Is Florida Where the “War on Woke” Has Gone to Die?
Why the campaign against “political correctness” worked for Trump but not for DeSantis
When Donald Trump and Ron DeSantis start arguing about “woke,” you know the term is on its way to becoming what Orwell called a “dying metaphor.”
“Dying metaphors, Orwell wrote, are so “worn-out” that they “have lost all evocative power.” That’s presumably why Trump said at a campaign event recently:
“I don’t like the term ‘woke’ because I hear, ‘Woke, woke, woke.’ It’s just a term they use, half the people can’t even define it. They don’t know what it is.”
Is this the same guy who said at a rally in 2021 that “everything woke turns to shit”? And who, at CPAC in 2022 had crowds cheering when he declared, in his keynote speech, that “The radical left is trying to replace American democracy with woke tyranny?” Or who complained not so long ago on “Truth Social” that Disney was "Woke and Disgusting”?
“Railing against wokeness has long been commonplace for Trump,” writes Newsweek, listing among the things he has called woke in the past:
Now, though, Trump is running against anti-woke crusader Ron DeSantis, who’s constant drumbeat has begun to bore even those warriors-against-woke who saw pernicious transgendered cultural Marxism in what Tucker Carlson called “obese and distinctly frumpy lesbian M&Ms” and who has alienated Black Republican donors with policies that require teachers to teach middle school students that enslaved people “developed skills” which “could be applied for their personal benefit.” (Former Texas Republican Congressman Will Hurd, quipped “slavery wasn’t a jobs program.”)
DeSantis hasn’t even got a decent definition of “woke” in his arsenal. In an interview with Jake Tapper he sputtered and stalled when asked what “wokeness” is, saying that there is an “issue”” there, as most people don’t know what it means. At the same time he showed himself to be among them. “I’ve defined it,” he said, but he didn’t offer that definition (which didn’t stop him from insisting we have to “rip it from the military”):
“When Tapper presented a survey suggesting that "wokeness" ranked ninth in a list of factors affecting enrollment, DeSantis responded, "Well, but I think there's an issue about -- not everyone really knows what wokeness is. I mean, I've defined it, but a lot of people who've railed against wokeness can't even define it. And so I think it's a sense of, this is not something that's holding true to the core martial values that make the military unique."
“Core martial values that make the military unique”? You mean like “men will be men and women will be women”? Or “Transgendered individuals can’t shoot straight”? Or what?
Apparently he thought about the “issue” a little more after that interview, because when NBC correspondent Dasha Burns asked him to define the term during his campaign stop in Iowa on Saturday, he responded that it is “basically a war on the truth.” Hmmm. Truth? His Stop-Woke (Wrongs to Our Kids and Employees) Act, prohibits educational institutions and businesses from teaching students and employees anything that would cause anyone to “feel guilt, anguish or any form of psychological distress” due to their race, color, sex or national origin. Sounds less like a defense of “truth” than educational Xanax.
But of course, DeSantis was just grabbing onto “truth” as something that would give the “anti-woke” agenda some dignity. And for a minute after that, Trump, apparently forgetting that he didn’t like the term, embraced “wokeness” again. In a statement to Newsweek, Trump spokesperson Steven Cheung said that DeSantis' comments were an example of him "stealing President Trump's messaging”: "Ron DeSantis doesn't have an original thought in that minor league brain of his, so that's why he's been stealing President Trump's messaging and policy ideas from Day One.”
That’s true.
But what DeSantis can’t steal is Trump’s ability to deploy “wokeness” to harness the resentment and anger of those who feel the libs are taking the country away from them—and to convince them that he’s the man (not just the agenda, not just the legislation, but the man himself) who will hold down the fort against the unwanted invaders. He tries—“You’ve got to be willing to fight the woke, we’ve done that in Florida, and we proudly consider ourselves the state where woke goes to die”—but with Florida full of retired folks who don’t like to think of themselves as living in a state where anything “goes to die,” that’s a sort of…offputting?….slogan.
If you go back to 2016 (ignore your inevitable PTSD when that election is mentioned) you’ll recall that in the beginning of his campaign Trump didn’t use the term “wokeness” but “political correctness”—another borrowing from the left, turned to right-wing devices. The first Republican debate was a breakout moment for that:
When confronted with his tendency to describe the women he dislikes as “fat pigs,” “slobs” or “disgusting animals,” he dismissively replied that neither he nor the United States “have time for political correctness.”
