Woke is on the ballot this midterms
Minority Leader Mitch McConnell may have pointedly declined to release an official policy agenda for the GOP heading into the midterms, but one emerged soon enough. It’s succinctly summarized in the 2022 Conservative Political Action Conference theme: “Awake Not Woke.”
Toward a unified theory of wokeness
Dashing the hopes of anyone who thought this election cycle would find conservatives embracing wokeness, CPAC coincided with the release of Senator Rick Scott’s blueprint for taking back the majority, which was also heavy on culture war politics. While that plan proved a little too straightforward in its goals for sunsetting social security and other government programs, ideas such as officially declaring “there are two genders” and ending any reference to ethnicity on government forms aligned nicely with alternate agendas set by former VP Mike Pence and House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, not to mention, uh, most GOP midterm campaigns. Wokeness is undeniably on the ballot this election—no matter whether most people understand the potential ramifications of voting against it.
What even is woke? I’ll leave the answer to Senator Scott, who made fighting wokeness the centerpiece of his blueprint for rescuing America.
“I don’t know what the definition of woke so much is,” he said when a reporter pressed him earlier this year. Probably because there is no set definition for it. There are plenty of explainers about the word’s origins, and how it gained popularity among Black activists protesting police brutality in Ferguson eight years ago. The important thing to know about the word at this point is that whatever it once may have meant, “woke” has since morphed into a catchall term for any left-leaning bogeyman. Being aware of the long history of racism in America is woke. Encouraging—or even just tolerating—gender expression is woke. And somehow, incredibly, believing in climate change or championing vaccines during a pandemic is also woke.
The nebulous nature of the word means that Donald Trump can say the Biden administration is “destroying [America] with woke” and the average outraged Fox News viewer doesn’t have to know exactly what he means in order to agree with him. Whatever their particular grievance—antiwhite racism, say, or Drag Queen Story Hour—it’s covered by the umbrella term.
How we got here
Many of the individual elements that comprise so-called wokeness have been anathema to conservatives for ages, but they all started to converge during the summer of 2020. Between the racial justice movement sparked by George Floyd’s murder at the hands of police, an increased focus on post-#MeToo cancel culture, and the confused messaging around COVID safety measures, a lot of scolding was going around at the time—justified and otherwise. Some people chose to learn from it, others chose to quietly ignore it, and others still chose to very loudly reframe it into a rallying cry around their own personal victimhood.
Thus, the antiwoke movement was born.
Whether systemic racism actually exists can be debated (badly), but what’s beyond dispute is that a lot of people find it oppressive when they or their children have to hear about it. The same goes for COVID-19 safety restrictions. Stay-at-home orders and vaccine mandates may or may not have saved countless lives, but to skeptics who did not personally die in the pandemic, it seemed like overkill. Add to these largely conservative complaints the defeat of Donald Trump, and Republicans entered 2021 fired up on all fronts. It didn’t take long for a prominent new leader to emerge from among them.
“We can’t just stand idly by while woke ideology ravages every institution in our society,” Florida Governor Ron DeSantis said in a speech back in August, campaigning for Senate candidate Dr. Oz in Pennsylvania.
In the past two years, DeSantis has leaned into every crevice of antiwokeness and in the process become the GOP’s second most popular 2024 candidate, behind only Trump. With the wind at his back after dodging any fallout from rejecting vaccine and mask mandates, he set to work turning grievance into policy. He channeled the national conservative obsession with transgender students athletes into a bill forbidding them from playing on Florida public school teams. (One of many such bills passed nationwide in the past two years.) He addressed the dual threats of critical race theory and diversity training with the subtly titled Stop WOKE Act last December. He put a stop to the scourge of teachers being able to “instruct” young students on sexual orientation or identity in any way, with what opponents have labeled the Don’t Say Gay bill. And, crucially, when so-called woke corporations such as Disney have objected to his handling of these culture war issues, he’s taken the fight to them as well.
If DeSantis has built a blueprint for using the power of elected office to fight wokeness, though, Virginia Governor Glenn Youngkin has provided one for using the fight against wokeness to earn that power.
Governor Youngkin notched an upset victory last fall over Terry McAuliffe in typically blue Virginia by appealing to parents outraged over mask mandates and CRT. “We actually have this critical race theory moved into all our schools in Virginia,” he said in the leadup to the election, without offering proof for this claim. (Perhaps because none existed.) Not long after Youngkin’s 2021 victory, and his subsequent tip line for “divisive” teaching practices, the idea of courting outraged parents began to look like a viable path for the GOP to reclaim the majority in 2022.
