Is woke a four-letter word?

Arkansas Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders knew exactly what she was doing when, in her response to Joe Biden’s State of the Union, she excoriated his “crazy” “woke fantasies.” Like her old boss Donald Trump and Florida’s Ron DeSantis, she was ginning up a Republican base that gets in a lather over anything that they perceive as progressive overreach.

She was hitting a blow-up dummy version of the president, not the real thing.

In fact, Biden is a well-grounded, mainstream Democrat who rightly rejects many excesses of those on his left flank. One among many examples: The portion of his address on criminal justice skillfully balanced a call to serious action to hold rogue cops accountable with a commitment to policing.

But there’s a second prominent elected official who’s been aiming rhetorical fire at “woke” Democrats, and this one has more of a point. It’s Mayor Adams — who, like Biden, won his office by addressing mainstream concerns that more progressive opponents downplayed. In other words, he listened to and spoke to the voters, not the advocate class.

“There’s a hemorrhaging of our Latino community, our AAPI communities, that’s leaving the traditional Democratic base, because we’ve allowed the loudest and those who consider themselves to be ‘woke’ [to take charge],” Adams says. “I think the party is now understanding that we have to speak at those issues that are important: jobs, public safety, educating our children, good health care, just these common kitchen-table issues.”

Adams is right that in this heavily Democratic city, there’s a powerful contingent of purer-than-thedriven-snow progressive officials who are less interested in building more effective government and a safer, fairer, more economically dynamic, responsibly budgeted city than in making simplistic ideological statements against development, policing, incarceration and so on.

There’s nothing at all wrong with being woke, if that means having one’s eyes opened to systemic racism and other injustices. But both Adams and Biden are right that the job of governing means fixing people’s problems in the real world. More power to them.