Good! I was hoping someone would give a detailed, serious response. I've been spending a lot of time learning about these topics, but there is only so much Wikipedia articles and political commentary television shows can teach. I need to hear what actual humans who know what they're talking about have to say in case I decide to join that Edutainment contest with a politics game before it's too late ;)
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Well if the artical won't work then sadly I don't think you can get a fair interpretation of what I was saying (although keep in mind it was in jest). But I will attempt to respond to you, more or less on a point by point basis.
First to summarize and clarify: The assumptions about identity were made by the Georgetown article. I don't even know if their study is particularly valuable or should be taken seriously—however a brief search suggests to me there might be some validity to their results. I was just using it to make a humorous point. Since you say it won't open, here is a snippet from their results (and keep in mind, the Georgetown study was about how people identity politically.):
"The predicted probabilities shown in Figure 3 show that as levels of sexism increase, so
too does the predicted probability of identifying as a progressive rather than as a liberal. The
results of the full sample model show that the predicted probability of identifying as a progressive rather than as a liberal is about 0.21 at the lowest level (0) of sexism and increases to
0.6 as the value of sexism increases to its maximum (0.9), an increase of approximately 0.39. The magnitude of this effect is large and shows that sexist attitudes are a powerful predictor of identifying as a progressive rather than as a liberal."
As for what the study is actually looking at, and the deliberate muddying of the waters I did for humor reasons, here is a snippet from their conclusion that may assuage concerns:
"First, we include a major caveat that the meaning of progressivism may be different
among activists and the general public. Activists in recent years have described candidates and
policies that are further to the left of liberal candidates and policies as being more progressive.
While it is plausible that this is what the concepts means to elites, progressive identifiers do not
seem to follow suit."
As for my own opinion, as I will discuss below, I do think there is some actual validity in differentiating progressives from "modern liberals," mainly because I believe there are some differences in ideological foundation. Non-trivial ones, IMHO, even if there is convergence on policy. Of course, that isn't what the article is about, and it's not why I posted it. I was just teasing that "woke" doesn't always correlate with particular attidudes and beliefs about what roles women should have in soceity.
Why I brought up religious groups: (Keep in mind, this part wasn't meant to be particularly serious. Minority religious groups are far too small to make any meaningful statistical bump in a study like this, so they probably aren’t very relevant here—even if they do tend to hold more traditional views on gender.)
My discussion on some religious groups uniting with progressives is simply an observation that many prominant religious people who come from religions that tends to be marginalized in the West who are involved in politics have tied their movements to the progressive movement. As a concrete example, consider where prominant Muslims tend to lie on this political spectrum. As they tend to be marginalized in Western socity, and progressives tend to defend and empower marginalized people, it seems a natural alliance. I will admit that this seems more of a "by obviousness" claim by me, as the right seems to be extremely anti-Muslim, which seems to explain why we see many prominant Muslim figures associated with the progressive movement. And then things like the alliance between Marxists and the Iranian Ayatollahs prior to overthrowing the Shah come to mind, suggesting there may be a pattern. HOWEVER, I have not done any semblance of a systematic analysis on this, and am simply going by basic intuition and anecdotal evidence.
My mentioning of religious people who seem to me to lean towards alliance with progressives (generally minority religions) as a partial explanation of the results of the article was because of the more traditional views on women and their role in society that such groups appear to have (with the obvious implication that "traditional role for women" = "sexist," again, as a joke). I mean, maybe I'm wrong, but based on my own reading of Quran and Hadiths, and discussions with Muslims, it does seem that women and men tend to be assigned different roles in society among Muslims, and those roles seem to fit closely with what we generally refer to as "traditional" gender roles. Although this doesn't seem to be true based on the couple of Sikh friends I have had over the years, and my basic reading of their religion. So clearly not every minority religious group is going to hold traditional gender roles in their culture (Sikhism seems to be unusually egalitarian—although I know little of the religion). Again, I could be wrong. I have limitted experience, and it is also true scripture doesn't always translate to the actual way the religion functions in practice. But most of all, that, too, was just flippant humor.
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Moving on to the next topic. You said: "There is no one woke ideology." If that was the implication you gathered from my post, know that it was not my intent to communicate that. The person I responded to used the word, so I also used the word for the purpose of clear communication with them—otherwise I feel like my joke would not have worked.
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Disclaimer: I did not major in philosophy or political or social science. My thoughts on the following topics are based on a few electives I took because they were interesting and I liked the professor teaching them.
