A protest outside of Seattle Children’s Hospital on February 9 after the institution postponed some gender-affirming surgeries for minors following an executive order by Donald Trump.
Photo: Lindsey Wasson/AP Photo
In the midst of chaos and cataclysm, it’s rare to find agreement across partisan divides, but in the months since Donald Trump won his second presidential election and commenced a full-bore attack on this country’s civil rights and protections, pundits and politicians from across the ideological spectrum have joined in rare consensus: that it was “identity politics,” known more commonly as “wokeness,” that is largely to blame for Trump’s destructive return to the Oval Office.
Liberals and centrists arrived at this conclusion with a speed and ardor only available to people who’d been dying to crow about this for years. “Woke is broke,” wrote Maureen Dowd days after Kamala Harris’s loss to Trump, arguing that the left’s “worldview of hyperpolitical correctness, condescension, and cancellation” had alienated half the country. James Carville told Dowd that “defund the police” (not uttered by any mainstream Democratic politician since 2020) were “the three stupidest words in the English language,” while Rahm Emanuel scolded Democrats for dooming themselves via “debates over pronouns, bathroom access,” and “terms such as ‘care economy’ and ‘Latinx.’” Some Democratic politicians agreed, taking particular aim at transgender advocacy, with Massachusetts representative Seth Moulton worrying about his little girls “getting run over on a playing field by a male or formerly male athlete,” and saying that “Democrats spend way too much time trying not to offend anyone.”
Reactionary trolls like Bari Weiss were in full accord, cautioning Democrats that “if you keep doubling down” on “these niche issues you find on college campuses and gender-studies departments,” then “you are going to lose.” Fox News, the house organ of the Republican Party, chimed in, mocking the Democratic National Committee for laboriously acknowledging varied gender identities and Indigenous land at a recent leadership meeting, and more broadly for continuing to talk about gun control, gender, and race, braying over how Democrats hadn’t learned anything from their 2024 loss.
Prominent leftists are also onboard, making one righteous argument at the expense of another. “It’s a Democratic Party that increasingly has become a party of identity politics,” said Bernie Sanders, “rather than understanding that the vast majority of people in this country are working class.” Running to lead the DNC, former Sanders adviser Faiz Shakir declined a call to appoint more trans representatives to DNC seats, arguing that identity should not be the basis of committee appointments. Days later, Shakir and socialist journalist Bhaskar Sunkara were quoted in the New York Times arguing that left activism should be rooted in labor and class inequality, not fights against racism, sexism, homophobia, and transphobia. On a Jacobin podcast, NYU sociologist Vivek Chibber blamed Trump’s victory on Democrats “pushing identity politics down people’s throats,” and argued that progressives focus on race and gender “because they are most important to and for elite sections of minority populations.”
This rare cross-ideological alignment has created an opening for the Trump-Musk-Vance team, which, thanks to the Democratic pullback from “woke-ism,” faces scant opposition as it busily dynamites a civil-rights infrastructure built painstakingly over generations. The first weeks of Trump 2.0 have featured imperialist promises of foreign conquest, unconstitutional power grabs, gargantuan data and national-security breaches, ICE roundups, and the severing of life-saving aid and medical trials to millions around the world. Thrumming behind the whole shebang has been Trump’s promise to eradicate “DEI,” a term that in MAGA-land stands for the encroachment on our public, professional, and political spaces by people who are not straight, cisgendered white men. The administration has even added an “A” to its DEIA code, indicating “abilities” for extra-eugenicist oomph.
Trump is firing federal workers who have had anything to do with diversity initiatives and halting scientific, medical, and arts funding related to gender, race, sexuality, or disability, while conservative groups assemble watch lists of mostly Black employees tied to health-equity initiatives. Government agencies have barred federal workers from observing Martin Luther King Jr. Day, Black History Month, Women’s History Month, Pride, and Holocaust Remembrance Day; forced them to remove gender pronouns from their work communications; and cut gender-affirming health care for kids. Military schools overseas are ripping down posters of Harriet Tubman and rainbow flags, while NASA employees were ordered to remove references to “women in leadership, etc.,” from the organization’s website. Trump has falsely blamed a plane crash on diversity and scrubbed information about HIPAA protection for reproductive care, threatening easier surveillance of reproductive lives. Trump’s cabinet nominees have been accused of sexual assault or of having covered it up. Musk’s team includes the “I was racist before it was cool” guy who also suggested repealing the Civil Rights Act. Darren Beattie, Trump’s choice for under secretary for public diplomacy at the State Department, posted in October that “competent white men must be in charge if you want things to work.”
