forummag | “Wokeness is a problem and everyone knows it,” James Carville, the political strategist often credited with Clinton’s 1992 victory (and, let’s be honest, not much else), whinged to Vox last year, 100 days into Joe Biden’s presidency. “It’s hard to talk to anybody today—and I talk to lots of people in the Democratic Party—who doesn’t say this. But they don’t want to say it out loud.”
If someone makes up an identity grounded in nothing but subjective feeling and a state recognizes it as constituting a protected class, subjective reality becomes immune to challenge and the ultimate political contest becomes to control what feelings are recognized by the state
— Wesley Yang (@wesyang) July 9, 2022
The statement is immediately self-contradictory, sure—it’s hard to talk to anyone who doesn’t say this, but not out loud? But it’s already setting the stage for a year of recriminations and preemptive blame-shifting for what is widely expected to be a midterm bloodbath for the ruling Democratic party. The political scientist Ruy Teixera—co-author of a best-selling Bush-era book on how demographic change would lead inexorably to permanent Democratic dominance—now peddles a newsletter where he moans about “the Democratic Left’s adamant refusal to base its political approach on the actually-existing opinions and values of actually-existing American voters,” as if “the Democratic Left” has been the determinant of what a government led by Joe Biden—again, that Joe Biden, the one who is president—has managed to accomplish, or not accomplish, over the last year.
In lengthy Twitter threads and ugly Substack newsletters, consultants and would-be consultants tell the gerontocratic and eternally triangulating leadership of the Democratic Party that the real problem is that the kids who work for them are too “woke.” Despite “everyone” knowing it’s a problem, “wokeness” is a poorly defined concept. “Woke” was once a Black slang term for being politically aware (specifically, being aware—sometimes in a comically exaggerated way—of the myriad methods the white establishment has of punishing politically active Black people). It now serves, in the popular political discourse, the exact same function as the term “PC” did for Marshall and From in 1993. “PC” stood for “political correctness,” which, after the fall of the Soviet Union and prior to 9/11, was, in the eyes of the white commentariat, the single greatest threat faced by the United States. (A few years ago Moira Weigel observed that the term “political correctness” hardly appeared in print at all prior to 1990. As she notes, in 1992, a database of U.S. magazine and newspaper articles turned up 2,800 references.) The point of each term, as deployed by these men, is to euphemize a euphemism: “special interests.”
“African Americans, women, white farmers, and, especially, organized labor,” is how Geismer describes the New Democrat conception of “special interests.” The big idea of the New Democrats was that denying all of these annoying groups any material gains would please the White Suburban Voter, who had emerged from all the social upheavals of 1960s and beyond as the Main Character of American Politics. What is remarkable, more than three decades later, is how little anyone has learned.
“WHAT THE WHITE HOUSE DOESN’T WANT YOU TO READ,” huffed a recent tantalizing subhead in Politico’s “West Wing Playbook” tipsheet. Was it some previously undisclosed intelligence operation? A newly declassified Kennedy assassination document? No. It was a Wall Street Journal op-ed by Republican Senator Mitt Romney calling on the White House to “ditch its woke advisers.”
“White House chief of staff RON KLAIN may have taken this a bit personally,” Playbook’s authors wrote. He “retweeted our own SAM STEIN, who quipped that White House deputy chief of staff BRUCE REED was the ‘embodiment of woke’ (Reed is objectively un-woke. In fact, the woke don’t like him).” I do not mean this as a cheap gotcha point, but all of the capitalized names in this dispatch are white men, and at no point do the keen analysts behind Politico’s West Wing Playbook define what they think the term “woke” means.” At a certain point, though, you have to ask:. What does “wokeness” mean, to you, to Democratic centers of power and (last and probably least) to Politico?
Back in George W. Bush’s second term, Jonathan Schwarz articulated what he called the “Iron Law of Institutions.” It goes: “the people who control institutions care first and foremost about their power within the institution rather than the power of the institution itself. Thus, they would rather the institution ‘fail’ while they remain in power within the institution than for the institution to ‘succeed’ if that requires them to lose power within the institution.” Schwarz meant to universalize it, but I think he nailed something very specific about how the Democratic Party works, and I think Al From and Will Marshall ought to agree.
The long-standing fight over who runs our nation’s left-of-center party has featured multiple linguistic evolutions but otherwise remained strikingly static. For my entire life, white moderates have been complaining about how difficult the people on the side of multiracial democracy are making it for them to win their idealized suburban voters.
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