Democrats Must Pick Fights with Woke Activists

Election pundits like to argue that the issues they care about most are also at the front of voters’ minds. However, it is difficult to dispute that wokeness harms the Democratic Party in national elections. Polls show overwhelming opposition to letting transwomen participate in women’s sports. In 2020, California voted by over fourteen points to continue the prohibition of affirmative action. At a more superficial but still politically meaningful level, Hispanics are more likely to say that they find the term “Latinx” offensive than they are to use it.

Some commentators on the Left maintain that opponents of wokeness largely got what they wanted from Kamala Harris’s presidential campaign. Don Moynihan, for example, argues that Harris kept talk about identity to a minimum. She also endorsed a tough border bill, and walked back her previous support for government providing gender-confirmation surgery to imprisoned illegal immigrants.

This is all true, and when the Harris campaign published its policy proposals, I noted how remarkably free of identity issues they were. Nevertheless, voters are not wrong to connect Democratic governance with radical views on issues related to race and sex. Each political faction is considered responsible for what members of its coalition do. This is rational because governing is not only about the policies leaders implement, it is also about sins of omission that allow policy to move in undesirable directions. 

Where Does ‘Wokeness’ Come From?

Opponents of wokeness sometimes say that “facts don’t care about your feelings.” But the federal judiciary does.

QuilletteRichard Hanania

In California, governor Gavin Newsom and every other elected statewide official is a Democrat, as are large majorities in both state houses. Schools throughout the University of California system require DEI statements for aspiring faculty. At places like Berkeley and Santa Cruz, commitment to diversity isn’t simply one criterion among many—it serves as a threshold test for deciding which applications are even considered. Conor Friedersdorf calls this “a revolutionary change in how to evaluate professors.” The University of California system has also banned the consideration of standardised tests in admissions, removing the only objective measure schools have to select students according to merit.

Newsom did not run on diversity statements or banning standardised tests, and he never signed a law mandating these things. The problem is that regimes like these can only flourish in states under full Democratic control. State universities rely on legislatures for funding, and in most states, boards of regents are appointed by the governor. It is therefore reasonable to worry about politicians interfering with academic freedom, but it’s difficult to argue that states have no right to step in when public education has gone as far off the rails as the University of California system has. In places like Texas and Florida, state governments have acted to rein in left-wing excesses in the universities.

Even if no Democratic politician comes out for eliminating gifted classes in schools, diversity statements, racial preferences, pronouns in bios, biological males playing in female sports, or various other initiatives that fall under the banner of “wokeness,” voters correctly understand that Democratic rule is likely to result in all of these things, and probably much else that currently isn’t even part of the discussion. Voters in Pennsylvania and Ohio know that their university systems could easily be as woke as that of California if Republicans did not enjoy substantial representation in government.

What’s true about colleges also applies to primary and secondary education. Matt Yglesias notes that the Biden administration has had no principled objection to involving itself in local education issues. It has used its bully pulpit to attack the removal of LGBT-themed books from school libraries but said nothing about the elimination of gifted programs in the name of equity. 

Wokeness has rarely been directly imposed by elected officials. Rather, it is what you get when ideologues seize the reins in schools, universities, corporations, and government bureaucracies. Reasonable people can differ about how much authority the federal and state governments have to intervene under different circumstances. But in cases where the government itself engages in undesirable behaviour, like imposing soft racial quotas or turning state universities into left-wing monocultures, we need politicians who are going to chart a different course.

If Democrats are to reassure voters, they must start picking fights with woke activists. On the cultural level, there must be greater tolerance for internal dissent instead of treating reasonable and widely held positions as if they are beyond the pale. Congressman Seth Moulton took a step in the right direction by speaking up about transwomen in sports, but the backlash revealed why more Democrats don’t register their disagreements with the far-left—one of Moulton’s staffers resigned and others who have previously worked for him began circulating a critical letter. Where Democrats hold power, they should work to check woke excesses in areas where the use of policy levers is appropriate, and at least use their political platform to loudly disagree with leftists within their coalition when it is not.

One might argue that it doesn’t matter what Democratic office-holders do, because Fox and right-wing Twitter will always tar them with the Left’s most unpopular policies and rhetoric. But this is too pessimistic about the ability of politicians to shape the narrative. The media is so unused to Democrats pushing back on identity politics that a leader beginning to do so forcibly would get the attention of a man-bites-dog story. Outrage from former staffers and interns will only help to publicise the efforts of those adopting such positions. Until now, Democrats have shown themselves to be somewhere on the spectrum between enthusiastically backing identity politics and simply ignoring it. Only by actively opposing left-wing dogma can they begin to win back trust among their fellow Americans.

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