In Defense of Wokeness

After the election, the dismal fact that almost half the American people voted for Trump caused a massive soul-searching and self-flagellation by the left and various progressive or moderate pundits.  A culprit was quickly identified – wokeness!  The left had overplayed the wokeness card and provoked an otherwise sane half-portion of the electorate to throw in their lot with a corrupt, tinpot dictator wannabe.

But what is ‘wokeness’ really?  The Cambridge dictionary definition is:  'a state of being aware and attentive to issues of racial and social injustice'.  Sadly, both of those terms have now become anathema to the right.  Social justice equals ‘socialism and Marxism’ and racial justice equals ‘defund the police’.

Wokeness has now displaced ‘identity politics’ as the new poster child description for political correctness and liberal fragility – the self-righteous liberal wielding a cancel culture sword, seeing everything through the lens of racism or social injustice.  There is now an oft-heard self-criticism that democrats have alienated many independents and middle-of-the-road voters by emphasizing and focusing on wokeness.

The BLM movement, which reawakened much of the country in the spring to racial issues, began with a large support base (the Pew Charitable Trust estimated overall support at 67% in early June 2020), and the broad participation in protests led many to believe that we had reached a seminal moment in our society regarding race relations.  Many who had previously discounted concerns about continuing racial inequities began to acknowledge that a problem did indeed exist.

But as protests continued and the media focused on the sporadic violence and rioting that occurred in parallel, the support dropped significantly among white Americans (https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2020/09/16/support-for-black-lives-matter-has-decreased-since-june-but-remains-strong-among-black-americans/ ).  Highly exaggerated descriptions of an antifa threat became a staple of right-wing media.

The slogan ‘defund the police’, a pithy yet ill-chosen phrase for a complex topic, allowed the media and the Trump administration to frighten a large swath of the previously supportive public.  Images of rampant crime and unanswered calls to 911 were employed energetically in the four months leading up to the election.  How many independents and borderline voters were persuaded to return to the Trump fold because of this is hard to estimate, but it is not difficult to believe that it had a strong effect.

So yes, in one sense, the effort to make America ‘woke’ at least partially backfired.  And the effort to use soundbites like ‘defund the police’ to spark a discussion about funding priorities and police reform was a big mistake in retrospect. 

To the extent that ‘woke’ people become self-righteous and puritanical and heap contempt on anything that does not meet their definitions of political correctness, there is certainly room for criticism.  The culture wars have become so acrimonious that we all need to take a deep breath and relax a bit. 

But the fact remains that 55 years after the major civil rights’ acts of the 60’s we still have a race problem in the U.S.  Black people are behind in almost every area of quality of life – education, family stability, incarceration, income, wealth, life expectancy.  To ignore this deeply troubling truth is not only inexcusable from a moral and ethical viewpoint, but also foolhardy in terms of self-interest.  This problem will continue to fester and become a hideous open wound with serious implications for our society if we do not address it.

There is a similar dynamic at play in the broader sense of social justice.  The income and wealth gaps in our society have become so large that they are threatening to unravel the delicate fabric of our civil order and send us back to the worst days of the gilded age or create in our land another third world plutocracy.  The populist movement that supports Trump is at least in part fueled by these income and opportunity gaps, though like the fascist cult leaders of the 20’s and 30’s, he has transformed economic anxiety into cultural animus, xenophobia and nationalism.

So, the themes of ‘wokeness’ are not some liberal fantasy.  It is more a problem of form than content.  It is true that the efforts to engage these concepts and associated new ideas for societal change are sometimes too shrill and provocative, but these issues are at the very heart of America’s challenge for the 21^st century and cannot be swept under the rug.

America has always been a land of two minds with inevitably slow progress laboriously achieved through compromise and debate.  Those who wish for America to live up to its best ideals and dreams must be relentless, but also less combative.  Being ‘woke’ is the long game, and it must be played with passion, but also with patience.