“I think the big problem this country has is being politically correct. I’ve been challenged by so many people and I don’t, frankly, have time for total political correctness. And to be honest with you, this country doesn’t have time, either.”
Trump didn’t focus on policy—in those days, he hadn’t yet developed a position on abortion, and I doubt he’d spent five minutes thinking about what children should and shouldn’t read (he never reads himself)—but on presenting himself as the fierce and fearless champion of all those “real” Americans who were mad as hell and thrilled to be told they didn’t have to stifle their rage—at immigrants, at feminists, at the snotty “coastal elites,” and of course at Hillary Clinton. He didn’t use terms like “cultural Marxism” (whatever that is) or, indeed, any coded words that might puzzle the crowds at his rallies. Like Howard Beale in “Network,” he got right down with folks:
via @YouTube
Trump’s politics (if you can call them that) were different from Howard Beale’s. But the effect was the same. They went to the window. They saw there were others doing the same, and that made them scream all the louder. The media was captivated. Hillary’s speeches warning of what would happen—to the courts, to human rights, to democracy itself—if he were elected were not good television. (They have, however, turned out to be beyond prescient.) But Trump’s rallies? They were the televisual motherload. “I know I’m not supposed to say this,” he’d often begin, and then go on to say something outrageous anyway, to thunderous shouts of appreciation from his audience.
I suspect Trump himself was genuinely surprised at how voraciously his supporters gobbled up the permission he gave them to let loose with the purest, most vicious rancor against elite restraint. The line that drew the most whoops of delight during the first Republican debate was Trump’s takedown of “political correctness” as the ruin of the culture—not immigrants themselves (he’d already done that when he announced his candidacy) but the prohibition against being anti-immigrant. It’s an important distinction, I think, because the latter touches deeper recesses of resentment, the frustrations and angers that go back to being a child not allowed to do and say bad things. You don’t have to be good little boys and girls, someone was finally preaching; say what you feel, do what you feel like, don’t let the goody-two-shoes liberals (read: that bitch Hillary) boss you around. In this way, Trump’s relationship with his supporters got at their most infantile desires: a release of the id and a fuck you to the parental super-ego.
DeSantis, in contrast, has advertised himself as representing the parental ego—as championed in reactionary bills such as the Parental Rights in Education Law, which he argued would give parents more say in what their kids learn in schools. In reality, as in the case of reproductive rights, it’s the state legislatures that are put in charge, requiring educational “reform” (read: erasure) of “race-related content” (read: African American history,) regulating high school curricula, and even requiring vows from college presidents against including content that covers "intersectionality” or the teaching of “systems of oppression” as a “lens through which teaching and learning are analyzed and/or improved upon."
A Very Brief History of the “Culture Wars” (in Education)
When the GOP began its war against the “liberal” curriculum (read: race, sexuality, and gender studies) I felt as though I had been transported in a Time Machine to the late 1980’s, when conservatives, irritated that college teachers had expanded their canons beyond White Male History and Literature, began to fulminate against what Alan Bloom, in his 1987 book, called “The Closing of the American Mind” (subtitle: “How Higher Education Has Failed Democracy and Improverished the Souls of Today's Students.”) The arguments were loftier: Bloom’s central premise was that contemporary academic "openness" was actually an abandonment of standards of Truth and Value. Feminists were not interested in knowledge but in making sure that inferior women writers had their share of educational airtime. Ex-hippies and sixties politicos, now college teachers, were preaching cultural relativism and sexual liberation instead of teaching Great Books.
The arguments didn’t stay high-minded for long. The immediate popularity of The Closing of the American Mind (it sold over a million copies in the first few months and remained on the best-seller list for a year) suggested that Bloom had hit a live nerve in directing attention to the state of higher education in America. He had also subtly politicized the terms of the conversation that we were having at the time. The educational reforms that many of us saw as having more historical and intellectual integrity than the largely white male dominated disciplines were now redescribed (and attacked) as a social agenda. For Bloom, our expansion of the curriculum was seen as mindless educational egalitarianism: the misguided notion that democracy would best be served by teaching students equal respect for all cultures tures and lifestyles.
With Bloom, the questioning of established knowledge (no new thing in the history of ideas) was on its way to becoming "political correctness." And over the next ten years, that’s just what happened. The first big cannon fired was Illiberal Education: The Politics of Race and Sex on Campus (1991), in which right-wing polemicist Dinesh D'Souza claimed that a totalitarian academic elite had emerged, forcing feminism and cultural diversity into the college curriculum, policing thought and expression on campuses, and fomenting a "victim's revolution" in the previously high-minded groves of academe.
