Last month, National Review played host to a lively discourse on the meaning of “wokeness.” In response to the increasingly prevalent left-wing arguments that conservatives either can’t define what they mean by “woke” and/or that wokeness is actually good, many of our writers rose to the challenge, defining it and outlining why it’s good for conservatives to stand against it.
In the Deseret News, I joined this discourse. “Wokeness is an elastic creed for a cause whose demands and stipulations seem to grow endlessly, and thereby to consume more and more areas of life,” I wrote. However, defining it is still possible:
“Woke” in something like its expansive, modern sense took off about a decade ago, in the wake of protests over police brutality. At the time, many on the left were quite clear — and often enthusiastic — about what the term meant: to be radically, totally and personally aware of perceived structural injustices (particularly those purportedly tied to identity based characteristics), and committed to rectifying them, whatever one thinks they might be at a given time — and to fault anyone who disagrees either on means or ends as part of the problem.
Wokeness also tends to absorb apolitical aspects of life into its sphere, at the same time that it tends to condemn existing political processes as complicit in injustice. The inherent radicalism of wokeness, as well as its all-consuming tendency, make opposing it a political winner for conservatives — though to focus only on the political benefits of doing so is to ignore deeper deficiencies of the worldview in question.
To oppose wokeness properly, it’s important to keep a few things in mind. First, such activity “does not mean affirming genuine injustice.” Rather, “it means defying the attempts of a terminally online, self-appointed elect to constantly redefine reality — think of the ongoing war on acknowledging differences between the sexes, for example — to suit its ends.” Conservatives also should be careful not to make “woke” an all-purpose descriptor for “liberal thing I don’t like,” lest the word lose its meaning. But if conservatives can keep these things in mind, fighting wokeness will remain a righteous and rewarding cause.
For an alternative view, see Democratic strategist Steve Pierce’s corresponding contribution to the Deseret News, in which he argued that opposing wokeness is an electoral loser for Republicans.