Woke Is It!

The dark art of sloganeering to wage war on human decency.

Coke Is It!
A Diamond Is Forever
Think Different
Just Do It
Marlboro Country
Labor Isn’t Working
Morning in America
Does She or Doesn’t She?

These are some of the most powerful and enduring advertising slogans of all time. You recognize most of them, dated though they may be.

Having plied my trade as an advertising critic for 25 years, I can briefly explain why “Just Do It” is on the list, whereas, for example, “Live mas!” is not. The answer in general is distilling a product’s (alleged) benefits so purely, and triggering an emotional connection so rarefied, as to alter purchasing patterns and human behavior on a grand scale. Also known as: striking a nerve. For example, once upon a time, the diamond engagement ring as the standard symbol of betrothal did not exist. It was foisted on the American consciousness in 1947 by the advertising agency NW Ayer in an ad campaign by De Beers, the diamond cartel. This turned out to be extremely bad news for the ruby industry.

Upon the emergence of the birth-control pill, “Does she or doesn’t she?” expropriated the tumult and liberation of the sexual revolution to sell, of all things, hair dye to women. It was a sly double entendre — with the astute kicker reflecting the role of hair salons as de facto confessionals: “Only her hairdresser knows for sure.”

There’s an old story about a beggar on the street one April morning, holding a sign that said “Blind,” alongside a nearly empty tin cup. An advertising copywriter noticed him and asked if he might make a slight edit to the sign. Within an hour, the cup overflowed with coins and paper currency. The sign now read, “It is spring, and I am blind.”

Advertising works.

Now, it happens that bad advertising works nearly as well as good advertising; its basic mechanism of proliferating a brand name requires no particular genius. But sometimes, for the aforementioned reasons, lightning strikes. In such circumstances, an image of a sun-weathered cowboy on an open range can induce 500 million (mostly) young people to express their non-existent rugged individuality by commiting slow-motion suicide. Because nobody told them Marlboro Country is a cemetery. I regret to say that this was the most effective abuse of advertising imagery and adolescent psychology in history.

But now, it further breaks my heart to report, there is another slogan — just as ingenious, just as evil — that has in three short years risen to the pantheon:

“Woke.”

The term first appeared in the early 1970s to convey the emerging awareness of the persistence of racial inequality far beyond the horrors of Jim Crow into the (somewhat) more subtle racism of everyday life, from economic injustice, to employment and housing discrimination, to environmental exposure, to educational disadvantages, to abusive marketing, to healthcare outcomes, to racial profiling, to even the passive-aggressive racism of liberal whites. Not to mention lethal policing and the Black gulag archipelago.

But “woke” took off in the late 2010s with the rise of the Black Lives Matter movement, and the publication of The New York Times seminal “1619 Project,” which documented structural racism dating back to the slave trade four centuries ago and persisting to this day. “Woke” was an adjective, something of a rallying cry and ultimately a state of mind.

Then, like freedom, dignity and human rights before it, “woke” was stolen — or at least expropriated — by the political right for its own depraved benefit.

With apologies in advance, I commend you to my own book, American Manifesto (not to sell copies, babycakes — alas, that ship has sailed). It was published in 2020. And it listed the whole litany of conservative grievances against so-called “liberal democracy” — the political structure that commenced with the Magna Carta in the year 1215 and has evolved over eight centuries to enshrine and expand human rights through the evolution of constitutional democracy. Since the end of World War II, in particular, it has swept the world. So embedded in modern civilization are these principles that in 1989 political scientist Francis Fukayama wrote The End of History and the Last Man, his ceremonial burial of tyranny, superstition, theocracy and other retrograde thinking that for mankind’s previous 30,000 years privileged barbarism over civilization.

Oops. Turns out Frank got out a bit ahead of his skis. He neglected the sheer, enduring power of demagogy, deceit, delusion and, above all, resentment.

In the United States, for example, he regarded as settled law and societal consensus such matters as civil rights, voting rights, gender equity, separation of church and state, liberal immigration (“Give me your tired, your poor, your swollen masses yearning to breathe free”), rights of the accused, legal abortion, regulated industry for the safety and protection of air, water and human life, gay marriage and fucking seat belts.

But, nope. Each of these iterative legal decisions yielded profound anger and resentment. For 60 years, ⅓ of the populus seethed at the serial repudiation of their “traditional values” — aka religious doctrine and bigotry — and the so-called “religious right” coalesced as a formidable political force. (Ask Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush, not to mention the monstrous Trump.) And they achieved all this despite some pretty crappy advertising. Oh, it was filled with lies, anti-Constitutional rhetoric and culture-war propaganda, but they never quite found the magic word to synthesize all of their constituencies’ diverse grievances, prejudices, superstitions, religious fanaticism and just plain hatred.

The best term they could toss around was “secular humanism,” which I happen to embrace proudly as a sort of melding of the Magna Carta and Golden Rule, but which they simply used as a synonym for “Godless.”

Well, things have changed. Because the very same coalition of racists, misogynists, white supremacists, religious freaks and evil demagogues have found a word that, in their depraved minds, is synonymous with “secular humanism” but several orders of magnitude more powerful. Because it not only stands for all of the liberal transgressions against their primitive ideals, but simultaneously mocks the black-English roots of the idiom. It is the ultimate linguistic ju-jitsu, taking the immense power of a truthful expression of moral and historical awakening and flipping it into a snide racist epithet.

And it will define the politics of our nation at least until the 2024 presidential election, and most likely longer still.

Francis Fukayama, please learn from the diamond cartel: Ignorance and Hatred Are Forever.