I'd definite it as a secularized neo-Puritan social movement, based in the United States. The "4th Great Awakening" if you will.

First, I'll get it out of the way - as a Marxist, Marxism has absolutely nothing to do with Wokeness. It's so, so common for people to call it "Neo-Marxism" or other shit. It's not. It's fundamentally a post-modernist philosophy which (should) reject Marxism. Though I will admit it has co-opted a lot of leftist/Marxist rhetoric.

At its core, wokeism is a worldview and philosophical system based on an us-vs-them mentality. It can be compared analogously to just about every similar one throughout history: "we" are the just, moral upholders of decency, morality, and "what is right", everyone else is a demon/evil person actively subverting us.

It makes heavy use of the (bunk) concept of Whig History, thinking that "now" is "the end of history", that "progress" - and specially "social progress" - is a linear, forward moving march from "bad" to "good". "Progressiveism" is a virtue, "conservatism" is a sin. "The right side of history" is quite literally the definition of this thinking.

As I mentioned above, modern Wokeness is based in postmodern philosophy. A key, almost fundamental, tenet of postmodernist philosophical discourse is the rejection of notions of historical narrative and absolute truth (in the sense that, say, the mathematical property "2 + 2 = 4" is "true") and is, in the philosophical sense, incredibly Idealist - that is, positioning mental ideas above physical, material reality. This is why it is contrary to Marxism, which is fundamentally a historical narrative, and materialist philosophy. Think "the mind shapes the world" versus "the world shapes the mind". This is most clearly evident in the context of the Trans debates, since the entire notion of "trans" is built off the idea that the mind has some magical, mystical, metaphysical superiority to the body, and in the idea of "lived experience" trumping statistics, provable fact, etc.

Beyond that, we get things like the Critical theories, specifically Critical Race Theory and Query Gender Theory, which is something that could (and should) have thousands of pages of essay debunking. I don't know it well enough to really speculate. But this has also been included in Wokism.

I mentioned above that it is a "neo-Puritan" movement, because it functions almost entirely like a cult. There are mantras that must be repeated without question, base truths that must be accepted without question, it is "us-versus-them" against the "bad world", leaving results in excommunication and shunning, etc. But it is not centralized; there is no "leadership", it's a broader cultural phenomenon.

It is ultimately driven by activist culture and white guilt. An offshoot of mainstream American Liberalism, it seeks - again in very Christian fashion - to "atone" for the "sins" of the past, especially the sins of "cishet white men". This is the crux of it all - "smashing X" to "dismantle" the "systems" that "oppress minorities". But it is, at best, a surface-level analysis - as liberal analysis often is - and misses many of the most critical structural issues (namely, Capitalism and the relation of workers to property) while simultaneously co-opting its discourse, terminology, and such. Hence "intersectionality", "class reductionist" accusations, etc. It fundamentally cannot, and will not, achieve any actual success in its objectives because it is fighting symptoms rather than diseases, and misdiagnosing the symptoms at that.

Finally one last thought, why it's bad - it's bad because, basically, it is a distraction. It is the perfect tool of the ruling classes (the billionaire class and their political lackeys) to divide working people into ever and ever smaller and isolated groups/"identities", both to sell us things, and to prevent us from unifying in opposition to them. This has been clear since the 1960's and 1970's when the CIA devoted numerous resources to studying and influencing the French postmodernist philosophers, and they have worked to push this ideology in academia for decades. Now it is leaking into the "real world" due to a generation or two being raised on it and the rise of social media allowing its ideas to spread like a virus.