The Right’s Obsession With "Wokeness"

The political right is obsessed with fighting what it describes as a threat to American society and personal freedoms.  Objective reality is something, not surpisingly, something quite different and a majority of Americans view being "woke" as something positive as revealed by a recent USA TODAY/Ipsos Poll.  Indeed, the poll found that fifty-six percent of those surveyed say the term means "to be informed, educated on, and aware of social injustices." That includes not only three-fourths of Democrats but also more than a third of Republicans.  Unfortunately, Republicans like Ron DeSantis, Glenn Youngkin and a host of others care noting about the views of the majority but instead care only about the wants and demands of evangelicals/Christofascists, ultra far right Catholics and white supremacists within the Republican Party base who want to turn back time to the early 1950's when white Protestants ruled American and gays were invisible and racial minorities "knew their place."  As the piece in USA Today notes, this anti-wokeness obsession may play well with extremist Republican primary voters but could prove toxic in general elections. During his CNN "townhall" Youngkin again falsely pretended to be a moderate yet the only reason a raft of extreme anti-abortion and anti-LGBT bills that Youngkin favored floundered in the General Assembly was because of the Democrat controled Virginia Senate.  But for this firewall, Virginia would be looking much like fascist rule Florida.  A column in the New York Times looks at this anti-wokeness obsession and how it could backfire.  Here are higlights:

Leonard Leo, a leader of the right-wing Federalist Society, an extraordinarily effective legal organization, is broadening his ambitions. Leo is hoping to transform American culture the way he transformed the judiciary. In the words of an investigative report produced by ProPublica and Documented, he aims to build a sort of “Federalist Society for everything,” devoted to helping reactionaries consolidate power in realms like Wall Street, Silicon Valley, journalism, Hollywood and academia.

I just said to myself, ‘If this can work for law, why can’t it work for lots of other areas of American culture and American life where things are really messed up right now?’” That includes “wokeism in the corporate environment, in the educational environment,” biased media and “entertainment that is really corrupting our youth.”

Given Leo’s past success, he should be taken seriously. As Donald Trump’s adviser on judicial nominations, he helped put Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett, all of whom have close Federalist Society ties, on the Supreme Court, making him central to the demise of Roe v. Wade.

But while Leo’s grandiose project could pose a danger to liberalism, it can also be seen as a sign of existential crisis on the right. It demonstrates how conservatives are relying on fantastical ideas about wokeness to tie together a movement that has otherwise lost much of its raison d’être. . . . . Hatred of wokeness is a brittle foundation for political identity, but it’s almost all that’s left.

Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida, a favorite for the Republican presidential nomination, declared during his January inaugural address that “Florida is where woke goes to die.” Mike Pompeo, a former secretary of state and a possible presidential candidate, recently tweeted, “Our internal threats — especially those trying to corrupt our kids with toxic wokeness — are more serious than our external threats.” . . . . Republican presidential candidate Nikki Haley said, “Wokeness is a virus more dangerous than any pandemic.”

Given that the Covid pandemic has already killed over a million Americans, this is transparently insane, even if you find much of what falls under the rubric of wokeness annoying. Such threat inflation is best explained by the right’s desperation for a unifying enemy. But to support the weight they’re putting on wokeness, conservatives have had to create a hallucinatory conspiracy theory about how progressive social change works.

Baehr seems to believe that cultural edicts can be handed down as imperiously as judicial opinions, so a handful of well-placed apparatchiks can redirect the zeitgeist. The Federalist Society project was fairly straightforward: Replace one set of judges with another. Trying to turn back social change across American life is a far trickier thing, especially when you don’t understand where that change is coming from.

None of this is to say that the war on wokeness can’t do enormous damage. Laws are being passed all over the country targeting trans people, particularly trans kids, and the right’s language has turned openly eliminationist. (One speaker at CPAC said, “Transgenderism must be eradicated.”) America is enduring a wave of hysterical censorship. In Oklahoma the State Senate just passed a bill banning material with “a predominant tendency to appeal to prurient interest in sex” from all public libraries, not just those in schools.

But I’m skeptical that anti-wokeness can be the basis for a durable mass movement. . . . The Federalist Society trained many young meritocrats who were willing to devote their lives to fighting legalized abortion. It’s hard to imagine the battle against neopronouns and the 1619 Project inspiring the same sort of single-minded intensity. Ronald Reagan used to describe conservatism as a three-legged stool, comprising social conservatives, fiscal conservatives and defense hawks. These days it looks a lot more like a pogo stick.

Glenn Younkin's war on abortion and LGBT Virginians may play well with devotees of The Family Foundation - one of Virginia's leading hate groups with antecedents in opposition to desegration - but if properly exposed will likely not be attractive to a majority of Virginians, much less all of America.