The Big Truth, Part 8
About This Series
I am not a Democrat. Haven’t been since 1980. If I had a political affiliation, it would be Despising the GOP, which has become the American Fascist Party. As such, I have, for practical purposes, come to rely on Democratic victories to save the republic from Nazis, demagogues and the Christian Taliban.
Which is why for years I’ve been utterly infuriated by the Democrats’ inability to communicate the stakes (and the truth), while the opposing Party of Lies endlessly dwells in thirst traps of reactionary unreality.
Why the Dems refuse to message systematically until the cusp of Election Day is an ongoing mystery, though they have often claimed the voters care only about pocketbook issues — and now, finally, abortion rights — versus the jagged noise of the 24-hour campaign. There may be truth in that, but the upshot is ceding the Great Political Message Board to the GOP, which beams a steady flow of disinformation into a near-total vacuum of dis-disinformation.
That’s insane. First of all, policy and legislation do not wait for the three months before the polls open every two years. Secondly, while the Democrats sit on their hands, repugnant lies take hold. As we saw in the debt-ceiling clusterfuck, once again the GOP held hostage the full faith and credit of the United States while blaming the administration for the crisis, when objectively the opposite was true.
And so, for what little it matters, I’m stepping in. This will be the eighth of nine columns examining crucial issues long since clouded by laughably dishonest Republican propaganda in the service of authoritarianism, racism, toxic antisemitism, anti-secularism, nationalism and pandering-to-the-stupidism. My mission: to distill GOP depravity to its essence, one spurious lie at a time.
“A virus more dangerous than any pandemic, hands down,” said Republican presidential candidate Nikki Haley.
“I traveled the country calling out the woke-industrial-complex in America,” said Republican presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy.
“We reject woke ideology,” said Republican presidential hopeful Ron DeSantis. “We will never ever surrender to the woke mob.”
DeSantis, governor of Florida and Donald Trump’s main rival for the nomination, has built his own presidential ambitions on smearing the left. Florida, he boasts, is “where Woke goes to die.” You’ve got to hand it to him; he puts his revisionism where his mouth is. He rammed the Stop WOKE Act into Florida law in order to once and for all free school kids from exposure to shameful narratives about racism, genocide, imperialism, misogyny and other stains on America’s past — or, as people used to call it, “history.”
Yes, the GOP has surely been awakened to woke. But they’re still a little drowsy, because they unfailingly misunderstand it, or at least mischaracterize it, in order to raise the blood pressure of their mouth-breathing base.
Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Hades) defines “wokeism” as:
… the left seizing institutions of transmission of ideas and that includes education — K-12 and universities. It includes journalism. It includes entertainment — Hollywood, movies, TV, sports, music, video games. And it’s characterized by demanding one uniform view on any particular topic, engaging in brutal punishment for any who disagree, including most simply being canceled.
But Cruz is confused. That would be a more apt, albeit hysterical, description of political correctness, which is the imposition of a doctrinaire set of political and cultural values enforced by the risk of denunciation, ostracization and/or “No tenure for you, professor.” True enough, political correctness, a product of campus liberalism of the 80s, quickly devolved into speech codes, a vast catalog of “microaggressions” and other received liberal wisdom. If you called it “the tyranny of the left,” you wouldn’t be much exaggerating.
Wokeism, if you’ll forgive me for using a word utterly co-opted by the forces of reaction, is a much narrower concept. Actually, DeSantis — for all his demagoguery and hatefulness — more or less gets it. His spokesman defined wokeism as “the belief there are systemic injustices in American society and the need to address them.”
Well, exactly.
The notion was first attributed to Marcus Garvey, the early 20th century pan-African activist, who admonished Black Africans to “Stay awake.” Fifteen years later, blues singer Huddie Ledbetter — known as Lead Belly — recorded the song “Scottsboro Boys,” about nine Arkansas teenagers unjustly accused of rape. The lyrics implored Black Americans to “stay woke” about the society they lived in. And “woke” remained a fixture of Black vernacular to signify vigilance for Americans ever oppressed and ever at risk of violence.
When in 2014, the Scottsboro Boys’ nightmare was repeated for the umpteenth time, with the police killing of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, the fledgling Black Lives Matter movement embraced the word for precisely the same reason. To be woke was to be careful, be aware, be not overly comforted by the historical distance of slavery and Jim Crow, because systemic racism puts you at risk every moment of your life.
