Twilight of the Woke

Review of Left Is Not Woke by Susan Neiman (Polity, 2023)

Susan Neiman’s Left Is Not Woke is a wonderful little book. The kind more intellectuals need to write. Neiman’s prose is lively and refreshingly fearless. She does not rely on complicated sentences or passive voice to gloss controversy. She takes a stand and sticks to it. Nor does she suffer from the reverse-victimhood complex common to so many “anti-woke” writers. This is a book you can recommend to friends and family members, even those who disagree with her starting premise.

For Neiman, “wokeness” is not a project that can rightly trace its inspiration from the progressive political tradition. And while much has been made about the political liabilities of woke rhetoric, few critics of wokeness from the Left have offered a sustained argument for what defines the Left and why “staying woke” might be at odds with it.

Neiman’s argument, sustained over four big chapters, is that wokeness is not only alien to the principles of the Left, but antithetical to them. It’s an argument that has, expectedly, garnered her enemies — one reviewer called her book “a cringe-inducing screed.”

But far from a screed, Neiman’s writing is compelling and sensitive. Wokeness, as defined by her, is an ideology that reduces all groups down to the “prism of their marginalization.” By doing so, it makes an implicit claim about society as a set of conflicts rooted in power dynamics between rival groups (black versus white; cis versus trans; straight versus gay; and on and on). Neiman offers a provocative question at the start: “Which do you find more essential: the accidents we are born with, or the principles we consider and uphold?…