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Donald Trump’s victory successful the 2024 statesmanlike race wasn’t conscionable a prelude to mass deportations and geopolitical chaos. The MAGA faithful besides saw it arsenic the final, definitive rebuke of “woke” ideology.
By that point, the word had been afloat wrested from its origins. As it emerged from African-American vernacular English successful the discourse of civilian rights movements, “woke” described a authorities of progressive engagement with these societal issues. Then, during the Black Lives Matter protests against racialized constabulary brutality that began successful the 2010s, the idiom came to denote an consciousness of systemic injustice—and was much broadly adopted by wide groups.
Eventually, right-wingers perceived thing “woke” arsenic insidious propaganda against their ain constricted norms astir race, gender, and sexuality—and weaponized the connection successful ways that robbed it of specificity. These civilization warriors apt couldn’t specify “woke” to prevention their lives, but they knew with utter condemnation that the word could beryllium applied to immoderate they didn’t like, arsenic substance for cycles of exaggerated outrage that centered their reactionary politics.
What precisely did nine look similar aft a 2nd Trump triumph sounded the decease knell of wokeness? In short, the winners believed they were escaped to offend without fearfulness of consequence. As a Wall Street banker told the Financial Times up of Trump’s 2nd inauguration: “We tin accidental ‘retard’ and ‘pussy’ without the fearfulness of getting cancelled … it’s a caller dawn.”
Meanwhile, progressives hunkered down for different agelong 4 years. But adjacent successful the acheronian of a nakedly corrupt, authoritarian regime, they can’t assistance seeing a glorious airy astatine the extremity of the tunnel. They fantasize astir a resurgent “Woke 2,” a improvement already eroding Trumpism earlier our eyes, with millions turning out for nationwide “No Kings” protests and polls showing that cardinal groups of Trump voters—including independents, young men, and the working class—are abandoning the president. This evident drift has already occasioned galore deliberation pieces; the video crippled and net civilization website Aftermath conscionable dedicated an entire week to celebrating the instrumentality of wokeness.
But tin this adhd up to thing meaningful, peculiarly fixed information showing that Trump’s unpopularity hasn’t converted into affirmative attitudes toward the Democratic establishment? That’s a thornier question. “It is amusive to unreal similar erstwhile bully things hap successful this satellite incidentally, there's a design,” says Edward Ongweso Jr., a writer and researcher with the argumentation inaugural Security successful Context and cohost of the podcast This Machine Kills who occasionally riffs connected the quality of Woke 2 connected X. “But the happening it each has to spell backmost to is organizing workplaces and communities successful existent life.”
Liberal commentators (and shitposters) tin clasp up immoderate fig of artifacts arsenic grounds of a nascent Woke 2. It’s everything from Bad Bunny performing an all-Spanish performance for Super Bowl halftime, which acceptable a viewership grounds contempt MAGA tantrums, to the occurrence of TV shows similar the cheery hockey romance Heated Rivalry and The Pitt, a nerve-shredding aesculapian play that picks isolated inequities successful wellness care. Sinners and One Battle After Another, 2 films derided arsenic woke by the close for grappling with America’s surviving bequest of racist violence, were commercialized and captious hits. The week of the Oscars, UCLA researchers came retired with a survey showing that movies with divers casts execute amended with audiences. Elsewhere, “alt” fig skater Alysa Liu inspired “woke agenda” memes aft winning golden astatine the Olympics; Muslim socialist millennial Zohran Mamdani became politician of New York, past instantly converted the president himself into an infatuated fan.
English (US) ·