Liberals vs progressives:
I cannot fully agree with you on what progressivism is, in terms of progressivism merely being a discriptor for a particular species of liberal. I see progressivism as more of a critique of liberalism. As it appears to me, modern liberals (by this I mean liberals that are not classical liberals) and progressives converge on a lot of policy, but the motivation for each side is different. And to me that makes them fundamentally different. The liberal core morals: individual autonomy and rights; the progressive core morals: collective well-being and justice. Their roots: modern liberals: classical liberalism, Locke, Mill, freedom from interference; progressives: social reform movements, freedom through empowerment, etc; Dewey, for example, on the idea that the government has a responsibility not just to protect rights, but to empower people to reach their full potential. Obviously neither group holds exactly to the original ideas, but I think these different roots have evolved into two very similar views on policy but with differening REASONS for those views.
And then their respective explanations for human bevahavior seems different to me: liberals: humans are rational individuals capable of moral self-direction; progressives: humans are social beings shaped by power structures and systems (Identity politics is a big thing among progressives for these reasons, it seems). Also, as I see it: liberals are more often empiricists (think Richard Dawkins, Bill Maher, who incidentally believes in universal basic income and single payer health care, so the next time someone calls him a "classical liberal" I will bludgeon my forehead on my desk), while progressives are more often post-modernists. But most importantly, again, as I see it, liberals (modern liberals; Bill Clinton, Andrew Yang) favor equal opportunity, and progressives favor equality of outcome (however, clearly there is a spectrum of views).
Lastly, there seems some differences in ethical foundations. Liberalism usually seems to be based around deontological ethics, virtue ethics. But SOME groups who call themselves progressive seem to swing heavily into utilitarianism (e.g., "The moral worth of a policy depends on how much good it produces," rather than the particular virtues it is based on. For example, free speech. What I would consider a modern liberal would say burning a Quran regardless of intent should be protected speech, because free speech—even offensive speech—is a fundamental human right; while a progressive of the type I'm describing might say, "Protesting is a right, but if your protest is influenced by hate, or it may lead to someone feeling unwelcomed, or to violence, your right to free speech is trumped by the fact that curtailing it leads to greater good.")
If I would sum up MY opinion on the difference between modern liberals and progressives in a single example (and I make this distinction knowing most people do not, and for the reasons I'm discussing in this post, among others), it would be this: ACLU = modern liberals. Progresives: the people who criticized the ACLU for defending the free speech rights of white nationalists in Charlottesville. Interestingly there was disagreement WITHIN the ACLU on this. I feel like we're in the middle of a split.
My ideas on what "woke" means, and my non-expert opinion on it:
I agree with your next two paragraphs, including the feminist thing and the book thing. However, I think a concise way to define "woke" in the sense here is left-leaning politics that focus heavily on IDENTITY politics, which to me, is illiberal at its fundamental core, because it seems to inevitably call for replacing equality under the law with government compulsion to produce equality in actual fact. Which consequently seems to result in some individuals who have no control or benefit very little from a system which is mostly controlled by the group they belong to being swept up in the tide to rescue a marginalized group, resulting in these already oppressed people being more oppressed (who are outside the defined marginalized group, and belong to an "oppressor" group but are in fact powerless and benefit very little from the power structure those in their defined group control). The proverbial eggs that are cracked to make an omlet.
Moving on.
Your next paragraph is kind of what the Georgetown study I linked to was investigating. It's a shame you can't read it, because I think it's pretty interesting. But you seem to be aware of other studies, so then again maybe it's nothing new to you.
As for your last paragraph, I think you're taking my post too seriously, since it was meant as a joke. I don't ACTUALLY believe the progressive faction of the left is more sexist than modern liberals (as I have been defining them here). I think the simpler explanation is something you hinted on, as well did the Georgetown study: people don't want to be associated with certain things (cringe, as you mentioned; the article specifically mentions the perception of how feminism is viewed). My one speculative suggestion was that the historically oppressed religious minorities who have traditional views of women might actually also contribute to this observed trend. But even that, again, was joking (as I mentioned earlier, even if it were true, they are too small a group to make a meaningful statistical difference).
All that said, I am going to die on the hill and say the progressive movement is something different from liberalism, and I will say that there is an actual split happening in the Democrat party where Third Way people, and some social liberal people are diverging from a group that prefers actual socialism over mere regulated capitalism with a welfare state, that prefers restrictions on hurtful, targeted speech over "free speech is a fundamental human right even if people get offended," and which fiercely embraces identity politics (because that is seen as necessary to achieve social justice), while the other group sticks to universalism.
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If you've read this far, please give your critiques or thoughts on my ideas about any perceived or actual splits among the left that I described here. It's something that I find very intriguing and am mulling the idea of making an edutainment project on, regardless of whether or not I join the contest. As I said I'm not remotely qualified on the topic, but there are already a couple of math games and I don't want to just add to that and create math fatigue. But I'd rather not make an edutatainment game if I my game doens't have either legtimacy and agreement with the experts or presents a good argument for disagreeing. Else I'll just have to remain an outsider for the contest.
