The Right Is Rethinking MAGA. The Left Is Rethinking ‘Woke.’

19:17David French:kerfuffle among progressives with this new reassessment of wokeism, which has sprung up in part because there's this viral clip making the rounds of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez distancing experiencing herself from what has been dubbed woke one. So Jamal, for people less tragically online than we are, you want to just give us a quick explanation of this woke one controversy?

19:47Jamelle Bouie:Sure. Before I do, I do want to say two things just to establish them right now and kind of to say where I stand on some of this stuff. The first thing is woke is a term that comes from African-American vernacular. It has its origins in the 1930s and it has traditionally meant something along the lines of, be aware of the ways that this society is not built for you. Be aware of the ways that you may face disadvantage and oppression in the society. Again, this is a term that emerges in black vernacular in the 1930s. and that is as far as i'm concerned what the term means and the you are exactly one of about 20 people who think that's what i know i mean i i think a lot of historical i always love the

20:41David French:historical reference but that ain't where it's gone i think a lot of black americans would agree

20:46Jamelle Bouie:with me on this point i'll say that i think among commentators sure not very many people agree with

20:52David French:me among the people for whom the term no no no you can't pull that as a split between commentators yes i yes i'm half of america has decided what woke is and it's among black americans it still means what i just said so but beyond the commentators and there's plenty of folks who have decided something very different i just want to put that out there that's the first thing

21:15Jamelle Bouie:I want to say. The second thing is that irrespective of what you think of all this, all of this stuff emerged in response to actual problems in the society. I want to make that clear, right? This emerges because people saw real injustice and had a strong reaction to it. Okay. So what is Alexandra Cotter-Cortez talking about? I think I read her as talking about a response to kind of like the hyper-academic, jargony, you know, in the case of Francesca Hong, maybe we shouldn't have Thanksgiving, like that kind of stuff that you saw. I would say you saw principally online, the kind of outbidding, people trying to outbid each other in their cultural radicalism in this 2020, 2021 period.

22:08Jamelle Bouie:I think that's what she's referring to when she says woke one. And to the extent that that is, you know, a thing, I think it's entirely appropriate to say, yeah, don't that stuff is silly. Right. There's a lot of litigation right now of what the 2020 2021 period was to begin with. and I would describe the two sides as well-meaning but some a lot of silly stuff happened versus there was like a mini cultural revolution that happened that harmed real people uh and

22:48David French:people who got pushed out of jobs of course right that's what I mean that harmed real people

22:53Jamelle Bouie:and I I'm gonna I'm gonna see you didn't ask me to editorialize but I will editorialize a little bit. I think that were there people who got unfairly pushed out of jobs? Yes. I still think, even with that, that we need to be careful about describing this. Not even need to be careful. It is not accurate to describe this as anything like a cultural revolution. But even when you look at people who received unfair treatment, you have to ask yourself as well, were their lives irreparably harmed here? And as unfair as some of the treatment was, we're not, this wasn't a HUAC. There wasn't a HUAC. There wasn't a blacklist.

23:37David French:And by HUAC, you mean the House Un-American Activities Committee?

23:41Jamelle Bouie:Yes. And I, you know, I have a real frustration with the way that no one can seem to talk about this with any kind of, not context, but like perspective here. And I have a real frustration, you know, with this conversation in this moment when, you know, the current government was literally sending people to foreign prisons. You know, Americans are literally being deported from the country, legal permanent residents. And so to, from like, from where I sit now, to observe this conversation about the excesses of wokeness while there's a government that that has murdered people on the street and isn't even investigating the deaths there is no investigation the death of renee good by the federal government that's that's a thing that's happening you know my guess is that

24:35David French:you then completely reject the idea that we wound up with this wretched administration in part because the backlash to the excesses of woke, especially alienating young men who were like told they were the problem, just generally speaking.

24:54Jamelle Bouie:I completely reject that for like simple reasons of like linear time that like this administration was elected in 2024. At peak woke, when like Nancy Pelosi was wearing Kente cloth, Democrats won a trifecta, right? At the aftermath -

25:10David French:idea of a delay.

25:12Jamelle Bouie:I reject the idea of a delay. Yeah. I think that if you look at the 2024 election and you ask yourself, why did Trump, why did Trump win? The very obvious answer is he won because inflation was high and people didn't like it. And people backfield a lot of cultural reasons. They wanted to read the election as a big cultural backlash against woke. But then if that were the case, why is it that in March of 2025, when they're polling on DEI, public support for DEI still remains pretty high? Like, why is it that all of the public opinion indicators that you would expect to demonstrate a mass public backlash against woke aren't there, but people are mad about inflation and that directly tracks the president's declining approval, right?

