[In their justified concern for inequalities of power, the woke
often simply focus on power struggles rather than thinking about
justice, which sometimes gets left by the wayside. If all you see in
history is attempted progress that failed, you’ll find it hard to
struggle towards progress in the future. ]
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A CONVERSATION WITH SUSAN NEIMAN ABOUT LEFT AND WOKE  
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Robert Kuttner
May 2, 2023
The American Prospect
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_ In their justified concern for inequalities of power, the woke
often simply focus on power struggles rather than thinking about
justice, which sometimes gets left by the wayside. If all you see in
history is attempted progress that failed, you’ll find it hard to
struggle towards progress in the future. _

,

 

ROBERT KUTTNER: Susan Neiman is director of the Einstein Forum, in
Potsdam, Germany, a position she’s held since the year 2000. She’s
lived in Germany more than three decades. Susan has a doctorate in
philosophy from Harvard; and she has taught at Yale and Tel Aviv
University.

She’s an American by birth, born in Atlanta. Susan is the author of
nine books, but I think she’s best known to American lay readers for
a remarkable book that we did a podcast about a few years ago,
published in 2019, called _L__earning from the Germans_
[[link removed]]. The subtitle is _Race
and the __M__emory of __E__vil_. And her point, to summarize a
complicated book, is that Germany is really the one country that has
accepted responsibility for past evil in a way that the United States
has only very partially done.

I wanted to have this conversation with Susan about her newest book,
whose title is _L__eft __I__s __N__ot __W__oke_
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Those are fighting words.

What do you mean that left is not woke?

SUSAN NEIMAN:

This book came about after a series of conversations I was having with
friends in various countries. My guess is that you have had the same
conversation in one form or another. They would point to some news
item in which someone was being cancelled. And the friend would say:
“If this is left, I guess I’m not left anymore.”

And I said, wait a second. What is being done here is not left. In
many respects it has more in common with conservatism and even fascism
by making tribal identities primary. This is actually quite
reactionary. So I set out to try to untangle what really is left from
what is woke, in fairly simple terms.

ROBERT KUTTNER:

In your view, what's the essence of left? And why is that at odds with
what is characterized as “woke?”

SUSAN NEIMAN:

Universalism is the very first principle that distinguishes left from
right, and always has. The right believes that the only people you
ever have real connections and obligations to are members of your own
tribe.

Since the Enlightenment, liberals and progressives have insisted that
there's a common humanity that goes beyond differences of tribes and
clans. This is not to say that particular histories aren’t
interesting and important. But what’s most politically important is
a common human dignity that needs to be respected, and that can be
found in anyone anywhere.

A second core idea is that it’s possible to make a principled
distinction between justice and power. The third is a belief in the
possibility of progress—not the inevitability of progress, as it’s
often caricatured, but simply its possibility. And this, too, is an
idea that comes from the Enlightenment: The idea that human beings
working together could actually improve their own and other people's
lives was a new idea; we’ve come to take it for granted.

Now here we have to go just a little bit into theory. So called
post-colonial theory, which depends on theorists like Michel Foucault,
even among people who don't read any theoretical stuff, holds that the
very idea of universalism is a Eurocentric sham to pull the wool over
the eyes of the rest of the world. This is totally wrong because the
most important Enlightenment thinkers believed that humanistic
principles applied universally. They were the first opponents of
colonialism and slavery.

In order to believe that we can make progress in the future, you
actually have to believe that we made progress in the past. But you
have some people criticizing, say, Lincoln, for not going far enough.
Of course, our ability to go further than Lincoln in combating racism
was made on the shoulders of Abraham Lincoln and people like him who
died for the rights of African Americans.

But instead of saying that, which would be a progressive view, and
celebrating the fact that we’re able to go further than Lincoln was
in understanding and fighting racism, you have people saying that
Lincoln was a racist and that we are still living in a world that’s
just as racist as it was in 1865.

It’s also important to distinguish left from liberal. Leftists, like
me, believe that a whole series of things, like education and workers'
rights and health care, parental leave, vacation, housing are social
rights. Liberals call them benefits or entitlements or safety nets.
But all of those things are written into the 1948 UN declaration on
Human Rights, which was ratified by most countries that were member of
the members of the UN at the time. It's an entirely different
conceptual way of looking at those things.

No country has ever realized all of those rights. But if you're on the
left you believe that social rights are not utopian, but genuine
rights to be worked for.

ROBERT KUTTNER:

Let’s go back to Lincoln and Jefferson. One of the fallacies of
wokeism, I think, is to fail to locate historical figures as figures
of their own time. You would not expect Jefferson or Lincoln to have
the sensibility of Martin Luther King, much less of Black Lives
Matter. You have to look at Lincoln as someone who was quite radical
for the 1850s.

It’s one thing to pull down statues of Robert E. Lee, another to
demand that we reject Jefferson or even Lincoln. That seems an example
of woke excess, splintering the progressive coalition, and giving a
lot of ammunition to the right, and being an unwitting ally of
neoliberals and absolute reactionaries.

The Forge published a very courageous essay by Maurice Mitchell
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who is now the national director of the Working Families party. He
wrote that it’s a mistake to use one’s identity or personal
experience as a justification for one’s political position. He
writes that there are 40 million Black people in this country. Some
have great politics, some don’t; and one's racial or gender identity
or experience in a marginalized community is not, in and of itself, a
sufficient mandate for one’s perspective to prevail.

Do you agree with that view? And where does the effort to police
language fit in: asking people to use their pronouns, inventing words
like Latinx.

SUSAN NEIMAN:

Yes, I entirely agree. And I think the emphasis on policing language
really is born out of despair—the sense that well, we can't make any
changes in the real world, but at least we can change our language.

