The Scope of the Anti-Woke Backlash

An article in yesterday's NY Times, "In Shift From 2020, Identity Politics Loses its Grip on the Country," describes various ways in which the overall political zeitgeist has shifted since 2020. I don't quarrel with all of the specific vignettes the story relates, but I do want to suggest that it glosses over some important nuances.

Let's start with attitudes towards policing. In the summer of 2020, following the police murder of George Floyd, mass protests brought attention to the Black Lives Matter movement and a number of inter-related policy proposals to shift away from carceral approaches to crime.

The slogan "defund the police" meant different things to different people. No doubt many of the people using it did not literally mean that police should be abolished; rather, they were suggesting that many of the public resources given to the police should be diverted to other priorities that would lead to fewer deadly police/citizen interactions and might better address root causes of crime. However, "defund the police" sounds a lot like "abolish the police," and many of the same people who called for defunding the police were also saying "abolish ICE" (Immigration and Customs Enforcement), so it was not all that surprising that most people were turned off by what they regarded as calls for anarchy--especially as violent crime ticked up during the pandemic.

The fact that crime has declined again has not led the broad public to be more sympathetic to calls to defund the police for two main reasons: first, the proposal was probably never broadly popular; and second, Donald Trump and the FoxNews rightwingoverse incessantly and falsely assert that crime rates (which are substantially lower than in the 1980s and early 1990s) are at unprecedentedly high levels.

That is not to say that the shifting zeitgeist is only a phenomenon on the right. As the Times story notes, in her 2019 presidential primary campaign, Kamala Harris ran to the left and tried to emphasize progressive policies she implemented as San Francisco District Attorney and California Attorney General, whereas in her current general election campaign, she proudly touts her record putting criminals behind bars and the fact that she owns (and knows how to use) a Glock. That's a real shift, to be sure, but the Times story ignores the quite different context even apart from the changing times. Candidates for the Democratic nomination are trying to appeal to a more liberal/progressive electorate than Democratic nominees running in a general election.

The other signs of a shift identified in the Times story are also a mixed bag. For example, it reports that "many top universities no longer mandate diversity statements for job applicants." Assuming that's true, one would want to know whether it's a response to a shift in attitudes or mostly a litigation-avoidance strategy in response to Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard. (SFFA was a Title VI case, whereas job applicants are covered by Title VII, but a prudent employer would foresee a substantial likelihood that lower courts and eventually the Supreme Court will apply SFFA's reasoning to Title VII.)

Meanwhile, the Times story also cites the primary defeats of Jamaal Bowman and Cori Bush as evidence of the waning power of "progressive politics" within the Democratic Party. Perhaps they're partly that, but it's highly misleading to point to those two primary races without mentioning the millions of dollars spent by pro-Israel groups to defeat Bowman and Bush in light of their stance on the Gaza war.

To be clear, I'm not saying that there hasn't been a shift. I am saying that it's not clear how much of it involves a public that four or five years ago was highly sympathetic to progressive policies shifting to the right.

Meanwhile, the backlash can be difficult to distinguish from ordinary politics--especially because right-wing politicians have, over the last several years, lumped together all sorts of progressive slogans, policies, and badly distorted views of progressive politics under the catch-all of "anti-wokism," so much so that, as Professor Buchanan has repeatedly noted on this blog and elsewhere, the term "woke" has become meaningless except as an emotive right-wing signifier for things Ron DeSantis believes that FoxNews viewers won't like.

That said, I believe there is--or at least once was--a core complaint about "wokeness" that has some meaning, if not necessarily coherence. I had better believe that because this semester I have been co-teaching (with my colleague Professor Nelson Tebbe) a seminar called "The Woke Constitution." Here is the official course description:

In recent years, pundits and government officials mostly but not exclusively on the political right have decried wokeness—a somewhat catchall phrase apparently meant to convey a judgmental attitude on the part of progressives. Insofar as the wokeness label connotes censoriousness, it implicates questions of constitutional free speech. More generally, many of the culture-war battles over what Elon Musk has called a civilization-threatening “woke mind virus” raise important legal questions. This seminar will examine various such questions, chiefly through discussion of assigned readings selected by the instructors but also in five sessions in which outside scholars with a variety of perspectives will present works in progress. Topics will include: the legal status and scope of academic freedom; restrictions on critical race theory and DEI; state laws banning gender-affirming care for transgender youth; regulation of social media platforms; laws restricting corporate ESG programs; the reorientation of some conservative and liberal views about campus free speech in the wake of the war between Israel and Hamas; and more. Students will produce short reflection papers and a final paper that satisfies the writing requirement.

I know. You wish you could have audited the seminar. Sorry.

More seriously, the core to wokeness I have in mind is the "judgmental attitude on the part of progressives." That is captured by this example in the Times story: "Even Oprah came under attack, when angry fans accused her of supporting cultural appropriation when she promoted a white author’s novel about a Mexican family." The key word there is "angry." There's nothing wrong with raising a concern that some work of fiction (or nonfiction, music, or anything else) is an example of cultural appropriation. Maybe it is; maybe it isn't; maybe even if it is, it has value. The worry is that by going after even people like Oprah--whose good faith has been demonstrated over the course of decades--the angry fans were being mean and unfair.

Venting such anger is also frequently counterproductive. My own experience as a vegan and occasional vegan activist confirms that telling people they're bad or coming across as judgmental is not effective advocacy.

But if there is a legitimate objection to the harshness of the tactics deployed by some progressives about a half a decade ago, there's no reason why that should discredit the goals they were seeking to advance. If Jane says "she" and "her" to refer to a person who has recently chosen to go by "they" and "them" because Jane is only now getting used to gender-neutral pronouns but is making an effort to do so, Jane should be given some grace. If a professor, a judge, or a politician insists on deadnaming a transgender student, litigant, or rival because they (see what I did there?) insist that there are only two genders and sex is immutable, then the professor, judge, or politician is rightly subject to opprobrium.

That brings me, finally, to the incoherence--or at best hypocrisy--at the heart of the anti-woke movement. Insofar as it has a legitimate target, the target is over-zealous social opprobrium for innocent mistakes. But while some such social opprobrium has concrete consequences--as when an employee loses a job for making offensive statements captured on video and shared on social media--much of it does not. Yet, in turning to law to attack wokeness, DeSantis and the Florida legislature, as well as the broader anti-woke movement, have zeroed in on so-called divisive concepts that do not lead to adverse concrete consequences but merely risk making white men and boys feel uncomfortable for a few minutes. Put differently, the war on woke is, at its core, an expression of the view--often associated with wokeness itself--that some people are such snowflakes that they need official protection against hurt feelings.