Voters rejected a 'woke' America — time for Democrats to listen and learn

Remember Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis’s ill-fated campaign for the Republican presidential nomination? He proudly proclaimed that he made his state the place where “woke goes to die” and promised that he would do for America what he had done in Florida.

The 2024 election shows that, for many voters, DeSantis’s message was the right one, even if he was the wrong messenger. While the Florida governor talked a lot about what he would do to end woke culture, Donald Trump did him one better.

He turned every rally into a battle in the war on woke.

If Democrats and progressives are ever to come to terms with the Trump phenomenon, they will have to come to terms with the fact that a majority of American voters cast their ballots for him, knowing him to be crude, offensive and as politically incorrect as anyone could be.

In 2016, Trump was something of an unknown quantity. He seemed more to be bluffing than political savant.

In 2024, we all know who Trump is. This time, we can’t claim ignorance as an excuse.

In the wake of the 2016 election, progressives could attribute the Trump phenomenon to white working-class grievance and resentment. This year, he assembled a multiracial, cross-generational coalition that complicates the previous explanation of what fueled his rise.

Millions cast their ballots for him, not in spite of but because of what progressives find most offensive about him. They voted for the man whose voice was caught demeaning women on the Access Hollywood tapes, who incited an attack on the Capitol, who is a convicted felon, who was found liable for committing sexual assault and who violated every convention of woke culture.

Progressives must come to terms with that fact — and they have no time to waste. But there will be no quick fixes.

As Anand Giridharadas puts it, welcome to “the rebuilding years.” He notes that “there is a kind of freedom in the rebuilding year. ... You’re not expected to turn around and win the title, because you acknowledge that you’re broken. Your work is not winning, not at first. It is rebuilding to put yourself in a condition such that you might win again.”

Acknowledging that the progressive team and the old Democratic coalition is broken begins with acknowledging that their understanding of freedom is not playing in Peoria.

Vice President Kamala Harris made one version of freedom the centerpiece of her campaign. She even adopted “Beyoncé’s anthem of defiance and redemption” as “the soundtrack of … [her] campaign.”

Beyoncé notwithstanding, Harris’s version of freedom was a caring kind of freedom, but it was also a technocratic, wonky kind of freedom. It depended on making sure that government policy respected freedom.

As Peter Slevin noted at the start of her campaign, “Harris is pledging to support bills guaranteeing the right to vote, to join a union, and to choose abortion anywhere in the country, as well as measures to ban assault weapons and require background checks on gun purchases.” Slevin quotes historian Eric Foner, who rightly observed that “‘freedom’ has always been a contested term” and “Harris is advocating for an active, positive, progressive rendering. ‘Freedom from want requires public intervention of one kind or another.’”

Bills, measures, public intervention — all of it seemed to many voters desperate for change to be a recipe for more of the same. Many Americans are now deeply disillusioned with government and policy wonks.

While Kamala Harris talked about freedom, Trump exemplified and enacted it. Trump showed his dedication to a version of freedom that did not require anyone to believe that government programs could make their lives better.

It is not an accident that his version of freedom embodied a certain version of masculinity — that his is the freedom to say what one thinks, the freedom to offend. It is available to anyone, rich or poor, Black or White, old or young, but more to men than to women. And no one has to wait for government to enact a law or convene a commission to make it possible.

Let me be clear, there is nothing admirable about what Trump did or said. There is nothing valuable about giving offense just for the sake of offending. And I do not believe for a moment that Trump will protect people who have the temerity to offend him.

But Trump’s version of freedom struck a chord with many decent people who chafe at the way their speech is policed — the way their seemingly trivial or thoughtless offense is converted into an actionable harm.

It is undeniable that words can wound and that freedom does not mean doing whatever you want whenever you want. But taken to excess, the policing of language and manners fosters fear, not freedom. People choose silence over speech and retreat to the comfort of their “tribe” over the danger of saying something that might offend others.

Millions of Americans whose economic conditions are precarious could not, and cannot, understand why progressives put such a premium on what we say rather than on what we should do to help people who have neither the wherewithal nor the prospect of living a comfortable life.

George Packer argues that the goal of woke culture is to “cleanse language of any trace of privilege, hierarchy, bias, or exclusion.” He offers an example of the environmental organization The Sierra Club, which he says in its “zeal” to accomplish that mission has “clear-cut a whole national park of words.” 

If you are going to be accepted in the Sierra Club, you can’t say certain things, and new language has to replace the old. “Urban, vibrant, hardworking, and brown bag all crash to earth for subtle racism. Y’all supplants the patriarchal you guys, and elevate voices replaces empower, which used to be uplifting but is now condescending. The poor is classist; battle and minefield disrespect veterans; depressing appropriates a disability; migrant — no explanation, it just has to go.”

Packer is right to observe that “The new language might not stick in broad swaths of American society, but it already influences highly educated precincts, spreading from the authorities that establish it and the organizations that adopt it to mainstream publications, such as” The Atlantic, where he published his article.

Now what? What can we do in the wake of Trump’s victory?

First, we do not have to give up on the goals of a culture, even one derided as woke, to create a more inclusive, equitable nation. They have been and remain the right goals.

But it is time to rebalance the scales, to find new modes of achieving those goals that will make it less difficult and less fraught for people to say what they think and interact across their differences, even as we reject its most macho version.

This means that the work of creating an America that actually makes a place for everyone needs to be done by everyone, though not in equal measures. Freedom is no good if everyone cannot participate.

For many, including the privileged, that means listening more and speaking less. For all of us, it means being willing to treat identity as loose fitting some of the time.

That means focusing a little less on building and fortifying enclaves and more on forging alliances. We need to find new ways to cultivate tolerance and forgiveness and to turn down the burners on righteous indignation.

For a long time, Americans who live in small towns and in places that seem to have been left behind have been sending those elite institutions a message about their desperation, economic anxieties, and their feeling that this country is on the wrong track.

Many of our leading educational, cultural and economic institutions have ignored that message, writing off the complaints of ordinary Americans as reactionary, racist or ignorant or simply irrelevant. Now the objects of such condescending views and those who have never been admitted to those clubs have set off an electoral nuclear bomb.

Early in her campaign, Harris threw down the gauntlet to Trump. “If Donald Trump,” she said, “wants to pick a fight over our most fundamental freedoms, we say: Bring it on. Because we’re ready.”

He did. He won.

Let the rebuilding begin.

Austin Sarat is the William Nelson Cromwell Professor of Jurisprudence and Political Science at Amherst College. His views do not necessarily reflect those of Amherst College.