The worst possible thing has happened again. Donald Trump is heading back to the White House and all the Democrats can do now is desperately wail one question: Why?
We’ll have to wait some time for the political scientists to figure out the full story, but the recriminations have already begun.
In time, the blame game will surely land on factors like inflation and the anti-incumbency sentiment it triggered around the world. Then there’s the utterly disastrous decision made by Joe Biden to run again in the first place, denying his party the opportunity to elect a candidate who could have stood a better chance against Trump.
However, despite these unavoidable factors, I hope that the scale of the defeat will also force the party to look seriously at the ideas and ideology that has been influential in the Democratic Party ecosystem over the last five years or so. Specifically, it’s time for the party to get real about what detractors call “wokeness”.
Now I know what you’re thinking. It’s hard not to sound like a crank when throwing around the word “woke” – but even though cynical politicians, racists and culture warriors have spent years rinsing all meaning from it, it is probably the best name we have for a genuinely new ideology that since the mid-2010s has proven influential on the American (and to a lesser extent British) left.
So what are these ideas? In a nutshell, the “woke” umbrella covers a number of different ideas, which are united in how they significantly differ from traditional small-L liberalism.
The “woke” story is one of original sin – where identity conflict is an immutable part of American life
For example, I’ve written before about how one “woke” tenet is the idea that we should defer to people based on their “lived experience” instead of their expertise on a topic. Another idea that falls under the woke umbrella is a tendency to restrict speech to protect people from harm – instead of advocating for more permissive speech norms. And it all comes bundled with new, unfamiliar language – such as rigidly enforced “inclusive” language (like the infamous “latinx” instead of “latino”) and using the language of decolonisation academics.
And what undergirds these ideas is, broadly speaking, a rejection of the traditional conception of progress. Instead of viewing history as a story of expanding rights, as illustrated by, say, the civil rights movement which expanded America’s national story to include African Americans, the “woke” story is one of original sin – where identity conflict is an immutable part of American life, and where we’re not one shared humanity beneath our superficial differences – that instead, identity characteristics such as race plays a defining role in our lives.
Because I’m not a complete crank, unlike many opponents of “wokeness”, I do actually think that there can be a lot of value in these ideas as lenses of analysis. Many of them were popularised during the “racial reckoning” of the late 2010s, which was sparked by a number of high profile police killings of African Americans, and it is good that these ideas offered new perspectives on where American (and indeed, British) society still has some way to go.
But what’s also important for the journalists, politicians, activists, and academics who make up the Democratic Party’s elites, is that whether it is fair or not, these ideas are catastrophically unpopular with the large swathes of voters who pulled the lever for Donald Trump.
That’s why Trump and his supporters have been able to effectively weaponise the term. In a mirror image of Tim Walz’ “weird” charge against the Trumpist right, the language and values that “woke” ideas have marked out the Democrats as people who are different to most Americans.
What this all means then is any reckoning with Kamala Harris’s loss, and the broader problems of the Democratic party is going to have to reckon with “wokeness” if the party wants to win again.
Though it is still too early to draw strong conclusions, since 2016 it has been clear that the Democrats are no longer the party of the working class, and are instead the party of elite professionals – the sorts of people who are sympathetic to “wokeness” as an ideology.
But we now know that the party needs to expand its appeal, and win back these voters if it is to prosper again. And this could mean difficult, or awkward choices – like moving beyond the relatively narrow ideological constraints of “wokeness”, and optimising the party’s platform and language to appeal much more broadly.
It will no doubt be a controversial process – but now is the time to take ideas seriously. To undertake a new reckoning – so that in 2028, the Democratic flag-bearer isn’t weighed down by unpopular ideas.
James O’Malley writes a politics and policy newsletter at Odds and Ends of History
