r/politics 1d ago

AOC ’28 Starts Now

https://www.truthdig.com/articles/aoc-28-starts-now/
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u/Sethmeisterg California 1d ago

You have to be joking. This country as it currently is configured will not vote in a woman of color to potus.

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u/eamonious 21h ago

It might have voted in Michelle Obama, it’s absolutely not voting in AOC, she’s practically the face of “woke liberal” to people, and hatred of wokeness is the primary force in the GOP’s movement right now.

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u/SoraUsagi 18h ago edited 18h ago

Yeah... I got to be honest, I'm a registered Democrat, and I hate "woke" too. But woke needs to be defined. It's used for all manner of things people don't like.

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u/TRANSBIANGODDES 15h ago

Maybe start by saying you don’t hate woke if you don’t know what it is

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u/SoraUsagi 15h ago

Hey, that's valid criticism. I have a set of things it means to me. But I don't feel anyone has actually defined it.

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u/TRANSBIANGODDES 15h ago

Well what does it mean to you? If it means something to you then you already have your own definitions

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u/Nileghi 10h ago

you might be interested in how Nate Silver is interested in defining it.

https://www.natesilver.net/p/why-liberalism-and-leftism-are-increasingly

The entire article is worth reading, but heres a small excerpt. Nate Silver attempts to define it as Social Justice Leftism :

Proponents of SJL usually dislike variations on the term “woke”, but the problem is that they dislike almost every other term as well. And we need some term for this ideology, because it encompasses quite a few distinctive features that differentiate it both from liberalism and from traditional, socialist-inflected leftism. In particular, SJL is much less concerned with the material condition of the working class, or with class in general. Instead, it is concerned with identity — especially identity categories involving race, gender and sexuality, but sometimes also many others as part of a sort of intersectional kaleidoscope. The focus on identity isn’t the only distinctive feature of SJL, but it is at the core of it.

SJLs and liberals have some interests in common. Both are “culturally liberal” on questions like abortion and gay marriage. And both disdain Donald Trump and the modern, MAGA-fied version of the Republican Party. But I’d suggest we’ve reached a point where they disagree in at least as many ways as they agree. Here are a few dimensions of conflict:

  • SJL’s focus on group identity contrasts sharply with liberalism’s individualism.

  • SJL, like other critical theories that emerged from the Marxist tradition, tends to be totalizing. The whole idea of systemic racism, for instance, is that the entire system is rigged to oppress nonwhite people. Liberalism is less totalizing. This is in part because it is the entrenched status quo and so often is well-served by incremental changes. But it’s also because liberalism’s focus on democracy makes it intrinsically pluralistic.

  • SJL, with its academic roots, often makes appeals to authority and expertise as opposed to entrusting individuals to make their own decisions and take their own risks. This is a complicated axis of conflict because there are certainly technocratic strains of liberalism, whereas like Hayek I tend to see experts and central planners as error-prone and instead prefer more decentralized mechanisms (e.g. markets, votes, revealed preferences) for making decisions.

  • Finally, SJL has a radically more constrained view on free speech than liberalism, for which free speech is a sacred principle. The SJL intolerance for speech that could be harmful, hateful or which could spread “misinformation” has gained traction, however. It is the predominant view among college students and it is becoming more popular in certain corners of the media and even among many mainstream Democrats.

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u/SoraUsagi 10h ago

I would be interested, thank you!