"Woke"—The Word That Doomed the Democrats

Hallelujah, the Left Has Lost Control of the Language

In 1962, Black novelist William Melvin Kelley wrote an opinion piece for the New York Times headlined, “If You’re Woke You Dig It; No mickey mouse can be expected to follow today’s Negro idiom without a hip assist.” Kelly argued that the hipster Left had a long history of appropriating words and themes from Black culture and ultimately bastardizing them.

Such was the fate of the word “woke,” a word originally used to mean awareness of racial injustice. In 2015, when my book Scarlet Letters was published, I struggled to find a word to categorize the emerging Democratic mainstream. Older Democrats preferred the word “progressive.” It made sense. At the risk of tautology, progressives, by definition, progressed. Unlike old school liberals who could content themselves with fixed values, progressives, like sharks, moved forward or died. The word “woke” was not yet in my vocabulary, but it was gaining headway in theirs.

Just as they appropriated Black idioms, White progressives appropriated the Black civil rights model and applied it other pet causes. The feminists came first. In 1972, they managed to get the “Equal Rights Amendment” passed in both the House and Senate. Had it not been for the heroic efforts of Phyllis Schlafly, the states would have fallen in line as well, and the self-destructive “ERA” would have become law.

Liking the sound of the word “equality,” progressives coopted it to gussy up “same-sex marriage.” The youthful enthusiasm for “marriage equality” might have swept Hillary into the White House if the Supreme Court had not dimmed their passion with the 2015 Obergefell v. Hodges decision. True to form, five liberal justices cited the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment— a response to issues affecting freed slaves—as their justification for gay marriage.

In that same year, 2015, the progressive march through the institutions speeded up. Taking the lead was the aggressively liberal ESPN, then owned by the Walt Disney Company. Again falling back on Black precedents, ESPN gave Bruce Jenner its “Courage Award” named in honor of Black tennis great Arthur Ashe.

Ashe struggled manfully through a series of afflictions before dying in 1993 of AIDS-related pneumonia, a disease contracted through a blood transfusion likely from a gay donor. For his part, Jenner masqueraded as a woman. To the degree that Jenner deserved a courage award it was for remaining an “out” Republican in Hollywood.

For years, the Left had eased its long march through the institutions by its control of the media and, through the control of the media, control of the language. With “liberal” being passé and “progressive” being unwieldy, the increasingly confident hipsters of the Left started to use the word “woke” as a form of collective self-identification. To oppose any element of the Woke agenda was to merit denunciation.

NFL great Brett Favre learned this the hard way. He apparently did not get the memo from his PR people that he was supposed to applaud enthusiastically when “Caitlyn,” in full drag, strolled down the aisle at the televised ESPY Awards. Progressives wasted no time in smearing him. The day after the ESPYs Favre was denounced as a “hater” during ESPN’s coverage of the Open Golf Championship.

The unlikely Woke coalition now included Muslims, illegal immigrants, gay activists, trans activists, feminists, climate change advocates, and Blacks among others. Opposing them—at least from the media’s perspective—were, respectively, Islamophobes, xenophobes, homophobes, transphobes, sexists, denialists, and racists, now ratcheted up to white supremacists. “Hate” and “bigotry” were the umbrella words to cover all dissent.

But by diversifying “woke” and denying the word its Black roots, the Left had unwittingly supplied conservatives with an easy handle to summarize an absurd coalition no stronger than its weakest link. Better still, “woke” was a funny word, easily mocked, easily rhymed.

Dylan Mulvaney and Bud Light helped popularize the phrase, “Go woke, go broke.”

The weakest link, of course, was the trans movement. For the previous half century, leftists had been rolling out new euphemisms like Apple rolls out iPhones. The newly christened Woke activists could paper over same sex weddings with “marriage equality” and abortion with “reproductive rights,” but “gender affirming care” could not begin to make sense of the sexual mutilation of children, certainly not in an increasingly democratized media environment.

Nor could the Woke find any phrase—or any logic—to justify men competing in women’s sports, let alone exposing themselves in women’s locker rooms or grooming preschoolers with story hours. High on their own moral superiority, the Woke commenced to butchering pronouns the way they did America’s children. When anti-trans activist Riley Gaines heard herself use the phrase “her penis” to accommodate the language despots, she drew the line. There could be no accommodation with this whole twisted movement.

In 2024 the Trump campaign exploited this madness. Its most effective ad showed Kamala Harris boasting of how she made it possible for prisoners, even murderers, to get free sex change surgeries. “It sounds insane because it is insane,” says the female voice over in the Trump ad. “Kamals’s agenda is they/them. Not you.”

In the progressive spirit, the Woke have moved on. They haven’t given up on their causes, at least not yet, but they have given up on “woke.” When South Park starts mocking your word, it is time to find a new one.

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