OBSESSIVE CULTURE WAR IS A DEAD END. JUST ASK RON DESANTIS.  
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Ben Burgis
January 24, 2024
Jacobin
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_ Ron DeSantis went all in on the niche fixations of online
right-wing culture warriors. In the process, his failed presidential
campaign proved that the Right’s obsessive “anti-wokeness” is a
political cul-de-sac. _

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis makes a campaign visit ahead of the New
Hampshire primary election, Steve Peoples, Associated Press

 

If there was ever any doubt that Donald Trump has this thing in the
bag, it was removed by last night’s results in New Hampshire. It was
the state where Nikki Haley’s chances were the best. From here, if
she stays in the race at all, it’ll be on the desperate hope that
something happens to take Trump out of the race and she’ll be the
last candidate standing.

The chances of that strategy paying off are slim. But at least Haley
made it through the first two contests. Florida governor Ron DeSantis
barely made it to Iowa. The candidate, who Trump called “Ron
DeSanctimonious,” spent well over $53 million
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got a grand total 23,420 votes in Iowa.

If you’re glued to the daily news cycle, you saw DeSantis’s
campaign hit the wall in slow motion and were not surprised by the
ending. But though his campaign had been obviously doomed for months,
this wasn’t how the story was originally supposed to go.

At the beginning of 2022, 65 percent of Republicans said
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wanted DeSantis to run for president. Fifty-six percent preferred him
to Trump. By June, Jonathan Chait was writing
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the “coronation” of DeSantis in _New York _magazine and saying
that anyone who didn’t believe the Florida governor could “beat
Trump straight-up in 2024” wasn’t “paying attention to
conservative media.”

So what happened?

Part of the answer is that the gravitational force of Trump was too
powerful. The politics of Trumpism and anti-Trumpism have defined much
of what goes on in both parties since 2015, and it was always going to
be hard to convince Republican voters not to rally around the Donald.
Another factor at play is surely that DeSantis has a deeply
unappealing personality, with increased media exposure dulling his
original luster.

But a factor we shouldn’t underestimate is that what DeSantis’s
campaign was selling just didn’t excite voters — not even
Republican primary voters. As conservative writer Sohrab Ahmari points
out:

[DeSantis] made everything about wokeness. The Sunshine State, he
boasted, is where “woke goes to die.” In a June address echoing
Winston Churchill, he vowed: “We will fight the woke in education,
we will fight the woke in the corporations, we will fight the woke in
the halls of Congress.” There wasn’t a single issue that DeSantis
didn’t somehow reduce to the problem of wokeness. Asked on Fox News
what he would do about Ukraine on Day One, he offered a long
disquisition on the spread of wokeness and gender ideology in the
military. Asked about the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank, he blamed
— you guessed it — “DEI”, or diversity, equity and inclusion.

It turns out that even voters who most dislike “wokeness”
weren’t particularly moved by DeSantis’s framing — and it’s
worth taking a minute to think about why that is.

The Misuses of “Woke”

At one point during the nomination fight, Trump made fun of those who
say “woke woke woke” all the time. “It’s just a term they
use,” he said
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“Half the people can’t even define it, they don’t know what it
is.”

Trump is undoubtedly a culture warrior in his own way, but he’s not
wrong that the term is extremely loose. While its earliest meaning was
something like “aware of and vigilant about racism,” perhaps its
dominant meaning now is a kind of progressive culture-war posturing
characterized by language policing, censoriousness, automatic
deference based on personal identity, and moralizing about individual
behavior. Certainly that seems to be the thing that socialist critics
like Adolph Reed
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the late Michael Brooks
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when they criticize things they call “woke.”

_Know Your Enemy_ cohost Sam Adler-Bell
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part of what people are often talking about when they talk about
wokeness when he described
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language of wokeness” as a “communicative register” that
presents “unintuitive and morally burdensome” progressive
requirements “in a manner that suggests they are self-evident.”

