During the Cold War, right-wing representatives used the word “communist” to discredit their political opponents. This strategy is still used by demagogues and polemicists.
However, the word “communist” has been replaced by the neologism “woke.” They are serving us the same dish that the right served during the Cold War, but they are serving it with a “woke” sauce rather than a “communist” sauce. No matter the sauce, it is still the same mush.
When the words “woke” and “communist” are used in the media, it is always in a pejorative way. These words are used as an ad hominem attack. An ad hominem attack is when a person insults the other person instead of arguing against the other person’s opinion.
When the right wing called its opponents communists during the Cold War, it didn’t matter whether they supported communist ideas or not. The insult served to discredit them and their ideas.
This insult had the effect of attaching to the rival the image of the communist who represented the enemy of the American way of life, that is, a threat to property and the class privileges of the wealthy.
Today, the image of the communist enemy is a bit outdated, but the word “woke” takes up the torch by carrying the same imagery. The right uses the word “woke” in the same way that it used the word “communist” during the Cold War.
Furthermore, we can also talk about symbolic violence; this quote from the anthropologist Jean-Michel Landry outlines it: “Symbolic violence thus manages, thanks to the ignorance of social agents, to naturalize its exercise and to disseminate under the cover of the universal a particular political point of view, that of the dominants.”
Symbolic violence
When people use the word “woke” as an insult, what they’re presenting as an insult is the importance of the ideas associated with it, namely equity, diversity, and inclusion. In short, when they use the word “woke” as an insult, what they’re presenting as an insult is anything that threatens their privileged status as the dominant.
This has the effect of naturalizing domination and inequality. It makes the social order as they see it imposed on us as natural. They do not present arguments because symbolic violence does not need them since it already presents itself as a natural evidence.
Nowadays, the right does not need arguments since it opposes “common sense” to a demonized vision of the ideas that oppose it by attaching the qualifier “woke”. This has the effect of naturalizing its opinions and presenting them as an absolute truth that should not be debated.
When their opinion is integrated as an indisputable truth, symbolic violence has worked. When it works, it is when the person acts mechanically and follows the doctrine imposed on him without questioning it.
As Jean-Michel Landry says: “Bourdieu draws our attention to the fact that symbolic violence provokes the exclusion of a whole range of political and social possibilities by presenting as obvious, acquired and established once and for all what, in reality, belongs to the vision of the world shared by the dominant social forces.”
Additionally, the word “woke” is used as “ buzz word ” by polemicists because it generates clicks and ad revenue. They use the word “woke” to bait clicks.
We have the imagination to see beyond the few possibilities they present to us as natural and to question their “common sense.”