Between 'woke' and ultra: the deceptive equidistance
"The extreme right represents the reaction against a left woke which has perhaps gone too far." This commonplace is not normally used to introduce a debate about the Left and the challenges it faces, such as reconciling the defense of individual identities and universality, or like the debate around the uncritical importation of concepts from an Anglo-Saxon postmodernism that feels a lack of the complexity of the complexity of complexity. made by the thick beak of the contemporary Left that consolidates a powerful idea instrumental in the rise of the extreme Right: the existence of a supposed cultural hegemony (what the extreme Right calls Cultural Marxism) of a condescending and authoritarian Left that imposes a new unnatural morality on the average citizen. YouTubers and influencers, there are a number of opinion makers in the traditional media, disguised asenfants terribles although they are often over sixty and have had their lives sorted out for years, who complain that freedom is threatened by the wokismIt is common for the same people who make fun of the "offended woke"They find it intolerable that a feminist corrects them or that someone suggests some formula of "inclusive newspeak", often trying to convert, in the name of exasperating narcissism, their daily pettiness into definitive proof that there are legitimate reasons to rebel. woke and good-natured that violates their freedom.
A deceitful equidistance that claims to live halfway between goodism woke and Trump's evil cretinism, when in reality his portrayal of the left is a case of the straw man fallacy (an adversary conveniently distorted to make it easier to combat) that at best serves to ridicule it and at worst to legitimize and adopt some postulates as its own.
Unlike the supposed ethereal danger of do-goodism woke, the danger of reactionary evilism is absolutely pornographic today and has obvious consequences. Very macho septuagenarian leaders (Trump, Netanyahu, Putin, Xi, Erdogan), some proudly misogynistic, homophobic and harassing, perpetrate ethnic cleansing, violate the rights of minorities and immigrants in broad daylight, destroy the welfare state, trample the world over sovereign peoples, establishing a new nineteenth-century imperialism of oligarchs and autocrats within the incomparable framework of a fundamentalist Saudi monarchy that chops dissident journalists to bits. On another level, but equally toxic, we have characters like Mazón, who compulsively lie to cover up flagrant negligence and make deals with the far right to keep their asses in the chair with 225 dead in the mud, or former ministers who, with all the gall, lie in parliamentary headquarters, aware that they are untouchable. But reading some of the aforementioned writers, it seems that all this is the fault of Irene Montero, "who went too far with the law of only yes is yes", and even more so now, after the TSJC (High Court of Justice) acquitted Dani Alves by amending the page in the Provincial Court of Barcelona.
This equidistance in the face of so much reactive evil strengthens an anti-humanism that not only ignores a supposedly interventionist leftist moralism, but also destroys fundamental liberal values that, in principle, conservatives and centrists should hold dear. This equidistance, precisely, reflects the refusal of many conservatives and centrists to commit to these values. A refusal that was already evident a few years ago, when, in the name of debt containment, the social rights of millions of Europeans were destroyed and the most lacerating inequality and poverty were normalized, and which the far right exploited to gain ground. But today they are calling for debt to rearm Europe.
We can criticize and ridicule the left cool, but the real problem is not a wokism supposedly hegemonic, but the absence, as was the case during the interwar period, of an actively anti-fascist democratic conservative humanism. Equidistance is nothing other than the cowardice and cynicism that cloaks historical irresponsibility.
