The politics of woke
Wokeness is a somewhat abstract collection of beliefs that can be hard to define. But apparently, we know it when we see it.
In its current usage, wokeness is trying to describe something about the politics of today’s young, highly educated “new” left, especially on cultural and social issues surrounding race, sex and gender. In his newsletter this week, The New York Times columnist Nate Cohn offers a few identifying characteristics of this group that seem to encapsulate wokeness.
The new left speaks with righteousness, urgency, and moral clarity.
The new left is very conscious of identity.
The new left sees society as a web of overlapping power structures and systems of oppression.
The new left views racism, sexism, and other oppressive hierarchies as deeply embedded in American society.
The new left prioritizes the pursuit of a more equitable society over enlightenment-era liberal values.
Taken together, these core beliefs describe a brand of righteous, identity-conscious, activists eager to tackle oppression in everyday life, even at the expense of some liberal values — and necessarily push the new left toward a decidedly pessimistic view of America and the future. While I can empathize with these issues and concerns, it’s the pessimism that’s most difficult for me to embrace.
One of the earliest origins of wokeness was in the formation of The Wide Awakes, a group of young activists cultivated by the Republican Party during the 1860 US presidential election. Employing a variety of tactics, the organization rallied participation among many new voters and proclaimed itself as the voice of a new generation of younger voters, a growing political force bent on liberating slaves and upending an immoral institution.
Wokeness seems to have first appeared as a term specifically representing Black political consciousness when Marcus Garvey wrote in 1923, “Wake up Ethiopia! Wake up Africa!” Later, Black American folk singer-songwriter Huddie Ledbetter, or Lead Belly, used the phrase “stay woke” as part of a spoken afterward to a 1938 recording of his song “Scottsboro Boys,” which tells the story of nine Black youths falsely accused of raping two white women in Alabama in 1931. In the recording, Lead Belly says, “I advise everybody, be a little careful… — best stay woke, keep their eyes open.”
The notion continued to resurface in this context over the subsequent decades. Black author William Melvin Kelley is credited with first committing woke to print in 1962, in an Op-Ed published in The New York Times entitled “If You’re Woke, You Dig It,” in which he pointed out that much of what passed for “beatnik” slang (dig, chick, and cool) originated with African Americans.
Shortly after, in 1965, Martin Luther King Jr. put a more political spin on the concept in a commencement address called Remaining Awake Through a Great Revolution at Oberlin College:
There is nothing more tragic than to sleep through a revolution […] The wind of change is blowing, and we see in our day and our age a significant development […] The great challenge facing every individual graduating today is to remain awake through this social revolution.
And then, between 2012 and 2015, a sequence of tragic incidents brought attention to the treatment of young Black Americans by police and sparked an eruption in racial justice activism. In summer 2013, after George Zimmerman was found not guilty of killing teenager Trayvan Martin, the hashtag #blacklivesmatter was created, urging people to stay woke and be mindful of racial strife.
Following the election of Donald Trump, usage took off. Shortly after this peak, however, pejorative uses of the term began to appear from the right, mocking its “overrighteous liberalism.” In this sense, woke means “following an intolerant and moralising ideology.” Today, the Democratic party is largely on the defensive against what many Americans see as an elitist and self-hating movement meant to diminish America.
Wokeness clearly isn’t to blame, but it has nonetheless played — and still plays — a role in the realignment of the reigning political coalitions in the American electorate that are now solidly based on cultural attitudes rather than class interests, an inversion that was largely cemented by the 2016 election.
Republicans now control most of the House seats in districts where the median income trails the national level of nearly $65,000 annually. Today, House Republicans are more likely to represent districts that are older than average, whiter than average, and poorer than average. And conversely, the opposite is true for Democrats. Nearly half of House Republicans, in fact, represent districts in which all three things are true — they have more seniors than the national level, more white residents than the national level, and a lower median income than the national level.
The looming budget confrontation highlights a fundamental enigma: The Republican majority in the House is now more likely than Democrats to represent districts filled with voters who rely on the programs that the GOP wants to cut. The fact that so many House Republicans feel safe advancing these proposals in districts with such extensive economic need testifies to the diminishing power of these pocketbook issues and the pull of social and cultural identity. In this context, anti-wokeness seems likely to continue to play an outsized role in our partisan politics — including the presidential campaign.
