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Left Is Not Woke

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Left Is Not Woke

By: Susan Neiman
Narrated by: Susan Neiman
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About this listen

If you’re woke, you’re left. If you’re left, you’re woke. We blur the terms, assuming that if you’re one you must be the other. That, Susan Neiman argues, is a dangerous mistake.

The confusion arises because woke is fuelled by traditionally leftwing emotions: the wish to stand with the oppressed and marginalized, to address historic crimes. But those emotions are undermined by widespread philosophical assumptions with reactionary sources. As a result, wokeism conflicts with ideas that have guided the left for more than 200 years: a commitment to universalism, a firm distinction between justice and power, and a belief in the possibility of progress. Without these ideas, the woke will continue to undermine their own goals and drift, inexorably and unintentionally, towards the right.

One of the world’s leading philosophical voices, Neiman calls with passion and power for the left to return to the ideals that built the best of the modern world.

©2023 Susan Neiman (P)2024 Polity Press Political Science Politics & Government Socialism
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The hope I had for this book in detailing artfully where leftism has become conflated with Liberalism and possibly even how we start to undo this damage can’t be overstated. What I, bizarrely, got instead was sneering condescension for considering the Palestinian resistance of over half a century of violent occupation justified. Because, of course, Susan is a citizen of Israel, which shouldn’t be relevant to this book but somehow still features at the forefront. The thought of someone, with truly no sense of irony, considering themselves a leftist while supporting the subjugation of an entire population and the implementation of a clear and defined apartheid state would be laughable if it was any less deplorable. The wokes may not be entitled to the hard-fought label of being a leftist; but certainly neither are those who overlook the most basic of its tenets when it suits their internalised superiority complex.

Turns out there’s nothing Zionism can’t ruin.

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