26:00Jamelle Bouie:Like, The actual both timeline and what we're witnessing suggests that, no, 2024 wasn't a big backlash against some woke cultural revolution. It was a narrow election because of inflation. It was 1980 more than anything else.

26:18David French:David, I'm going to get you in here. The one thing I just wanted to say, the Democratic brand is toxic in part because they're seen as weak, woke and whiny. Talking to voters, especially outside of urban enclaves, you get this like they don't care about me. They care about their individual bespoke identities and their, you know, that sort of thing. So that's a piece of it. But David, like you've been sitting there patient long enough. Please.

26:48Michelle Cottle:I think, you know, look, I date woke one much earlier. So, for example, if you look at what was happening on campus, there was actually a pretty clear, sharp break by around 2014, 2015, when the nature of censorship on campus, which is something that I'd been working on for a very long time, switched from predominantly top down, where it might be a dean of students or an administration silencing people. By around 2014, 2015, we began to see a huge wave of essentially what you might call grassroots censorship on campus, where there were attempts to hound people out of their jobs, to get people fired.

27:29Michelle Cottle:And one thing that I want to really emphasize about this, look, we don't have to go to something like the Cultural Revolution, where lots and lots and lots of people died, to talk about how horrific it was to be in the epicenter of some of these firestorms, where everything was taken in the worst possible faith. And then it began to radiate and move from there into a position where lots of just regular folks felt like, I may lose my public reputation. I may lose my job. I might be subject to public shame campaigns. When I'm not, I'm just not going along with some things that were actually, part of woke was both a lot of intolerance and ambitious intolerance tied to a lot of weirdness and strangeness, like weird language changes, very trendy things like putting your Instagram square all black, you know, weird things like this, you know, that didn't do much of anything in the real world, but were supposedly quite symbolic of your in-group inclusion.

28:36Michelle Cottle:And I think the idea that this didn't kind of permeate America over time. Because I think that I hear what Jamel says about 2020. I do hear that. I also think the outcome in 2020 might have been different. 2020, remember, was a lot closer than people expected that it would be. The outcome may have been different had primary voters in the Democratic Party gone with one of the more woke candidates in 2020. They went with kind of the least woke guy in the field, which was Joe Biden, the most normie Democrat in the field, which was Joe Biden. I agree with Jim L also that inflation is the big thing.

29:13Michelle Cottle:And I think, though, however, Donald Trump, I don't think Donald Trump is back in office without this. And now I say I don't I say that specifically about Donald Trump. I think other Republicans could have probably won based on inflation alone. But I think Trump, with all of that history, all of that toxicity, one of the things that he rode was this wave. And look, listeners know I am unsparing in my criticism of this administration, unsparing, okay, to say everything that I said does not excuse one millimeter of Trump injustice, not one bit of it. But I think we do a disservice when we try to minimize what happened in actual people's lives is horrific.

30:05Michelle Cottle:It was horrific what was done to people again and again and again throughout that process. And at some point, I know that some folks were well-meaning, but some folks were just vicious and gleeful and vindictive. I mean, I was there. I experienced some of it in coming to me. I knew exactly what it was like. And yeah, it wasn't fatal, but it was horrible. And something could be horrible without being fatal or creating your, or incarcerating you.

30:33Jamelle Bouie:Can I, can I, can I make, ask a question, well, make a point and ask a question. The, the point I make is that I agree internet pylons of that sort are terrible. I don't want to diminish the real psychic personal damage that does to people. I think where I disagree is to treat it as the particular product of like an ideological formation that we can call woke. and more the function of social media. And I say that because, and this is a question to you, David, you experienced a woke pile-on, but you also experienced, if I'm not wrong, like a right-wing pile-on, like an extraordinarily ugly and racist and quite dangerous right-wing pile-on, right?

31:27Jamelle Bouie:Oh, yes. I would just say that the fact that you experienced both of those things, and there was no wokeness happening amongst right-wingers, to me, that is not evidence, but potentially a data point in favor of the view that what we're talking about here are the way that social media platforms, through the fact that they anonymize people, and they can incentivize the kind of pile on behavior that can happen from any particular set of ideological perspectives, right? I'm just not certain that one can say, you know, this thing that we call woke was responsible for all of this.