Just as every fiber of every testosterone-injected muscle of the executive branch is being flexed in an effort to terrify and threaten people who have still not gained full equality in this country, the press and the dazed opposition remain fixated on the idea that identity politics is what got us here. The problem is that evidence of the unpopularity of “wokeness” — a term for the messy, sometimes pedantic, frequently annoying, occasionally righteous calls for greater awareness of structural privilege based on race, sex, gender, and ability — is thin at best, and at worst undergirds a dangerous misdiagnosis that will ensure Democrats lose again the next time around.
Think back to the most hard-core, over-the-top, taking-it-too-far periods of wokeness of recent years, the moments that provoked commentators left, right, and center to moan about “cancel culture.” Like when Minnesota senator Al Franken was sacrificed to the ravening feminist mob at the height of the Me Too movement in 2017 — and the next week, a Democrat won a Senate race against an alleged sex pest in Alabama. What about the next fall, after a summer in which activists were castigated by both the right and by the left for their “uncivil” interruptions of the dinners and movie nights of Republican officials in charge of child separation? Pundits and pollsters fretted that backlash to progressive anguish would benefit Republicans in the midterms. Yet in 2018, Democrats won in the biggest blue wave since the Nixon administration.
Analysts regularly attribute surprise Democratic victories to low-turnout midterms, but at the pinnacle of the “woke” era, Democrats emphatically dominated a presidential contest. In 2020, millions protested racist police violence, sparking a reckoning in which people lost jobs for racist infractions from their past and present. A few Democratic lawmakers did join calls to “defund the police,” and more signaled that they understood the need for criminal-justice reform. Democrats not only won back the White House, but they did so by turning Arizona and Georgia blue and in the process securing two crucial Georgia Senate seats.
During the Biden administration, columnists and consultants were sure that distaste for explicitly feminist, LGBTQ+-friendly and anti-racist politics was potent, warning of how Moms for Liberty chapters had tapped into a fury over drag-queen story hours, “critical race theory,” and “parental rights.” But both Moms for Liberty–endorsed candidates and the milquetoast Dems selected specifically to assuage reactionary ire lost, while many of the Democrats who ignored anti-woke warnings and campaigned with gusto on abortion access and LGBTQ+ protections won, staving off a predicted red wave in 2022.
Even this past November, “woke” Democratic policies on abortion and the “care economy” stuff that Emanuel mocks as jargon — like paid leave and paid sick days — won in places that the Democratic presidential ticket lost badly. In fact, a YouGov survey conducted before the election and published in the Washington Post showed that voters vastly preferred some of Kamala Harris’s “wokest” policy proposals — including background checks for gun purchases, job training and substance-abuse care for former prisoners, and a database to track police misconduct — to Trump’s. They just didn’t know that these ideas were Harris’s.
That’s because after a few giddy weeks spent talking about care work and housing, Harris eventually did listen to Beltway wisdom and tacked aggressively away from anything left, young, or with ties to identity politics. A woke campaign would have channeled activist energies by having Palestinian speakers at the Democratic National Convention; a woke campaign would have responded to anti-trans attacks with more than equivocating reticence; a woke candidate would not have previewed the Trump administration’s obsession with military “lethality” at her own party’s convention, nor would she have held up a garbage immigration bill as some ideal rebuffed by Republicans.
Critics might reasonably argue about whether those choices were, as I believe, strategically unsound and morally bankrupt or, as Dowd and Carville and Emanuel believe, smart and politically savvy. But they were certainly not woke. And they certainly did not work.
Never mind that, had Biden been ten years younger, or inflation a couple of ticks lower, we might not be having this conversation at all. It simply doesn’t track that ideas that helped Democrats win over three cycles can be blamed for their loss in the year they disavowed them. Carville treats “identitarianism” as some gothic stain on the Democratic brand, suggesting “we could never wash the stench of it off,” while Chibber explains that “dropping it at the 11th hour didn’t fool anyone.” It is true that, in 2024, Harris distanced herself from the more progressive ideas about criminal justice and economic policy she’d voiced as a 2020 candidate. But her shape-shifting makes her emblematic of a party that has sometimes worked to cash in on but was never deeply committed to the kinds of fights that have motivated its base to get into the streets and engage in politics. That doesn’t make her loss attributable to an excess of progressivism but, rather, to too flimsy an association with it.
The walk backs of a party scared of its own woke shadow create silence that the right is happy to fill with grotesque fairy tales: schools that “trans” kids without informing parents; career women dooming the nation by failing to reproduce at a fast enough pace; immigrants eating cats and dogs. Republicans’ ghoulishly persuasive passion for identity politics, left unchallenged by Democrats, surely greased the slide of young and minority voters to the right over immigration and crime and transphobic fictions.
