From Anti-Woke to Woke Critical
Why it’s time we break decisively from the negative recent past
In recent years, particularly since around the time the world woke up from the pandemic, I began having serious concerns about the way the ‘anti-woke movement’ was traveling. Slowly but steadily, it was becoming less intellectual and more emotionally charged. It was also becoming less constructive and more reactionary. Perhaps most importantly, there was less and less emphasis on the classical liberal values and the focus on individual freedom that had underpinned the movement since the beginning. As a result, authoritarian New Right voices were increasingly welcomed into the fold. These changes didn’t happen overnight, but by 2023 the whole tone of the movement had changed. It was this change that allowed the concept of anti-woke to be hijacked by Ron DeSantis for his failed presidential campaign, promoting nonsense like how Disney is a ‘woke corporation’ along the way, to justify his brand of New Right authoritarianism.
I have done a lot of soul searching as to why things have turned out this way. There’s the role of certain media outlets funded by big money, trying to slant the narrative a certain way. There’s power hungry and dishonest politicians. But there’s also a crucial element that has often been overlooked: the relentless negativity. The anti-woke movement was descending into a spiral of ever-increasing negativity, and this was something I only realized in hindsight. At some point, it became no longer about trying to fix what’s gone wrong with progressive politics in the 2010s West, but rather a brand of grievance politics in its own right. Around mid-2022 or so, many fans of Jordan Peterson began noticing a change in his personality and the way he argued about things that they didn’t like very much. The change seen in Peterson was quite abrupt and surprising, and I suspect this was at least partially due to his experience of illness and emotional trauma from the years before. However, what has often been missed is that a similar kind of change actually occurred in many other prominent anti-woke figures around the same time. It’s just that, unlike Peterson, they didn’t get sick and disappear from the scene for 2–3 years, thus they had 2–3 years to change gradually. But the fact was, this was not a Jordan Peterson only problem. This was a widespread problem. Anti-wokeness simply lost its previous rationality, critical thinking and patience, and became crude, emotional, and frankly reactionary.
Let’s face it: the years 2020, 2021 and 2022 were not easy for most people. We had a pandemic, the social upheaval from the BLM protests, a bitterly fought election in America (as well as similarly close and emotional elections in Canada, Australia and France within the next year and a half), and a struggling economy partly as a result of post-pandemic conditions. During this period, I observed that people had become angrier, meaner, and more negative generally speaking, and not just limited to politics. I also observed that most people seemed not to be aware that the new negativity was affecting the way they thought and spoke about things. Perhaps this was only to be expected, given how these new conditions all came in quite suddenly. But given that we are in 2024, and there still hasn’t been a good recovery, I think it’s time we actively reset things mentally. We need to actively re-embrace positivity, and insist on rationality and good faith dialogue again. We can’t let this endless spiral of negativity continue. We need to draw a line in the sand, and truly move on from those terrible years.
Which is why I suggest we shift from being ‘anti-woke’ to being ‘woke critical’. To be anti something is, by definition, to be negative, but to be critical suggests an intellectual and rational engagement, which is actually closer to what anti-wokeness was like in the early days. To understand what is wrong with woke activism, and most importantly, to change things for the better, we need to engage with it and critique it rationally, rather than just fight it with blunt rhetoric that riles up people’s emotions but gets nothing actually resolved. I’ve explored several alternatives, but ‘woke critical’ sounds closest to what I envision. I also understand that people might draw parallels with ‘gender critical’ feminism, which I don’t support, as I’ve previously explained (basically, they’re just anti-trans, rather than engaging with the arguments on all sides critically). But the misuse of the term ‘critical’ by gender critical feminists shouldn’t mean we need to avoid the word. Indeed, if we do ‘woke critical’ well enough, it could expose how ‘gender critical’ activists are not really being critical in a rational and constructive way at all, and encourage people to look towards a truly critically rational approach when it comes to gender issues too.
Originally published at https://taraella.substack.com.
TaraElla is a singer-songwriter and author, who is the author of the Moral Libertarian Manifesto and the Moral Libertarian book series, which argue that liberalism is still the most moral and effective value system for the West.
She is also the author of The Trans Case Against Queer Theory and The TaraElla Story (her autobiography).
