The War on Woke, Part 3
The Right goes "anti-woke" crazy
When asked to define the word “woke”, Conservatives have a very difficult time doing so. During an interview on The Hill’s online program Rising, anti-woke culture warrior and conservative author Bethany Mandel became visibly flustered after co-host Briahna Joy Gray asked her to define the word “woke.”
Mandel was promoting her new book “Stolen Youth” which proposes that America’s youth are being brainwashed into the “woke ideology” by nefarious forces on the Left. She even spends an entire chapter defining the word “woke” to her readers yet when asked by the host to define it for her, she was stuck.
Gray asks: “What does that mean to you? Would you mind defining woke? It’s come up a couple of times. I just want to make sure we’re on the same page.”
Mandel seemed stunned by the simple question, stammering: “So, I mean, woke is sort of the idea that … um …” After a few seconds of silence, Mandel predicted: “This is going to be one of those moments that goes viral.”
Well that moment went viral indeed.
And when the question of the meaning of the word came up during a Florida trial over the potential reinstatement of Democratic State Attorney Andrew Warren, whom DeSantis suspended after Warren signed a pledge not to prosecute abortion seekers or providers. DeSantis argued that Warren’s pledge signaled a failure to perform his duties (the judge ruled that Warren’s ousting was blatantly unconstitutional, but also said he couldn’t do anything about it).
Asked what “woke” means more generally, [Desantis’ General Counsel Ryan] Newman said “it would be the belief there are systemic injustices in American society and the need to address them.”
Newman added that DeSantis doesn’t believe there are systemic injustices in the U.S. He also emphasized he believed Warren’s “wokeism” led him to sign the pledge not to prosecute abortion crimes, the primary factor that led to his suspension.
A belief that there are systemic injustices in this country and the need to address them.
THAT is the meaning of the word “woke”. The word that’s supposedly “tearing apart the fabric of this country,” according to Conservatives.
Meanwhile DeSantis continues on his “anti-woke” crusade, stating flatly after his reelection that Florida is “where woke goes to die.” He even signed a new law in 2022 called the “Stop W.O.K.E. Act” which essentially prohibits instruction on race relations or diversity that imply a person's status as either privileged or oppressed is necessarily determined by his or her race, color, national origin, or sex.
Might as well have called it “Stop REALITY Act”.
Republicans and Conservatives across all spectrums have now settled on the word “woke” to mean “everything we hate about the Left, about Progressivism, about anti-racism, and about social justice.”
In fact when Fox News recently fired Tucker Carlson, Marjorie Taylor Greene felt it necessary to accuse Fox of being a bastion of “wokeness” without a shred of irony. And in public speeches Ron Desantis cannot go two minutes without bashing wokeness.
Mike Pompeo, a former secretary of state and a possible presidential candidate, recently tweeted, “Our internal threats — especially those trying to corrupt our kids with toxic wokeness — are more serious than our external threats.” At the most recent Conservative Political Action Conference, the Republican presidential candidate Nikki Haley said, “Wokeness is a virus more dangerous than any pandemic.”
Given that the Covid pandemic has already killed over a million Americans, this is transparently insane, even if you find much of what falls under the rubric of wokeness annoying. Such threat inflation is best explained by the right’s desperation for a unifying enemy. But to support the weight they’re putting on wokeness, conservatives have had to create a hallucinatory conspiracy theory about how progressive social change works.
None of this is to say that the war on wokeness can’t do enormous damage. Laws are being passed all over the country targeting trans people, particularly trans kids, and the right’s language has turned openly eliminationist. (One speaker at CPAC said, “Transgenderism must be eradicated.”) America is enduring a wave of hysterical anti-woke censorship. In Oklahoma the State Senate just passed a bill banning material with “a predominant tendency to appeal to prurient interest in sex” from all public libraries, not just those in schools.
Public polling does not support Republicans’ anti-woke agenda
However this “war on woke” doesn’t seem to be playing as well as Republicans think it does, as a recent USA TODAY/Ipsos poll indicated, where 56% of responded said the term means "to be informed, educated on, and aware of social injustices” and only 39% agreed with the Republican definition of “to be overly politically correct and police others' words."
“Most Americans understand that to be woke is to be tuned in to injustices around us,” said Cliff Young of Ipsos. "But for a key segment of Republicans who make up the Trump-DeSantis base, 'woke' is a clear trigger for the worst of the politically correct, emerging multicultural majority."
Americans overwhelmingly oppose, by 76%-21%, efforts by state governments to ban certain books from school classrooms and libraries. The opposition to state bans crosses party lines, including 86% of Democrats, 78% of independents and 66% of Republicans.
The partisan divide is gaping on matters involving gender.
Overall, those surveyed overwhelmingly oppose the use of gender-neutral pronouns to describe someone, 61%-36% but while almost all Republicans oppose gender-neutral pronouns, 87%-11%, Democrats support them by double-digits, 61%-37%.
The clashing views are similar over whether people should be able to identify as someone other than "man" or "woman" on government documents such as passports and birth certificates. Overall, Americans oppose the idea by 61%-36%.
While 88% of Republicans oppose it, however, 60% of Democrats support it.
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