GOP pols rail against ‘wokeness’ of ‘leftist mob’

Beware the insomniacs. The unsleeping will loot cities, sabotage elections, pervert girls’ sports, defund police, ban guns, cancel Dr. Seuss, kick Republicans off social media, open the border and — this just in — denigrate the British royal family.

Republican political leaders hardly can utter a talking point nowadays without invoking the iniquitous motives of restless connivers. Almost as one, GOP operatives condemn “the woke” and all their attendant wokeness.

“If you keep threatening the public with your woke psychobabble, the NCAA will not last much longer,” Florida Sen. Rick Scott tweeted last week, as his party tried to gin up outrage over the NCAA’s refusal to ban transgender athletes from women’s sports. (The latest cultural issue the GOP’s political consultants hope will pique the tender sensibilities of a treasured constituency: angry, decidedly unwoke white guys in pickup trucks.)

Six days later, Scott was back at it, raging against Delta Airlines and Coca-Cola (along with executives from more than 100 other American companies) who dared criticize Georgia legislation apt to suppress Black voter turnout. “These companies are trying to do one-upmanship about how woke they can be,” he said on Fox News. Scott complained they had capitulated to “this woke crowd,” which he defined as a “leftist mob.”

Meanwhile, Sen. Marco Rubio was conjuring his own woke outrage, remarkably similar to Scott’s woke outrage, disparaging Major League Baseball “for the woke corporate virtue signaling of moving the All-Star Game from Atlanta.” (MLB was also reacting to Georgia’s election meddling.)

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, completing Florida’s anti-woke trinity, warned that corporate bosses, “by trying to genuflect to this wokeness” were “going to tie themselves in knots trying to please the extreme left.”

Merriam-Webster defines “Woke” (a millennial slang term expropriated from the lyrics — “I stay woke” — of a 2008 Erykah Badu song) as “aware of and actively attentive to important facts and issues (especially issues of racial and social justice.)” Last year, hoping to exploit resentment among Trumpsters over the Black Lives Matter movement, Republicans performed a linguistic retrofit, turning woke into their new favorite pejorative, a short hand for clunkier terms like “identity politics” or “political correctness” or “gender identity” or “critical race theory” and other jargon they ascribe to overzealous leftie dogmatism. Probably, “woke” elicited more frothing-at-the-mouth anger among Republican focus groups. Also, it’s easier to spell. (The wokeness phenomenon transcends national boundaries. In Britain, the Sun tabloid newspaper disparaged defecting royals Harry and Meghan as “the oppressive King and Queen of Woke”.)

Still, it’s slightly weird how a word outside the Republican lexicon a few years ago has suddenly become a ubiquitous utterance among pols competing for the approval of Trump voters, most of whom are still seething over the results of the 2020 election. When corporate leaders express their disgust over the Republican Party’s refusal to acknowledge certified election results, by the Jan. 6 capitol insurrection and by Republican-sponsored voter suppression legislation, their collective disapproval is dismissed as so much “woke capitalism.” Though “cancel culture” (another millennial term appropriated by right wingers) may rival “woke” as a favorite culture war-mongering buzz word. Rick Scott, as if Trump had won the election, warned Republican donors, “If they can cancel the President of the United States, they will have no problem canceling you and me.”

Even better to cobble together “woke” and “cancel culture” in the same rant. Especially in all-caps. After the dust-up over the new Georgia voting law, Donald Trump himself issued a statement: “For years the Radical Left Democrats have played dirty by boycotting products when anything from that company is done or stated in any way that offends them. Now they are going big time with WOKE CANCEL CULTURE and our sacred elections.”

Of course, lefties sling around their own weary cliches and catchphrases, stretching the definitions of fascism, Nazis, sexism or homophobia to include just about any conservative principle and discovering unintended trigger words or hidden bigotry or sexual intimidation in innocuous pronouncements. Their fragile sensitivities lend a certain truthiness to the “snowflake” taunts from rightwing pundits. The left’s ill-considered rallying cry last summer, “defund the police,” probably cost the Democrats seats in both the U.S. House and Senate.

Sloganeering mostly just warps reality. Whether we’re woke or unwoke, transgender kids still aren’t displacing women athletes. No serious politician would consider defunding police departments. This multistate campaign to restrict voting isn’t democratic. And Mr. and Mrs. Potato Head, shorn of their honorifics, won’t warp the gender identity of precious American children.

Just wake me up when this is over.

Fred Grimm