Perhaps the real lesson from both DeSantis’ and Youngkin’s success is that any issue relating to so-called wokeness can gain traction if it’s framed around protecting children.
What the 2022 candidates are willing to do to fight wokeness
Whatever the opposite of virtue signaling is, many GOP candidates in battleground states have spent part of their campaigns doing it.
Some of them, like aspiring Governor Kari Lake in Arizona and Senate candidate Herschel Walker in Georgia, present as full-fledged MAGA swamp creatures, and it’s no surprise when they scream about wokeness. Others, however, come across more like they’re wearing an ill-fitting antiwoke costume when they do so. For instance, Yale-educated J.D. Vance, the former darling of Trump-mystified liberals, strikes a false note as a Senate candidate explaining that CRT is a major threat to Ohio schools, climate change is not much of a threat at all, and woke corporations need to be taken down a peg. Dr. Oz, who is a doctor, and who was once praised by GLAAD for his coverage of trans issues, seems like he’s just going through the motions when he dismisses climate science or tweets like this:
Displaying a strong desire to fight wokeness, without necessarily revealing any specific plans to do so, is essentially a prerequisite for leadership in today’s GOP.
So, what antiwoke policies will the party actually enact if they take back one or both chambers of Congress? A House GOP would have trouble getting any laws past President Biden’s veto power, especially if the Democrats maintain control of the Senate. However, a GOP majority could pass message bills and launch investigations to keep the antiwoke crusade in the headlines, and use debt ceiling standoffs to get the Dems to bend toward their will.
Among their most likely targets is the U.S. military. Conservatives have spent the bulk of Biden’s term bemoaning how weak our military has become, due to diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives and a vaccine mandate. Some have even falsely equated the former with CRT in the military, and claimed it constitutes an ideological purge against conservatives.
“The CRT that I was raised on is the Combat Readiness Test, and that’s the only CRT we should teach,” House rep candidate Rick McCormick, a Marine veteran, said at CPAC in August.
Republicans have also said they plan to celebrate their majority with a surge of attacks on woke investing. That means potential pain for any large company that has sunk money into environmental, social, and governance initiatives, building off the billion-dollar loss Republican state treasurers inflicted on BlackRock recently as punishment for its ESG efforts. In an interview with Politico, House Financial Services Committee member Andy Barr promised a GOP majority would usher in “more aggressive oversight of the SEC’s proposed climate disclosure rule and the emphasis on climate risk at the Federal Reserve and other bank regulators.”
What a comfort to voters struggling to make ends meet in an inflation-addled economy, to know their vote is going toward such worthy goals.
“Won’t somebody think of the children?”
What may be more troubling than the GOP’s specific policy proposals, though, are the vague ones like Kevin McCarthy’s suggestion for a Parents Bill of Rights, considering how many different antiwoke directions that could go in. Conservative leaders and candidates have made so much noise about classroom politics leading up to the midterms, they may feel obligated to deliver on it in some way.
Beyond the issue of trans student athletes, which has crept into the campaigns of everyone from Herschel Walker to Michigan Governor nominee Tudor Dixon, the conversation has increasingly turned toward the existence of trans kids altogether. A lot of GOP candidates twist the issue to make it sound as though anyone who even vaguely supports trans students’ rights to express themselves is “a groomer.” Meanwhile, former Trump advisor Stephen Miller’s new organization has been carpet bombing airwaves and mailboxes around the country with youth-centered antitrans messaging in the leadup to the election.
For all the fearmongering, though, and all the messy school board elections around the country, the vast majority of actual parents seem relatively unbothered. A national poll by NPR and Ipsos back in April, for instance, found that just 18% of parents say their child’s school taught about gender and sexuality in a way that clashed with their family’s values, and just 19% say the same about race and racism. Could a poll conducted by NPR produce biased results? Maybe. After all, Governor Youngkin’s shocking success in Virginia last fall must mean that a lot of parents of all stripes are indeed afraid of wokeness invading their children’s education. However, one recent finding that couldn’t possibly be biased is that the tip line Youngkin set up in February for Virginia parents to report “any instances where they feel their fundamental rights are being violated” in school was quietly deactivated in September, due to a lack of tips.
Could it be that the various issues broadly defined as woke aren’t all simultaneously raging out of control and destroying America, but that portraying them this way is electorally useful?
Of course, that could just be the wokeness talking.
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