It has been commonly understood that the middle years of adulthood are the most challenging, the period when people generally express the highest levels of stress and the lowest levels of happiness, as they deal with young children and aging parents, as they establish their careers, and as they struggle to maintain the social relationships of their youth. Younger people, by contrast, were generally shown to be happier, with a greater sense of optimism, opportunity, and freedom.
Now, a Harvard-led study shows younger adults with the lowest scores of any age group on a dozen measures of well-being. Epidemiologists at Harvard, including Tyler VanderWeele, director of the Human Flourishing Program at Harvard’s Institute for Quantitative Social Science, began to see these changes leading up to the pandemic, but this study is the first time it was absolutely clear that across every dimension studied — happiness, health, meaning, character, relationships, financial stability — well-being steadily improved with age. And 18 to 25-year-olds felt worse off across each dimension.
The data is purely descriptive and not conclusive in terms of causes, but VanderWeele speculates several factors have contributed to these changes, including the pandemic, global instability, climate change, diminishing job prospects, educational debt, and high housing costs, as well as the impacts of social media.
He also believes political polarization has played a role. “How can I live in a country like this, where half the people are terrible?” We’re all confronting this, but older people have had longer periods of relative stability. We also have greater perspective. I see this with my own children. They are acutely focused on what’s happening right now. And their pessimism and negativity are less tempered by an ability to envision a future other than the one that is foretold by current events.
“Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.” — from Ernest Hemingway’s The Garden of Eden.
As Cohn observes, the new left, driven by young people, has a moral clarity that demands urgency and can’t abide patience or inaction. For them, social and economic justice are unambiguous concepts. The status quo is unjust and intolerable. Young people today are fundamentally driven by a politics of overwhelming empathy. With these as their core beliefs, it’s easy to understand why young people are so unhappy. Even I fear for our future if our young people are the least hopeful among us. Something has to change.
How did wokeness, which represents some of the highest ideals of humanity, become so divisive and despised? Wokeness is now the latest cudgel in the culture wars, and it’s cleaving a divide between the new left and their natural liberal allies. I don’t know many liberals who aren’t okay assuming some guilt and bearing the burden of self-reflection. But even the most well-intentioned liberals have grown weary of gotcha cancel culture and the negativity of the new left.
I frequently blame the right for fomenting anger and division in our politics, and in the culture wars, they clearly deserve the lion’s share of the responsibility — from the war on Christmas to the attacks on LGBTQ rights. And do they really care that much about green M&M’s and Aunt Jemima? Just today, I read that a Florida elementary school is barring a showing of the film “Ruby Bridges,” because it depicts historic racism and may not comply with Florida’s Stop WOKE Act. A triumph of ignorance and censorship.
Nonetheless, the left — and the new left, in particular — is clearly underperforming. In order for a movement to be successful, it needs to grow to include more than its most committed followers. It needs to educate, persuade, inspire, and lead. The new left has not only failed to achieve its aims, but it has also failed its adherents. The new left is as sad as the far right is angry.
Jonathan Sacks, a British rabbi and Judaic scholar, calls this the politics of anger. Anger is very effective in motivating voters, but it also pushes them to extreme positions, alienates potential allies, and increases everyone’s resistance to compromise and accommodation. This isn’t unique to the left — or to young people — but the politics of anger does seem to have driven young people to despair for the future.
The alternative is a politics of hope, but we know that hope is missing from our current political discourse. We can understand how people have lost hope. We can understand how the loss of hope may seem like a rational response in the face of such divisiveness, when facts are no longer facts, when even the most basic principles of democracy seem open for debate. In the words of Rabbi Sacks, we need to resurrect the idea that we share an identity and a fate and that we are collectively responsible for the common good. Without a renewal of this social covenant and a renewed commitment to this democratic society, we are destined to destroy each other.
To be woke is simply to be awake. To open your eyes to the world in front of you. To see the possibility of something better.
“We choose hope over fear. We see the future not as something out of our control, but as something we can shape for the better through concerted and collective effort. We reject fatalism or cynicism when it comes to human affairs; we choose to work for the world as it should be, as our children deserve it to be.”
– President Obama to the UN General Assembly, September 24, 2014
