So, back in late March, Poilievre was unveiling his platform for Quebec, and in that speech he talked about eliminating “woke ideology” from university research. At first glance, you might look and say “meh, so what?”
The problem, of course, is that this puts the politicians in the position of being the arbiters of what is “worthy” of being studied. As we have seen with Trump’s “campaign against Woke”, this goes much further than merely attacking research that involves transgender people. No, in fact the Trump administration has published a list of words that it has now banned. It is quite extensive - pretty much covering every area of discourse that conservatives have decided that they don’t like - climate change, equality, women, diversity, allergies, and even the analysis of applying science to either policy or medical treatment.
At its core, the conservative assault on “Woke” turns out to be little more than re-litigating every rights and politics issue that they have lost the argument over in the last century. “It’s gone too far!”, they declare. They complain that the research itself should not be done because it offends their “feelings” about the subject.
But what price do these bans on certain subjects exact from society? Well, in Trump’s America, it’s now next to impossible to study how drugs affect women versus how they work in men. We have known for some time that women have very different responses to treatments than men do, and that’s in a wide range of topics including cardiac care. But now that research is effectively halted in the US. When Harper was Prime Minister, we saw him engage in overt suppression of climate science, even going so far as to prohibit scientists from speaking on the subject without political authorization.
To posit a bit of a straw man, you might assert that Poilievre wouldn’t go as far as Trump has done on this file. But what does that even mean? Poilievre hasn’t shown us any evidence that he would moderate his behaviour, and in fact his willingness to emulate Trump on so many points suggests that in fact he would lift heavily from Trump.
But think about it from a government policy perspective. Do you think that a government should ignore science when forming policy? Or should policy at least consider the scientific evidence in that domain?
To make a somewhat extreme example, consider the legislature deciding to pass legislation governing the treatment of heart attacks. The evidence today around heart attacks is clear - treatment is urgent, and requires a combination of medicine and surgical interventions. Long term follow-up is necessary, and the patient is encouraged to make major lifestyle changes, including exercise. All of this has decades worth of research backing it up.
Now consider the government decides in drafting its legislation that in fact all that research is wrong, and because the politicians believe that a heart attack is an event that the victim should “tough out”, they ban ambulances from responding to calls that are possible cardiac events.
I would hope you would be outraged by such legislation, and you would be calling on the politicians to pay attention to the scientific literature on the subject. Yet, that is exactly what we are seeing on so many levels with conservative politicians writing legislation on other matters - they are ignoring any kind scientific evidence in favour of their “feelings” about the subject.
To be clear, science doesn’t write policy, but science produces information that should be used to guide policy. If a subject makes you uncomfortable, that doesn’t mean it should not be studied - in fact to me that makes it more important that it is studied actively. Similarly, politicians should write policy, but not direct what _cannot_ be explored in research.
But what is this conservative “war on woke” really about? When I look at it broadly, it seems to boil down to unwinding equality because a bunch of white dudes are all butt-hurt that they aren’t the only ones with a say any more.
DEI - which is in many respects about dismantling the legacy of racism and marginalization that was pervasive in society even after the civil rights era supposedly made us all equal (it didn’t, it just knocked over the legal impediments to equality).
Immigration - oh yes, the problem of “the immigrants”. Whether this is “great replacement theory”, or other aspects of immigration like temporary foreign worker permits, at the end of the day it boils down to this existential fear that “white males” won’t be able to compete. They might wrap it up in respectable looking terms, but it’s really just racism with a thin gauze of “concern” wrapped around it.
Women’s reproductive rights - at its core, this is a matter of bodily autonomy. The whole abortion fight has always been about regulating women’s bodies - a matter rooted in a myriad of ancient fears about the female body. Medicine has gradually dismantled the superstitious beliefs that those fears once buttressed, but far too many still view women, sexuality, and pregnancy with deep mistrust. But, as a central theme in conservative thinking, fighting abortion remains stubbornly consistent - even when the logic behind their claims is no longer relevant.
Transgender people - like female reproductive rights, this is all about bodily autonomy. The idea that transgender people exist poses a huge, complex problem for the conservative mind. Not only does it connect back to women’s rights in general (because so much of women’s oppression in the past has to do with reproduction), but in fact transgender rights are inextricably connected because the transgender person represents a radical form of both bodily and social autonomy that centres on the individual. Conservatives tend to value conformity, and transgender people are the opposite of conformity. In fact, transgender people push back on all the social pressures that they experience in the process of actualizing themselves as human beings.
All of this connects back to an underlying fear on the part of conservative men that somehow these social changes make them “lesser” in society. They don’t, of course - we still live in a society where being a white male carries an enormous amount of power and privilege. Look at the people who are the biggest opponents of “woke” - almost inevitably they are anything but the “prime specimens” that they think themselves to be. Donald Trump, Jordan Peterson, Pierre Poilievre - none of them are ideal, and frankly if it weren’t for money or notoriety, any of them would be ignored as simply snivelling twits.
The “war on woke” is really about restoring a social hierarchy that died out decades ago - and it’s being conducted at the cost of the rights and freedoms of real people.
