Democrats are afraid of woke reaction syndrome. Over the last five years, public reaction against wokeism has grown so severe that most Democrats now claim to have seen nothing, heard nothing that could possibly connect them to it.
This is pure crap, obviously, but it is understandable. Now that woke is radioactive, everybody’s instinct is to run away from it, as fast as possible. You don’t want to be the last Democrat still holding that glowing chunk of plutonium. This is why politicians change positions so much. Trump was against foreign wars before he started them. Obama was against gay marriage before he supported it. Politicians may lack consistency, but they excel at chutzpah.
Trump doesn’t have much time left, thank God. If he lives through his second them and doesn’t finagle a third term, he’ll be gone after January 21, 2029. He’ll still be a pest, but have no Constitutional power. What will Democrats do then, or now, during his lame duck presidency? Will they reboard the woke train, on the insistence of their union paymasters and far-left associates? Or is woke gone for good?
Short answer to the latter question: No. Woke is not gone for good. It still has a lot of momentum, even though its proponents have had to cover up their true intentions while the anti-woke storm is blowing. But think of the woke people you know: they’re stubborn. Ideological. Emotional and passionate. They really believe God is on their side, or they’re on hers. Such people do not go gently into the night.
Now think of the leading Democrats. In California we have Gavin Newsom. He seems to be fading just a little bit lately in the ’28 Presidential jockeying, as Pete Buttigieg advances, but these calibrations come and go, and 2028 is still a long way off, so nobody should be making conclusions yet. It the candidate is Newsom, he’s certainly not woke, as Republicans try to portray him. He’s a mainstream traditional San Francisco Democrat who actually doesn’t care much for wokeism. Nor is Pete Buttigieg woke. Both men support, of course, gay marriage, but that’s no longer considered woke. It’s accepted throughout America except for certain Christian extremists.
Then we have the Sanders-AOC-Warren wing. And here in Oakland, we certainly have the Fife-Fortunato wokes. We don’t hear much about Nikki these days because she’s a Supervisor, but she’s more woke than ever, and as for Fife, well, I don’t have to remind anyone here that she remains a dangerous, racist radical out to destroy our way of life.
I’m thinking of all this after I read a comment on X: “It's really obvious that the Democrats think they can hide their bad ideas until they get back into power and then pick up where they left off.” This could be an effective attack line by Republicans against Dems. The Democratic Party, or a majority of it, went so far to the left, into insanity and making a mockery of truth, that the damage they caused themselves will take at least a generation to heal. If it ever does heal. According to the X poster’s theory, people like Newsom and Buttigieg are just hiding their extreme wokeism, until such time as they feel safe enough to call for, say, completely gender-neutral bathrooms even in elementary schools. Or for defunding the police and replacing them with “therapists.” I, myself, don’t think Newsom would ever entertain such nonsense, but is it possible that the Democratic Party as a whole is simply masquerading as moderate until it can launch a woke revolution on America?
I believe Wokeism really has been thoroughly repudiated, even though its warriors are laying low in their trenches, ready for more battle. Wokeism reached its tipping point well before Donald Trump reached his, which is why he’s President. The American people proved that they’re willing to tolerate his criminality, his depravity, his vanity. That may finally be changing now; we’ll see soon enough. But what the American people have also proven is that they’re not willing to tolerate wokeism even in the smallest degree. That is not going to change. Wokeism is the worst thing to ever happen to the Democratic Party of FDR, JFK and Obama. It almost killed it, but we rose up and instead crushed wokeism under our feet!
Steve Heimoff