That kind of thing definitely exists and, as Adler-Bell articulated,
it strikes many people as obnoxious and controlling. It’s no
surprise, then, that many conservatives have perceived an opening to
capitalize on a backlash against “wokeness.” This in turn has
often led them to overuse the term in ways that make it an all-purpose
signifier for things they don’t like. Anything that has anything to
do with “social justice” becomes woke in their rhetoric.

Ordinary right-wingers may not like wokeness, but they also seem to
find preoccupied “anti-wokeness” off-putting, possibly for the
same reason: it amounts to hectoring over niche concerns. That level
of culture-war obsession speaks much more to right-wing media
creatures who spend much of their time stewing about how annoyed they
are by their counterparts in mainstream and progressive media spaces
than it does to ordinary Republican voters who don’t spend all day
on X, formerly Twitter. Similarly, Chait’s formulation that people
who didn’t think DeSantis could beat Trump weren’t “paying
attention to conservative media” is telling. Why think that what was
going on in conservative media is going to reliably track the concerns
of voters — even conservative ones? Right-wing podcasters and
magazine interns simply aren’t a very large demographic.

DeSantis’s bizarre decision to do his campaign launch as an
experimental use of Twitter Spaces is emblematic of his campaign’s
discourse poisoning. Most people aren’t on Twitter, and the ones who
geek out about the idea of interacting in a Twitter Space are a small
minority even of Twitter users.

Getting Out of the Culture War

The final and deepest problem may be that the sort of obsessive,
carping “anti-wokeness” represented by DeSantis ends up
replicating a great deal of what makes “wokeness” so off-putting
in the first place. I wasn’t surprised, for example, to see one
poll
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suggested that even Republican voters tend to dislike the idea of
using government power to crusade against businesses that allegedly
“promote ‘woke’ left ideology” — an idea that DeSantis
enthusiastically supports and attempted to put in practice in Florida,
where he’s battled the Disney corporation for culture war–related
reasons.

If “wokeness” spurs backlash by projecting an obnoxious and
controlling attitude that insists that everyone be on board with a
given checklist of cultural preoccupations, why would an anti-wokeness
that displays similar characteristics be a winning formula for
appealing to voters — even conservative ones? Even voters who
(unlike me) favor socially conservative _policies_ may dislike a
sense that everyone and everything is being constantly policed for
signs of excessive “wokeness.” In other words, anti-wokeness may
be beginning to feel like wokeness by another name.

Left-wing writer Freddie deBoer once captured much of what can be
annoying about “wokeness” in an essay called “Planet of Cops
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People are alienated and worn down and hopeless, and so they see their
opportunity to finally be the one pulling over somebody else’s car,
lazily tapping the glass with their flashlights. . . . Everyone’s a
detective in the Division of Problematics, and they walk the beat
24/7. You search and search for someone Bad doing Bad Things, finding
ways to indict writers and artists and ordinary people for something,
anything. That movie that got popular? Give me a few hours and 800
words. I’ll get you your indictments.

Well — why would nonstop hectoring about movies that are “too
woke” be any less grating over time? Conservative pundit Ben Shapiro
— tellingly, a strong DeSantis supporter — put out a video
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for _forty-three minutes_ about the woke feminist evils
of _Barbie_. I didn’t see the film, so I can’t judge, but as far
as I can tell _Barbie _was light and fun and vast numbers of
ordinary people enjoyed watching it. Is there any particular reason
why people would enjoy Officer Shapiro tapping at their window to
demand to know why they liked _that_ than, say, Officer Noah
Berlatsky complaining
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List_ didn’t have a strong enough anti-fascist message?

Maybe ordinary Americans are getting sick of _all _of this and would
like to turn the dial of the “woke” vs. “anti-woke” culture
war down a notch or two. Fingers crossed that politicians hear the
message.

_Ben Burgis is a Jacobin columnist, an adjunct philosophy professor
at Rutgers University, and the host of the YouTube show and
podcast Give Them An Argument. He’s the author of several books,
most recently Christopher Hitchens: What He Got Right, How He Went
Wrong, and Why He Still Matters._

* war on woke
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* Ron DeSantis
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* political strategy
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* elections
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