Hi guys! It’s Jasmine here, filling in today for JVL. You may know me from my omnipresence in the comments section or from the Triad Mailbags. This is my first time writing a Triad, so I hope you’ll let me know your thoughts in the comments. Today, we’re going to talk about “woke”—the ideas behind it, plus the political impulse that fell under that umbrella term—and I want to prime you all:
Woke began as one inner-circle concept and ballooned into many other things.
Because of its many meanings, people often talk past one another when it comes to woke.
Keep that in mind when reading below and in our discussion in the comments.
Now let me give you the short version: It’s time we bring back woke.
I’m kidding! I kid because I know that out there on X, someone is going to say, “The Bulwark wants MORE woke?!” And that’s not what I’m arguing here. Today I’m trying to explain the evolution of woke. I want to see if we can come up with a theory for what a new and improved wokeness would look like.
(Spoiler: I think maybe we can?)
But this only works if everyone dials back and engages in good faith. Which I know you guys will do.
If you want to be heard in the comments section, please join us as a Bulwark+ member. That way you can read today’s full newsletter and let me know what I’ve gotten right and where I’ve gone wrong. And you can enjoy all our other locked content. Click here:
1. The re-awokening
The word “woke” is as curious a cultural phenomenon as it is a linguistic one. Woke’s great language problem is its flimsy definition: Across roughly a decade, it went from being one half of a phrase used within the Black community (“stay woke”) that meant simply to be aware of social injustice; to a term adopted earnestly by progressives for the same reason; to an insult leveled against sensitive, politically correct leftists; to an amorphous criticism used to describe anything the speaker does not like.
This current definition—“woke” as an all-purpose pejorative used by both the right and the left—is a familiar villain’s journey.
After gaining traction during the first wave of the Black Lives Matter movement in 2014, woke went mainstream. By 2017, lexicographers added it to the Oxford English Dictionary and the political phenomenon became so prominent that commentators started joking, sometimes disparagingly, about a “Great Awokening.” Then woke went off the rails, careening into unpopularity by 2020 when leftists started insisting upon agreement with a host of social and policy issues ranging from expanding bike lanes, to diversity hiring quotas, to critical race theory in K-12 schools.1
This is when, for a swath of America, the left took woke too far. The crossover point where woke peaked and the MAGA “vibe shift” began was probably around 2022. By 2024, Donald Trump was able to return to the White House in part by running against woke identity politics (think of the “they/them” attack ads he ran against Kamala Harris).
The irony, of course, is that to the extent that wokeness was repressive, it was nothing compared to the total obeisance Trumpism demands of Republicans. The canceling, the censorship, the sycophantic ass-kissing, the overreach—these are now inalienable features of the Republican party. Except the Trump administration has outshone woke and created an actual authoritarian agenda, with real-life, dire consequences—but more on that in a moment.
A word of caution: I am not arguing that we should bring back wokeism. Woke created in-groups and out-groups based on the acceptance of an inflexible ideology that divided society into victims and oppressors, from which the latter group was supposed to grovel for the forgiveness of the former. If woke was attempting to build a unifying coalition to bring about actual change, that was decidedly not the way to do it.
But woke is having a bit of a renaissance. The electoral victories of left-wing Democrats such as Zohran Mamdani,2 D.C.’s Janeese Lewis George, and Colorado’s Melat Kiros—people who would’ve been easily identified as “woke” just a few years ago (and sometimes still are)—may not mean that this strain of candidate is about to sweep the country. But it probably means something.3
Yet Democrats continue to balk at their woke adolescence, cringing at their old social media posts and statements like a twentysomething recalling their embarrassing college years. The latest viral example is from Wisconsin gubernatorial-hopeful Francesca Hong: After facing criticism online over her 2020 post that Thanksgiving should be abolished because it celebrates colonialism, Hong now says it is her favorite holiday.
Canceling Thanksgiving is a ridiculous idea, and it’s equally ridiculous that a candidate for governor is having to talk about this. Many woke trademarks were like this: trivial and irrelevant outside of certain feisty corners of the internet.4 But the terror campaign that Republicans have executed during their government trifecta is of actual consequence. Republicans made a bogeyman out of liberal woke repressiveness—even comparing it to Soviet purges under Stalin—but have stood by as their own party turned into a far more repressive, submissive collective. Yet Democrats refuse to point out this hypocrisy.
Instead, the consensus among Democratic officeholders and candidates—from Gov. Gavin Newsom to Abdul El-Sayed, from Sen. Bernie Sanders to James Talarico—seems to be to continue to distance themselves from wokeism to save face ahead of the midterms. In an article published in the Guardian shortly after the Democratic victories in last November’s off-year elections, labor union leader Dustin Guastella wrote that to maintain the Democrats’ newfound momentum, progressives should embrace moderates, and he warned against “reanimating the dead-end politics of fringe woke causes.”
To be clear: Democratic operatives are wise to widen the party’s aperture to left-wing populism. It’s more likely to create a winning coalition than wokeness, which sabotaged itself by issuing mandates of compulsory guilt and shallow activism. But in the scramble for center-left Democrats to shake off wokeness and brandish populism, they are ignoring that “woke,” flawed as it was, was also not completely off the mark—and that some of its core demands foreshadowed
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