Journo Tells of the Anti-Woke Diagnosis in the Midst of a Civil Rights Apocalypse

If that headline sounds like some word salad that Kamala Harris would have spit out, it's because it is. I read Rebecca Traister's in New York Magazine's Intelligencer, and what she seems to be trying to say is that Democrats shouldn't be so quick to blame "wokeness" for their loss in 2024. Traister is afraid that wokeness will suffer.

Wrote about the morally vacuous, strategically unsound (and also wrong!) anti-“woke”diagnosis everyone’s still sticking with, even in the midst of a civil rights apocalypse. https://t.co/wnKAY32r76
— Rebecca Traister (@rtraister) February 18, 2025

A civil rights apocalypse? We thought we were in a constitutional crisis. We're not sure whose civil rights have been taken away since President Donald Trump was inaugurated, but it must have been enough to create an apocalypse.

Traister writes:

In the midst of chaos and cataclysm, it’s rare to find agreement across partisan divides, but in the months since Donald Trump won his second presidential election and commenced a full-bore attack on this country’s civil rights and protections, pundits and politicians from across the ideological spectrum have joined in rare consensus: that it was “identity politics,” known more commonly as “wokeness,” that is largely to blame for Trump’s destructive return to the Oval Office.
Liberals and centrists arrived at this conclusion with a speed and ardor only available to people who’d been dying to crow about this for years. “Woke is broke,” wrote Maureen Dowd days after Kamala Harris’s loss to Trump, arguing that the left’s “worldview of hyperpolitical correctness, condescension, and cancellation” had alienated half the country. James Carville told Dowd that “defund the police” (not uttered by any mainstream Democratic politician since 2020) were “the three stupidest words in the English language,” while Rahm Emanuel scolded Democrats for dooming themselves via “debates over pronouns, bathroom access,” and “terms such as ‘care economy’ and ‘Latinx.’” Some Democratic politicians agreed, taking particular aim at transgender advocacy, with Massachusetts representative Seth Moulton worrying about his little girls “getting run over on a playing field by a male or formerly male athlete,” and saying that “Democrats spend way too much time trying not to offend anyone.”

So the civil rights apocalypse is what? Denying life-altering "gender-affirming care" to minors. I'm not sure what Traister thinks sunk the Democrat Party if not a focus on identity politics. Yes, Democrats did campaign over such things as letting boys take over girls' sports and using the correct pronouns. It felt like the Harris campaign was focused solely on the transgender vote.

"The problem is that evidence of the unpopularity of 'wokeness' — a term for the messy, sometimes pedantic, frequently annoying, occasionally righteous calls for greater awareness of structural privilege based on race, sex, gender, and ability — is thin at best, and at worst undergirds a dangerous misdiagnosis that will ensure Democrats lose again the next time around," she adds. Good. I want to ensure that Democrats lose again the next time around by campaigning on wokeness.

Journo Tells of the Anti-Woke Diagnosis in the Midst of a Civil Rights Apocalypse

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