Skip to content
Search

Latest Stories

Top Stories

What happened to the Republican war on 'woke'  and what we should have learned from it

Pencil erasing the word "woke"
mj0007/Getty Images

Goldberg is editor-in-chief of The Dispatch and the host of The Remnant podcast. His Twitter handle is @JonahDispatch

This isn't going to be more musing about whether America has reached "peak woke." But that is part of the story. So let's start there.

About a decade ago, many on the left embraced the word "woke," a term with roots in African American culture and activism. It originally meant staying awake — that is, "woke" — to the dangers facing the Black community. But in the hands of the broader, and whiter, academic and journalistic left, it soon became a kind of cool catchall for progressive politics, alongside other buzzwords like "intersectionality."

The combined effects of the Trump presidency, the death of George Floyd and the COVID-19 pandemic pushed wokeness into overdrive. This was the era of "defund the police" and other radical inanities.


The right soon took up the word, using "woke" as a catchall for everything — woke or not, real or not — it hated about the left. The novelty of wokeness as a concept lent an equal edginess, for a time, to anti-wokeness. It's a familiar tale, really: The same thing happened with "political correctness" in the early '90s.

Sign up for The Fulcrum newsletter

Republican politicians declared war on wokeness. Erstwhile presidential candidate and Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis was at the anti-woke vanguard, even pushing the Stop WOKE Act through the state Legislature. It didn't work out too well for DeSantis or his imitators.

And that's the point: Both wokeness and anti-wokeness have lost their transgressive edge. Now they're both kind of "cringe," as the kids say.

And that is a sign of healing.

One of the worst annoyances of polarized politics is the way the fringes symbiotically feed off each other. Like bootleggers and Baptists both benefiting from blue laws, the extreme left and extreme right need each other to justify their catastrophizing. The worst thing that could happen for Republican House fundraising efforts would be for the "Squad" of far-left members of Congress to be replaced by sensible Democrats. And the last thing the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee wants is for Marjorie Taylor Greene to be primaried by an intelligent Republican who doesn't talk about Jewish space lasers.

So is woke over? Probably not. The term might be in terminal decline as anything other than an epithet, but the ideas are going to be around for a while — as will anti-wokeness — because both are just stand-ins for the culture war's left and right.

But it does seem as if many on the left are starting to realize they went too far. Most Democrats don't talk about "defunding the police" anymore because it is a wildly unpopular idea, including among Black people. Nor do they use the term "Latinx" as much now that they have learned that it repelled more Latinos than it pleased.

It was recently reported that the Massachusetts Institute of Technology will no longer require applicants for faculty jobs to submit "diversity statements" confirming their support for "diversity, inclusion and belonging." University President Sally Kornbluth told UnHerd, "We can build an inclusive environment in many ways, but compelled statements impinge on freedom of expression, and they don't work."

A slew of elite schools have reversed course by requiring standardized tests again. Big corporations are paring back their diversity, equity and inclusion, or DEI, departments, which surged under Trump.

And, of course, the explosion of lawlessness and antisemitic rhetoric on elite campuses has been a lesson for academia, the left and Democrats. The country isn't that into disorder and bigotry. Polls suggest that the public is siding with police more than protesters.

There's a lesson here for the right too. For a decade, the populist right has been whining about losing every battle in the culture war to rationalize its embrace of radical and authoritarian politics. But the premise is wrong. The right doesn't always lose — or win — any more than the left does.

Trump and his supporters insist that America can't survive without him in the White House. William Barr, who was attorney general under Trump, says his former boss is utterly unfit to be president but that he will still vote for him because a second Biden term would amount to "national suicide" because of wokeness or something. Never mind that wokeness surged under Trump and has been receding under Biden.

Obviously, the right and left still have plenty to complain and worry about. The point is that there's always plenty to complain and worry about. Tides come and go. And people learn, eventually, from their mistakes.

First posted May 7, 2024. (C)2024 Tribune Content Agency, LLC.

Read More

A Right to Exist in Mutual Dignity

Paper cut-outs of people and the earth.

Getty Images, Liliia Bila

A Right to Exist in Mutual Dignity

The question of Israel's right to exist isn't an abstract debate—it's written in the ashes of six million souls, in the tears of generations, and in the fierce determination of a people who refuse to let their story end in darkness. Any questioning of Israel's right to exist is to whisper that the Jewish people's centuries-long journey of survival, resilience, and hope, somehow matters less than others. As a Black American, I know too well how systems of oppression work to deny people their fundamental humanity.

When Hamas' charter calls for Israel's destruction, it echoes the same dehumanizing logic that has justified countless atrocities past and present. However, there is an inconvenient truth one must remain answerable to. Israel's right to exist doesn't permit any of us to look away from Palestinian suffering. Personal experiences with injustice inform the understanding that pain doesn't cancel out pain. Trauma doesn't negate trauma. The Jewish people have a right to security and self-determination in their uniquely established territorial homeland alongside—not in opposition to—the Palestinian people's right to dignity and self determination in their ancestral homeland.

Keep ReadingShow less
Interpersonal communication is a – not the only – way to reduce political divides
Polarization and the politics of love
Polarization and the politics of love

Interpersonal communication is a – not the only – way to reduce political divides

Think of the words “a” and “the.” Two of the smallest and most basic words in English, it is easy to not think very closely about which to use.

Yet when it comes to thinking about how to reduce perceived political divides, the difference becomes clear.

Keep ReadingShow less
Fulcrum Democracy Forum: Maxine Rich

Maxine Rich, Program Manager with Common Ground USA at Search for Common Ground

Fulcrum Democracy Forum: Maxine Rich

Maxine Rich is the Program Manager with Common Ground USA at Search for Common Ground.

Rich applies proven methods from international peacebuilding to shore up social cohesion in the United States. She oversees efforts to reduce online polarization and build grassroots resilience to extremism.

Keep ReadingShow less
The Republican Party Can Build A Winning Coalition With Independents

People voting at a polling booth.

Getty Images//Rawpixel

The Republican Party Can Build A Winning Coalition With Independents

The results of the 2024 election should put to bed any doubts as to the power of independent voters to decide key elections. Independents accounted for 34% of voters in 2024, handing President Trump the margin of victory in every swing state race and making him only the second Republican to win the popular vote since 1988. The question now is whether Republicans will build bridges with independent voters and cement a generational winning coalition or squander the opportunity like the Democrats did with the independent-centric Obama coalition.

Almost as many independents came out to vote this past November as Republicans, more than the 31% of voters who said they were Democrats, and just slightly below the 35% of voters who said they were Republicans. In 2020, independents cast just 26% of the ballots nationwide. The President’s share of the independent vote went up 5% compared to the 2020 election when he lost the independent vote to former President Biden by a wide margin. It’s no coincidence that many of the key demographics that President Trump made gains with this election season—Latinos, Asians and African Americans—are also seeing historic levels of independent voter registration.

Keep ReadingShow less