I didn’t use the term “fascism” because most people don’t know what it means. It’s one sort of authoritarianism that arises through a malignant cooperation between corporations and government. I think instead it’s better to talk about the broader category of authoritarianism, and how that impacts freedom through coercion. These are crisper and more accessible terms that haven’t been muddled through so much misuse.
Woke is certainly CRT, Marxist, collectivist, radical egalitarian, etc. Left to its own devices it would eventually go to war with other foundations of Western Civilization like private property in just the same way Marxism and all collectivism does. Probably its hallmark though, is requiring equal outcomes. That’s the stuff of Kendi’s anti-racism, the book wars on modern campuses and all
third stage post-modernism.
I didn’t propose anything new about Western Civ. Years ago you could not get any sort of academic degree without a full year of Western Civ, and because making a responsible member of society that was capable of self-governance was the goal of academics, that made sense. Everyone in the West used to agree about our heritage which includes The Bible as well as The Greeks. Most historians will say that Western Civilization is the combination of revelation out of Jerusalem and reason out of Athens. That’s a good summary. Today, anyone who lauds that tradition as central to human flourishing around the world is generally discounted as a White Supremecist, despite Jews, Northern Africans, and indigenous Americans are not white.
The hallmarks of Western Civilization are its values: realism, individualism, justice, mercy, equality, freedom, reason, industriousness, etc. as well as its outcomes: medicine, science, mathematics, economics, vast institution building, human flourishing. No matter how you define it, Western Civilization is the most successful, most copied, most transformative civilization in the history of the world. Admitting this will get you labeled a White Supremacist in many of today’s circles, but it’s simply a fact. No other civilization ended slavery, landed a man on the Moon or invented the flush toilet, so let’s give credit where it’s due.
I doubt I’m giving you specific answers so much as the framework to ask the questions. I hope that’s more helpful. It’s just not helpful to fling about terms like “fascist” when next to no one really understands what the term means. Certainly, no one at ANTIFA knows what fascist means. ANTIFA’s tactics are all drawn from fascists. If they knew what the term meant they’d surely choose another. Then they’d be stuck. They’d want to settle on being opposed to authoritarianism, and find nearly everyone in Western Civilization is opposed to authoritarianism. That would be terrible for their recruiting.
To return to the broader question of woke, let me propose to pierce the foggy and point out one very specific issue.
Throughout all Western Civilization there has been pretty uniform acceptance of what entails good and evil, especially as regards a special kind of evil known as “abomination”. Though abominations generally extend primarily toward sexual perversions, they also include things like child sacrifice, abortion (same thing), drinking blood especially in celebration of death, witchcraft, sorcery (includes especially hallucinogenic drug use), mediumship with “familiar spirits”, etc. It’s not an especially long list. These kinds of perversions earn the special moniker “abomination” because they’re deliberate refutations of God’s proper province over life. They seem to repudiate God’s character. They seek to mock.
Adultery is horrible, but it is the result of selfishness, passion, lack of discipline, etc. It does not mock God directly.
Alternatively, each and every time a little boy or girl claims God made a mistake and they’re in the wrong body, that is abomination.
You can see the difference. Today’s woke movement is not about arguing over adultery. It’s arguing over the very nature of existence. It’s arguing over God’s character and often asking “did God really say. ..?” in the same way that the serpent tempted Eve. Abomination is a whole new level of evil. It seeks not just to replace morals and values it doesn’t comprehend, it seeks to judge those values as wrong, and evil unto themselves. Woke therefore plays for the biggest of stakes.