US Democrats count the cost of strident 'wokeness'
As published in the Western People, 3 December 2024
People are seen looting stores at the Grove shopping center in the Fairfax District of Los Angeles on May 30, 2020, during the Black Lives Matter protests. Picture: Valerie Macon/AFP via Getty Images
It was 2020, during the height of the ‘Black Lives Matter’ protests when TV host, Trevor Noah, finished his ‘Daily Show’ comedy programme with a clip from a city whose name I forget. A local store (a Target supermarket I think) had been deliberately set on fire and a young black woman was interviewed nearby. She stridently defended the protesters’ actions saying (effectively) that it was the expression of their anger and a clamour for change by the local Black community. Noah, who is an upper-middle class, South African Black comedian, uncharacteristically signed off his segment without challenging her spiel, instead sombrely asking who were we to argue the Black Lives Matter protestor’s point of view.
Except, he should have. This was a local neighbourhood store which had been attacked by people drawn from the very community who relied on it for low-cost groceries and other necessities (American shops seem to carry everything). It also was clearly a stupid target (pun intended) for such destruction, as scores of local retail workers would now be unemployed with its closure — perhaps family and friends of the arsonists themselves.
Noah’s reticence to criticise the protestors was far from unique, with calls by activists to ‘defund the police’ often going unchallenged in the left-wing debate space. This in turn led to right-wing accusations that the mainstream media were too ‘woke’, even as they themselves failed to acknowledge the failings within the justice system which had sparked the ‘Black Lives Matter’ movement in the first place. The public debate here often feels like blind passengers arguing with their deaf colleagues about the Titanic’s deckchairs as she is sinking.
Being ‘woke’ is thus both worn as a badge of honour and cast up as a derogatory insult, often within the same conversation. According to Wikipedia, the term originated in African-American Vernacular English (AAVE), principally referring to a person’s alertness to racial prejudice and discrimination. ‘Woke’ has evolved significantly over time, especially in the last decade or so, expanding its semantic range to encompass a broader awareness of social injustices, especially issues related to systemic racism, gender inequality, and various forms of oppression. However, there has been a growing backlash against this most recent iteration of ‘wokeness’ with critics blaming it for stifling debate with ‘cancel culture’, reverse-racism and unchallenged revisionist history.
Following Kamala Harris’s narrow loss to Donald Trump, the post-mortem debate within the Democrat party is at times been bitter and heated. The veteran political strategist, James Carville, has called the party’s presidential defeat on ‘woke era’ politics, arguing that the perception of Democrats aiming to defund the police and wanting ‘to empty prisons’ was not popular with voters.[1] Other senior party officials are disseminating that ‘woke’ advocacy groups pushed Democrats to adopt extreme policies, driving voters away from the party.[2] So, while left-wing voices such as Senator Bernie Sanders point to disillusionment among working-class voters to Joe Biden’s government, over high inflation, widening wealth inequality and failure to deliver economic reforms, the moderate or conservative Democrats see the party’s embrace of progressive cultural issues as having alienated moderate and working-class voters.
Even as the economic argument (and anger over illegal immigration) has been borne out in polls, there was also a perception of Harris being ‘too Woke’ with 47% of likely voters viewing her as ‘too progressive or liberal’. This is ironic, considering she campaigned with many former right-wing Republicans such as Liz Cheney.[3] Yet, Donald Trump’s campaign doubled down on this labelling of Harris, with Trump himself frequently highlighting transgender issues at rallies, implying she supported radical gender policies. He claimed schools were indoctrinating children and lied that ‘there are some places, your boy leaves for school, comes back a girl. OK? Without parental consent’. His campaign’s advert stating ‘Kamala is for they/them, President Trump is for you’ was very effective in mocking inclusive language and portraying Harris as out of touch with mainstream voters.[4]
I recently met a 30-something-year-old tech entrepreneur who claimed that Democrats were turning off voters such as himself, by engaging in these culture wars. He believed strongly in the European model of left-wing politics but said that the American left was dividing people into communities of diversity or ethnic groups, instead of seeing the overarching socio-economic commonalities of the working class. He did not vote in the election and said he had stayed awake several nights with his gun ready, during the ‘Black Lives’ protests, when cars were being torched on his street and shops looted. While he was culturally liberal, he found ‘self-righteous woke idealogues’ hard to take for berating people into using they/them prefixes or accepting gender fluidity. As a Bernie Sanders supporter, he also saw Hillary Clinton, Joe Biden and Kamala Harris as part of the elite establishment, yet he also abhorred the Republican agenda. He thus no longer felt either political party represented his views. He is not alone.
I am reminded of a conversation in a Ballina pub with a Knockmore man whom I had played GAA football (badly) against, following the marriage-equality referendum. He supported the constitutional change that gave official status to same-sex marriages but was yet uncomfortable with his side’s moralistic campaign. ‘Basically they are telling me that I am an awful person if I have some reservations about any part of their agenda. Its either all or nothing and I’m afraid to say anything out loud about it’.
There seems to be a ‘woke’ disconnect between progressives who stridently advocate for social justice and their conservative comrades seeking economic reform. As long as being ‘woke’ fails to build relationships with others who are not, or meet opponents where they are at, then it is doomed to fail – especially where it results in people divided from each other by skin colour, ethnicity, sexual orientation or gender expression. However, there is no sign the Democrat party is coming to terms with this and the alternative is already happening, in the form of another Trump administration.
[1] https://www.newsweek.com/james-carville-harris-loss-woke-politics-1982035
[2] https://www.thenation.com/article/politics/corporate-democrats-not-woke-activists-doomed-kamala-harris/
[3] https://www.tuftsdaily.com/article/2024/11/there-is-no-one-reason-harris-lost
[4] https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/election-fact-check-transgender-issues-trump-harris/story?id=115349047