When power passes from one group of people who are strongly polarized to another, not only politics but also society faces a change or challenge at a cultural and sociological level. In the U.S., this situation may be reflected in the woke culture, which has been a particular point of division between President-elect Donald Trump's supporters and opponents for years.
Essentially, Wokeism refers to awareness of social inequalities, racial and gender-based discrimination, LGBTQ rights, etc. While it was used long ago for black people to become equal citizens, over time, these issues have also been included.
As Joanna Williams says in her important 2022 book "How Woke Won," "Defining woke is not straightforward. Woke may be ubiquitous, but it is also elusive." The real problem I’ll discuss here is determining what constitutes a “right.” What one group considers a “right” and imposes on others can be viewed as a violation by another group. For example, many Democrats consider trans-men’s participation in women’s sports to be an LGBTQ right. Vice President Kamala Harris supports this. Trumpists, on the other hand, see this as an extremism and oppose men walloping women in the name of sport. Today's Wokeists, instead of accepting this as an area open to discussion and only regarding it as an issue they disagree on, have considered it as evidence of Trump's hostility toward LGBTQ. Because according to them, not denying the obvious physical truth and making a connection with "maleness" means being hostile toward LGBTQ.
However, compared to the steps taken by Putin, the steps taken by Trump during his presidency that are being interpreted as anti-LGBTQ are incomparably small and only serve to curb the extremity of some extremists. Actually, the Republican National Committee (RNC) defended that "President Trump Has Taken Unprecedented Steps To Protect The LGBTQ Community" and published a very long list showing his words and doings in support of LGBTQ in 2020. Wokeists are also trying to trivialize the issue by saying that the number of such athletes is small. But, it is obvious how much trouble even one person, Algerian boxer Imane Khelif, who is claimed to be biologically male by a medical report leaked recently, has caused.
Likewise, regarding the issue of abortion, Trump is probably not keen on its implementation and sees it as murder and radicalism to do it even after eight to nine months. His supporters also consider allowing women to be born as the first step to women's rights. Many contemporary Wokeists, on the other hand, consider it misogyny if abortion is not unconditionally defended.
In addition, Trump’s statement that “it doesn’t matter to me, but she has to decide which one” after Harris first said she was Indian and then Black was considered blatant racism by the Wokeists in question. He criticizes the act of manipulatively appearing to be a member of a group to which one does not belong to gain political advantage. Interpreting this criticism as hostility toward a group and including it within the scope of racism is also considered frivolous and excessive by those who voted for Trump. It's not hard to read the reaction of many people as being sick of everything being accused of racism and sexism.
In short, the current state of the Wokeists resembles the Zionists’ weapon of “anti-Semitism.” Just as the Zionists accuse anyone who does not say what they want of being anti-Semitic in the most irrelevant and absurd way, so too do the Wokeists go to extremes in their interpretation of “rights” and “equality” and resort to the most serious accusations against those who disagree with what they say 100%.
So then, it can be said that the reaction of many on the Trump side is not against some equality and rights expressed in the beginning and essence of Woke culture but against the excesses of some groups. In that case, our expectation is not the death of wokeism but its restraint.
After the election, Democrat Ritchie Torres said Trump has no better friend than the far left, which he said has alienated a variety of people from the party with absurdities like “defund the police” or “from the river to the sea.” Harris' promise that taxpayers will fund transgender surgeries for inmates is useless, said Joe Scarborough, pro-Harris host of MSNBC. These criticisms were evaluated on the Trumpist Fox News program The Five with the phrase, “Some Democrats’ wondering if it’s time to give up on wokeness.” During the speech, famous commentator Gutfeld reminded that Elon Musk has a trans child and said, "He knows what wokeism has done. It took one of his kids from him." He also said that they are not transphobic, explained the current situation with the phrase "We are voluntarily butchering children," and pointed out that what bothers them is that underage children are involved in such bloody operations. I specifically quoted these sentences because it should not be ignored that there is an understanding that includes almost every idea they oppose, including support for Palestine, in woking. However, there is a difference between opposing some of the things they understand by “wokeism” and opposing it altogether. As can be seen from the explanation we gave above, for example, one cannot speak of absolute opposition to wokeism unless one is against LGBTQ in general. And such a situation certainly does not appear to exist in the U.S. at the moment.
