THE GOP’S WAR ON WOKE
It’s hardly a secret that politicians like to define their opponents with simplistic, negative code words that can offset their positive messages and turn off potential voters.
For the 2020 Republicans, that word was “socialist,” as they sought to make mainstream Democrats like Joe Biden into the ideological kin of self-proclaimed democratic socialists Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.
For the Biden White House, the target is the “MAGA Republicans,” an effort to link all shades of Republicans with the anti-democratic extremism of former President Donald Trump’s “Make America Great Again” movement.
Now, as Republicans launch their 2024 effort to regain the White House, they are trying to label every Democrat policy and politician as “woke” and turn a historically positive definition of openness, diversity and racial justice into a code word for left-wing extremism.
It’s part of a broader GOP assault against the transformation of American society that has seen wider acceptance of racial and sexual diversification and more open discussion of attitudes toward the transgender community and America’s legacy of slavery.
Though many are doing it, the antiwoke campaign has become most associated with Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, who clearly hopes it can be a vehicle that he can ride into the presidency. It’s a term he uses against liberal or even mainstream policies with little restraint.
But DeSantis is hardly the only GOP hopeful using the new conservative code word.
“The antidote to woke America is freedom,” former Vice President Mike Pence told an audience last year at the University of Virginia, declaring “wokeism is running amok in universities and schools.”
Former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, a West Point graduate, said in an article for Fox News, “we must do everything we can to stop the spread of wokeness throughout our armed forces.”
New Hampshire Gov. Chris Sununu, considered a more moderate hopeful, told Fox News that he agrees with DeSantis — “we need to push back on woke policy” — but disagrees with his aggressive actions against corporations like curbing the Disney Co.’s tax benefits for opposing DeSantis initiatives.
Confusion about the use of the word “woke” is understandable, since it has been used by both advocates and critics of the “diversity, equality and inclusion” policies it’s designed to champion.
The Merriam-Webster Dictionary defines “woke” as being “aware of and actively attentive to important societal facts and issues (especially issues of racial and social justice).” Wikipedia says it’s an adjective from African American vernacular English meaning “alert to racial prejudice and discrimination.”
More recently, it adds, “it came to encompass a broader awareness of racial inequalities such as sexism and has been used as shorthand for American Left ideas involving identity politics and social justice, such as the notion of white privilege and slavery reparations for African Americans.”
Over the past decade, however, opponents have given negative connotations to a word designed to illustrate the positive breadth of American diversity.
Targets include the Black Lives Matter movement; critical race theory programs that explore the role of racism in American life; the more open discussion of issues of gender diversity; and even the impact of environmentalism on economic decision-making.
In a broader sense, its critics are signaling to the more conservative elements within the country’s shrinking white majority that they want to roll back the clock to an era where these issues were neither openly discussed nor accepted as valid influences.