It was around 2018 that I recall “woke” fully wiggling its way into our political dialogue, rapidly supplanting the erstwhile “social justice warrior” as the default pejorative for far-left progressives and their Marxist antics.Unlike socialism, “woke” has never possessed a single doctrinal definition. Say what you want about the tenets of communism, dude, but at least it’s an ethos. “Woke” is an umbrella term encompassing much of contemporary progressive ideology, generally rooted in intersectionality: the belief that a litany of grievances and identity categories are interconnected through the shared pangs of oppression.During the 2010s, this worldview manifested in the advancement of transgender ideology to the point of denying any meaningful distinction between a biological woman and a transgender woman. It then shifted much of its attention toward denouncing law enforcement as wanton racists during the Black Lives Matter movement. In recent years, the same activist class has become beguiled by Palestinian nationalism as its latest moral crusade, buying up keffiyehs like they’re Hot Topic’s spring collection.
The causes may appear disparate, but they share a common political grammar. Society is divided into oppressors and the oppressed. Identity confers moral authority. Institutions must be reorganized around rectifying group disparities. It updates Marx’s effort to unite the ostensibly oppressed by economic class, substituting identity as an even more powerful source of perceived grievance.For a time, “woke” served as an effective shorthand for this ideological tendency. In recent years, however, some prominent conservatives have begun using it for everything — the duct tape of political jargon.The word has gradually become a reactionary reflex among some on the Right who have appointed themselves cultural gatekeepers. Films and television series featuring women, non-white actors, gay characters, or any other demographic associated with progressive politics are scanned for ideological impurities and summarily dismissed as woke.A clumsy casting decision is “woke.” A female protagonist or gay character? “Woke.” A movie that fails to flatter conservative politics is “woke.” The term has been stretched so broadly that it increasingly communicates little beyond the speaker’s displeasure.This is a self-defeating and myopic approach to cultural criticism. It also threatens to maroon the political Right outside the cultural mainstream, resigned to cheering explicitly right-wing fare such as “Citizen Vigilante” — which was perfectly entertaining, though blunt and unmistakably ideological — while treating every major studio production as enemy propaganda.Influencing culture requires engaging with it, and engagement warrants considerably more thought than labeling anything outside one’s preferred aesthetic vision as woke drivel.The online Right’s response to Christopher Nolan’s “The Odyssey” crystallizes the problem.Nolan’s films have long displayed a distinctly conservative artistic temperament. “The Dark Knight” was practically a love letter to George W. Bush and the moral burdens of the war on terrorism. “The Dark Knight Rises” transformed the rhetoric of Occupy Wall Street into mob tribunals, revolutionary violence, and the summary execution of Gotham’s bourgeoisie. “Interstellar” celebrated American ingenuity, individual heroism, paternal duty, and humanity’s refusal to accept managed decline. Even “Oppenheimer” portrayed many of its communists as fashionable intellectual posers dabbling in ideas whose consequences they scarcely understood.His latest work, “The Odyssey,” is a traditionalist and intensely masculine war epic about marriage, family, sacrifice, and the yearning for home. Nolan has reached back to one of the foundational texts of Western civilization and spent hundreds of millions of dollars bringing it to a mass audience. Sales across all editions of Homer’s epic had risen 76% from a year earlier — how many self-professed conservative influencers can claim to have inspired such a renaissance in reading the classics?Yet some conservatives have condemned Nolan, a valuable cultural ally, over the casting of Elliot Page as Sinon and Lupita Nyong’o as Helen of Troy.Jimmy Gonzales, Matt Damon, and Himesh Patel in “The Odyssey.” (Melinda Sue Gordon/Universal Pictures/Everett Collection)