Let's not forget, woke was a marginal term in 2016. Few people were
using it. It comes originally out of black culture. It was first used
by the Bluesman Leadbelly in 1936, and a song about the Scottsboro
brothers. But it didn't come into common parlance until the Trump era.

You mentioned my book _L__earning __F__rom the Germans, _which I
still think is a good book, but I am working on a long piece called
“What I learned since I wrote learning from the Germans.” In the
last three years, Germany has acted from a misguided sense of guilt.
There has been a campaign in Germany, a sort of hypersensitivity
against any perceived form of antisemitism, which includes almost any
criticism of Israel.

As the Israeli government has been moving further towards the right,
Germany has ramped up its expressions of guilt to the point where
Germans have called Jews or Israelis like me, who speak out against
the Israeli government, anti-Semitic.

This strikes me as having extremely important parallels with some
things happening in the United States; because if you make the voice
of the victim as the only voice you listen to and you prioritize
victim identity over anything else, you can get into enormous trouble.

All of us have a number of identities. They can grow or recede in
importance at different times, and essentializing any one part of them
used to be considered completely reactionary, or even racist or sexist
because these are the components of identity over which we have the
least control.

Originally you might have thought the concept of intersectionality is
a way of acknowledging that we all have different identities, and more
than one. But it's  been turned into shorthand for the idea that some
people are victims in more than one way. Now, I don’t deny that, and
I think it’s important to point to the fact that Black women have
experienced discrimination and marginalization, both because they’re
Black, and because they’re women.

But what I’m arguing against is prioritizing those parts of our
identity that leave us the least agency, and basing our political and
moral decisions on that. This, unfortunately, is something that the
woke do.

Looking back at the three core principles common to liberals and
leftists—universalism, justice, and the possibility of
progress—wokeism prioritizes tribalism, and particularly those
pieces of identity that are most likely to make someone a victim, and
over which a person has the least amount of control.

In their justified concern for inequalities of power, the woke often
simply focus on power struggles rather than thinking about justice,
which sometimes gets left by the wayside. And thirdly, if all you see
in history is attempted progress that failed, you’ll find it hard to
struggle towards progress in the future.

ROBERT KUTTNER:

To give the benefit of the doubt to people who want others to be woke,
defined as radically conscious of oppression, you might say that they
are proceeding in a perverse way, first by making demands on the rest
of the progressive community that you have to show us that you are a
better ally by doing thus and such. Otherwise you’re just a false
ally. It’s self-marginalizing. Not enough of the rest of the
progressive community is going to meet the purity test. Instead of
expanding your power coalition, you’re going to narrow it.

And secondly, wokeism presents an easily caricatured set of
propositions that the right is just going to run with. I don’t want
to turn your elegant book of moral philosophy into a tactical manual.
But let’s take a few minutes and talk about what we do about this
politically.

The right wing’s caricature of wokeism has become a basis for
embracing old-fashioned racism. Most Americans support affirmative
action, a distinctly non-woke term. But the further out on the woke
continuum of linguistics you get, the more unpopular and suspect these
contrivances are, and the more you give you give ammunition to the
right.

In _Learning from the Germans_, you compared the American experience
of reckoning with Jim Crow with the German experience of reckoning
with the Holocaust, and you found the American experience quite
wanting. But in your new book you say that actually, if you think
about it, there has been a lot of progress. Look at what race
relations were like when I was growing up in the in the sixties, and
look what they are now. And even though there's been a terrible amount
of backsliding since Trump, we”ve actually had a lot of progress.

Do I have that right?

SUSAN NEIMAN: You have that absolutely right.

My book was finished in late 2018, before the _New
York __T__imes_’ 1619 project, before George Floyd was murdered.
The Confederate flag was still flying over the Mississippi capitol;
and no one, I believe, had taken down a statue of a of a Confederate
general. So in the past five years the US has gone much further in
facing up to its national crimes. 

I do think the Confederate statues should be gone. We need to learn
about this period from the end of the Civil War to the beginning of
the Montgomery bus boycott, for most people was a hole in our
collective national memory. On the other hand, while we are in the
process of facing our racial history we are ignoring our political
history. Very few Americans know about the powerful labor movements in
the first half of the 20th century and how they were suppressed, very
few know about the implications of the Cold War.

Let me return to a question you asked about tactics. I do think
tactically, because I’m a sometime activist as much as I am a
philosopher; and I’m terrified, as I say at the end of the book,
about some version of a repeat of what happened in Germany in 1933,
when the Nazis came to power not by winning a democratic majority, but
because of infighting between different left wing groups, all of whom
felt that their scorn and hatred of the other was entirely justified.

We have fascist movements rising all over the world right now. Like
you, I am worried about the left splitting itself over these kinds of
issues.

I also think that tactics improve when the ideas behind the tactics
improve. And that’s the reason I wrote this book. An ally is the
wrong concept in progressive struggles for justice. To go back to the
Nazi example, Hannah Arendt wrote that Eichmann should not have been
indicted for crimes against the Jewish people. He should have been
indicted for crimes against humanity. And she was right.

Of course I support racial justice—but not as an “ally,” which
is someone whose interests are temporarily aligned, like the United
States and the Soviet Union during the Second World War. Allies are
different from those who share your principles and who stand with you
on the basis of deep convictions, not shared interests.

_Robert Kuttner is co-founder and co-editor of The American Prospect,
and professor at Brandeis University’s Heller School._

_The American Prospect is devoted to promoting informed discussion on
public policy from a progressive perspective. In print and online,
the Prospect brings a narrative, journalistic approach to complex
issues, addressing the policy alternatives and the politics necessary
to create good legislation. We help to dispel myths, challenge
conventional wisdom, and expand the dialogue._

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