Having yearned for a Donald Trump presidency for almost 14 months, the first 14 days of erratic protectionism from the Orange Man might well lead President Javier Milei to reflect on the wisdom of the saying: “Be careful what you wish for (lest it come true)” but clinching a free-trade agreement with a president who could slap 25-percent tariffs on his two partners in the ex-NAFTA USMCA in a world where trade wars minimise the importance of cultural battles still lies well in the future – for now Milei’s image is firmly linked to his anti-woke diatribe at the World Economic Forum in Davos, especially after society’s reaction to it last weekend.
Normally a speech plays to the strengths of the speaker and to the audience but Milei’s Davos rant curiously did neither – he could have boasted of crushing inflation, an unfailing fiscal surplus and deregulation on multiple fronts to listeners with potentially billions, if not trillions to invest or even beyond the economic sphere, he could have bragged some impressive crime figures and consigning pickets to the past but he did none of these things. Instead he embarked on an anti-woke tirade which was off-topic for an international economic forum while largely mystifying domestic galleries.
Rather than seeking to pin any tag on the speaker (neither fascist nor racist seem to quite fit any more than libertarian, no matter what last weekend’s marchers or his supporters might say), this column will focus on his target because all too few people here seem to have any precise idea what “woke” means – divided between having no clue to assuming it to be a Chinese saucepan dish, as one minor party deputy aptly commented. Half the letters in “woke” are not even used in the Spanish language beyond some first names (more than one famous Argentine sportsman is called Walter, not to mention Milei’s sister, Karina). Ignorance is not confined to the general public – one academic specialising in taxation this week wrote an article in a mainstream newspaper rubbishing the wealth tax as a “woke” burden when anybody with any idea of this movement will realise that wealth taxation has little or nothing to do with “woke,” having much older roots in socialism (Milei’s Davos target last year) and Peronism. “Woke” thus becomes a pejorative for anything the new right considers excessively progressive.
Woke is very much a creature of this millennium but it can be traced back over a century to the wake-up calls of Jamaica’s Marcus Garvey or even the Wide Awakes abolitionist movement backing Abraham Lincoln before the Civil War. A synonym for “awake” in Afro-American English referring to awareness of racism, “woke” remained very much within that community until the Michael Brown shooting in 2014 and the start of the Black Lives Matter movement. In an evolution accelerated by the technological revolution placing it online, it then started dovetailing into sexism, gender ideology, identity politics, environmental movements and social injustices in general as it became increasingly embraced by white liberals (not how Milei understands that word) – some Afro-American voices have recently complained about the movement’s original authenticity being lost amid the pseudo-progressive co-optation of its new sympathisers, justifying the backlash.
Action and reaction are equal and opposite, runs Newton’s third law, and this applied to “woke” in the increasingly polarised United States politics of the last decade. Black Lives Matter was soon followed by Trump’s electoral college win taking him to the White House in 2016 with the reaction to that lurch to the right seeing the term “woke” starting to become synonymous with an increasingly leftist political ideology in general, deploring social as much as racial injustice and sexual as much as racial discrimination, while the cancel culture started to run riot in US academic circles along with inclusive language and deconstructing gender norms. But the backlash only began in earnest about five or six years ago with “woke” mocked as the intolerant moralising of self-righteous progressive posturing and political correctness going over the top – even if the word did not enter Trump´s vocabulary until after his first term.
Although ethnography tells us that the human race is not literally black and white, it remains striking how “woke” has remained within its Afro-American origins despite the progressive hodgepodge surrounding it, not spreading to other races – thus “woke” is a bad word in India. While black militants see themselves as victims of discrimination, Asian-Americans tend to have a different take – at the risk of generalising, their attitude is often: “If discrimination obliges me to give 110 percent, then fine, I’ll give 110 percent – I can do it and it’ll make me a better person.”
While critics strive to come to grips with a content which is sometimes all over the place, “woke” can also be faulted for its timing – both in fighting past battles long over and counterproductively seeking to accelerate future progress in societies adapting to change at their own pace. Thus it might be asked where was “woke” at the Congress of Berlin in 1885 when the European powers were carving up the entire African continent among themselves? At the start of this century neither gay marriage nor abortion looked on the horizon in Argentina and yet both have found social acceptance in their own time.
Ridiculing “woke” is all too easy with such absurdities as “Cancel Beethoven” or rewriting history to make the aristocracy of Jane Austen’s Britain multi-racial but there is always the danger of throwing out the baby with the bathwater – what is humanity without racial and gender equality, social justice and environmental concern?
In conclusion, Earth to Milei – stop distracting yourself with “woke” and Elon Musk’s SpaceX when you have an overvalued currency (with the crawling peg halved to a monthly one percent) on your plate at a time when all other emerging countries are devaluing with Trump-driven global uncertainty prompting a flight to greenback quality while you also have crucial midterms to contest, so give “cultural wars” a rest.
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