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
intellectual roots and resources of wokeism conflict 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 Neiman argues they will
continue to undermine their own goals and drift inexorably and unintentionally towards the
right. In the long run they risk becoming what they despise. One of the world's leading
philosophical voices Neiman makes this case by tracing the malign influence of two titans of
twentieth-century thought Michel Foucault and Carl Schmitt whose work undermined ideas of
justice and progress and portrayed social life as an eternal struggle of us against them. A
generation schooled with these voices in their heads raised in a broader culture shaped by the
ruthless ideas of neoliberalism and evolutionary psychology has set about changing the world.
It's time they thought again.