32:14David French:Well, I want to jump in and say nobody's suggesting that woke is uniquely pernicious, But AOC is clearly telegraphing that the Democrats have decided that it is problematic because the reason she is doing this, it is widely acknowledged, is that gal is looking at a presidential run. Right. Right. And she knows she needs to do some damage control.

32:35Jamelle Bouie:Well, I'll say I want to I want to throw in at least just sort of like the left wing critique of of wokeness as it developed, which is that and I know at the start, I said this was responsive real problems. And what ends up what ended up happening and you mentioned the black squares, that's a good example. What ended up happening is that like there wasn't really any attempt to make any material change to those problems. Right. There wasn't any attempt to sort of like deal with the underlying the fundamental questions that are responsible for things like police violence. are responsible for things like institutionalized sexual violence.

33:08Jamelle Bouie:Instead, it was, you know, we can do some symbolic politics and get people off of our backs. And that, I think, from the left is like the failure of that moment.

33:19David French:Well, one of the things that happens in these situations is, you know, the people who are looking for change, they attack the people who they think are the problem. Those people don't care. Like Trump doesn't care. Trump's not going to do anything. A lot of the Republicans are like, yeah, come at me. And so then the people who wind up getting caught up in this are the kind of wokesters allies. And they're the ones who wind up too nervous to say anything or, you know, like everybody had to go out and buy how to be an anti-racist so that it could be seen in their house and stuff like that. So you wind up attacking your allies.

33:56Jamelle Bouie:I'll say you may have felt that way. You got to understand part of my skepticism here is that people use this language. Well, everyone had to do this thing. No, you didn't. No one forced you to do anything. I didn't put a black square on my Instagram. I didn't go out and buy a bunch of books. Like, I think I wrote a column in 2020 that was like, white fragility is a bad book, right? Like, you know, you know, there was part of my frustration is like, there's this language of like compulsion and it's like, I don't know, you know, but like the compulsion was there.

34:27David French:Like if you didn't want to take a beat down, if you didn't want to get fired in certain places, if you didn't, you know, like it's it's not like somebody was going to come shoot me if I didn't do certain things or, you know, certain politicians didn't do certain things. But it doesn't have to come to that. In parts of the right, you worry about that. Absolutely. Again, nobody's nobody's suggesting wokeism is pernicious in like some unheard of way. But what we're looking at here is a Democratic Party and a progressive, you know, a corner of progressives in the Democratic Party even are thinking that it is time to push back and separate themselves from this.

35:06David French:And my question is, like, can they do that? Is is that going to be a viable approach? Sure. I mean, just practically speaking.

35:16Jamelle Bouie:I mean, what's interesting, what's interesting, this was true in the 2020 cycle. This is true now. What's interesting is that for the most part, like Abdul Sayed wasn't running a campaign about cultural sensitivity. He's running a campaign about like you can't afford your groceries.

35:33David French:But he doesn't have a huge record that's going to, one, he hasn't won anything yet in a general election. Two, he doesn't have a huge record like, say, AOC does that they're going to throw at him. The point I'm making, though, is that there may not necessarily be anything.

35:50Jamelle Bouie:like AOC might have to might have to say, you know, some of that stuff is silly and move on. But when you look at sort of the the the the most left wing candidates then and now they tend to run on very material issues like they're not actually like part part of the and this gets to sort of like a left wing critique of wokeness. Part of the funny thing is that it's the candidates closer to the central left who don't want to offer big transformative material programs who bend towards the cultural politics. I think the people who are going to have a more difficult time maneuvering this are actually closer to the center precisely because they use that cultural moment to try to make themselves palatable to the left without actually having to give any concessions.

36:41Jamelle Bouie:That's sort of the challenge.

36:43David French:Well, one thing I'm interested in is calling woke one crazy pretty much assumes there's a woke two on the horizon. So have we a sense of what this will be? It's here.

36:55Jamelle Bouie:Woke 2 is here? Yeah, it's here. It's from the right. Okay. This whole like woke right thing, which I know got some currency a couple of months ago, I think is stupid. I'm not even going to be polite about it. I think it's very stupid. I think we can just talk about that as like right-wing ideology. Like it's its own thing with its own dynamics. But the other thing, Woke 2, I'll just say real quickly, to the extent that that's a thing, you know, woke one was a backlash to Trump. Woke two is going to be a backlash to Trump. The question is, what is the nature of that backlash going to be? I think in this iteration, the nature of the backlash is going to be less about trying to find, you know, create like a cultural space of anti-Trumpism and more about what does like political hard-nosed anti-Trumpism look like.

