed, in my first essay for Arc Digital on the Substack platform, I have challenged readers (and writers) to delineate the differences between “cancel culture” and “political correctness.”

Some of my liberal readers may have even participated in efforts in the 1990s to combat “political correctness” as the greatest threat to free speech and freedom of expression. This battle against “political correctness” was happening at the very same time that cultural conservatives were trying to get Murphy Brown pulled off the air for its positive depiction of pregnancy by an unwed mother, or to get Ellen pulled off the air for its positive depiction of a gay woman. When a television show is pulled off the air, one would say that the show has been “canceled.”

Is this the so-called “cancel culture” today’s alarmists are talking about? The social fragility of the religious right, and fundamentalist Christians’ insistence that lifestyles and values they deem offensive should not have any place in mass media? Perhaps not.

Rather, isn’t today’s “cancel culture” simply a rebranding of yesterday’s “political correctness,” a term tossed around in the 1990s and early 2000s to gin up a moral panic among those in the chattering class who were accustomed to having their views accepted as an “objective” starting point for all discourse in the public square?

As recently as 2013, Young herself was using the term “politically correct,” without scare quotes, in a piece for The Boston Globe.  Somehow, between 2013 and 2021, “political correctness” apparently ceased to be a threat, and “wokeness” and “cancel culture” became threats.  Before 2013 “wokeness” was surely not a problem, or someone would have written about it, right?  The same goes for “cancel culture.”  According to right-wing or “heterodox” thinkers, these two terms—“wokeness” and “cancel culture”—denote new and dangerous menaces to free and open discussion in the public square.

I am hoping someone who uses the terms “wokeness” and “cancel culture” will rise to the challenge and provide a taxonomy that distinguishes “political correctness” from “cancel culture” or “wokeness.”  One difference is historically relevant: “politically correct” was pilfered from a largely white discursive setting, while “woke” was pilfered from the Black vernacular. Beyond that, they will have to get cute, because from where I stand as a historian, both terms have served as interchangeable shibboleths for the right, in-group signals to denote an amorphous collection of “dangerous” outsiders and their ideas.

Apparently, those dangerous ideas now include the “history of American thought and culture.”

It’s a good thing I didn’t identify myself as an intellectual historian; I would never hear the end of it.

As intellectual historians, will we ever hear the end of “woke” and “wokeness” and “cancel culture”?  Well, yes and no.

Yes, because eventually reactionaries will borrow a new term for some old ways of polemicizing, and “woke” will be relegated to the ideological dustbin, alongside “politically correct.”

No, because then we’ll have to write about it. Good luck to whoever draws that straw!

Okay, now back to the history of “Western Civilization.” Nothing problematic there, you know.