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Comment by edmundsauto | Hacker News Reader

It's be more accurate to say the word "woke" is a conservative satire of the left side of the aisle - it does not convey meaning about the ideology itself, but about the reaction to it. It's also not super accurate to say its about identity politics, as the right leans heavily on that approach with different identities. Instead of race, it's being Christian. Everything is identity politics - abortion and 2A are possibly the 2 biggest conservative positions that derive from identity politics.

When using an overarching term, I think "progressive politics" is less inflammatory than "woke" (which is generally not used for self-description). It has the nice effect of linguistically balancing out conservative politics - we can have "woke" versus "fascist", or we can say "progressive" versus "conservative".

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I think what you're saying makes sense. I was not aware of the full breadth of negativity associated with the term "woke".

I think I will start using the term "progressive politics" from now on (at least, as long as it makes sense).

That said, there is a clear distinction between modern progressive politics (of the "woke" type) and the progressive politics from a few decades ago, and I think "woke" is a term that makes that distinction more clear.

It's unfortunate that it has become so negatively charged, though.

> there is a clear distinction between modern progressive politics (of the "woke" type) and the progressive politics from a few decades ago

Not to be glib, but this is the nature of "progress" - it changes things. ;)

> Not to be glib, but this is the nature of "progress" - it changes things. ;)

Well, I genuinely hope you are right.. :)

But note that not everything that we call or called "progress" is necessarily positive. We have made quite a few mistakes before which we thought was progress.

Probably too many to mention, even, but as examples, I can think of the Dark Ages and Nazism.

Mind you, I'm not saying modern liberal politics can be compared to these examples! I don't even known that much about history to be able to comment on them.

It's just food for thought.

I've noticed people using "identity politics" where I think they really mean "intersectionality."

Also, I have no dog in this fight, I've been out of the US for a few years. Though my outsider perspective (right/wrong/indifferent) is that intersectionality has been a substantive policy plank on the left.

The right has utilized identity politics as a means to expand their "big tent" and to drive voter turnout.

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