What's In A Name?
Why do Leftists hate identifying names for themselves?
The Washington Post recently published a bizarre opinion piece accusing Republicans of using the terms “woke” and “wokeism” as “catchall terms they have weaponized to include a host of liberal policies and positions they don’t like.” The authors go on and on about how the word originated in black culture, and accuses our side of “appropriating” it to attack them, working in subtle insinuations that people who push back against them are somehow vaguely engaging in racist behavior. (There goes Rule 2 again!) They also claim that we have no good way to actually define “woke.”
This is gaslighting, plain and simple. If you’re old enough to be reading and caring about this blog, you lived through the last decade just like I did. We all saw what was going on around us. Leftists took the term “woke” for themselves and wore it proudly as a mantle of their own enlightenment. (Hey, that’s Rule 1!) It was all over the place; they loved to set themselves apart from those of us who were implied to still be “asleep” and not noticing the petty grievances they had invented to stir up strife and contention. It’s only in recent years, when conservatives started really catching on to their attacks on our civilization and pushing back, that they began to claim that it was a term we stole to attack them. (“Attack” them. Yeah. That’s conflating defense with aggression. There’s a reason I call these things standard dirty tricks!)
We’ve seen this movie before. Before “woke,” they were proudly proclaiming themselves warriors fighting for social justice, until we started denouncing the absurdities of the SJW mindset, and suddenly that’s a right-wing slur that has no real meaning. And before that, it was “politically correct.” Same thing all over again: they prided themselves on it until we started laughing at them for it, and then they abandoned the term, pretended it was something we had made up, and proclaimed it meaningless.
They Hate Being Named
As Ian Fleming famously said, “Once is happenstance. Twice is coincidence. Three times is enemy action.” When you see the same thing happening enough times, it strongly suggests that there’s a real pattern there, a thing that people are doing deliberately. So we should ask, why do leftists hate being named so much? Why do they react so negatively to having the names they take pride in for themselves being used by outsiders to distinguish them, that they consistently would prefer to abandon the name and proclaim it meaningless?
It seems to me that the only answer that makes sense is because names differentiate and identify. That’s the point of having a name for something: if this is a cat, then not only do you know what it is, you also know what it isn’t. It is not a dog, or a horse, or a house, or a car, or any other thing that has a name that is incompatible with being a cat. Naming it a cat makes it distinct.
Therein lies the problem for leftists. If this is a woke, then it’s distinct. It’s something highly visible, something that’s noticeable, recognizable, and out of place. Something that isn’t normal. And when your entire movement is based on beating everyone over the head with the idea that their ideology is so thoroughly normal and mainstream that questioning it in any way is completely outside Overton Window, any word that draws attention to its distinctness undermines the ideology and is thus intolerable and must itself be shoved outside of the Overton Window as well.
If this feels uncomfortably like George Orwell’s description in 1984 of the elimination of vocabulary that make people capable of asking uncomfortable questions… well, we can’t say we weren’t warned. To Leftists, there can be no distinctive terms applied to their ideology; the only thing they will accept is normalization. Their ways are standard; all else — including noticing how often the standards change at the slightest whim of whoever — must necessarily be CRIMETHINK.