As a matter of fact, last year, the Washington Post published an opinion claiming “Wokeness is winning” based on a survey conducted by research institute NORC at the University of Chicago. According to the survey on “accepting people who are transgender,” 56% of respondents said their society has been about right or “has not gone far enough.” The view called “anti-woke” that the U.S. has gone too far in accepting them is held by 43%. On “accepting people who are gay, lesbian, or bisexual,” the poll found respondents to be 69% woke versus 29% anti-woke.
In the election, some 57% of Florida voted to try to enshrine abortion rights into the state constitution. But they also voted for Trump. In general, 33% of people think abortion should be legal in most cases, and 49% of them voted for Trump, according to CNN. These data clearly show many pro-abortion people are among Trump supporters. In short, various woke topics have been digested by Trump supporters as well. This shows that the main role in the election outcome was played by the economy, not culture wars.
Republican Dave McCornick, who defeated incumbent Bob Casey in the Pennsylvania Senate race, explained the reasons why people chose him over Casey, who was a strong candidate because he has deep ties in Pennsylvania with his father, was the governor there for two terms as follows: “People deeply distressed by the skyrocketing prices, the wide open border, the crime in our cities, the war on fossil fuels” He continued by making this important observation: “I don’t think people identify themselves as clearly as Republican or Democrat. They want problem-solvers.”
At Fox News, which is one of Trump’s most prominent supporters in the media, Laura Ingraham did not emphasize woke in her 40-minute program on Fox News on Nov. 7. But to those on MSNBC who accused women who voted for Trump of being uneducated; she said: “Women actually see the grocery bills, understand the heating oil costs in the winter ... They see the problem with migrant crime. They are not one issue voters!”
On the other side, MSNBC host Stephanie Ruhle claimed after blaming Elon Musk for false propaganda: “Whether it is the economy, immigration or for lack of a better term 'woke,' we have now let misinformation become the accepted information ... America has just decided, ‘We’re gonna f.. around and find out!’”
Ingraham's following observation in response is worthy of quotation: “The left is blaming everyone, everything, trying to find something to blame for Kamala’s loss, but they still haven’t realized that they’re just totally out of touch with the concerns of everyday Americans.” Tulsi Gabbard, who also attended the program, confirmed the same.
Here is a moment that summarizes the election: Aforementioned Scarborough reported that when a voter saw a butter at $3 in a grocery store, she said, “Oh my God, Trump is going to win.” When his co-worker corrected him to $7, he was surprised and asked, “Is it framed in gold?”
Even Madonna seemed to accept that the economy determined the outcome when she voiced her reaction: “Trying to get my head around why a convicted felon, rapist, Bigot was chosen to lead our country because he’s good for the economy.”
As Arthur Delaney HuffPost put, inflation “may be the single biggest contributing factor to the resounding defeat” of Harris, and “the trouble is, inflation falling doesn’t mean prices are falling – it just means they’re not going up as fast. And people hate high prices.” This quote he made is also important: “The University of Michigan’s index of consumer sentiment in October was 10 points higher than it was two years prior.”
ABC News also published an analysis explaining that inflation tipped the election toward Trump.
One of the prominent Democrats, Amy Klobuchar, opined, “This has been an economic vote.” Maria Theresa Kumar, another Democrat, also indicated that the main reason for the Latino votes was the economy, saying, “If you’re making $15 in an hour and your eggs cost you $6, that material impact.”
The following observation by author and former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich on a TV show he attended is important: “The average American is pretty pragmatic... I've never worried about the debates. Because the next day, people go to the grocery store, they buy gasoline, and by the end of the day, they would remember why they didn’t want to Democrats.”
Just as erasing a part of a stain does not make it all go away ... Or just as an expanding empire does not disappear when it is finally stopped somewhere ... The rejection of some extreme of extreme LGBTQ demands is neither the complete defeat and killing of LGBTQ nor Wokeism. It is simply their reining in. The restraining shackles, in fact, are the high cost of living and, as noted in my Nov. 8 article and subsequent articles by Kathleen Parker and Fareed Zakaria, the Democrats’ own mistakes. So, if the Trump administration fails to keep its promises, these shackles can be easily removed.
