Part II of a series on anti-wokeness in U.S. politics
(Part I “From #staywoke to anti-woke”)
Anti-woke agitation is usually associated with Republicans. But not always. Looking back over the past twelve months, Google Trends reveals two peaks of interest in the the word “woke.”
Today, I’ll look into the first of those, (apparently sparked by Democratic strategist James Carville after the 2021 elections). In the next part of this series, I’ll discuss the second one (apparently sparked by Republican Governor Ron DeSantis)
The November 2021 “woke” wave—Democrats eat their own
On November 2nd, 2021, the day after Republican Glenn Youngkin scored an upset win over Clinton ally Terry McAuliffe for governor of Virginia (a state Biden won by a 10-point landslide), James Carville took to the airwaves. He told Judy Woodruff on PBS that the Democrat’s loss could be blamed on “stupid wokeness.”
“Some of these people need to go to a woke detox center or something,” Carville advised. “They’re expressing language people just don’t use and there’s a backlash and a frustration at that.”
Carville putting the spotlight on “stupid wokeness” sparked a barrage of punditry. Voices from left, right, and center unloaded on wokeness and anti-wokeness Some joined Carville in blaming Democrats for being too woke, others blamed them for falling into the GOP “wokeness” framing, while still others blamed Republicans for distorting and weaponizing the word. Here’s a small sample:
Maureen Dowd (NYTimes): “Wokeness Derails the Democrats”
Eugene Robinson (Washington Post): “Wake up to these ‘woke’ distortions”
The Guardian: (panel): “We need to discuss the word ‘woke’”
Garry Kasparov (WSJ): “‘Woke’ is a bad word for a real threat to Democracy”
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (Twitter thread): “‘wokeness’ … is a term almost exclusively used by older people these days”
Matt Lewis (Daily Beast): “AOC’s ‘Woke’ Whine Is Why the Dems Can’t Stop Losing”
Charles M. Blow (NYTimes): “The War on ‘Wokeness’”
Ari Paul (FAIR): “Media’s Anti-‘Woke’ Mania Moves Social Justice to the Fringe”
Carville chose to slam Democrats for “stupid wokeness” despite the fact that McAullife was never conspicuously woke. Furthermore, wokeness wasn’t even a theme of Youngkin’s campaign. Not by that name, anyway. What Youngkin attacked was a specific subset of wokeness—the teaching of critical race theory (CRT) in schools. He introduced that attack early in his campaign (July 9th, 2021), saying “We actually have this critical race theory moved into all of our schools in Virginia.” (In truth, it hadn’t.)
A comparison on Google Trends makes it clear that, leading up to the election, Virginians were far more concerned with critical race theory (in red) than generic wokeness (in blue).
The guy who weaponized critical race theory
Why did Youngkin go after critical race theory, which wasn’t even taught in Virginia’s schools? He was simply following a trendy, tested right-wing attack strategy that had been devised, framed, and nurtured by conservative activist and self-described brawler, Christopher F. Rufo. If you’re not a Fox News viewer, or a follower of right-wing Twitter, you may never have heard of Rufo. But if it hadn’t been for Rufo, you might never have heard of critical race theory, either. Months before before Youngkin left The Carlyle Group to enter politics, Rufo had established CRT as a star villain in the Republican and Fox News litany of woke and progressive horrors.
The story of how Rufo formulated this line of attack and then promoted it on Tucker Carlson’s show—where, naturally, Trump saw him and asked Mark Meadows to give him a call—is told by Benjamin Wallis-Wells in The New Yorker. Rufo had concluded that generic “wokeness” was too vague for politics. He hit upon critical race theory, which was, at the time, an obscure academic discipline taught in law schools and other graduate schools. Rufo borrowed the term because he saw it as a punchy rubric that could be applied it to everything going on in schools, universities, and corporations dealing with race. To promote his CRT attacks, Rufo spent more than a year writing articles in The Manhattan Institute’s City Journal and bouncing between Fox News and Twitter. He was on Fox News so frequently that he even built a broadcast studio into his home.
The left’s response to Rufo—that CRT is an academic legal theory taught only at the graduate school level, and not in public schools—was accurate, but completely ineffective in blunting Rufo’s assault. Rufo never allowed himself to be constrained by what scholars mean by CRT. He only cared how he could energize Fox News viewers to fear and resent it and how he could get Republican politicians to exploit it. As he openly explained on Twitter:
Goebbels would have been jealous.
Michael Harriot crystalizes the difference between the scholarly and polemical versions of CRT in his article “Weaponizing 'Woke': A Brief History of White Definitions” (The Root).
*CRITICAL RACE THEORY
Black definition: The work of Black legal scholars that examines the law through the lens of race in the same way that every other class in law school examines the law through the lens of whiteness.
White definition: A social studies curriculum that turns Black people into victims and white kids into villains by teaching them that Black kids can’t achieve things because America is a racist country.
How Youngkin won
Youngkin’s path to victory in a blue-trending state required him to do two things: first, to hold onto Trump’s MAGA base and then, to claw back enough of the suburban Republicans and independents who had defected to Biden in 2020 to put him over the top. He carefully calibrated his Trumpiness, winning the former guy’s endorsement but keeping him at arms length. He presented as affable and caring, promising to fight inflation by repealing Virginia’s sales tax on food. Despite Youngkin’s effectiveness as a campaigner, McAuliffe managed to hold his lead throughout the campaign until the very end. In the closing week, Youngkin leaned heavily into Rufo’s attack lines and focused on education, parental rights, and critical race theory. According to the Real Clear Politics average of polls, it was only in that last week that McAullife faltered and Youngkin surged to victory.
Source: Real Clear Politics
In the closing week of the campaign Youngkin seized on McAuliffe’s gaffe-a-riffic self-own in debate: "I don't think parents should be telling schools what they should teach." Oops. Youngkin pounced. He went up on TV with this ad featuring a scandalized mom upset that her son was reading “explicit” material that McAuliffe refused to allow her to ban.
Unmentioned in the ad:
The son was, at the time, a high-school senior in an advanced-placement, college-level course
The book she sought to ban was Tony Morrison’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, Beloved
The incident happened in 2013
By the way, in 2021, when the ad ran, the son was a 27-year old lawyer serving as Associate General Counsel for the National Republican Congressional Committee in Washington. So, not in fact, terribly damaged by reading that scandalous book.
What was it that prompted Carville to attack “stupid wokeness? I can’t know, but as an architect of Bill Clinton’s centrist campaign for president, he may have wanted to push Democrats back toward the center and away from that progressive policies formed the core of Biden’s then stalled agenda.
Heading into the 2022 elections, it appears that events have overtaken wokeness and CRT as dominant salient campaign issues. For Democrats, abortion, abortion, abortion, (plus gun safety, and threats to voting and democracy) loom larger. For Republicans, it’s inflation, inflation, inflation, (plus energy, crime, and immigration).
Christopher Rufo will return in Part III “DeSantis becomes the King of Anti-Woke”
Chris Rufo and Governor Ron DeSantis at the signing of Florida’s “Stop W.O.K.E Act”
photo from manhattan-institute.org