Of the Term "Woke Cultural Imperialism"

Back in 2022 when the Toy Story prequel Lightyear hit theaters much was made of the film's gesture toward LGBTQ+ inclusiveness by making Buzz Lightyear's comrade Alisha Hawthorne a woman in a same-sex relationship (with which partner, whom she is seen kissing, and to whom she seems very married, she apparently has a child). The decision led to fourteen African and Asian countries refusing to screen the film, including what had then recently been considered the hugely important Chinese market. Asked about the decision Galyn Susman said that while they "had been warned this would be a likely outcome" it was also the case that "[w]e weren't going to change the movie we wanted to make just because of a few countries with--for a lack of a better term--backward beliefs."

Ms. Susman's response generally went uncriticized in the mainstream media, which often did not bother to report the more inflammatory parts of Ms. Susman's statement (one may imagine, because they were broadly aligned with her view), but commentators on the right, for example, The Spectator's Rod Lampard, had much to say, Mr. Lampard noting critically the inconsistency by a representation of a supposedly anti-racist and anti-sexist tendency championing the LGBTQ+ in the very same breath that they denounced non-Western cultures as "backward" in a manner worthy of a pith-hatted colonialist. In fairness, one can argue that coming from right-wingers hardly famed for their cultural sensitivity to those societies, or their condemnation of the imperial-colonial past, this was just cynical point-scoring by the anti-woke. Yet one can only score genuine points when there are points to be scored, and critics like Lampard were quite right to note the juxtaposition of a "progressive" attitude on LGBTQ+ issues with a bigoted and reactionary one on the relation of "the West and the rest"--but at the same time wrong in thinking this a case of plain and simple hypocrisy such as one would imagine if, as they did, insisting on the equation of "woke" with "left." Instead the episode seems an excellent example of the falsity of any such equation.

As a great many observers (many of them people have actually heard of, not just somebody on a blog like this one) have pointed out again and again to absolutely no effect whatsoever on the mainstream conversation wokeness is not a left political tendency. After all, leftists know full well that a government (for it is they who banned the film in every case) is not its people, and the latter not to be judged by the deeds of the former given the hard realities of who has power and who does not, period, all as they know full well that a people are not the organic unity sharing a consensus of thought and feeling so often seen in the propaganda of conservative nationalists. There are always divisions and disagreements (not least along that line the woke like to ignore, class) that mean one ought to be very cautious about generalizing here--the more in as not every opinion is equally expressed in even the most "democratic" society, some voices heard above others, namely those most congenial to those in power.

Moreover, even where the people as a whole may be demonstrated to hold a view that a leftist would regard as, "for lack of a better term--backward," they do not moralize at that people for being so in the contemptuously dismissive way that Ms. Susman at least appeared to do in her quoted remark. The leftist, after all, believes in a common humanity rather than in the all-importance of "difference," while in their view what differences there are between cultures are a far from mystical thing, conditions creating consciousness and the former changing the latter, so that what may seem oppressive is not a matter of the implicit, inherent, eternal wrongness of another culture--all as the triumph of what some may be tempted to call "backwardness" is often a matter of the play of interests and forces apt to go far beyond the bounds of the nation. Just as imperialism can make a country economically backward ("underdevelop it," as it were, establishing modern transport systems to exploit its resources but otherwise standing in the way of its fuller development) the associated politics has commonly seen big powers align themselves with and throw their weight behind the most reactionary of local forces (unreconstructed fascists, racists, religious fundamentalists, military juntas, etc.) to get their way, with all that implied for the evolution of those societies. As a result, if backwardness reflects "traditionalist" views backwardness today apt to be at least partly a product of what the leftist sees as the long list of imperialist crimes, to which they are highly sensitive, and which they will not slight or compound by insult (the kind of psychic wound to which the woke are supposed to be sensitive), or sanctimoniousness given the history of their own societies (for such feeling against the LGBTQ+ is, of course, far from unknown outside those "Other" societies Ms. Susman sneers at as backward, as the box office receipts to her own movie demonstrated). Leftists also know how such attitudes can easily be exploited to support and cover for foreign policies of a far from "progressive" and peaceable nature, often in the most hypocritical fashion (as seen in right-wing politicians opposed to LGBTQ+ rights exploiting the records of foreign countries in regard to LGBTQ+ rights as excuses for demonizing them, often as a prelude to dropping bombs on them). Accordingly rather than sneering at a people as backward the people of all nations are the left's hope, in which, as their striving to persuade them shows, they are bound to believe--and in which the right disbelieves, the sneers of the misanthrope and the pessimist that utterly pervade contemporary culture bespeaking not the influence of the left, but the ferocity and success of the right in crushing the left; in, as Philip Cunliffe had it, creating a society organized around the defeat of the left.

As all this implies the thinking of the woke derives not from the left but from the right, though one would do well to be clear on what kind of right-wingers they are. They are not the sort of cosmopolitan--in George Friedman's terms, "civilized"--conservative inclined to say of other peoples "They have their ways which suit them, just as we have ours which suit us, and we must respect that." Rather they are the sort of nationalistic--to refer to Friedman again, "barbarian"--type who regarding their ways as the only ways worthy of respect, and others' ways as worthy only of contempt. (One should not mistake this for a leftist's universalism. The "barbarian" believes in the importance of difference as much as their cosmopolitan counterpart does, and is emphatic as anyone else in insisting on the Other's difference and its importance--they just can't deal with them in a civil, respectful, way.) This should not seem very surprising. After all, high postmodernist theory would seem to conduce to a cosmopolitan sort of conservatism. Yet its popularization saw that fall by the wayside amid an exaltation of subjectivity and difference that have been married to a strident and often hysterical politics of identity and status, which are often replete with inconsistencies, members of one marginalized group often despising others just as or even more marginalized than themselves in the selfish scrum that is their politics. What we call wokeness is respect for, accommodation to, the unwieldy, contradiction-riddled mass of these claims, which given the intellectual premise can easily see demands for justice for one group go hand in hand with the most utter--and truly backward--bigotry against another group in that way epitomized by what some have called "femonationalism" or "homonationalism." Bespeaking the woke's parochialism in mentality, extending the status and identity politics of American life onto a very different, much more diverse, world (as they show no knowledge of, curiosity about, respect for that wider world); and the hierarchy of priorities that, as the existence of terms like femonationalism and homonationalism shows, ranks gender higher than ethnicity, and LGBTQ+ rights rank far higher than fighting racism, religious bigotry, xenophobia (and especially certain species' of them); the combination of LGBTQ+ championship with denigration of foreign cultures that would be a contradiction in a leftist's view of a kind forcing them to do some hard thinking is for the woke not even second nature but first, and what one may call "woke cultural imperialism" with its punching down at people treated very brutally in the past perfectly consistent with the woke view of the world--and wokeness, like its cultural imperialism, all too consistent with the regular kind in a way with which no leftist would align themselves.