The Misuses of “Woke”

At one point during the nomination fight, Trump made fun of those who say “woke woke woke” all the time. “It’s just a term they use,” he said dismissively. “Half the people can’t even define it, they don’t know what it is.”

Trump is undoubtedly a culture warrior in his own way, but he’s not wrong that the term is extremely loose. While its earliest meaning was something like “aware of and vigilant about racism,” perhaps its dominant meaning now is a kind of progressive culture-war posturing characterized by language policing, censoriousness, automatic deference based on personal identity, and moralizing about individual behavior. Certainly that seems to be the thing that socialist critics like Adolph Reed or the late Michael Brooks have in mind when they criticize things they call “woke.”

Know Your Enemy cohost Sam Adler-Bell captured part of what people are often talking about when they talk about wokeness when he described “the language of wokeness” as a “communicative register” that presents “unintuitive and morally burdensome” progressive requirements “in a manner that suggests they are self-evident.”

That kind of thing definitely exists and, as Adler-Bell articulated, it strikes many people as obnoxious and controlling. It’s no surprise, then, that many conservatives have perceived an opening to capitalize on a backlash against “wokeness.” This in turn has often led them to overuse the term in ways that make it an all-purpose signifier for things they don’t like. Anything that has anything to do with “social justice” becomes woke in their rhetoric.

Ordinary right-wingers may not like wokeness, but they also seem to find preoccupied “anti-wokeness” off-putting, possibly for the same reason: it amounts to hectoring over niche concerns. That level of culture-war obsession speaks much more to right-wing media creatures who spend much of their time stewing about how annoyed they are by their counterparts in mainstream and progressive media spaces than it does to ordinary Republican voters who don’t spend all day on X, formerly Twitter. Similarly, Chait’s formulation that people who didn’t think DeSantis could beat Trump weren’t “paying attention to conservative media” is telling. Why think that what was going on in conservative media is going to reliably track the concerns of voters — even conservative ones? Right-wing podcasters and magazine interns simply aren’t a very large demographic.

DeSantis’s bizarre decision to do his campaign launch as an experimental use of Twitter Spaces is emblematic of his campaign’s discourse poisoning. Most people aren’t on Twitter, and the ones who geek out about the idea of interacting in a Twitter Space are a small minority even of Twitter users.

Getting Out of the Culture War

The final and deepest problem may be that the sort of obsessive, carping “anti-wokeness” represented by DeSantis ends up replicating a great deal of what makes “wokeness” so off-putting in the first place. I wasn’t surprised, for example, to see one poll that suggested that even Republican voters tend to dislike the idea of using government power to crusade against businesses that allegedly “promote ‘woke’ left ideology” — an idea that DeSantis enthusiastically supports and attempted to put in practice in Florida, where he’s battled the Disney corporation for culture war–related reasons.

If “wokeness” spurs backlash by projecting an obnoxious and controlling attitude that insists that everyone be on board with a given checklist of cultural preoccupations, why would an anti-wokeness that displays similar characteristics be a winning formula for appealing to voters — even conservative ones? Even voters who (unlike me) favor socially conservative policies may dislike a sense that everyone and everything is being constantly policed for signs of excessive “wokeness.” In other words, anti-wokeness may be beginning to feel like wokeness by another name.

Left-wing writer Freddie deBoer once captured much of what can be annoying about “wokeness” in an essay called “Planet of Cops“:

People are alienated and worn down and hopeless, and so they see their opportunity to finally be the one pulling over somebody else’s car, lazily tapping the glass with their flashlights. . . . Everyone’s a detective in the Division of Problematics, and they walk the beat 24/7. You search and search for someone Bad doing Bad Things, finding ways to indict writers and artists and ordinary people for something, anything. That movie that got popular? Give me a few hours and 800 words. I’ll get you your indictments.

Well — why would nonstop hectoring about movies that are “too woke” be any less grating over time? Conservative pundit Ben Shapiro — tellingly, a strong DeSantis supporter — put out a video where he ranted for forty-three minutes about the woke feminist evils of Barbie. I didn’t see the film, so I can’t judge, but as far as I can tell Barbie was light and fun and vast numbers of ordinary people enjoyed watching it. Is there any particular reason why people would enjoy Officer Shapiro tapping at their window to demand to know why they liked that than, say, Officer Noah Berlatsky complaining that Schindler’s List didn’t have a strong enough anti-fascist message?

Maybe ordinary Americans are getting sick of all of this and would like to turn the dial of the “woke” vs. “anti-woke” culture war down a notch or two. Fingers crossed that politicians hear the message.