Consider that, whenever a critic of some woke supposition lays out the case for, say, why defunding or even abolishing the police is a terrible idea (as Neiman ably does)

In that regard, wokeness must serve a very useful function in contemporary capitalist society, which means it will be much harder to leave behind than it may seem.

The story of how exactly it serves that function has yet to be adequately written. It probably has something to do with the immense (and immensely wealthy) “nonprofit” sector and the revolving door between large influential corporate foundations, the Democratic Party, the media, and the government. A self-reenforcing circuit that surely operates in ways similar to the military-industrial complex.

fedcobin, here is incredibly easy logic why it works the way it does in the real (capitalist) world: some out-groups are not allowed into the capitalist class. When they are allowed in - it leads to dramatic deradicalization (see civil rights movement or more recently gay rights) of demands and marginalization of radicals. It doesn’t mean being normal empathetic human being to other people suffering is not leftist, christ sake.

As bad as wokeness is, what’s next could always be worse. If Foucauldian-Schmittianism wrought havoc on the Left, this “mind virus” is likely to cause even more trouble if its tenets become widely adopted on the Right. Consider that the major impulse of wokeness was a kind of reflexive pity for victims.

Yet the “victimology” mindset can go both ways. If the woke have insisted that characteristics like a person’s skin color, or their gender, or whatever else, marks them as fundamentally different in a grand metaphysical way and have made that point central to political appeals, then what happens if the Right takes up the charge by simply reversing the friend-enemy polarity? They will say to young men that their loneliness is not a function of “toxic masculinity” but instead the result of women’s claims to equality. And they will say to poor whites, who are adrift and frustrated, that they don’t need to “abolish ‘whiteness’” — instead, they should embrace it. We already see this beginning to happen — a reversal of the Left’s hard-fought victory in the civil rights era.

We should be worried about the fact that the woke paved the way for a hard right in more ways than one. Not only has particularly outlandish woke rhetoric offered right-wingers a set of increasingly easier political layups, their mocking rejection of patient democratic persuasion offers them a playbook for how to do political combat in an age of ideological nihilism.