I left the 2024 Republican National Convention convinced I had just spent several days in one of the wokest places in America. This might seem nonsensical or, to the nation’s triumphant conservatives, an insult on the scale of declaring the Democrats won fair and square in 2020. These are the enlightened army of the anti-woke, the good doctors battling the woke mind virus, the rightful owners of libs everywhere. It’s sunshine in the GOP every day—not a snowflake to be found anywhere.
Woke is social justice politics, and it’s fair to say the modern Republican Party isn’t terribly committed to that. But it’s also a grievance politics. Identity and language-obsessed, it rests on a foundation of victimhood and resists material analysis. Woke wars on the cultural terrain. Woke thins the discourse. Woke is one long screech into the night.
Woke is J.D. Vance insisting it was language that got Donald Trump’s skull nearly blown open. Woke is Kellyanne Conway boasting about all the women Trump has promoted. Woke is treating Israel as an oppressed identity category. Woke is whining about the state of high school and college female sports. Woke is braying about Trump—and his supporters—being the most persecuted and marginalized in America; the 2024 RNC was intersectionality for Trump.
The discourse at the Republican convention was as free and open as any Robin DiAngelo struggle session. Suddenly, the Republicans were the woke scolds, the liberals returned to their old posture as the subversive joke-tellers. Try cracking wise about Trump near a Trump delegate; try watching his soft skin redden. In Microplastic America, the discourse is so thinned, so memetic, that the Trump Right will unleash the cancel culture mobs on anyone who dares speak ill of their Dear Leader, just as the campus left might have shouted at anyone who wore the wrong costume on Halloween. If there was one overriding message of the RNC, it was that the Democrats are mean. They’re too mean to Trump. They should stop playing dirty tricks and stop being mean. “Our family,” Lara Trump despaired, has faced “tasteless and violent comments directed towards us on social media.”