This is part of why the anti-woke diagnosis of what’s ailing Democrats is not only factually flawed and morally vacuous but also strategically enfeebling. To point out that, over the past decade, Democrats have consistently won more when feminist, anti-racist, pro-trans energies have been ascendant, and lost more when the party worked to muffle or distance itself from them, is not to argue that today’s Democratic candidates should be running on defunding the police or requiring land acknowledgments or excommunicating people confused by pronouns. It is to suggest that advice that Democrats should get quieter on ideas that are simply the right thing to do and that helped motivate millions to vote for them just reaffirms a pallid insincerity, and is therefore politically suicidal.
Any movement with the power to drive voters at the numbers you need to win is always going to feature extremism, dumb kids, and alienating self-righteousness from the fringes, as well as belligerently insistent groups whose job it is to push a party further than it wants to go. But a party that wants to lead and act — that has at its core a set of principles it is determined to lead and act on — should be capable of metabolizing these dynamics.
All of us elites who tell the story of American politics — purveyors of bland groupthink, spineless politicians, academics, consultants, self-assured journalists — are pointing fingers at each other and making accusations of elitism like we’re in that Spider-Man meme, so I will join in and point my own: I believe that it’s we elites, who do not enjoy getting dogpiled on social media or having college students yell at us about settler colonialism, who are the most put off by the hyperwokeness of our era, while the vast majority of Americans don’t love but also don’t think that much about the use of “Latinx” or pronouns, and remain far more affected by the material wins — around racial and gender pay equity, hiring- and housing-discrimination protections, access to health care and education — that have been enabled by movements for both economic equality and identity-based protections.
Chibber, Shakir, and Sunkara are all correct that elements of progressive activism have been gobbled by capitalist entities looking to paper over a multitude of sins with cheap feminist and anti-racist sloganeering, that corporate capture of identity-based agitation has all too often diversified a management class that continues to abuse and exploit workers. But so, too, have movements for class solidarity often been inattentive to, and sometimes undergirded by, racism and sexism. Many of the appeals Trump has made to working-class voters, including to the multiracial coalition of young men who supported him in 2024 and the white women who have continued to vote for him, have been via the siren song of bias, the promise of blame and domination, not material gain or anything like economic justice. Capitalism and bigotry are partners in crime, feasting on each other’s spoils at every opportunity.
Moreover, it is difficult to overstate how discordant it feels to hear left thinkers talk about the benefits of woke movements accruing only to elites in a period in which studies of Black maternal mortality are being frozen, trans soldiers are being purged from the military, immigrants are being detained in Guantanamo, and pregnant women who can’t afford to travel are bleeding out in parking lots. When it comes to workers, the very clear goal of the right is to empty workplaces — and not just the high-paying ones — of employees who might fall under the rubric of DEI: Missouri’s attorney general this month filed a lawsuit against Starbucks alleging that the company has engaged in discrimination by making its workforce “more female and less white,” hiring diverse employees who are “less qualified to perform their work.” The “DEI” initiatives being ripped out of workplaces aren’t just those mindless videos about sexual harassment, but accessibility ramps, lactation facilities, job protections, pay equity requirements, and paid-leave and child-care programs. Rather than ceding to the right’s distortions, the left could use this moment to make legible what DEI policies actually do to make workers lives more stable and humane, could emphasize that this is not niche stuff for college campuses; it is policy that enables more humans more access to better lives.
One of Trump’s first priorities was to gut federal agencies in charge of labor protections. He illegally fired Gwynne Wilcox, the first Black woman to serve on the National Labor Relations Board since its 1935 inception. Removing Wilcox meant that there cannot be a quorum at the NLRB, wholly disabling the institution. Trump also disassembled the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission by firing Jocelyn Samuels and Charlotte Burrows. All of these dismissals were done in the name of eradicating DEI.
Overriding the courts and democratic precedents, Trump has hobbled farmers, small-business owners, Medicaid and Medicare recipients, senior citizens, those hit by natural disasters, and people in medical trials, domestic-violence shelters, and early education programs. In his executive orders freezing funds to these people, he caterwauled about “Marxist equity, transgenderism, and Green New Deal social-engineering policies.” Trump doesn’t worry about identity politics versus class politics: To him they are, altogether, the enemy of what he seeks, which is the empowerment of a ruling class built on capitalist exploitation and white dude-bro Christian nationalism.
The right perceives things about the centuries-long march toward a more just and inclusive nation that the left fails to grasp: that all of this is intertwined. As the left tears itself apart trying to distinguish between fights for civil equality, workers’ liberation, and democracy, its opponents are the ones who understand that we cannot have economic justice without social movements, that we cannot have a functional democracy while workers are exploited and people cannot easily vote or control their own bodies. Democrats have lost recently not because of an excess of wokeness but because of a failure to get excessive enough — to fight like these efforts, like the fate of all Americans, are linked.
