When a conservative pundit recently struggled to define “woke,” the Left gleefully pounced, mocking the idea that there even could be a definition to their word. Other conservatives, however, gamely offered their take on the subject. Professor Wilfred Reilly did it two years ago, and he did it again earlier this week.

After setting up the kerfuffle, he gets right to the point:

All of this is frankly pretty silly. Many political terms (“fascism”) are as slippery as greased lobbyists, and this one is hardly the toughest to figure out. What is woke, then? The definition from the meme is actually rock-solid: a “woke” person, or “social-justice warrior,” is someone who believes that (1) the institutions of American society are currently and intentionally set up to oppress (minorities, women, the poor, fat people, etc.), (2) virtually all gaps in performance between large groups prove that this oppression exists, and (3) the solution to this is equity — which means proportional representation regardless of performance or qualifications.

Most other popular, coherent definitions are quite similar. To James Lindsay, a “woke” person is someone afflicted (infected?) with modern critical consciousness — which is itself the belief that society is set up to oppress you, and the only way out of the Matrix is critical theory. These summaries aren’t witty trolls from the center-Right, but instead reflect canonical statements from woke leftists themselves.

The claim that racism is “everyday,” “everywhere,” and that apparently neutral systems like standardized testing are actually structured primarily to benefit dominant groups, comes from Richard Delgado — one of the founders of critical race theory. The claim that virtually all group performance gaps indicate racist policy or subtle bias is the cornerstone argument of Ibram X. Kendi, probably the most famous “crit” alive today. Kendi has baldly stated, on several occasions, that the only two possible explanations for, say, an income or tested-IQ gap between major populations are actual inferiority on the part of one group or some form of bias — no matter how well-hidden and impossible to winkle out.

These authors and many others almost universally propose “equity” — in the sense I outline — as the solution to such gaps.

Reilly also states the obvious: “It is worth pointing out that the core assumptions of what I sometimes call wokeism are wrong, and often stupid.” It’s simply not true that our institutions systemically oppress or that most gaps of any kind between people exist because of racism or other discrimination. Most differences in a large society, says Reilly, can be explained by variations in “literally dozens of cultural and situational and civilizational characteristics.”

Woke ideology crumbles under scrutiny, which is why its adherents prefer it not even be defined (equity doesn’t work either — imagine it as the primary tool for selecting airline pilots). And, while we’re criticizing this stuff, the canard that labels like “woke” secretly refer to blacks or other people of color — giving conservatives a chance to “dog-whistle” — is empirically wrong. As I once noted for Commentary magazine, by far the wokest group of contemporary Americans is college-educated, upper-middle-class white women.

He concludes:

“Woke” policies can be complex to discuss — and are almost invariably dangerous to implement — but they aren’t at all hard to define. We should keep calling them out, using the proper word.

Read the whole thing here.