Liberals have been reluctant to use the term woke and the media blames the GOP for their negative use of it. The truth behind “woke” could be more complex and pose problems for progressives in the upcoming elections.

James Carville, a Democrat strategist, blamed “stupid wokeness”, for the party’s disappointing loss in Virginia. The long-standing liberal strategist stated that some of his party’s ultra-progressive policies had a suppressive effect on Dems across the country in an interview with PBS Newshour. He said that some of these folks need to go to an AWED detox center or something. Alexandria Ocasio Cortez, a New York Dem, took a different approach. She said that their losses on Election Day were due to Democrats trying to run a 100% moderated campaign.


AOC reacted to being branded as advocating for “woke” policies. She tweeted, “How can news outlets even attribute terms to me I didn’t say?” … Did not say anything about “wokeness”, which is an almost exclusive term used by older people these day btw.


David Marcus, a New York-based writer, said that waking up was once viewed by the left, despite her disapproval and that of other Democrats. In an interview with Fox News Digital, he stated that “You can go back 12, 13, years… It was definitely something people on the Left would use in an appraising way.” However, AOC’s comments and Carville’s observations show that this is not the case and the media are blaming Republicans.


NPR wrote that the word was confusing and it was time to change it. They explained how words with very specific meanings were being used by very specific people and becoming shorthand for politics, eventually being turned into linguistic weapons.


A New York Times columnist wrote that the GOP wants to recast “wokeness” as progressive politics run amok. He said the term had been used in “the most hyperbolic language possible, from ideology to religion and cult.” The piece said that it was no surprise that young people have abandoned the word. “Opponents of the idea want to make it toxic.”


The Guardian published a piece explaining “How the right used the word “woke” to justify its use. It is said that the word is often used as a stick by people who don’t realize how un-woken they are or are proud of it.


Washington Post columnist claims that “the word “woke” once meant something, sort of. It’s now an all-purpose insult that conservative propagandists and anti-vaccine fabulists use to attack lazy journalists, lazy journalists, and others who don’t care about our history. Marcus stated to Fox News Digital that the left’s rejection of the word was due to “so many excesses” and “commoditization.”


He said, “There are all these companies whose job is to go into schools or corporations and do these antiracist woketrainings.” “I think the term has been associated with corrupt people or with perverse interests, in terms of how much money they can make through it,” he said.


Marcus cited research by Christopher Rufo (a Manhattan Institute senior fellow and contributing editor to City Journal), who has extensively written about the infiltration of progressive policies and training into corporate America. Rufo brought to light corporations like AT&T, Walmart, and others for their policies. White employees at AT&T were “tacitly expected” to confess to their complicity with “white privilege” and “systematic racism” or to be “penalized in performance reviews.


According to Rufo, internal documents obtained from a whistleblower, Walmart “launched an intensive critical race theory program that denigrates the United States and teaches White hourly workers that they are guilty of ‘white supremacy thinking,’ and ‘internalized racism superiority.


Marcus stated that these findings are part of the left’s desire to abandon the term “woke” but, despite media pressure to ban the use of the term, it will still be an issue for Democrats during the 2022 midterm elections. He said that he believes people running in tighter races will have to deal with the excesses and that they would need to find a compromise. He said if Democrats fail to find a way of addressing this and reeling it back in, then they will be in trouble.