Don’t Expect Democrats to Give Up on Wokeness Anytime Soon

There are deep structural reasons why it will be very hard for the left to correct its course.

Democratic Representative Seth Moulton. (Photo by Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images.)

There are many reasons Democrats lost. They suffered from an unpopular incumbent, were punished for the high inflation of the last years, and fielded an uninspiring candidate who never managed to put forward a clear governing agenda. But the most fundamental reason why so many voting groups that had long been supposed to buoy blue fortunes have turned red—and the one that is most likely to dog Democrats’ chances in upcoming electoral cycles, when they no longer bear the burden of incumbency—lies in the fact that they are seen as being far outside the cultural mainstream.

Democrats now speak with the inflections and the vocabulary of the coastal, college-educated upper crust of the American meritocracy. This is rapidly alienating a multiracial coalition consisting of everyone for whom there is no space in that upper crust—plus those who resent the constant self-monitoring and self-censorship that is required to remain a member of it.

To overcome the damage to their increasingly toxic brand, Democrats need to change how they talk and what they say. This includes jettisoning some of the most unpopular elements of the left’s identitarian thinking, popularly known as “woke,” that they took on over the past decade—the emphasis on equity and DEI, the vocabulary of BIPOC and Latinx. But it goes much further than that. Democrats need to convince Americans that they are willing to speak the truth even when that truth shocks the activist groups that make up a big part of their base; that they sympathize with ordinary citizens who are fed up with crime and chaos rather than with the petty criminals who disturb public order; and that they have figured out how to stand up for inclusion without violating common sense.

Will the American left be able to effect such a profound self-transformation?

It is tempting to believe the left is finally turning away from wokeness. Back in September, for example, The Economist reported a modest decline in the frequency with which terms like “intersectionality” and “microaggression” were mentioned in mainstream media or scholarly articles. The magazine duly concluded that we had passed “peak woke.”

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Now, the open disavowal of some identitarian positions to which Democrats seemed deeply committed until a couple of weeks ago has seemed to validate that prediction. Since Trump’s victory, elected officials like Gilberto Hinojosa, the outgoing chair of the Texas Democratic Party, and Rep. Seth Moulton, a moderate Democrat from Massachusetts, have sensibly urged Democrats to ditch their most unpopular positions on cultural questions. “Democrats spend way too much time trying not to offend anyone rather than being brutally honest about the challenges many Americans face,” Moulton acknowledged last week. “I have two little girls, I don’t want them getting run over on a playing field by a male or formerly male athlete, but as a Democrat I’m supposed to be afraid to say that.”

Many Democrats I have spoken to in the last few days are hopeful that the vibe shift on the left will prove real. According to New York Times opinion columnist Maureen Dowd, “Some Democrats are finally waking up and realizing that woke is broke.” Longtime Democratic strategist James Carville seems to share the same opinion. Democrats, he told Dowd, are fleeing identitarian positions “like the devil runs away from holy water.” 

But I am skeptical that this is how things will ultimately turn out.