The New Discourses Podcast with James Lindsay, Episode 42
Many of you will already be very familiar with the fact that the Woke manipulate language, often by meaning more than one thing by a term. One meaning will be quite milquetoast; the other quite radical. Much of Woke activism works by equivocating between these two meanings in a strategic way: boring everyday meanings to gain access and win arguments; specialized meanings to do their activism once they have the power. Among the words that the Woke have strategically manipulated in an important way is democracy. Of course, in nations like the United States and the other contemporary parliamentary democracies, we use democracy to enable republics, to which the Woke are generally strongly opposed. This isn’t the only reason for their incessant push for “democracy,” though, which is only comprehensible when you understand the relationship between equity (or communism) and democracy. To the Woke, if anyone or any group has any more power, money, or privilege than anyone else (as they see it), there is no equality, thus democracy is skewed. That is, for them, democracy presupposes equity (or communism). In this episode of the New Discourses Podcast, James Lindsay walks you through more pieces of the Woke, neo-Marxist, and Marxist literature to make the case that when the Woke are calling for “democracy,” they mean something that demands a very radical agenda along with it.
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11 comments
Hi, James. On the point of language, I thought I’d tell you I’ve been permanently suspended from Twitter because I used the term, “Hunter’s whore” instead of “the canonized sex-trade worker whom Hunter victimized.”
Note the sign in the window…
It has been my observation; when anyone tells you- “You are either With Us or Against Us”, it means THEY are AREADY against YOU.
Where the article has
“To the Woke, if anyone or *any* group has any more power, money, or privilege than anyone else (as they see it), there is no equality”, they don’t mean *any*, they mean any that they hate.
If *their* darlings had more that others, most of the Woke (esp. their leaders) would be ecstatic.
Excellent podcast. I agree with everything you said except your equating of “true democracy” with communism. You give CRT advocates too much credit by assuming they know what they want to build. They only know what they want to destroy: capitalism, “Euro-centrism”, neoliberalism. They have no coherent conception of what to replace American “semi-democracy” with. They know the gig is up as far as communism is concerned, and they know “socialism” gets a bad rap (even though most thinking people appreciate a hybrid of capitalism and socialism, and the only real argument is about the appropriate balance between the two), so they refuse to define their “true democracy”, fearful that it will sound too much like one of the old bugbears.
“Most thinking people appreciate a hybrid of capitalism and socialism”. Who exactly are “most thinking people”?
Fantastic, as always.
You know, I haven’t read all of the stuff you’ve read (except the basics like The Communist Manifesto, and The Origin of the Family sounds familiar too), YET it still seems as I’ve been hearing this jargon and these arguments my entire life. When I hear them say “democracy,” I KNOW they don’t mean it in any recognizable sense. It’s frustrating not being able to articulate why, because it would take talking for an hour, plus months of research to back up what we say. Thanks for doing that here. You and your wife are heroes.
When the woke use the word “democracy” they mean it in the same way that the German Democratic Republic ( East Germany) or the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea ( North Korea) mean it.
Can I expect that you will be filling in the caption for “Democracy (Ideal)” in the Wokish translator soon?
Yes please! James
Just as the official name of East Germany was the “German Democratic Republic” and North Korea is still called “The Democratic People’s Republic of Korea”, totalitarians always abuse language.
War is Peace
Freedom is Slavery
Ignorance is Strength
Tolerance is Repressive Tolerance!
MarkR
Another excellent presentation, James, this time on the manipulation of the word ‘democracy’. You note from 6 mins to about 7:30 how often Henry Giroux uses that word in his ‘On Critical Pedagogy’ and calculate using the word-search function in the .pdf version of the book that it occurs ‘several hundred’ times. I checked – you are correct – 227 to be exact.
You also discuss the treatment of ‘Democracy’ shown at marxists.org, in particular Lenin’s uses and misuses of that word.
Back in 2017, on a boring rainy day while flicking through the 45 pdfs that make up Lenin’s ‘Collected Works’ in 45 volumes at that same site, it occurred to me that ‘struggle’ was a concept he was totally obsessed with.
A cumulative word search for ‘struggle’ turned up 12,247.
The bad news is that a hundred years later the activist followers of Marx and Lenin are STILL obsessed with ‘struggle’.
Many thanks for your great ongoing work – much appreciated!