37:44Jamelle Bouie:And when you look at the kinds of candidates that Democrats are going for, it's those candidates that have like a very hard-nosed, We want to extirpate whatever this is from the society. I think more economic. I think more political reform. The fact that, you know, an easy applause line for a Democratic audience is we're going to pack the Supreme Court should tell you, I think, where Democratic voters are and what woke to looks like in practice.

38:10David French:OK, we're going to we're going to switch to lighter fare. It's time for recommendations. Jamel, go first.

38:18Jamelle Bouie:I've been reading the book from our colleagues, Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan, Regime Change. It's quite good. I really recommend it. And I recommend it just because even if, you know, we're all involved in this, politics sickos, and if you're watching this or listening to it, you're a politics sicko too, I hate to tell you. And even being people who follow this stuff for a living, it is quite shocking to read some of this inside reporting of what's happening in the White House. It's actually genuinely quite shocking. I'll say the things that have shocked me the most reading are just the total collapse of the information environment inside of the White House.

39:01Jamelle Bouie:There's a lot of stuff in there that's even more troubling. and troubling is a very, you know, modest way to put it. Yeah, mild way to put it. Super reassuring, Jamel. That book, you know, I'm not one for hyperbole, but that book fills me with dread, knowing just how disorganized, how much like that White House is operating. operating in a cloud of delusion.

39:37David French:Awesome. Cloud of delusion. There's the phrase for the day. David, please give me something less grim and unsettling.

39:44Michelle Cottle:Read the book.

39:45David French:It's good. Please.

39:47Michelle Cottle:Okay. Michelle, your wish is my command. I have the most heartwarming, the most uplifting, the sweetest show on television to recommend. And it's an absolute freaking hoot. It is hilarious. It is warm. It is joyful. I like it better than Ted Lasso in all of those regards. It's on Apple TV. It's called Trying. And it's about a young British couple. They can't have kids. And so they start trying. The trying is to adopt. And we're an adoptive family. It is a beautiful show for adoptive families to watch. It really does illustrate The difficulty of the process and the ups and downs and the heartaches and the triumphs.

40:31Michelle Cottle:And so it's a wonderful show. And if you really want something that is going to, quite frankly, show you what love looks like, watch Trying. It's so wonderful. Okay.

40:44David French:That's going to the top of my list. So we talked a little about the McCarthy era, which is funny because I'm going to recommend American Scoundrel, which is the soon-to-be-released bio of Roy Cohn that Kai Bird has written. I think it's out early September. It is amazing. It is very upsetting because, as viewers probably know, viewers and listeners probably know, Roy Cohn was this big political figure all through the 50s through the 80s. He was a prosecutor on the Julius and Ethel Rosenberg trial. But his influence on Donald Trump, as you read through, is just so upsetting. I mean, Cohn was this kind of monster who plowed through life just through sheer force of will, shamelessness, dishonesty.

41:47David French:it was like watching the making of the proto-Trump. And so it is the most compelling read. It's, you know, for those who will recall the Oppenheimer book, this is along those same, not quite as substantial. It is not going to serve as a doorstop in the house, but it is a compelling read. Absolutely put it on your list.

42:12Jamelle Bouie:Can I recommend two things to watch along with it? if you read it, I haven't read it, but they come to mind. There's an HBO documentary, Bully Coward Victim, the Story of Roy Cohn. That's pretty good. And then The Apprentice from a couple of years ago, it's Sebastian Stan as a young Donald Trump and what's his name? Jeremy Strong as Cohn is actually very good. So I would recommend -

42:34David French:Multimedia experience.

42:36Jamelle Bouie:Yeah.

42:37David French:All right. What's that? I think we're going to land this plane. Guys, always fun. We've solved at all. Although I do think we're going to have to like do a return to woke part two, something in the future. So just brace for that.

42:49Jamelle Bouie:I would say that we don't have to do that.

42:53David French:Jamal is a hard no.

42:55Jamelle Bouie:I would say that there are, there are, there are more important things for us to talk about, but.

43:00David French:All right, guys, have a great week. Thanks.

43:02Jamelle Bouie:Thank you, Michelle. Bye.

43:12Thank you.