this is not going to be further reflecting on whether the United States has reached “top I woke up.” But that's part of the story. So let's start there.
About a decade ago, many on the left adopted the word “woke,” a term with roots in African American culture and activism. Originally it meant staying awake – that is, “woke” – to the dangers facing the black community. But in the hands of the broader, white academic and journalistic left, it soon became something of a catch-all for progressive politics, along with other buzzwords like “intersectionality.”
The combined effects of the Trump presidency, the death of George Floyd, and the COVID-19 pandemic pushed the awakening into overdrive. This was the era of “defund the police” and other radical nonsense.
The right soon adopted the word, using “woke” as a catch-all term for everything (woke or not, real or not) that the left hated. The novelty of the concept of wokeness gave equal jitters, for a time, to anti-wokeness. Actually, it's a familiar story: the same thing happened with “political correctness” in the early 90s.
Republican politicians declared war upon awakening. Former presidential candidate and Florida Governor Ron DeSantis was at the forefront against wokeness, even pushing for Stop the WOKE Act through the state Legislature. It didn't work out too well for DeSantis or his imitators.
And that's the point: both woke and anti-woke have lost their transgressive character. Now they are both a little “embarrassed,” as the children say.
And that is a sign of healing.
One of the worst annoyances of polarized politics is the way in which marginal sectors feed off each other symbiotically. As smugglers and baptists Both benefit from blue laws, the extreme left and the extreme right need each other to justify their catastrophism. The worst that could happen to House Republican fundraising efforts would be if the “squad” of far-left members of Congress were replaced by sensible Democrats. And the last thing the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee wants is for Marjorie Taylor Greene to be elected in the primary by a smart Republican who doesn't talk about Jewish space lasers.
So is the awakening over? Probably not. The term might be in terminal decline as more than an epithet, but the ideas will still be around for a while (as will anti-woke) because both are just stand-ins for the culture war left and right.
But it seems that many on the left are beginning to realize that they went too far. Most Democrats no longer talk about “defunding the police” because it is a wildly unpopular idea, even among blacks. They also don't use the term “Latinx” as much now that they have learned that repelled more Latinos than I would like.
it was recently reported that the Massachusetts Institute of Technology will no longer require applicants for faculty positions to submit “diversity statements” confirming their support for “diversity, inclusion and belonging.” University President Sally Kornbuth told UnHerd: “We can build an inclusive environment in many ways, but forced statements affect freedom of expression and do not work.”
A number of elite schools have changed course by again requiring standardized testing. Large corporations are reducing backwards its diversity, equity and inclusion, or DEI, departments that emerged under Trump.
And, of course, the explosion of lawlessness and anti-Semitic rhetoric at elite universities has been a lesson for academia, the left, and Democrats. The country is not so mired in disorder and intolerance. Polls suggest the public is on the side of police more than protesters.
There is a lesson for the right here as well. For a decade, the populist right has complained that it has lost every battle in the culture war to rationalize its embrace of radical, authoritarian policies. But the premise is wrong. The right does not always lose—or win—more than the left.
Trump and his supporters insist that the United States cannot survive without him in the White House. William Barr, who was attorney general under Trump, says his former boss is unfit to be president, but he will still vote for him because a second Biden term would be “national suicide“For being awake or something. Never mind that wokeness emerged under Trump and receded under Biden.
Obviously, the right and the left still have a lot to complain and worry about. The point is that there is always There is a lot to complain and worry about. The tides come and go. And people learn, eventually, from their mistakes.
