How We Know That ‘Woke’ Is Losing

By Noah Rothman

Monday, March 20, 2023

 

We find ourselves in the middle of an exhaustingly familiar spectacle in which the American Left and its allies in media pretend that a word with an all but universally understood definition is all of a sudden incomprehensible. Today, that word is “woke.”

 

A campaign consisting of straight reporting, survey data, and contrived “viral” moments all contribute to the desired impression that those who wield the term don’t know what it means, especially if they use it as a pejorative. But even polling purporting to show that more Americans believe the term describes only positive attributes also finds that the public sees it as an epithet more than a compliment.

 

It’s hard to avoid the conclusion that what’s driving the campaign is that “woke” is now a political liability for those who once proudly embraced it. These periodic crusades against shorthand bubble up from the partisan depths when the Left is losing a political conflict. Rather than change their tactics, they change the language.

 

The Atlantic reporter Molly Ball picked up on this phenomenon a decade ago when she noticed that the Obama administration had ditched the phrase “gun control” in favor of a cavalcade of euphemisms. Anti-gun activists had begun toying with alternatives such as “gun-violence prevention,” “firearms regulation,” and, of course, “gun safety,” which edged out its competitors. Ball observed at the time that the phrase was confusing insofar as it evokes “a firearms-training course” more than any legislative initiative. It still does. But the phrase emerged as the consensus alternative to “gun control” because something had to replace “gun control.” That phrase had become toxic.

 

At the beginning of the last decade, anti-firearms activists confronted a conundrum. On the one hand, they convinced themselves, polling indicated that the public favored stricter gun laws, but their legislative initiatives consistently went down to defeat. “Why?” they asked themselves. It must be the words we use.

 

“‘Gun control’ suggests big government telling Americans what to do,” NPR’s Ari Shapiro speculated. “‘Violence prevention’ — well, that’s something everybody could support in theory.” Monitoring the contours of the debate, Ball later observed that “advocates of gun control got smarter” when they abandoned the loaded expression. “Gun-control groups don’t even use the term ‘gun control,’” she wrote in February 2013. “They’ve radically changed their message into one that’s more appealing to Middle America and moderate voters.”

 

But just over one month later, an attempt to re-implement an “assault weapons ban” died when 60 U.S. senators in the Democrat-controlled upper chamber of Congress voted against it. “How can something have 90 percent support and not happen?” President Barack Obama marveled. The answer is that “gun control” was no one’s priority, save for Americans who oppose gun control. The linguistic games played by people enamored with their own cleverness fooled only themselves.

 

Much the same could be said of abortion — sorry, “reproductive rights.”

 

“Frustrated by the individualist approach of the ‘choice’ paradigm,” read the abstract of a 2010 study by San Diego State University professor Kimala Price, some activists had abandoned the notion that “choice” has or should have anything to do with it. Instead, the language should appeal to a “human rights framework.”

 

In the interim, voguish expressions took the place of “choice.” Among them, “reproductive justice,” “reproductive rights,” plain old “women’s health care,” or, if you’re inclined to avoid using the “lady-parts name,” gestational management for “people who become pregnant.” In the wake of the Supreme Court’s decision in Dobbs, even the House Pro-Choice Caucus advocated doing away with the word “choice” in favor of “decision.”

 

None of this much changes the shape of the public debate, which has for nearly 50 years orbited around the fact that a majority or plurality of American adults believe that abortion should be legal “only under certain circumstances.” Following Dobbs, polling has shown that the number of Americans who identify as “pro-choice” has increased dramatically, but only after nearly two decades in which self-described “pro-life” Americans beat back a formerly prevailing consensus to achieve parity with their opponents.

 

The once prohibitive dominance that “pro-choice” views enjoyed in the United States evaporated in the early 2000s, and state-level laws restricting access to later-term abortion procedures accompanied this sea change in American politics. The anxiety felt by pro-choice activists is understandable given these conditions, even if they’ve elected to take their frustrations out on their thesaurus.

 

“If you’ve ever wondered if ‘climate change’ is the best way to describe the hot mess our planet has gotten into, you’re not alone,” read an earnest reflection on lexical matters via the climate-centric nonprofit Grist. By 2019, “climate change,” which replaced “global warming,” which replaced “global cooling,” had become passé. The term was not only “too neutral,” it “carries too much political baggage.”

 

Earlier that year, Politico chronicled an effort by scientists and meteorologists to ditch “climate change,” with all its “loaded partisan connotations.” They needed a “new lexicon” to convey a sense of urgency. Teenage weather-watcher Greta Thunberg suggested “climate breakdown, climate crisis, climate emergency, ecological breakdown, ecological crisis and ecological emergency” as a rather cumbersome alternative. “Climate crisis” emerged the victor in this insular debate, and media outlets ran with it.

 

But why? As the Grist item lamented, “climate-related legislation” designed to increase “resilience” or “future-proof” infrastructure against climatological events were on the rise, which has the inadvertent effect of convincing the public that a warming planet is a manageable condition. We can’t have that.

 

“The idea that a person’s sex is determined by their anatomy at birth is not true, and we’ve known that it’s not true for decades,” said one of the “experts” surveyed by the New York Times in 2018. Gender, the Times reported, “originates between your ears, not between your legs.” That’s why reporters need to stop calling it “sexual reassignment” and start calling it “gender-affirming care” so as to convey to the public that someone undergoing gender-transition therapies is in fact pursuing a destiny conferred at birth. The initiative has taken on new urgency amid the popular backlash against treatments that halt puberty in children.

 

Not all these efforts to massage language have taken off. The effort to fold Hispanics into an overarching category called “BIPOC” — black, indigenous, and people of color — or to redub them “Latinx” when Hispanics began drifting into the Republican column underwent a catastrophic failure on the launchpad. Likewise, a transparent attempt to shame Republicans out of criticizing Barack Obama by taking words such as “golf,” “skinny,” “Chicago,” and “apartment” and labeling them racist “code words” never caught on. Indeed, there’s now a backlash against the phrase “code words,” which fails to convey the malignancy of people’s attempts to use “racialized terms” such as . . . “welfare.” But these efforts to change the language all spring from the same insecurities.

 

The Left’s war against euphemisms that no longer advance their political objectives provides them with a self-soothing way to avoid confronting their own policy failures while indicting the public. Democrats don’t lose political fights. They only lose the “messaging war.” That explains why the Left is so often inclined to shoot the messenger.