The Washington Post explains Republican anti-wokeism

About as well as you would expect

It’s part of the Washington Post’s job to supply readers with talking points they can use to deride conservative themes and movements that have taken hold and threaten the left. For example, here’s the Post’s standard description of Critical Race Theory: “A somewhat dense academic theory that is rarely, if ever, a formal part of elementary or high school curriculums but is now part of political positioning.” The quotation is from a column by the Post’s Dan Balz, but might well have been cut-and-pasted from any of a dozen prior Post articles.

The talking point is misleading to the point of dishonesty, but that’s a subject for another time. Today, I want to address the Post’s talking points on “wokeism.”

They appear is this article. Like the CRT talking point, they are quite misleading.

The Post tells its readers that wokeism is a “vague and expansive” concept that Republicans have seized upon for political gain, without much likelihood of success. It adds that the term “woke” dates back to a 1938 protest song by Lead Belly, an African-American blues singer. This sets the table for a Duke University professor to suggest that the attack on wokeism is racist. (More on this ridiculous talking point later.)

What is wokeism, actually? I think it’s an attitude and an agenda.

The attitude is that only a portion of the population (the woke) is awake to reality. Those who disagree with the views of the woke are asleep.

This is little more than a hipster version of the leftists’ conceit that they are on “the right side of history” — a view that dates back to Marx and his embrace of Hegel’s “dialectic,” if not further. It’s not an argument; it’s clever packaging.

Wokeism is, indeed, the province of hipsters — “over-educated white people” and inhabitants of “faculty lounges,” as none other than James Carville puts it. The word “woke” may have originated with blacks 80 years ago, but it featured little in the modern civil rights movement, and was never attacked by conservatives in that context.

Only after arrogant 20-somethings “culturally appropriated” the word did conservatives made anti-wokeism a theme. So much for any suggestion that doing so is racist.

The woke agenda follows from the things wokesters say the rest of us are missing because we’re not awake. We are asleep to the fact that climate change is going to destroy the planet within a relatively short period of time. We are asleep to the fact that America is incorrigibly racist. We are too sleepy to realize that there are many genders a person can choose to be. And so forth.

From these “woke” realizations come ESG (environmental, social, and governance investing), DEI (diversity, equity and inclusion), and a host of radical transgender demands. This forms much of the core of wokeism.

The Post’s claim that anti-wokeism is “vague,” “expansive,” and ill-defined can easily be answered. Any movement will have a core of agenda items that nearly every adherent agrees with, along with more peripheral concerns that some adherents agree with and others would rather leave alone. And there will always be “mission creep.” These realities do not undermine the validity and usefulness of the label the movement adopts.

What about the Post’s claim, per Rich Thau of the “Swing Voter Project,” that anti-wokeism won’t succeed in winning over swing voters whose support is often the key to winning elections? Thau bases this view on focus groups he conducted with adults in competitive states who voted for Trump in 2016 and Biden in 2020. He found that these voters “struggled to explain what wokeism is, even in the most general of terms.”

No doubt. But do they struggle to reject the view that boys who claim to be female should shower with girls? With the view that whites attending elementary schools should be told they are “privileged” because of their race? How about the view that funding for the police should be decreased because police forces are racist?

We know that a candidate who runs against wokeisms like these can be elected governor in a state Democrats normally carry. Glenn Youngkin did it a year-and-a-half ago. And last November, anti-woke crusader Ron DeSantis won a landslide victory in what was, until recently, a swing state.

It’s up to individual conservative candidates to decide whether, in a general election campaign, to use the word “woke” and how often to do so. I assume such candidates will make that decision based on their instincts and what they learn from focus groups.

I believe skillful politicians can, in general elections, make the word “wokeism” work for them as a label deriding much of what they’re against. But even if I’m wrong about that, campaigning against the woke agenda has plenty of potential for success.

If it didn’t, the Post probably wouldn’t have published the article I’ve just addressed.