Every murder mystery must have an identifiable killer, every superhero movie an evil nemesis, every romantic comedy a spoiled yuppie antagonist. And apparently every lost presidential election needs a simple villain. The return of Donald Trump seems to many writers so inexplicable, so portentous, that there must be some deeper explanation than a cost-of-living crisis. And so, a culprit has been found—dragged kicking and screaming into the defendant’s chair and accused of fatally undermining liberalism. That enemy is “woke”.
Last week, the Financial Times journalist Henry Mance wrote an article titled “Where ‘woke’ went wrong”. The implication is fairly obvious from the title—wokery, in its many guises, derailed the Kamala Harris campaign, and Trump’s election was a widespread backlash against a much-hated form of social shaming. Mance argues that in the years after #MeToo and the murder of George Floyd, an initially sympathetic American public has reverted to scepticism towards the demands of liberals promoting identity politics.
Mance is picking up on a real vibe shift. The era where corporations flocked to hear from Robin DiAngelo, the white author of White Fragility, or prefaced annual meetings with land acknowledgments does seem to be in abeyance—it has been since 2021. But I think Mance, and the authors such as Sam Harris and Yascha Mounk that he covers, are at risk of both overstating the public backlash and of underplaying how vicious its political manifestation might be.
For one thing, it’s not so clear that Americans do, in fact, hate DEI (diversity, equity and inclusion)—the poster child of “woke” interference. The political scientist Jake Grumbach points to YouGov polls conducted in the week after Trump’s inauguration that found 48 per cent of Americans have a favourable view of DEI programmes, compared to 29 per cent with an unfavourable view. Similarly, Pew Research found 52 per cent of Americans think that focusing on DEI at work is a good thing and just 21 per cent that it’s a bad thing. It’s true that these numbers have narrowed in recent years. But not enough to give me any confidence that Americans truly hate DEI.
And the attacks by the Trump administration on vulnerable and underrepresented groups have far exceeded the state of American public opinion. Just days after Trump’s election, he, his vice president and his defence secretary all blamed DEI, without obvious cause, for the tragic crash of American Airlines 5342 from Wichita to Washington. Trump’s team have submitted a list of banned words for projects funded by the National Science Foundation, including such infamous terms as “biased”, “women” and “status”; tributes to women and ethnic minorities at the National Security Agency’s Cryptologic Museum have been papered over; and West Point military academy has banned all existing student groups based on ethnicity or national background.
It’s hard to imagine any of these moves commanding majority support among Americans. They have the scent of religious or revolutionary fervour—as mini-Robespierres go about guillotining any hint of wokery. And it seems just as likely to me that there will be a backlash to the backlash. As Mance notes himself, these concerns about crudeness versus censoriousness tend to come in waves. I, and I warrant many readers of Prospect, am old enough to remember when “political correctness went mad”. Everything old is new again. Sorry, everything generationally challenged is new again.
That said, it seems likely that the Democrats will denounce woke as part of their planned comeback tour. In the 1990s, Bill Clinton denounced the rapper Sister Souljah when after the LA riots she remarked, rather infelicitously, “If black people kill black people every day, why not have a week and kill white people?” Barack Obama regularly made critiques of young black men. I suspect there are wannabe Democratic presidential candidates just waiting for an opportunity to seize on a ham-fisted statement by a “woke” celebrity.
And the Democrats will go further. In a piece I wrote after the election, looking at their strategy for moving forward, I suggested they might be tempted to target DEI. Where I find myself more in agreement with Mance, and with the New York Times columnist Ezra Klein, is that some of the Democratic Party’s failings can be blamed on the “groups”: advocacy organisations with strong incentives to get politicians to agree to sometimes niche positions, but which face few consequences for electoral failure.
I suspect that Democratic politicians will not only disassociate themselves from the groups but will attack them directly. And they may do so by coming out against workplace schemes that are already pretty unpopular: self-criticism sessions, language-policing or the infamous “progressive stack” where participants talk in order of perceived discrimination.
Bemoaning DEI will be very low-cost for Democrats, certainly as compared to rethinking economic or immigration policy, which were much more obvious causes of their electoral defeat. It’s a real stretch to claim that “woke” lost the Democrats the election—more likely it just shifted a few thousand voters at the margin. But a party on its heels, looking for a few quick wins, may well decide it’s worthwhile sticking another knife in DEI.
