It’s hardly a secret that politicians like to define their opponents with simplistic, negative code words that can offset their positive messages and turn off potential voters.
For the 2020 Republicans, that word was “socialist,” as they sought, with some success, to make mainstream Democrats like Joe Biden into the ideological kin of self-proclaimed democratic socialists Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.
For the Biden White House, the target is the “MAGA Republicans,” an effort to link all shades of Republicans with the anti-democratic extremism of former President Donald Trump’s “Make America Great Again” movement.
Now, as Republicans launch their 2024 effort to regain the White House, they are trying to label every Democrat policy and politician as “woke” and turn a historically positive definition of openness, diversity and racial justice into a code word for left-wing extremism.
It’s part of a broader GOP assault against the transformation of American society that has seen wider acceptance of racial and sexual diversification and more open discussion of attitudes toward the transgender community and America’s legacy of slavery.
Though many are doing it, the anti-woke campaign has become most associated with Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, who clearly hopes it can be a vehicle that he can ride into the presidency.
“Florida is where woke goes to die,” DeSantis proclaimed last November as he celebrated his massive 1.5 million-vote re-election triumph over Republican-turned-Democrat Charlie Crist.
It’s a term he uses against liberal or even mainstream policies with little restraint. DeSantis says his efforts to curb teaching about injustice and racial inequality in Florida’s schools is an effort to rid them of “woke ideology.”
One of his principal 2022 legislative successes was enactment of the Stop the Wrongs to Our Kids and Employees (Stop WOKE) Act. It banned teaching that supporters claimed was designed to make students feel personal responsibility for historic discriminatory wrongs and blocked businesses from using diversity practices or training that they said made employees feel guilty.
This year, he is trying to defund diversity, equity and inclusion programs in Florida colleges and transform a state liberal arts college, New College, into a conservative institution.
Meanwhile, Florida’s Board of Education, controlled by DeSantis appointees, has approved new public school training programs banning children from reading books about racial justice and containing LGBTQ themes.
More recently, he has started to take his anti-woke crusade national, preparatory to announcing his presidential candidacy later this year.
On a three-state swing urging tough anti-crime policies, he explained, “The reason why you have crime that has spiraled out of control in these different areas is that you have politicians putting woke ideology ahead of public safety.”
But DeSantis is hardly the only GOP hopeful using the new conservative code word.
“The antidote to woke America is freedom,” former Vice President Mike Pence told an audience last year at the University of Virginia,” declaring “wokeism is running amok in universities and schools.”
Former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, a West Point graduate, said in an article for Fox News, “we must do everything we can to stop the spread of wokeness throughout our armed forces.”
New Hampshire Gov. Chris Sununu, considered a more moderate hopeful, told Fox News that he agrees with DeSantis — “we need to push back on woke policy" — but disagrees with his aggressive actions against corporations like curbing the Disney Co.’s tax benefits for opposing Desantis initiatives.
Trump freely uses the term, recently condemning investment funds that follow environmental, social and governance guidelines as “woke financial scams” by “the maniacs of the radical left.”
Confusion about the use of the word “woke” is understandable, since it has been used by both advocates and critics of the “diversity, equality and inclusion” policies it’s designed to champion.
The Merriam-Webster Dictionary defines “woke” as being “aware of and actively attentive to important societal facts and issues (especially issues of racial and social justice).” Wikipedia says it’s an adjective from African American vernacular English meaning “alert to racial prejudice and discrimination.”
More recently, it adds, “it came to encompass a broader awareness of racial inequalities such as sexism and has been used as shorthand for American Left ideas involving identity politics and social justice, such as the notion of white privilege and slavery reparations for African Americans.”
In a 1938 song, the famed African American singer Huddie Ledbetter (“Lead Belly”), in a song about the nine black “Scottsboro Boys” accused of raping two white women, advised everyone “best stay woke, keep their eyes open.”
Over the past decade, however, opponents have given negative connotations to a word designed to illustrate the positive breadth of American diversity, often racial or sexual.
Targets include the Black Lives Matter movement, designed to spotlight police abuses mainly against Black Americans; critical race theory programs that explore the role of racism in American life; the more open discussion of issues of gender diversity; and even the impact of environmentalism on economic decision-making.
The anti-woke counterattack has been spurred to some extent by the aggressive advocacy of some of its more outspoken left-wing concepts like the "1619 Project" stressing slavery’s impact on American history and the aggressive inclusion in school curricula of sex education and awareness of racial inequities.
In a broader sense, its critics are signaling to the more conservative elements within the country’s shrinking white majority that they want to roll back the clock to an era where these issues were neither openly discussed nor accepted as valid influences.
