Twenty-First Century Woke—Left and Right | James Lindsay
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New Discourses
4.8 • 2.5K Ratings
🗓️ 19 December 2025
⏱️ 95 minutes
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| 0:00.0 | Okay, so last night we talked about, just kind of dive in, we just talked about last night, |
| 0:20.0 | woke on the left and the right in the 20th century and of course 20th century |
| 0:23.8 | after I did a lot of throat clearing. I just really mean the modern era and it is arguable that something has changed since the 1960s. So the 20th century |
| 0:35.1 | outside of China which had a slight delay according to the reckoning I'm using 20th century outside of China, which had a slight delay, according to the reckoning I'm using, |
| 0:40.7 | 20th century goes up until about 1960, maybe to 1980 or thereabouts, and then we enter into the 21st century. |
| 0:47.3 | I'm not being literal about the time. What I mean is actually this modern era, and we could call the era that we're in now postmodern, but we talked about |
| 0:55.2 | how woke arose on left and right in the earlier context. And of course, I nodded that there's |
| 1:01.9 | woke earlier than that. I'll revisit just a little bit, but not too much. What was woke, |
| 1:07.6 | it is a socio-nostic. That's the word I didn't want to have to use, |
| 1:11.2 | awakening that turns a sense of alienation into class identity, with this desire to overthrow |
| 1:20.0 | the system and liberate man from all the evils and offals of the world. |
| 1:25.9 | So what is woke left? Well, it's doing that with a left-wing, |
| 1:32.1 | radically egalitarian vision for society, inequity regime. It's anti-traditionalist. And what is |
| 1:37.1 | woke right? It is a reaction to those provocations that wants to do it with a highly ordered, |
| 1:43.0 | rigid hierarchical system that I claim could be called traditionalist, |
| 1:47.9 | but is actually probably pseudo-traditionalist, falsely traditionalist instead. |
| 1:53.6 | So you have a kind of universalism on the left and a kind of tribalism on the right that are kind of the hallmarks. |
| 2:04.1 | Now, there have kind of in these three big changes, these kind of three big changes that |
| 2:12.8 | shift us from the 20th century or the modernist, 19th and 20th century modernist conception into what I'm calling a 21st century model. |
| 2:21.1 | And those three big changes, I have a slide, for that, are the transition from modernism to post-modernism, |
| 2:30.7 | the evolution of Western Marxism to identity Marxism, or what we might call American Maoism, |
| 2:38.9 | and the development of what we call the China model or the stakeholder system. |
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