One benefit of controlling the media, both standard and social, is that it becomes very easy to make an innovation appear an institution. Thus could our Left insert sexual devolutionary “gender” teaching into grade schools, something opposed by most Americans, and then instantly turn around and demonize opposition to it as a “Don’t say gay” attack on some kind of status quo. Metaphorically, it’s much like launching an unprovoked assault and then, when the hapless victim raises his arms to block your blows, asking him why he’s getting so violent.
This could come to mind when reading a Thursday USA Today piece whose title proclaims that “red America has declared war on corporate America” for being “woke,” and purports to be able to explain “why.”
Author Jessica Guynn mentions that the term “woke” was originally applied in a political context by America’s black community. True enough. Such usage dates back to the 1930s and initially referred to awareness of perceived social and political issues affecting blacks. It wasn’t popularized, however, until after the 2014 self-defense shooting of Ferguson criminal Michael Brown. Now it’s used widely by conservatives, prompting liberals to claim their opponents don’t even know what it means. So here’s the definition:
“Wokeness” is an intensified version of political correctness, which itself is the “suppression of Truth for the purposes of promoting a leftist agenda” (aka falsehoods).
Or as left-wing Vox put it in 2020, the term “has evolved into a single-word summation of leftist political ideology…. This framing of ‘woke’ is bipartisan: It’s used as a shorthand for political progressiveness by the left, and as a denigration of leftist culture by the right.”
Interestingly, anti-wokeness is also bipartisan, though you wouldn’t know it reading Guynn’s article. She frames it as a “red America” phenomenon, even though the first critic of it she cites is Elon Musk. Musk, of course, had long enjoyed the Left’s embrace (as the electric-car guy) and announced just last year that he’d voted Republican for the first time in his life — at age 50. The Democrat’s woke turn was what alienated him, too.
And Musk has plenty of company. Comedian-cum-commentator Bill Maher, @WalkAway Campaign founder Brandon Straka, Democratic consultant James Carville, author and mathematician James Lindsay, and author Helen Pluckrose are among the many liberals who’ve condemned wokeness (and it has turned Straka into a self-professed ex-liberal).
This is as with the innovation-to-institution illusion, however: As soon as a person effectively opposes the latest leftist orthodoxy, he may become an “old Bolshevik,” an enemy of the revolution who is suddenly branded a conservative.
So painting anti-wokeness as a solely GOP obsession, Guynn writes, “Republicans say they’re fighting back against the unchecked influence of liberal activists in executive suites and boardrooms.”
“Grievances include Delta Air Lines opposing Georgia’s restrictive voting laws and Citigroup paying for Texas employees to travel out of state for abortions,” she continues. “Companies suspending campaign donations to Republicans who denied the result of the 2020 presidential election following the Jan. 6 Capitol attack worsened tensions.”
Yes, for sure, grievances “include” the above. But, not surprisingly, Guynn not only sanitizes this corporate political correctness — Delta was actually opposing Georgia’s election-integrity laws — she also omits what would shock the widest swath of Americans, including liberals. For example, as Fox News reported in 2021:
Disney, Coca-Cola, American Express, Bank of America, Lowe’s and Pfizer faced accusations that they trained employees on … “woke” ideas, such as putting “marginalized” staff above “privileged” staff, learning to “decolonize” their minds” and combating aspects of an alleged “White supremacy culture,” such as perfectionism, individualism and objectivity.
… In February, a whistleblower at Coca-Cola claimed that the company forced employees to take a seminar teaching them to “be less white.” The whistleblower posted photos of a seminar giving tips to “be less white,” including “be less arrogant, be less certain, be less defensive, be more humble, listen, believe, break with apathy” and “break with white solidarity.” The materials claimed that White people in the United States and other western nations are “socialized to feel that they are inherently superior because they are white.”
“In March, Manhattan Institute Senior Fellow Chris Rufo revealed whistleblower documents from the Walt Disney Company’s diversity and inclusion program,” which tells “employees that they must ‘take ownership of educating [themselves] about structural anti-Black racism,’” Fox also informs.
Program documents hold “that the U.S. has a ‘long history of systemic racism and transphobia’ and that White employees must ‘work through feelings of guilt, shame, and defensiveness to understand what is beneath them and what needs to be healed,’” Fox adds.
It’s not only about race, either. Disney had the temerity last year to oppose Florida’s parental-rights law, which merely helps to combat the classroom sexualization of young children. So who has declared war on whom?
When you continually attack a civilization’s status quo — for example, its tradition, which Chesterton called “democracy extended through time” — you are launching the first salvos. Those firing back at your missile batteries are simply playing defense.
Perhaps, though, it’s understandable some leftists could mistake this defense for offense. When emotion-driven “change” unmoored from Truth is worshiped as an end unto itself and comes to define a civilization — as, tragically, it does ours — that process becomes a status quo. So maybe the sense that one’s latest pseudo-elite-embraced fancies deserve instant institution status is the worst kind of liberal entitlement of all.
It’s a kind of entitlement that needs to end, too — like yesterday.
