“Wokeness” has few defenders. Too many embarrassing episodes of language policing have eroded support for the term. It’s too bad, because the progressive shift of the 2010s—when attitudes on issues such as race and immigration moved markedly left—brought about many broadly popular developments.
Take the convictions of Harvey Weinstein and Larry Nassar, or that many states banned nondisclosure agreements from covering sexual harassment. Or how about the growing awareness of the unjust killings of civilians by police—a political shift that resulted in widespread state-level policy changes?
And yet, these material gains are often overshadowed by a focus on diversity, equity, and inclusion programs that probably don’t do much good or demands to change how people talk—such as pushing the unpopular term Latinx.
On today’s episode of Good on Paper, I talk with the New York Times columnist Michelle Goldberg about a piece she wrote, “Wokeness is Dying. We Might Miss It.” Goldberg accedes that many aspects of wokeness were counterproductive, but in this conversation, she urges listeners to have more perspective on the animating force behind the ideological and temperamental shift and remain skeptical of the backlash against it.
“People, I think—in reaction to stuff that really annoyed them, the kind of people who made their identity around opposition to wokeness—they almost had to inflate its danger to match the scale of their annoyance,” Goldberg argues. “Rather than something that really bugged them or really seemed obnoxious, it had to be totalitarian. It had to be something that was remaking all of the systems of our society, which I just don’t think was ever really true.”
Listen to the conversation here:
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The following is a transcript of the episode:
Jerusalem Demsas: In the 2010s, attitudes shifted sharply left. For instance, if you look at Gallup polling that asked Democrats whether they call themselves liberals or moderates, you see a big change. In 1995, 46 percent of Democrats are calling themselves moderates, and just 25 percent of them are calling themselves liberals. But in 2015, 45 percent of Democrats are calling themselves liberals, and just 35 percent are calling themselves moderates.
Views shifted significantly on issues like race, immigration, and gender. And these changes—plus the policy victories that have come because of them—have resulted in a backlash. Now, wokeness is on the outs.
Explicitly anti-woke politicians, like Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, have tried to root out ideas from the K-12 schools that he views as stemming from critical race theory, and he’s attacked corporations, like Disney, for being too accepting of LGBTQ+ identities.
But the anti-woke backlash hasn’t just come from Republican politicians. Lots of people across the political spectrum have registered discomfort with at least some aspects of this cultural and ideological shift.
I can see where aspects of this shift have become unreasonable. For instance, there was a lot of ridicule of a Stanford University document that cited words like brave as being culturally appropriative. But still, I have found myself surprised at how widespread the belief has been that wokeness was a mistake.
It can be easy to forget, but perhaps the greatest accomplishment of this period was showcasing the horrors of police brutality and significantly moving public opinion towards police reform. By 2020, support for ideas like civilian oversight boards, criminalizing chokeholds, federal databases for police were all above water—even with Republicans.
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This is Good on Paper, a policy show that questions what we really know about popular narratives. My name is Jerusalem Demsas. I’m a staff writer here at The Atlantic. And this episode’s topic is a bit harder to pin down than most. Even defining wokeness is difficult.
To have this conversation with someone who has been reporting on social movements for years, I invited The New York Times’ Michelle Goldberg onto the show to talk about a recent column of hers. It’s titled, “Wokeness is Dying. We Might Miss It.”
As she writes in her column: “There are aspects of the New Progressivism—its clunky neologisms and disdain for free speech—that I’ll be glad to see go. But however overwrought the politics of 2020 were, they also represented a rare moment when there was suddenly enormous societal energy to tackle long-festering inequalities.”
Michelle, welcome to the show.
Michelle Goldberg: Thanks for having me.
Demsas: Yeah. So I read an article you wrote a few months ago, and it was called, “Wokeness is Dying. We Might Miss It.” And it’s been something I’ve been reflecting on myself because I think that there’s a conventional wisdom that’s been built up in traditional media—and then just a lot of our public discourse—that the backlash of the progressive tilt of the 2010s is a good thing, and that we’re seeing a good correction of a time period that went too far. And I thought that your article was a really interesting take on that idea.
But before we get into all that, I wanted to ground us in what we’re even talking about. When we talk about wokeness, what are we talking about when you use that term?
Goldberg: Well, it’s a hard term to define. I actually rarely use it except in quote marks because it’s one of those terms that was—obviously started out in Black vernacular and then was appropriated by people who are really hostile to it.
