Welcome to “Looking Left”

The right can't defeat the woke left. Only liberalism can.

This newsletter will primarily be a place where I analyze and criticize developments on the cultural left. Which is just a fancy way of saying I’ll be writing here about woke trends.

Awokening Rises

I first started writing on the phenomenon early on in my time as a columnist at The Week, long before it was widely described using the term “woke.” That was in 2014, about halfway through Barack Obama’s second term as president. Every month or so, a story touching on race or sex and gender would gain traction in the news, and I noticed that left-leaning activists were staking out positions that struck me as quite extreme and illiberal, demanding that their political opponents not only lose but be publicly humiliated, decried as bigots, and forced to affirm the progressive position as a precondition of future participation in civil society. I thought this was an example of overreach and likely to provoke a backlash on the right, and I said so in numerous columns.

Then came the Trumpening of the GOP in the 2016 primaries and the shock of the presidency going to a man who began his campaign by fear-mongering about Mexican rapists, promised a travel ban against people from Muslim countries, and treated women like garbage to be used for pleasure and discarded at will. The cultural left responded by insisting that moral attitudes and presumptions in the United States needed to be changed in a fundamental way. Lines needed to be drawn. Toleration curtailed. Excommunications imposed.

Quite quickly and organically, a catechism was written, often by young progressive staffers working for powerful educational, journalistic, and cultural institutions. Using social media (especially Twitter) to create the illusion of a massive groundswell of grassroots support for progressivism, left-wing staffers convinced the leadership of these institutions to adopt their moral convictions and impose them both internally (on less morally fastidious employees) and externally (in public-facing gestures and statements).

By the summer of 2020, human-resource departments in the broader corporate sector had joined in the moral revolution and begun mandating participation in training seminars at which employees were informed they were now expected to contribute to institution-wide efforts at advancing “diversity, equity, and inclusion” (DEI). To hold or express views on race or sex and gender that diverged from what progressive activists considered morally acceptable was now anathema across large parts of civil society, especially in the most elite institutions.

Defining Wokeness

This is what I mean when I use the term “woke”: the effort by progressives to take ideological control of institutions within civil society and use those positions to mandate that their moral outlook (and accompanying empirical claims about race, American history, and human sexuality and gender) be adopted throughout the broader culture. Note that for the most part this is about society and not politics as normally defined. Democrats (at least outside of the very bluest districts) aren’t running for office on a woke agenda. Plenty of people tried to in the 2020 Democratic presidential primaries, but the least woke candidate among them (Joe Biden) prevailed, showing that America’s left-leaning party keeps one foot firmly planted in the unwoke liberal center-left, where I make my ideological home.

Yet Republicans haven’t responded at the level of civil society. Instead, prodded by rabblerousing right-wing digital activists like Christopher Rufo, they have sought to combat wokeness using the blunt force of government power—by banning books, curtailing what can be taught in schools, imposing penalties on private companies for taking progressive stands on social and cultural issues, and seizing control of public universities to prevent them from teaching the “wrong” things and following DEI mandates in their hiring decisions.

Republicans justify these aggressive moves by claiming that wokeness isn’t just a problem but a huge problem, a massive problem, maybe even the biggest problem facing the country. In this respect, wokeness has become a successor in their minds to communism—a totalitarian ideology of the left that threatens to destroy all that’s good and great about America and that therefore needs to be rooted out by any means necessary. (Some on the right make the connection to communism explicit by describing wokeness as a form of “cultural Marxism.” Since I see the phenomenon primarily as a form of post-Protestant Christianity, I avoid using the term.)

The right’s case for drastic action is bolstered by the conservative media ecosystem, which has become highly adept at dredging on a daily basis for examples of progressive foolishness and overreach in our sprawling country of 330 million people, highlighting those examples, treating them as exemplary of an ominous and insidious trend, and then promoting the agitprop at a national level. From the sensationalistic “Libs of TikTok” Twitter account and the muckraking Campus Reform website on up to Tucker Carlson’s prime time show on Fox News, the Republican noise machine is perfectly designed to produce right-wing radicalization by stoking constant outrage at progressivism.   

The left is justified in denouncing the right’s demagogic exaggerations, which have been so politically potent for Republicans that the party is now addicted to them. If you doubt it, consider the right’s absurd, self-parodic effort over the last few days to blame the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank on the institution’s wokeness and fixation on diversity.

But the left errs in denying the reality of the underlying phenomenon. Wokeness isn’t a phantom menace. It isn’t “a word that signifies nothing other than conservative disdain for anything that seems liberal.” It’s real. It exists. It makes headlines. People encounter it in their workplaces, in their kids’ schools and athletic events, in the pages of newspapers and magazines, in bookstores, in their neighborhoods and churches. Claiming none of this is true—that it’s all invented by the right, conjured out of thin air, for the sake of political gain—is a form of gaslighting that’s at once dishonest and bound to backfire politically.

The Right Way to Push Back

But that doesn’t mean the right’s approach to combatting wokeness is the correct one.

As I noted above, wokeness advances in civil society when younger progressive activists in junior positions push for it within institutions—and when those in positions of authority within those institutions (who are often liberals) capitulate to the demands, either because they feel shamed into it by their younger colleagues or because they fear the bad publicity that could follow from the formation of an outraged progressive mob online. (In many cases, both may be factors.) But this implies that the place and time to push back against woke trends is where they advance (in private institutions) and at the moment the advance is poised to take place (with an act of liberal capitulation to progressive activists).

This isn’t a hypothetical proposition. In a recent appearance on The Bulwark Podcast with Charlie Sykes, I pointed out how important it was when the management of Netflix refused to back down in the face of in-house and online criticism of the company’s latest controversial special by comedian Dave Chappelle. Rather than give in to the criticism, the company held fast, essentially telling its staff that they could either do their jobs without incident or quit and make room for people who would do them instead.

A far more important example has taken place in recent weeks at The New York Times, where a handful of carefully reported stories about youth gender transitioning prompted protests by LGBT activists, written denunciation of the newspaper, and statements of support for the activists by some Times employees. Whereas senior management at the newspaper capitulated to similar expressions of progressive outrage in the past, this time those in charge stood their ground, issuing strong statements of support for the reporters and editors responsible for the stories—and sharp rebukes for the Times staffers who spoke out against them.

Towards a Liberal Anti-Wokeism

That’s how to fight wokeness. Not by voting for Ron DeSantis (let alone for the even worse Donald Trump). Not by backing bills that would abolish academic freedom and quash free speech. Not by using state power to coerce private companies into changing their moral and political positions on controversial matters of public dispute. Wokeness began as a development on the progressive left with real but limited influence and only exploded into national prominence in reaction to the moral offenses that were a daily feature of life during the Trump presidency. Likewise, nothing would do more to empower wokeness as a grassroots phenomenon than sending DeSantis to the White House, where he would fight moral illiberalism with political illiberalism, in the process turning left-wing activists into martyrs for freedom and democracy.

We can’t fight wokeness by smashing it politically. We can only fight it by convincing liberal-minded people in powerful positions within private and public institutions that they should stand up to and resist it. Which may be just another way of saying that the key to stopping wokeism is a reaffirmation of liberalism.

One thing I hope to do in this newsletter is test out argumentative and rhetorical strategies for achieving just such a liberal pushback within civil society. If the effort is successful, it may well have the effect of weakening both the woke and anti-woke forces that contribute so much to polarizing our public life.

That strikes me as a very good use of my time. I hope you think it’s a good use of yours. Thanks for being here.