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

Hand waving an American flag

"Freedom, a word that should inspire, has been distorted to justify the unchecked pursuit of individual interests at the expense of collective well-being," writes Johnson.

nicoletaionescu/Getty Images

Redefining America's political lingua franca

Johnson is a United Methodist pastor, the author of "Holding Up Your Corner: Talking About Race in Your Community" and program director for the Bridge Alliance, which houses The Fulcrum.

A seismic shift has occurred in America's race, identity and power discourse. Like tectonic plates beneath the Earth's surface, long-held assumptions are adjusting and giving way to a reimagined lingua franca for civic engagement. This revived language of liberation redefines the terms of debate. It empowers us to reclaim and reinvigorate words once weaponized principally against marginalized communities.

Keep ReadingShow less
Ilana Redstone
Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation

‘A healthy democracy requires social trust’: A conversation with Ilana Redstone

Berman is a distinguished fellow of practice at The Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation, co-editor of Vital City, and co-author of "Gradual: The Case for Incremental Change in a Radical Age." This is the eighth in a series of interviews titled "The Polarization Project."

Ilana Redstone has launched a personal campaign against certainty. A professor of sociology at the University of Illinois and a former co-director of the Mill Institute, Redstone believes certainty is the accelerant that has helped to fuel the culture wars and political polarization in the United States.

“The power of certainty is easy to underestimate,” she writes. “And when it comes to both aspiring and established democracies, that underestimation can be downright dangerous. Certainty makes it possible to kill in the name of righteousness, to tear down in the name of virtue, and to demonize and dismiss people who simply disagree.”

Keep ReadingShow less
Caleb Christen

Meet the change leaders: Caleb Christen

Nevins is co-publisher ofThe Fulcrum and co-founder and board chairman of theBridge Alliance Education Fund.

A lawyer by trade, Caleb Christen has served in the U.S. Navy Judge Advocate General’s Corps since 2007, including two deployments to the Middle East. He is now a senior officer in the Navy Reserve. Attending seminary and an executive education program in organizational leadership helped Christen identify that communities are not thriving as they were intended and that people must work together to transform American democracy and civic health.

As a result, Christen co-founded the Inter-Movement Impact Project to promote organizing for collective impact. His new focus is on “Better Together America,” a collaborative network providing support to the local democracy hubs that are emerging in communities across the United States.

Keep ReadingShow less
Mismatched letters speelling out "respect"
Thinglass

The power of disrespect: Introducing the Return2Respect movement

Marinace is the coordinator of the Return2Respect movement.

My first thought was to extol the virtues of respect. However, we all know respect is good and right and necessary. But do we really know the impacts of disrespect on individuals and our democratic principles?

Disrespect manifests itself through incivility, impacting how people relate to one another. A 2012 survey conducted by PRRI showed 82 percent of Americans believed lack of civil discourse among politicians was a serious problem. By 2023, a Pew study showed it still at 84 percent.

Keep ReadingShow less
Red and blue heads colliding
wildpixel/Getty Images

Toxic political talk undermines the foundations of our country

Johnson is a United Methodist pastor, the author of "Holding Up Your Corner: Talking About Race in Your Community" and program director for the Bridge Alliance, which houses The Fulcrum.

The 2024 presidential race is heating up and, with it, an alarming trend has emerged in how we as a nation are talking to each other. It's not just a matter of political strategy; it's a crisis that demands our immediate attention.

Keep ReadingShow less