Ultimately, it’s a reminder of how easily our sacred democratic and human rights can be taken away, whether by a malevolent government or the populist mob. The proof resides in the obvious fact that Black Americans did have those rights taken away, at the very outset of colonial life, that they remained without basic rights well into the 1970s and that 150 years after abolition and 60 years after the Civil Rights Act they still are oppressed by structural racism contaminating almost every dimension of American life. Housing. Education. Policing. Sentencing. Commerce. Environmental exposure. Healthcare. And even the most fundamental element of democracy: one man, one vote.
Which is why rhetoric during the Obama Administration about a supposed “post-racial society” was delusional. And dangerous, as such happy talk emboldened John Roberts’ right-wing Supreme Court — in the 2013 Shelby County v. Holder decision — to undo Voting Rights Act of 1965 restrictions for nine southern states that had mandated Justice Department approval for any change to election laws. Loose lips sink statutes.
But the rise of BLM was not quite the tipping point. What followed was The 1619 Project, a body of essays organized by journalist Nikole Hannah-Jones, rejecting the established narrative of America’s founding, and (rhetorically or not is unclear) claiming that the true starting point was the year 1619, when Black slaves first were brought here in chains. The premise of the series was sound, namely that much of America’s founding myth has been cynically aggrandized, particularly by underestimating the crucial effect of the slave trade on the economy, the ethos and the political trajectory of the society. That is indisputable. What was disputable were certain claims that did not pass historical muster, such as the assertion that the Revolutionary War was rooted in the colonists’ fear that Britain would abolish slavery. Of that connection, historians who have devoted their careers to researching the American Revolution could locate zero evidence. Another inconvenient truth was that the first slaves arrived on our shores not in 1619 but 1526.
But the aspect of The 1619 Project that most alarmed (and, as we shall we, most delighted) Republicans is how it reminded them of Critical Race Theory. CRT is an arcane, and hitherto obscure, academic discipline that concerns the ways in which societies deal with race, racism, history, law and especially legal remedies for the injustice perpetually afflicting racial minorities. It’s a topic that, at least until it began to obsess the right-wing media, was argued entirely in seminars and scholarly journals. It is a debate, not a template; a theory, not a curriculum. But when in the wake of police shootings and the advent of Black Lives Matter, school districts around the country began to create mechanisms for Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (which, please note, is not Perversity, Delinquency and Contusion), large swaths of white America felt threatened, or at least insulted. Such programs are simply about being sensitive and aware of the other guy, but to angry parents it was a scurrilous accusation.
Around the country, local school boards have been battlegrounds for the Diversity Equity Inclusion backlash. One woman told her board that “my 6-year-old somberly came to me and asked me if she was born evil because she was a white person — something she learned in a history lesson at school.”
Let’s say she wasn’t lying. Let’s just say. Had this been my child, I would not have raced to the school board. I might have been in touch with the teacher or principal to find out what the lesson actually was, as 6-year-olds are notoriously unreliable narrators. But first I would have sat down with my kid:
Britney, sweetheart, no. You are not evil. You have done nothing, and you have nothing to be ashamed of. You are not responsible for what people did before you were even born. But evil things have been done, even in our great country. And one of the things that makes our country great is that we learn from our mistakes, just like you learned not to put Mommy’s car key in the wall socket. So don’t think you are responsible for the past. But it’s your job, and everyone’s job, to be kind and understanding every day of your life.
“Teachable moment,” they call that. But not for Republicans. For them woke is a moral-panic moment and a cynical political opportunity to scare the shit out of white folks. Needless to say, Republicans were quick to denounce such do-gooderism as a naked attempt to smear our sainted founding saga and brainwash our children. Trump ran on it. Dr. Oz ran on it. The litigious Arizona lunatic Kari Lake ran on it. As had DeSantis and, altogether successfully, Republican Glenn Youngkin, who anti-woked himself into the governorship of Virginia. And to feed the panic, a whole movement has coalesced, funded by the usual reactionary suspects.
Thus was the unwoke mob was unleashed, and egged on, by this (partial) list of rightwing activist groups, courtesy of NPR:
The Manhattan Institute, one of the most established conservative think tanks, published “Woke Schooling: A Toolkit For Concerned Parents” in June.
Citizens Renewing America, founded by President Trump’s former budget director Russell Vought, published a 34-page guide for activists also in June, dedicated to “combating critical race theory in your community.” The toolkit states the following: “CRT holds that racism is not just a belief held by individuals; rather, it is a system of oppression that has been built into the very structure of our society.”
