If being woke simply means having a political consciousness regarding matters of (in)justice, (in)equality, discrimination, domination, and oppression, then all Lefties (including social liberals and social democrats) are Wokies. And there are also Righties who do care about those things, including social justice. Actually, the very term "social justice" was introduced in the 19th century by Catholic conservatives.Peter Kropotkin wrote: ↑Mon May 27, 2024 6:00 pm WOKE: The meaning of WOKE is aware of and actively attentive
to important societal facts and issues....
(especially issues of racial or social justice)
"The term social justice as such makes its first appearance in Europe in the writings of a Jesuit advisor to the Vatican, Luigi Taparelli d’Azeglio, writing in the context of the Italian risorgimento in 1840, a political movement which, while promoting the unification of Italy, posed severe challenges to the existing social and political order, including the Catholic Church (Burke, 2011). For Taparelli, the term giustizia sociale signified an attempt to justify the established social stratification (which was highly unequal and based on special privileges of aristocracy and church) while giving credence to “modern” principles of individual responsibility and, in that sense, of autonomy. In opposing the liberalism and the associated demands for equality promoted by the American Revolution in the tradition of Locke (1960), Taparelli emphasized instead the legitimacy of differences as “natural facts” which the principles of social justice have to respect and protect rather than eliminate. “All individual human beings are naturally unequal among themselves in everything that pertains to their individuality, just as they are naturally equal in all that pertains to the species” (Taparelli d’Azeglio,1845, par. 355, quoted in Burke, 2011, p. 37).
In the sophisticated manner of Jesuit argumentation, Taparelli captured the spirit of the revolutionary times with the term “social justice,” only to give it a conservative, order-preserving interpretation. According to this interpretation, social differences can be legitimated and guarded against being perceived as inequalities and injustices when they can be grounded in the factual, “essential” constitution of these differences. In addition, possible weaknesses arising from these differences in natural constitution need to be protected by the interventions of a benevolent “bigger unit.” This idea constituted the core of the principle of “subsidiarity” which assumed a central role not only in Catholic social teaching but also in the social policies of corporatist states such as Bismarckian Germany (Hennock, 2007).
Taparelli distinguished the role of smaller social units, such as the family, from that of bigger ones such as the state to give the smaller ones absolute priority over the latter but obliging the latter to support the smaller ones if their own capacity to resolve problems did not suffice. In this form the principle of subsidiarity as the realization of social justice entered directly into the social teaching of the Catholic Church, initially in the form of the Encyclical Rerum Novarum of 1891 (Leo XIII, 1981) in which Pope Leo XIII, a former student of Taparelli,[17]defined the Church’s social commitment as being both a fight against Communism with its pursuit of equality and its reliance on collective action, and against excessive liberalism which left the individual abandoned by the collective and created scandalous social differences and injustices. In this line of development social justice became a virtue, a striving at all levels of society for the just distribution of personal freedom combined with responsibility and for public support consistent with the principle of justice when individual commitments proved insufficient.
This theme was taken up in the Encyclical Quadragesomo Anno by Pope Pius XI (1931), celebrating the effects and reaffirming the principles of Catholic social teaching at the height of the Great Depression and at the historical start of the confrontation between Communism and Fascism in Europe. The Pope reminds governments of their role in bringing moral order to a society by protecting the weak and warding off Communism. The Encyclical consolidated the Catholic Church’s understanding of social justice. Another Jesuit, Oswald von Nell-Breuning, had worked on its draft. He later became a leading figure in shaping Germany’s post-World War II social policies, which strongly reaffirmed the principle of subsidiarity, which had been a central feature of Bismarck’s first social legislation after the founding of the Second German Reich in 1871 (Krier Mich, 1998; Novak, 2000). West-Germany’s post-war social politics emphasized the freedom of individuals not in an absolute sense but in the form of their being embedded in organisms of civil society which, in that country’s strong anti-fascist and anti-communist orientation, had to form a safeguard against the powers of the state becoming too domineering (Huber & Stephens, 2001).
Social justice, in this typically conservative version, consists therefore, of ensuring everybody’s (different) place in society in such a way that society could become an organic whole where all the different members worked together harmoniously (the organism metaphor also appears in Catholic social doctrine). This interpretation of the principle of social justice does not seek to eliminate differences but reduces them to a level where they do not lead to social unrest. This, in turn, is achieved by relating inequalities back to “indisputable facts,” in which metaphysical evaluations of those facts, such as the religious meaning of poverty or the “sanctity of the family,” play a supporting role. Both the criteria of individual freedom and of equality can thus be respected in relation to each other, albeit in a very specific interpretation. “To each according to his rank” expresses social justice from this perspective.
This conservative interpretation of social justice, which lies at the core of 20th-century corporatist “welfare regime” versions of social policies, emerged as a defense against the arguments of two opposing interpretations of social policy [= the liberalist & socialist ones] which equally gave rise to distinct social policy regimes."
(Lorenz, Walter. "The Emergence of Social Justice in the West." In The Routledge International Handbook of Social Justice, edited by Michael Reisch, 14-26. Abingdon: Routledge, 2014. pp. 17-8)
Now THAT sounds racist to me. But how do you explain away the ignorance of the rich, white Leftists who have unthinkingly embraced the label "Woke" for themselves? What are you saying about them? Are you accusing them of stupidity, or "cultural appropriation"?
They write you a script, and expect you to agree with their scripting, and then pretend you said something just as silly as whatever they scripted.
I have to tell you, if I may, it is not Marxists that lead me to believe it is a conspiracy theory, rather, it is the fact that conspiracy theorists espouse it that I find compelling.