Planet of the Woke

Snowflakes falling at the RNC

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.”

Tasteless and violent comments! Can’t these liberals just relax? Stop posting?! The wokest of the woke might be the crusaders against anti-Semitism, the Israel hawks who now fit seamlessly with the evangelical Christian Zionists in the Republican coalition. The anti-woke free speech warriors want open discourse for everything except Israel; Israel is too precious, too special, its supporters too delicate to tolerate criticism in the public sphere. Ask Ben Shapiro. Ask Vance, who can somehow strike an isolationist posture on Ukraine but back the authorizing of endless military aid to another foreign nation that has done little, in recent years, to further American interests abroad. Combating anti-Semitism is the new anti-racism. Like Ibram X. Kendi, who popularized the concept of a pervasive, structural racism that could only be solved by Manichean and ultimately impossible public policy—an anti-racist constitutional amendment that would make racial inequity “unconstitutional” over a “certain threshold”—the Republicans and anti-wokes obsessed with anti-Semitism believe it is everywhere all the time, worse than ever, worse than World War II, and can only be squelched by curtailing speech rights and nebulously policing hate crimes. Anti-Semitism can mean everything from literal Jew hatred (the actual definition) to believing that Israel should stop occupying the West Bank. Anyone who wants to protest the state of Israel for the actions of its military will run into the new conservative scolds who equate language to violence and shed crocodile tears every time some twenty-three-year-old utters “from the river to the sea” at a street protest. Nonviolent protest is not permissible because the words might hurt the feelings of a nuclear-armed American client state.

The RNC, like the old wokes, delighted in tokenism. There were Jewish tokens, of course, men in kippahs to thunder about the new Nazism upon us. There were Black and Latino tokens—Democrats and Republicans equally relish a good identity play—who were here to tell you they were the blessed and all-seeing ones, their skin color offered up as a shield against the libs. Another anthem for the convention: we’re diverse too! Look, over there, a Black pastor who likes Trump! And over in the corner, to the right, isn’t that Ben Carson? And Vivek what’s-his-name? With a little more practice, we’ll learn to how to pronounce it! The convention floor itself was blindingly white. But so were all those women who bought White Fragility at their local independent bookstores.

“My message to my fellow Americans, those watching from across the country, is shouldn’t we be governed by a party that is unafraid to debate ideas and come to the best solution?” Vance asked during his nomination speech. “That’s the Republican Party of the next four years: united in our love for this country, and committed to free speech and the open exchange of ideas.”

Unless those ideas include criticism of Israel or outright anti-Zionism. Or trans rights. Or any attempts to call it the Democratic Party and not Democrat Party, that child’s troll move of wretched grammar. Or quips about Trump himself—his bankruptcies, his infidelities, his deceptions, his lousy Apprentice ratings, his bloviating speeches, or his many White House failures. Try, over the last week, exchanging those ideas inside the Fiserv Forum in Milwaukee. Try telling the furiously anti-immigrant GOP that it was the unchecked, borderless mass migration of the late 1800s and early 1900s that fueled the twentieth century American renaissance, that our nation would have intellectually, culturally, and economically stagnated without this tremendous surge of alien people. Tell them, in fact, that immigration self-selects for the most ambitious, the most motivated—that risking your life to enter a foreign nation makes you an ideal candidate for future citizenship, since you’ve already outworked most of the natives by simply showing up. Have that debate. I wasn’t convinced the fulminating Republican libs could handle it. I thought they might get triggered. The RNC was a safe space, after all.