Turning the Tide on “Woke”
The Democrats have a "wokeness" problem, but it's not the one we're talking about.
The conventional wisdom is that the Democrats lost the 2024 election because they went too far on DEI and leaned into “wokeness.” While there may be a grain of truth to it, I don’t believe it’s the whole story.
First, people vote largely on economic matters. As Ronald Reagan famously asked, “Are you better off than you were four years ago?” Second, Kamala Harris, at best, did not have the time to prepare for a national campaign, and at worst, she was just a mediocre candidate. But where wokeness is concerned, it’s not that wokeness itself doomed the Democrats. It’s that they let Trump and the Republicans control the narrative. In other words, they failed to make the case for standing up for marginalized people.
When you’re in a war, particularly a war where moral and civil rights are concerned, you don’t yield ground to your enemy. You do everything to turn the tide and rally people to your cause. In this sense, the Democrats have wimped out in the worst way. They wimped out on standing up for people, even when they knew they were in the right.
And now, some so-called liberal politicians and talking heads are ceding even more ground on wokeness. There’s Bill Maher, complaining about how DEI went too far. There’s Bill Maher interviewing Gavin Newsom, who agrees with him, despite his many years of supporting the LGBTQ+ community. Gavin Newsom is a presumptive Democratic presidential candidate, and so he is positioning himself to appeal to a broader base. He is exactly the type of candidate who measures everything he says and does via polling. He is so slippery that oil would trip over him.
What Maher, Newsom, and others like them fail to realize is that they are providing cover to the enemies of wokeism, and I don’t use the term “enemy” lightly. All over the country, state and local governments in red states are passing anti-trans bills that limit the rights of trans people. They are telling universities and colleges what they can and cannot teach, including Black history, feminism, and other studies pertaining to marginalized communities. In short, they are taking away people’s rights and bending the arc of justice toward something Orwellian. We used to point to the Soviet Union and other dictatorships as contrary to our values because they told their universities what they could and could not teach. Now, here in America, it’s suddenly fine to do so.
We should be able to have a reasonable discussion on the nuances of some of these issues. We should be able to ask ourselves whether minors should be able to go through transitions without their parents’ approval, whether trans women should play in women’s sports, and whether acknowledging the racism of our founding fathers means we should rename all the schools named after them (or after Lincoln, which seems crazy). All of these are legitimate questions, but I refuse to engage anyone on these topics if they believe that trans people do not deserve equal protection under the law, that universities should not teach certain things that offend them, or that we are in some sort of post-racist society.
When someone like Gavin Newsom, who is leading in the very early polls for his party’s nomination, yields ground on these issues, he is empowering the enemies not of wokeness but of our democratic ideals. And that’s what a real candidate needs to point out.
When someone complains about DEI, the first thing you should do is ask them to spell it out. Diversity: isn’t that something that has made this melting-pot country great? Equity: everybody gets a fair chance and is treated equally–is that really something we should turn our backs on? Inclusion: hell, we teach our kids about it in kindergarten!
A real candidate would turn the tide on this issue, and that real candidate is not Gavin Newsom, and it sure isn’t Kamala Harris, because she failed to do so in 2024. A real candidate would make the case for Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion, because those words align with our national ideals. In other words, a real candidate would stand up for people, all people, period. Maybe if the left elevated such turn-the-tide candidates and made the case, they could recapture people who understand that if you come after some people, you can come after any people, and they might capture people who have stayed out of elections precisely because they don’t see a Democratic Party standing up for them.
But also, and more to the point, a real candidate would point out that all of these cultural issues are a distraction. It’s the oldest trick in the book, something even Plato wrote about in The Republic: it is the mark of a dictator to inflame people’s passions on wedge issues and divide them, so that nobody will notice them accumulating power and wealth at the expense of the people. A real candidate would ask, what has a trans person, a Black history professor, or a feminist ever done to take your job away, raise the price of gas and groceries, and enrich themselves at your expense?
This is how you turn the tide on “wokeness.” Maybe it needs a rebrand to “fairness.” But either way, you fight the fight because it means standing up for people, because it’s the right thing to do. You don’t cede ground on taking people’s rights away. If Democrats can’t make the case on standing up for people, while MAGA Republicans divide people and dupe them into believing they stand for people, then Democrats deserve to lose.
Fight back, and get rid of the Newsoms.