Basically, any time someone uses woke, you assume that they’re using it as an insult. Very few people actually identify their own politics that way. But how I often describe it, even if it’s a little clunky, is like a style of social-justice politics that is extremely focused on changing the world by changing the way we talk about the world.
Demsas: It’s funny because as I was preparing for this episode, I was just looking back at before the 2010s, and it feels like we had a version of this before then. People would complain about political correctness all the time. And I wonder how you distinguish the two eras. Is this just a piece that has always been in our politics—it just changes forms and maybe the specific issues it cares about?
Or is it actually something completely separate and different?
Goldberg: No. I think it’s basically a replay of the political correctness and the political-correctness backlash of the 1990s, which also came about at a time when you were seeing a lot more ethnic-studies, women’s-studies, area-studies programs in universities; some academic language starting to filter out into everyday life, a lot of people feeling really annoyed and alienated by that; and then a right-wing backlash, which was out of proportion and was so much more damaging to progressive politics than any gains that they might have made through the evolution and language that people were pushing at the time.
Demsas: So when you chart the beginning of this—I think it’s hard because it’s fuzzy. I was looking back to see when people really started talking about this. Matt Yglesias has this piece in 2019 in Vox where he coined the term the Great Awokening, and he charts it then as beginning with the 2014 protests in Ferguson after Michael Brown was shot by a police officer. He looks at the increase that you see in polls in concern for racial inequality and discrimination and the simultaneous divergence of the Democratic Party, where you see racially conservative Democrats leave the party.
And his story is very focused on race and immigration there. I think there are other people who would go even earlier, and then others who think it really takes off with Hillary Clinton. What time period are you really thinking about?
Goldberg: It’s interesting that Matt Yglesias says that. I felt that was also maybe the year that this style of politics became really dominant in certain circles, if not in the culture at large. And I wouldn’t just limit it to the debate about race and policing, because I think some of it comes out of Tumblr culture and just the perverse incentives of social media, the perverse incentives of left-wing politics.
I wrote a piece in 2014 for The Nation, where I was a writer at the time, called, “Feminism’s Toxic Twitter Wars.” And it wasn’t about quote, unquote, “wokeness.” I don’t remember if people were actually using that word at the time. But it was about this really destructive style of competitive self-righteousness. And one of the texts that helped me make sense of what was going on was an essay by a feminist writer named Jo Freeman from the ’70s called, “The Tyranny of Structurelessness,” that was about how—when you have ostensibly horizontal, leaderless organizations—people do, in fact, fight for power and leaders emerge, but they do it through passive-aggressive and emotionally manipulative means. And so, this has always been an issue on the left; it’s just that social media supercharged it.
Demsas: Yeah. I’ve been thinking about how much of this is a story about technology, right? Social media, as you say—to unpack a bit, there’s obviously an incentive to move to the extremes. People often only think about this in terms of talking about politics, in terms of, Oh, people are saying radical things.
But if you scroll through TikTok or anything—and I’m sure you’ve seen this stuff, too—you see pretty shocking content in general: people doing weird things with food, really bizarre things with different toys and things in order to just get the viewer confused and really fixated. (Laughs.)
Goldberg: (Laughs.) Right. Social media does two things: On the one hand, it just incentivizes extremism because you need to catch people’s attention. And extremism can also serve as a form of novelty. But it also—and I’ve written about this, as well—there used to be this idea that the problem with social media was that it kept people siloed in quote, unquote, “filter bubbles,” and I don’t think that’s the problem. I think the problem is that it exposes you to some of the most obnoxious examples on the other side, so it ends up furthering this negative polarization.
Demsas: Mm-hmm. Let’s turn to the piece that you wrote. You titled it, “Wokeness Is Dying. We Might Miss It.” Why is wokeness dying, and why do you miss it?
Goldberg: Obviously, I don’t miss all of it. As I write in the piece, there was tons of it that I have always found—I’m kind of a cranky Gen-X person. I didn’t like these clunky neologisms. I find some of the language, like the people-first language—I’m trying to think of even—
Demsas: Like saying person without housing, or saying unhoused instead of homeless?
Goldberg: Right. I do understand some of it. And that’s the problem, that all of this you can understand in certain instincts. I do understand that there’s certain language that can be really stigmatizing, and that there’s reason for language to evolve. I’m watching—my kids are super into 30 Rock right now, and they’re constantly saying things on 30 Rock that my kids are like, Oh, my God. You can’t say that!
Demsas: (Laughs.)
