In recent days I have read in this newspaper several papers referring to the universe woke, the culture of complaint, etc. Without any intention of starting a controversy – I have not had any interest in being right for some time, either in this or in anything else – I would like to make some clarifications in the form of notes, which are naturally debatable.
1. The first qualification is almost ridiculous, but I think it should be made anyway: that the extreme right has attacked culture woke It does not mean, through an absurd syllogism, that giving up being critical of that mentality is progressive. No less than twenty-two years ago I published an essay with an academic bias entitled Communication and argumentation where I analysed this and other dialogical dysfunctions in a media context. It would not be prudent to summarise them now in a couple of lines.
2. The mentality woke and the European left, related to the negative dialectic of the Frankfurt School (that is, with an attitude that is always critical of social injustices) represent very different mental universes that should not be juxtaposed or confused. The first mentality is genuinely American, while the second arose and developed in the Old Continent. The United States is a nation that is foundingly and constitutively puritanical and, consequently, refractory to racial mixing (even when they claim to be anti-racist and establish quotas based on a notion of race that, in theory, they want to leave behind). That we Europeans make this alien mental ferment our own should worry us, but we surely watch too many films and series, and all of this is already beginning to seem as normal to us as the imposition of English in everyday life.
3. Rosa Parks and Martin Luther King have nothing to do with culture woke, which is a postmodern phenomenon, but with the struggle for civil rights, that is, with the idea of political equality in a modern sense. Wanting to vote and wanting to sit on a bus like everyone else has to do with equality; demanding a quota by appealing to race has to do, instead, with an accommodating exacerbation of difference. In some way, this whole mess is based on pretending that the modern left and the postmodern left are the same thing. Here I give in. the word to Mr. Toni Soler: "The left – in the broadest sense – has contributed by trivializing the concept of victim, preaching to people, turning every mistaken gesture, every unfortunate phrase and every misunderstanding into a cultural battle, putting ethical and moral values (individual) above the traditional defense of social justice that has opened it were clearly hostile."
4. In the 18th and 19th centuries, monuments were made to kings. Yours, let's say, merit was to be the sons of other kings. In the 20th century, these monuments were erected to honour heroes and people who had excelled in something. In the 21st century, however, the focus is on the victims, whose merit is, by definition, passive. Today, the status of victim is the most precious thing, which generates implausible political dynamics and contradictions such as the one we will see below.
5. Understood as a covert struggle for power, victimhood – racial, gender, etc. – has itself become a new ideology. But it is highly selective. Most white people in Zimbabwe, for example, left their country long ago, and the few who remain live under constant threats. The ultra-corrupt Robert Mugabe accused them until the day he died of being white and, therefore, related to the oppressors of the former Rhodesia. The ultimate reason for the persecution was, therefore, openly racist. White Zimbabwean farmers are victims, but they are not equated as such by the culture. woke. It is just one example among dozens.
6. Donald Trump has fully embraced the mindset woke, and this is not any joke, as you will see below. In fact, their policy is based on the overacted expression of the complaint and on the idea that others are obliged to redress an alleged historical grievance with the United States: "don't buy cars from us, make us pay too many tariffs, mistreat us commercially," etc. This snobbery serves to legitimize advantageous exceptions within international politics. All the presidents of the United States have pressured other countries, obviously, but not with that language or in that style. Once the complaint is established as the only political stratagem, free rein is given.
