ADDED: Review of “Bad News; How Woke Media is Undermining Democracy”.
Cathy Young:
In the culture-war discourse of the past decade, a variety of terms have been used to refer to the ideology of the socially progressive left: “political correctness” (first coined during an earlier phase of the culture wars, in the late 1980s/early 1990s), “social justice,” “identity politics,” and more recently, “wokeness” or “wokeism” (and occasionally, “cancel culture”). These shifting terms invariably become targets of left-wing ridicule as well as right-wing misuse (so that, for instance, any condemnation of actual bigotry is mocked as “political correctness,” “social justice warrior-ism,” etc.). Meanwhile, critics on the left dismiss the idea of a “woke” or “social justice” ideology as a right-wing myth. The latest such sarcastic dismissal comes from Vox writer Ian Millhiser:
The supportive replies are typical: It’s just “making an effort not be racist or sexist,” or “a meaningless epithet whose unironic use is pure cringe.” Read on…
