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J.D. Haltigan's avatar

Excellent piece. Important distinctions.

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Graham Cunningham's avatar

‘Woke’ is fast becoming an unhelpful label..... as this nonsense concept ‘Woke Right' well illustrates. When labels get co-opted by people to mean very different things then they risk becoming essentially meaningless. (A similar fate has sadly befallen the once highly meaningful term conservative.)

A much better term than Woke is Hyper-Progressivism. Progressivism became the rule and conservatism the exception from the early 20th c. onwards. Then a massive late 20th c. expansion of tertiary education put this partisanship on steroids...ie to hyper. This progressive intellectual hegemony is the great political-philosophical story of the 20th century and beyond. But this is only part of a broader story of how, what I have called a madness of intelligentsias leaked out from the groves of academe and spread virus-like, first through the political and then – much more importantly - through the apolitical fabric of Western civilisation. The story, in other words, of its relationship to a 21st c. madness of crowds. https://grahamcunningham.substack.com/p/the-madness-of-intelligentsias

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