The shift in the titles of Bloom's and D'Souza's books, from Bloom's imagery of closed minds and impoverished souls to D'Souza's complaints about "illiberal" politics, is significant. For Bloom, the cultural war (although he never uses the term "culture war," he is surely its paterfamilias) is between promiscuous relativism and fidelity to intellectual standards; for D'Souza it's all about "coercion" versus "freedom." Colleges and universities need to be protected, not (as Bloom had argued) from the dissolution of enduring values but from the enforcements of "political correctness."
The popular media—Harper's, Atlantic, Time, Newsweek—had already been on this track. A 1990 Newsweek cover reads: "Watch WhatYou Say. Thought Police. There's a Politically Correct Way to Talk about Race, Sex and Ideas. Is This the New Enlightenment-or the New McCarthyism?" By 1992 the specter of "political correctness" had so infiltrated the contemporary imagination that when a Barbie-type doll appeared on the market with proportions more representative of the average female it was described by reporters as "a politically correct Barbie, a doll with a social agenda."
The raison d'etre of feminism and multiculturalism was now seen, not as a coherent vision of liberal education (however misguided, as Bloom believed) but as the subordination of truth to politics. In 1995 former chairs of the National Endowment for the Humanities William Bennett and Lynne Cheney "came out slugging" (as the Chronicle of Higher Education put it) against the NEH: "Many academics and artists," Cheney claimed, "now see their purpose not as revealing truth and beauty, but as achieving social and political transformation.” According to Bennett and Cheney, the chief rationale for the inclusion of historically neglected literature within the liberal arts curriculum was to address and redress the grievances of oppressed groups. The goal was not education but curricular therapy for the wounded and marginalized, aimed-as George Will put it-at "making women and minorities `feel good' about themselves."
A few quotes will give a sense of how pervasive this notion was. The "issue" for multiculturalism, as described by Arthur Schlesinger, "is how to give various participants in America's drama their due"; the solution has been "therapeutic history," aimed at cultural affirmation and the nurture of self-esteem rather than the "exercise of intellectual disinterestedness." The National Association of Scholars described multiculturalism as "oppression studies," a motif picked up by D'Souza, who wrote of a widespread "victims' revolution" on campus, whose "mission" is to "advance the interests of the previously disenfranchised." In the NewYork Review of Books, historian C.VannWoodward wrote that the "cause" being championed by multiculturalism is "minority rights," as minorities ties demand "a curriculum of their own."
Enlivening the representation of multiculturalism as the political agenda of special interest groups are the numerous depictions of multiculturalists as "barbarians" (Hilton Kramer), "a tangle of squabbling nationalities ... a quarrelsome spatter of enclaves, ghettoes" (Schlesinger), a "new tribalism," a "tower of babel" (N Y. Times columnist Richard Bernstein, not to be confused with philosopher Richard Bernstein), "ethnic cheerleading" (D'Souza). Always, these racialized (and, in the case of D'Souza's metaphor, genderized) images of primitive, Hobbesian scramble and self-interest were juxtaposed to some unified, civilized "life of the mind," "common culture," or "universal heritage" that under siege by the rabble.
These rhetorical tirades suggested that while feminists and multiculturalists were uninterested in truth or beauty, Bennett, Cheney, and their colleagues had no political agenda.They also conveniently overlooked the fact that the "common" culture so nostalgically longed for was actually a monoculture whose much vaunted "objectivity" was a myth. Far from being single-mindedly devoted to truth, as Cheney maintained, the history of Western philosophy, for example (my undergraduate major, and later my doctoral specialization) had formerly been presented to students via a kind of de facto censorship of many important passages and ideas. So, when I was an undergraduate, my teachers simply omitted from our readings various philosophers' pronouncements on the lesser rationality of women, slaves, and Africans, viewing these ideas as irrelevant to their philosophical systems (read: too threatening to the image of Western philosophy as universal in its concerns).
To be fair, some on the left side of the culture wars did talk about curricular reform as a kind of therapy for the “voices” of “difference.” Catharine Stimpson in a presidential address to the Modern Languages Association spoke of “the promise of bringing dignity to the dispossessed and self-empowerment to the disempowered.” Sociologist Renato Rosaldo, defending Stanford's curricular revision, asked how a Chicano student (her words) could be expected to find her identity in Plato and Aristotle.
