Can the New Woke be the Rejection of Extremes on the Left and the Right?

Let’s resolve to reject extremes and work together to seek the truth.

Photo by Mikhail Nilov via Pexels

Woke is a term that has been beaten to death with so many different meanings to so many different people. Naturally, we’re going to beat it some more, because at this point, maybe the term deserves to die.

If you ask the left, woke means having a revelation on the challenges faced by other people. Coincidentally as a liberal, this is also my basic definition of the term.

If you ask the right, woke is attributed to a whole slew of grievances, both real and imagined: hating your country, seeing white males as the oppressor, anti-capitalism, drag queens in schools, transgender women beating up on biological women in sports, letting criminals and illegal immigrants run free, etc, ad infinitum.

Of course, we know all too well that the left’s wokeness does tend to stray into absurd, radical, illiberal and anti-science viewpoints at times.

We also know that the right’s illiberal, reactionary anti-wokeness flirts dangerously with destruction, rather than reform of important institutions that may have strayed into the more radical areas of left-wokeness.

And as usual, liberals, whether progressive, moderate or conservative, are caught…