Woke 2.0 Will Be Worse

Authored by Spencer Klavan via AmericanMind.org,

Readers familiar with Dr. Seuss’s classic, The Cat in the Hat, will remember the twin chaos agents Thing 1 and Thing 2.

“‘These Things are good Things,’” the Cat reassures the children whose mother has inexplicably left them under the supervision of a fish.

“‘They are tame. Oh, so tame! / They have come here to play.’”

The Things briefly feign innocence, then quickly reveal themselves to be marauding imps, knocking over nightstands and ruining the linens.

“I do not like the way that they play!” says the son of the house.

Now here comes Woke 1 and Woke 2.

“Woke 1 was crazy,” said U.S. Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, quoting an unnamed city councilman in a viral interview for ABC. The congresswoman sheepishly acknowledged that Americans did not like the way Woke 1 played out, while also implicitly announcing that there will soon be, or already is, a Woke 2. And it will be tame. Oh, so tame!

There is, in fact, a new version of wokeness in the making. But just as Thing 2 was fundamentally identical to Thing 1, Woke 2 will not be any different in essence from Woke 1. They are both here to upend the furniture.

Wokeness in all its forms is grievance politics.

Its central idea is that an injustice lies at the heart of America and must be corrected to atone for the historical misery inflicted on groups of innocents.

What is changing in Woke 2 is the account of who those innocents are, and how they have been wronged. Woke 1 was founded on the notion that black women are the most oppressed, and therefore most righteous, of all people. “I’m thinking,” said Kamala Harris in her vice presidential victory speech, “about the generations of women—black women.” She mentioned many other kinds of women, of course, but the list began and ended with “the black women—who are too often overlooked, but so often prove that they are the backbone of this country.”

This approach had rhetorical power, up to a point. It traded on the successes of second-wave feminism and the reality of black slavery in America’s past. But it ran into some problems. Third-wave feminism, as worked out by theorists like Judith Butler, made it basically impossible not to affix the prefix “trans-” wherever the word “woman” appeared. So the flag of Woke 1 became the complicated and confusing progress pride flag—a gay rainbow with black and trans colors intruding from the left.

To make matters worse, the legacy of slavery did not actually touch all the racial minorities that Democrats wanted to bring into their fold. Most Nigerians, for example, had not experienced segregation in the United States. Nor had the millions of unvetted South and Central Americans streaming across the border. They were certainly “people of color.” But so were Chinese, Japanese, and Indian Americans, whose typically enviable life outcomes fit awkwardly into the narrative that the country was built on a ruthless caste system.

The contradictions heightened as Woke 1 faced a series of embarrassments such as Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard, the 2023 Supreme Court case in which Asian students complained that admissions officers were discriminating against them in favor of black applicants. Then there were the notorious Trump ’24 ads that pinned Harris to her previous support of taxpayer-funded gender surgeries for federal prison inmates. Placing black women at the center of the moral universe created an unexpected and electorally unworkable set of obligations to illegal immigrants and queer felons.

Clearly, the coalition needed shuffling. And so rearranging the order of priorities in the grievance hierarchy is what the reinvention of woke has actually been about. In place of the black trans woman who defined Woke 1, Woke 2 has chosen as its ideal victim the dispossessed Palestinian liberationist, fighting with Hamas against Israel. This has a number of interesting strategic advantages.

First, the racial argument has been neatly streamlined. Rather than implausibly analogizing every racial group in America to the victims of Jim Crow, Woke 2 presents the black American story as just one instance of a global fight for justice carried out by minorities everywhere and epitomized in the intifada.

In 2023, on a panel for the Democratic Socialists of America, future New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani claimed that “when the boot of the NYPD is on your neck, it’s been laced by the IDF.” He was outlining the blueprint for Woke 2, which takes its cues not from Judith Butler but from post-colonialist Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth (1961). “Between colonial violence and the insidious violence in which the modern world is steeped,” wrote Fanon, “there is a kind of complicit correlation, a homogeneity.” Therefore, “The colonized, underdeveloped man is today a political creature in the most global sense of the term.”

Recently, in an intriguing interview with The New Yorker’s David Remnick, Democratic Senate hopeful Abdul El-Sayed put forward an argument that connects Fanon’s global struggle to America’s domestic economy. He claimed that pro-Israel politicians are allowing “the money that should be spent taking care of our kids to be sent to a military that has done a genocide.”

In other words, Woke 2’s new order of priorities allows its proponents to suggest that white or white-coded (read: Jewish) oppressors are funneling money away from America’s working poor to fund a worldwide campaign of mass slaughter. Distant as this account is from reality, it is much more ruthlessly focused as a line of woke reasoning. It emphasizes foreign policy and the economy, where the public’s real anger lies, and deftly mutes the discredited claims of LGBTQ extremists.

In practice, any woke administration of any variety will end up imposing pretty much the same bizarre sexual priorities on the country once elected. But for purposes of advertisement, Woke 2 will try to keep its trans members less conspicuous than Woke 1 did, for at least as long as it takes to re-establish national power. Replacing the progress pride flag with the Palestinian flag will distract from the ravages of queer excess while infusing socialist revolution with the moral self-righteousness of anti-white resentment.

Whether this tactic succeeds with voters is another matter.

If it does, though, Americans will discover that both Woke 1 and Woke 2, like Thing 1 and Thing 2, only play nice until they can start pitching over tables.

If we want to avoid a rerun of the early 2020s, then—to paraphrase Seuss—we will have to get rid of Woke 1 and Woke 2.