Critical use of the term “woke” originated within the Left before the critique was superficially adopted by the Right and then the term was stripped of all meaning and used as a generic term for everything non-Right by the Right; much the same as happened with “political correctness”, which it became a drop-in replacement for on the Right, before it.
The obvious reason is ad-hominem thinking is very human and natural, and people will be more receptive to the same message sent by someone otherwise aligned with them than someone otherwise opposed to them.
Another possibility is that this article just plain expresses it better, more effectively, or captured an important nuance that your preferred people missed.
Player A joins the match for the other team after the half, but does not have the opportunity to make a goal that puts his team in the lead because the team's score has been adjusted from the unfair treatment. Has Player A been unfairly discriminated against?
Should your team just be happy they are now in a fair meritocracy and just get on with making goals instead of whining?
Player A's game is long ended. They won't even play again. But it's a long championship and they are winning. Now your team is on the last round and will tie with them on points if you win, but will lose on the goal-count tie-breaker. Should the referee grant you 30 goals on your game with an entirely different adversary?
And your adversary is on the same situation, they will also tie with A's points if they win. Now what should the referee do?
A solution here is largely academic, and not readily reached due to massive amounts of missing information.
However if the question is simply, is it fair for someone to lose first place because the second place categorization was biased? Sure, it definitely can be.
Do you really think this is how anyone on the left views the situation?! Folks on the left watch all the right-wing efforts to block LGBT rights, oppose Black Lives Matter, ban a religious minority from entering the country and conclude, "yep I disagree with those guys on issues, but it is true they're the ones working to fight prejudiced attitudes"?
Are conservatives not by definition trying to conserve the status quo?
https://kottke.org/21/02/conservatism-and-who-the-law-protec...
You could argue that progressive mechanisms like affirmative action are just the same in reverse, and it's true that progressive politics in the US still has a conservative tinge.
But there are differences. AA is seen as a temporary rebalancing measure, while conservative privilege is seen as the natural and divinely ordained order of things, for all eternity.
It's essentially personal monarchy, as against anti-conservatism which is more layered and complex.
IIRC, in the American context there are very, very few conservatives like that. Everyone has some revolutionary project they're working towards, they're just very different and incompatible.
From one perspective, A lot of rank-and-file "conservatives" are probably more likely to take the social conservative stances in earnest, while being open to progressive economic policy, while the majority of their leadership absolutely prioritizes economic conservatism over the social element. The leadership merely uses the social aspects as a carrot to motivate what voting-base they can get, co-opting social conservative leadership into their own ranks, while obscuring the United States Chamber of Commerce lobby agenda. Rank-and-file conservatives are given reinforcement by their leadership to disapprove of progressive economic policy aesthetically, but are not ultimately able to fully overcome the pull of some of the material benefits that could be politically had without wrapping specific progressive political agenda into one big package with cultural divisions.
And that's not to deny that their aren't small business/contract work types that are both socially conservative and economically conservative through-and-through, but they aren't numerous enough to fill out the vast voting ranks need.
You could probably make the case that the Democratic Party are the real economic conservatives in a sense; Wanting to maintain the 30 or 40 year globalizing economic status quo, whereas "conservatives" that identify with the Republican party want to roll back to an idealized past, with a more nationally focused, but still liberal economy.
Then there is also the problem of popular US politics and their terms being too narrowly scoped when considering political movements from a fuller perspective. "Conservatives" call Democrats leftist as a pejorative, when neither Democrats or most self-identifying leftist would really consider the Democratic party far from center on economics, and probably conservative from a global perspective.
I disagree. The "neo-reactionaries" I'm familiar seems ridiculously, over-the-top radical. It's like libartarianism taken so far it had an integer overflow and wrapped around to monarchism.
It's not conservative to want to blow up society an replace it with a mockery of an old one that rejects what everyone across the political spectrum actually believes now.
Notably, the voters tend not to like neoliberalism and globalization and to be big fans of "why don't they just..." solutions for various problems—say, "why don't they just build a wall at the border?" Sound like any recent, prominent R politicians? Yep—he seems to have noticed the large gap between the Republican Party platform and what the average Republican voter you talk to at a diner says they want, then exploited that gap, which worked because the gap is very real and pretty large.
This occasionally got a bit weird, like in some of his speeches about how he'd provide "beautiful" healthcare to everyone, which seemed strangely close to some kind of (very vague) messaging about adding a public option of some kind of universal coverage and was met with cheering by his audience. This is because left- and right-wing populism in the US share a surprising amount in common, but those issues and commonalities are often ignored or deliberately sidelined by party elites. This is related to how laws that get passed and policies that are enacted are disturbingly disconnected from public sentiment generally.
(none of this should be taken as an endorsement of the former president, I'm just observing the lay of the electoral landscape and how he exploited that. I am also not claiming that a similar difference between typical voters and party leaders/platform doesn't exist for the Democrats—it absolutely does. This is all probably a result of our really shitty FPTP elections.)
My understanding is that "woke" started as shorthand for criticism from POCs towards their nominal white allies (progressives, Democrats, etc). "I know you're trying to help. Please stop."
One recurring affront, of allies doing more harm than good, that I've observed many times is "white knighting" (correct term?).
A white person will argue in defense of a black position (or cause). While there's black people present, trying to be heard.
The correct action would be for a white person to concede their time to a black person. So that we can hear first-hand their input about policies and decisions impacting them. "I don't know. Let's ask a black person what they think."
My criticism of wokeness, as a middle class white blue hair, is that maybe haranguing people is not the most effective strategy. Just like how fat shaming back fires.
Personal example. I have a friend whose compulsion is to correct my misgendering of others, while I'm talking. Each and every time. Are they really listening to me? Or are they just waiting for me to fuck up and pounce, demonstrating their greater virtue? It's exhausting.
Sure, I want to get the genders correct, and certainly don't want to inadvertently offend any one, especially not punch down. But decades of habit don't change over night. And how the fuck am I supposed to know when someone's picked a new pronoun for themselves? Is there a gender registry some where I can reference in real-time?
I can't comment specifically on the reactionaries' criticism of wokeness. I assume whatever they're fluffed up about is just part of another grift.
One example would be people who are elevating Zelenskyy to superhero status. It's quite likely that Zelenskyy is a flawed person, like the overwhelming majority of us, and making weird lionizing memes of him echoes the same shirtless horse-riding personality cult stuff that preceded Putin's actions.
Yet, however overblown the worship or however ineffective 'thoughts & prayers' may be for Ukraine, there's an actual population of people being invaded by another country for reasons most people find entirely objectionable. This stands regardless of whether or not someone is suggesting we boycott the YMCA for not putting a Ukranian flag emote in their twitter profile.
Because two groups can agree on the problem but disagree on the solution. For the left, the solution to the "woke" problem is de-centering identity in order to further the cause of anti-racism, anti-sexism, anti-homophobia, etc; for the right, the solution to the "woke" problem is to deny that any of the problems raised by the "woke" are problems at all -- and in fact to center identity.