Parents Defending Education, founded earlier this year, provides resources to activists, pursues litigation, and publishes “incident reports” on districts around the country. President Nicole Neily previously worked at the libertarian Cato Institute and the Independent Women’s Forum, another conservative group that has produced a template letter for activists challenging school mask mandates.
Turning Point USA, a group closely allied with Trump through its leader, Charlie Kirk, started School Board Watchlist, a website with the names and photographs of school board members around the country. They say they are “America’s only national grassroots initiative dedicated to protecting our children by exposing radical and false ideologies endorsed by school boards and pushed in the classroom.” School districts are called out for requiring masks and promoting “cultural literacy and sensitivity.”
The Proud Boys, which the Southern Poverty Law Center calls an extremist hate group, has taken part in school board protests in several states.
The 1776 Project is a political action committee backing school board candidates nationwide who oppose antiracist curricula. They raised nearly $300,000 in the quarter ending Sept. 30, according to FEC filings.
As the movement grew, the grievance extended beyond race to gender, and the perceived tyranny and Godlessness of LGBTQ+ consciousness. Tragically but unsurprisingly, those messages have more than sunk in with that vast part of the electorate predisposed to believing they are victims of “cultural Marxism,” and especially with GOP politicians who can all but taste a huge victory in the Culture Wars. As Sarah Schwartz reported in Education Week:
Patricia Morgan, a Republican in Rhode Island who proposed the state’s divisive concepts bill, called critical race theory ‘a divisive, destructive, poisonous ideology that encourages people to judge each other by the color of their skin … It makes white males oppressors ... and it makes everyone else the victims.’
Sure enough, over the past two years, eight Red states — Idaho, Iowa, Louisiana, Missouri, New Hampshire, Oklahoma, Rhode Island and West Virginia — have entertained legislation modeled on Florida’s WOKE act. Not to be out-bigoted, Trump banned diversity training for federal workers and contractors. And why? Because Jesus obviously does not condone empathy. That famous scripture — Ephesians 4:32, “Be kind and compassionate to one another” — that was just for the cameras.
Now then, as long as we’re discussing history, let us be clear that while “Cultural Marxism” is an epithet with plenty of zing, woke is certainly not that. The individual-rights origin story goes back much, much farther. In reverse order, I’d cite the ascent of liberal democracy, which dates to the 18th century, but has overwhelmingly been the trajectory of the world since the beginning of the 20th century. “Liberal,” in this usage, does not connote “bleeding heart.” It connotes representative democracy, free elections, universal suffrage, rule of law, free expression, civil rights, human rights and a market economy. It is a social contract, memorialized in a constitution. It does not mandate trans surgery or a Green New Deal.
Actually, you’ll find it all laid out in a handy document called The Constitution of the United States of America (1789), and even more explicitly in the first 10 amendments (1791) called the Bill of Rights. But why stop at the Age of Enlightenment? Why not begin in 1215 with the Magna Carta — the Great Charter — which first codified civil and human rights? I swear to God; Karl Marx was not involved.
To get to the nub of it, woke is the understanding that nine centuries later, such social contracts are only as good as the determination to fulfill them. And, so, to be ever vigilant, because even in 2023 America — if you are in any minority or marginalized community, or even merely a woman — the fulfillment sucks. I mean, come on, the very expropriation of the word “woke” is prima facie evidence of the stubborn racism it warns against.
As deftly explained in a 2021 issue of (the defunct) Mel Magazine, “woke” is powerful because it borrows from the argot of Black Americans:
‘WOKE WITH A HARD R’: HOW THE RIGHT CREATED A NEW DOG WHISTLE
The word woke is now a funhouse version of itself — a weaponized expression of winking anti-Blackness. How did we get here?
It’s a very good essay, but … dog whistle? No. “Woke” is a fucking air-raid siren, unabashedly ridiculing the concerns of Black Americans and Black America itself.
As Ron DeSantis and Donald Trump paid homage on Fourth of July weekend to the fascist (they keep quoting Hitler!) Moms for Liberty convention, liberty was not at stake for the attendees. Playing to the bigoted, Christian Nationalist “patriots,” DeSantis invoking “woke” was no different than rocking a white hood. The governor is nominally from Florida, but fundamentally he is Alabama Gov. George Wallace. He is Arkansas Gov. Orval Faubus. He is Georgia Gov. Lester Maddox, who brandished a mere ax handle to restore white supremacy. DeSantis deals with the uppity minorities, and promotes hetero hegemony, with explicitly marginalizing state laws.
All based on a lie, and a sick society fully prepared to swallow it.