In 2008 or thereabouts Occupy Wall Street was kicking off. The leaders - almost exclusively straight white males - made plans, openly debated the merits of different tactics, and generally got shit done. This scared the shit out of the elite finance parasites - and (((parasites))) - and shortly thereafter a bunch of gays, brown people, and women showed up. These newcomers demanded to be heard above and beyond the original leaders, so everyone agreed to implement the progressive stack. That is, straight white males speak last, have the least decision making authority, and can be interrupted at any time. The newcomers spent their newfound power airing their petty grievances over largely imagined slights.
The original, effective leaders threw up their hands in disgust and gave up.
Periodically, whenever someone on the left stands up against finance/capital, a horde of grievance-mongers crawl out of the woodwork and howl about their oppression before returning to wherever it is they come from.
It isn't necessary to do this to right-populists because of course everyone knows Republicans are Nazis. The media tells me so, and the media never lies!
Like everything else in America today, woke politics is a scam inflicted on us by finance capitalists and perpetuated by useful idiots happy with a few crumbs from their table. Most of the idiots don't see any profit from it, but they are re-enacting what they see on the internet and in movies and shows; they have internalized the beliefs finance wants them to have. This is a sort of psychological reward in lieu of wages.
The original leaders of OWS were middle class and upper middle class white collar professionals, what Orwell called the Outer Party. They are the smartest and best trained people in the USA, and are thus the greatest threat to uninterrupted, eternal rule of our finance/capital overlords - who, let's be honest, are more lucky than smart or hard-working.
The finance/capital upperclass employs elite managerialists - usually sons and daughters of upper class aristocracy - to manage their empires. The managers respond to the threat of middle class revolutionaries in two ways:
1. Disemploying straight white males (and increasingly straight white females) via outsourcing and importing foreigners to act as middle managers and trained professionals.
2. Pushing identify politics into corporate environments, especially increasingly granular, obscure, and esoteric manifestations such as transgenderism. This divides potential revolutionaries among arbitrary lines, preventing mutual empathy which precedes solidarity.
Source: I was an Communist before I became a racist.
tl;dr
Woke politics is a fat banker getting all the losers and morons in society to gang up on the banker's rivals.
