The ‘war on woke’ is getting so, so tiresome

So much of our political debate is now being reduced to a single word – and weirdly, it’s not even clear what that word means.

Anti-woke warriors: Florida Governor Ron DeSantis and conservative author Bethany Mandel.

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Political tribalism is one of the great unifiers. It knows no class, race or religion, no income bracket, no gender.

It’s like sport in that sense. The richest investment banker has little in common with a struggling factory worker, but plonk them next to each other in the grandstand, dressed in the same jersey, and they’re like brothers.

The effect is not always positive. There is an overpowering, feral energy in any decent football crowd, the thousands of bloodthirsty fans baying in unison, matching each cheer of support for their tribe with jeering abuse for the other.

When you’re in that cauldron, and the scoreline is ugly, and your disgust for a hated rival becomes as potent a force as your hunger for victory, you begin to lose yourself. The banker and factory worker both succumb to the same mindless, flailing contempt (usually expressed through increasingly hoarse screams of “Get ‘em onside!” and “They’ve been doing it all day!”).

So it is with politics. Consider two men who beclowned themselves this week, one a petty criminal, the other a potential US president.

The first gentleman featured in a viral TikTok clip. Apparently enraged by beer brand Bud Light’s collaboration with a transgender comedian, he marched into a Walmart in Kansas with vandalistic intent and unleashed his wrath in the beverage aisle, smashing cartons, chucking cans at bemused observers, and eventually getting himself arrested.

He targeted the wrong brand by mistake (Busch Light instead of Bud), perhaps having sampled too much of the product beforehand. Alcohol isn’t the only narcotic that dims the brain though. He was drunk on something else: anti-wokeism.

he destroyed the wrong beer. He broke the busch light cans 😭 pic.twitter.com/6gRr4HOi3N

— Victoria 🎀 🔆 (@EuphoriTori) April 18, 2023

On the same day as the TikTok vandal’s rampage our second man, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, announced his intention to stop drinking Bud Light, his latest gesture in a tiresome crusade against “woke companies”. Before the week was over he popped up in Spartanburg, South Carolina, to deliver the current iteration of his anti-woke stump speech.

“Because the woke represent a war on truth, we have no other recourse but to wage a war on woke,” thundered Mr DeSantis.

“We fight the woke in the schools. We fight the woke in the legislature. We fight the woke in the corporations. We will never, ever surrender to the woke mob. Florida is where woke goes to die.”

Imagine Churchill if he were waging war against corporate PR hacks and gay schoolteachers instead of Nazis, but taking the fight no less seriously, and you have the DeSantis experience. It’s “We shall fight on the beaches” for the modern rube, splayed on his couch, and from that comfortable perch predicting the end of free civilisation unless we stamp out transgenderism, and wield the power of the state to punish mouthy companies, and force teachers to pretend patriotism is the same thing as history.

We shall fight in the classrooms. We shall fight in the boring company ad pitch meetings. We shall fight in the Hollywood writers’ rooms. Picture: Sean Rayford/Getty Images/AFP

Mr DeSantis inhabits a country where, just this week, a kid was shot for ringing the wrong doorbell, two cheerleaders were shot after one opened the wrong car door by mistake, and a six-year-old was shot because her basketball rolled into a neighbour’s yard.

He governs a state whose residents are struggling with the aftermath of catastrophic flooding and can barely access fuel. There are real issues to address, then, before he wastes time on the imaginary.

What the hell is he doing in another state, spouting keyword-laden drivel like a walking, talking SEO headline? Why isn’t he doing his job? Does this wannabe president intend to do anything substantive with high office or does he just want to be a hero in the deranged culture war that dominates the right’s wet fever dreams?

It’s bizarre to witness, and it is not confined to America. You see it every night in the righteous TV monologues, every time you open Twitter, every time you glance at the opinion pages of a newspaper. Everywhere, anti-woke panic, as mindless and flailing as anything you hear bellowed at a football referee. The same bloviators who invented “Trump Derangement Syndrome” to mock those who traced every evil back to him are now themselves afflicted with Woke Derangement Syndrome. It haunts their every thought.

It’s not even clear what woke means. The word has become a blanket pejorative, a reflexive descriptor for pretty much anything the DeSantises of the world dislike.

Using someone’s preferred pronouns? Woke. Teaching about slavery in schools? Woke. Including a gay character in a TV show? Woke. To return to football, I’m awaiting and dreading the day when send-offs for dangerous tackles are labelled woke.

Last month the conservative author Bethany Mandel spluttered incoherently when asked to define the term. I want to stress: there’s no shame in suffering a mental freeze on television. But the moment was symbolic. Wokeness is ill-defined. We are forever complaining about it without explaining what it actually is. As far as I can tell, much of the time the thing being dismissed as woke boils down to not being an asshole to other people for no good reason.

Conservative Author Bethany Mandel gets caught in the middle of her interview on The Hill Rising unable to define “Woke” when her book talks all about wokeism…. WTF #Bethanymandel#grifterpic.twitter.com/M7dxy74oOH

— Lance Cotten (@lance_cotten) March 15, 2023

There must be a way to mock the lefties when they overreach into farcical territory, which they often do, without becoming vacuous automatons, repeating the same meaningless word over and over again.

With each utterance, that word becomes the even clearer hallmark of an incurious mind, of someone who is more interested in mocking the other tribe than debating an issue on the merits. It’s boring. The eyes can only roll so much. Enough.

Twitter: @SamClench