Ironic, isn’t it, that in 2023, we’re hearing similar concern—for the bruised feelings of white students “forced” to study slavery?
The Demise of “Woke”?
I’m pretty sure DeSantis knows nothing about the debates I’ve just described. Neither did Trump. But Trump wasn’t interested in education. Fox was his north star, not the Great Books. And the Fox “agenda” was set by Roger Ailes, not Alan Bloom. Ailes’ philosophy was not ideological but strategic: the creation of a listened-to, feel-good world for those huge audiences alienated by stations like CNN—and later, MSNBC, which Roger Ailes rightly discerned “left a lot of America on the outside.” [ii] Taking advantage of an already existing duality in values and deliberately appealing to those who felt dismissed or looked down on, Fox ultimately widened the chasm that characterizes what pundits now refer to, casually, as our polarized political culture.
In creating a world that would make viewers feel good about themselves, Fox has always played fast and loose with the truth—and without shame or guilt. In 1975, Bruce Herschensohn, former Nixon aide, had impressed Roger Ailes enormously with a memo of a “tactical programming proposal” to TVN, the forerunner to Fox News. The proposed techniques of manipulating an audience include: “Catch phrases . . . which seem to be factual though they are, in fact, editorializations” and “repetition,” which creates a news event through repeated assertion. Repetition— which Herschensohn called “the oldest and most effective propaganda technique”— is impervious to counter-argument or disproof. “Lock Her Up” (or more recently, “Biden Crime Family”) are probably all you need in the way of examples.
It was a marriage made in hell when Trump and Roger Ailes got together—although Trump, as a salesman and self-promoter, didn’t need Ailes to teach him how to make a lie pass itself off as fact. His version was drawn from the world of the ad rather than the news. Advertisements, unlike journalism, have always fudged the line between fact and consumer seduction—and in The Art of the Deal, Trump conceptualizes it:
. . . I play to people’s fantasies. People may not always think big themselves, but they can still get very excited by those who do. That’s why a little hyperbole never hurts. People want to believe that something is the biggest and the greatest and the most spectacular.
I call it truthful hyperbole. It’s an innocent form of exaggeration—and a very effective form of promotion.[iv]
In 2023, we know that Trump’s lies have never been “innocent.” But playing to “fantasy” is what really matters in the world of advertising, anyway, and Trump is a master at that. DeSantis? Not so much, and it’s not only his flaccid personality. You can get a huge amount of mileage out of “Lock Her Up.” There’s a clear “enemy” (“Lying Hillary”—another successful repetition) and a vibrant image: behind bars. “A commitment to end Woke government” may excite right-wing legislators, but apparently doesn’t do the same for prospective voters, many of whom have no idea what “woke” means (Trump is right about that.) And the power of repetition fails when a term has been so promiscuously deployed that its targets include beloved cultural icons and money-makers (Disneyland, M and M’s.) Once a popular buzzword, “woke” seems to have overstayed its visa. According to a New York Times poll, which was conducted between July 23-27, 52 percent of Republicans who will likely vote in the GOP primary election said they'd support a candidate who thinks the "government should stay out of deciding what corporations can support" over one promising "to fight corporations that promote 'woke' left ideology."
Even DeSantis seems to now he can’t make ‘woke” happen anymore. Ty Rushing writes, after attending DeSantis’s latest Iowa stump speech, that although he had “mentally prepared myself to start counting how many times I would hear the word ‘woke’ come out of the mouth of the Florida governor and 2024 GOP presidential hopeful” in fact “DeSantis sounded more like former Vice President Mike Pence or US Sen. Tim Scott of South Carolina rather than, well, Ron DeSantis.” During his May 30th campaign launch, DeSantis said “woke” at least five times and in a variety of ways: “woke Olympics,” “woke ideology,” “woke banking,” and “woke mob” twice. That was already a drop from the 10 “wokes” he uttered during a Moms For Liberty event in Philadelphia earlier last month.
And in the latest, “re-tooled” stump speech? Just once.
Hopefully, a last dying gasp.
A wonderful sweeping history of how language and catch-phrases can be distorted and manipulated into propaganda by any Big Brother or cult leader or conman or presidential wannabe who wants to mislead the masses to gain power.
Appreciated learning about Orwell's concept of "the dying metaphor which has lost its evocative power." It's applicable to so many things today..