Mark Penn and Andrew Stein write that "only a broader course correction to the center will give Democrats a fighting chance in 2022" and beyond.Opinion Debate Will the Democrats face a midterm wipeout? At its worst, as I argued in 2016, it allowed many progressives, supposedly attuned to injustice, to signal their commitment to combating it without actually demonstrating an understanding of its causes or remedies. At its best, it was deployed as a catchphrase - often in hashtag form - to urge others to stay focused.
The question is what will replace it.Īs I wrote back in August, “stay woke,” an expression that migrated from Black vernacular to mainstream use, went from being insider progressive-speak to a term of derision for a progressive agenda. Having arrived, then, at an intramural Democratic skirmish over the meaning of “woke” - and how much blame it should be assigned for the party’s woes - there should be little doubt remaining that progressives have lost this latest terminological battle. Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, herself an avatar of wokeness, tweet-dismissed that assessment by saying “the average audience for people seriously using the word ‘woke’ in a 2021 political discussion are James Carville and Fox News pundits so that should tell you all you need to know.” A couple of days later, she tweeted: “‘Woke’ is a term pundits are now using as a derogatory euphemism for civil rights & justice.”
In the aftermath of Democrats’ loss in the recent Virginia governor’s race, the veteran Democratic consultant James Carville identified “ stupid wokeness” as the proximate cause. That came on the heels of the Times columnist Maureen Dowd arguing that wokeness “ derails” the Democratic Party. Last week, the Times columnist Bret Stephens argued that wokeness has been “ clobbered” politically. What was once a popular adjective among left-leaning social media cognoscenti as part of the colloquial admonition to “stay woke” to various forms of systemic racism first morphed into a general shorthand denoting today’s left-leaning orthodoxy and then a slur that underscored the overweening, obsessive nature of said orthodoxy. But “woke,” which has a longer etymological history, has only become increasingly common in recent years. In 2018, the NPR correspondent Sam Sanders made this modest proposal: “It’s time to put woke to sleep” - arguing that the term had passed its sell-by date.