This isn’t going to be more musing about whether America has reached “peak woke.” But that is part of the story. So let’s start there.
About a decade ago, many on the left embraced the word “woke,” a term with roots in African American culture and activism. It originally meant staying awake — that is, “woke” — to the dangers facing the Black community. But in the hands of the broader, and whiter, academic and journalistic left, it soon became a kind of cool catchall for progressive politics, alongside other buzzwords like “intersectionality.”
The combined effects of the Trump presidency, the death of George Floyd and the COVID-19 pandemic pushed wokeness into overdrive. This was the era of “defund the police” and other radical inanities.
The right soon took up the word, using “woke” as a catchall for everything — woke or not, real or not — it hated about the left. The novelty of wokeness as a…
