The talented and interesting left-wing writer Freddie deBoer now makes his living on Substack on account of his being, in a number of ways, too interesting to be published anywhere else. He has become a ferocious critic of woke social-justice politics, and in a recent newsletter, he goes hammer and tongs after proponents of those politics who insist that their ideas must never be named in order that they cannot be meaningfully criticized:
You have to let people discuss your politics, and it’s childish and unhelpful to refuse to name them. You don’t like woke, fine, you don’t like political correctness, fine, you don’t like identity politics, fine, you don’t like CRT, fine, but please . . . pick some other term then. You’ll notice that I’m still doggedly trying to make “social justice politics” happen — I think it’s simple and neutral and gets the point across — but . . . a writer should be able to tackle a large and immensely culturally influential political tendency without having to accept such a contested word. The current reality is Voldemorting — declaring your politics simply off-limits to discussion by insisting that any name we might use for it is inherently bigoted. It’s a mark of weak people who can’t defend their perspectives, but it’s also a vestige of the fact that people who embrace social justice politics think that they are somehow naturally exempt from the ordinary way things work. I get to just live in my own little political fantasy reality, and that’s justice.
The naming issue is just part of a broader, deeply unhelpful tendency within social justice politics, which is that its proponents are constantly demanding to be freed from all of the regular practices of politics.
I have written at length on this precise tactic of trying to win arguments by refusing to allow the movement to even be named, an approach that is applied as well to critical race theory. DeBoer ascribes this to the fact that “social justice politics is fundamentally an institutional politics” — it developed its arguments and its tactics inside universities and other institutions in which the capture of powerful positions within the institution frees its practitioners from ever having to persuade anyone who does not agree; the institution itself will do the work of bringing them into line, either because it wants to or because a mob can apply pressure to it at vulnerable points:
“Don’t name our movement!” is one thing. Deciding that some people have to stop speaking is another — “it’s time for white men to step back!” But they’re not going to step back. The fact that you might have been able to enforce such a condition in your seminar on the humanities at Columbia does not mean that this is a principle that will survive in the scrum of American politics. Indeed, the only white men you’ll shut up are the ones who are most sensitive to your perspective, which seems strategically perverse to me. But you hear that . . . absolutely all the time, that according to social justice, you don’t have the right to speak in this instance, so shut up. I’m sorry to inform you that the people who reject social justice also reject that little childish dictate and all the other bizarre rules that people invented on Tumblr and then expected to simply enforce on the rest of the world. See, you can’t dictate the rules of the fight to the people you’re fighting with, because in order to do so you first have to win the fight. That’s politics, baby.
And this might be the biggest vulnerability of “wokeness” overall: its proponents have no out-of-coalition arguments. Everything that’s said in the name of social justice in the country is said as if everyone who needed to hear it was already in solidarity, was already part of the coalition.