Goldberg: And that show—I don’t remember at the time feeling particularly provocative. And so the natural evolution of language is often a good thing. The forced evolution of language in a way that feels like it comes down from some really sanctimonious, prissy commissar is not a good thing. Although I just said that, we have to remember that there actually was no commissar.
People, I think—in reaction to stuff that really annoyed them, the kind of people who made their identity around opposition to wokeness—they almost had to inflate its danger to match the scale of their annoyance. Rather than something that, like, really bugged them or really seemed obnoxious, it had to be totalitarian. It had to be something that was remaking all of the systems of our society, which I just don’t think was ever really true.
But anyway, there was this very laudable attempt to correct systemic injustices in our society, systemic injustices that were really thrown into high relief for a lot of people by the election of Donald Trump. And one of the reasons I don’t like this approach to politics is that changing the way you talk about things is one of the easiest things to do, as opposed to making concrete, material change.
But nevertheless, it’s a step. It was a good thing that people felt less comfortable using certain kind of slurs. Let me put it this way: It was a good thing that when J. D. Vance was writing to one of his left-wing classmates, who I believe he had described as a lesbian, but they were trans, and wrote (these emails have now leaked) this sensitive email that, you know, I love you. I’m sorry if I misgendered you. I hope you know it was coming from a place of respect—I think it was good that conservative men, or all sorts of people, felt the need to be a little bit more thoughtful and sensitive.
Obviously, there was plenty of places where it veered into self-parody, and those places were exaggerated and amplified by a social-media panic, which has now led to a really ugly right-wing backlash.
Demsas: The definition you gave for wokeness, too—it really speaks to the idea that it’s about language and discourse policing in a way. And I wonder—because it seems almost like a definition that has been won by the opponents of it, right? Because I would imagine the people in the 2010s who are really parts of these movements—whether they’re part of #MeToo movement or they’re part of racial-justice movements—there were very specific policy ideas and things that they were upset about.
And many of them were very popular. Police brutality becomes—even amongst independents and, in some polls, even with Republicans, you see support for measures that would rein back police. Of course, the prosecution of people like Harvey Weinstein was very popular. And then, of course, something like abortion, which is seen as now the best issue for Democrats, is something that’s obviously an issue about women’s rights and feminism.
But there’s a way in which we’ve bifurcated these two things that I’m not really sure how to think about. Because, at one point, I totally agree with you: There is clearly an increased focus on what types of things people are saying, but that seems it was at least intended by some people to be a way to get people on board with a policy agenda.
But those two things seem difficult to also separate. If you’re looking for who your allies are and you’re like, Who’s misgendering trans people? That tells you who’s part of your political movement. And I wonder how you think about how we’ve bifurcated the policy goals of these movements from the discourse policing, and were those two things really necessary to be together?
Goldberg: It’s a complicated question. But I would agree with you that the intention of a lot of people was to make real-world change, not just to change the way people talk about things. Do you remember, at a certain point on the internet, there was this taboo against quote, unquote, “tone policing?”
Demsas: Yeah.
Goldberg: Which meant, in turn, that it was almost impossible for the left to either make or listen to any kind of critique of its rhetoric or the way it approached people who might be partially on board but not fully on board. And it ended up really alienating a lot of people outright and then creating this rumbling, subterranean resentment that was then able to be harnessed by really sinister forces. And I think it’s easy to say, Well, if you were attracted to fascism because you don’t like being told what to say or because you’re angry about some new terminology, then that’s on you. And that shows that you always had these inclinations.
But people have lots of different inclinations. And it’s the job of a social movement to, I think, meet people where they are and draw out the parts of them that you want to encourage.
Demsas: Well, it seems in your piece that you’re skeptical about the framing that wokeness has won in any way. And I wonder why you think that, because, from my perspective, I mean, it’s obviously hard. People can point to different areas in which different movements have been successful or not.
But when you look at attitudes amongst the general public on many progressive issues, they’ve shifted dramatically to the left. And, of course, a lot of that is being driven from people moving really far left within the Democratic Party. But even independents on these issues—they’ve moved people left on these things.
And I think there’s also material gains that have happened. People don’t talk about these a lot, but in the year after the murder of George Floyd, for instance, half of U.S. states passed legislation in at least one of the following categories: use of force; duty for officers to intervene, report, or render medical aid in instances of police misconduct; or policies relating to law-enforcement misconduct reporting.
Goldberg: Well, can I just say—I don’t think we should tar all. Again, I feel like this category of wokeness is so unstable and amorphous. But I definitely would not want to put criminal-justice reform under that auspice, right? When I’m saying that I think this style of politics is dead, I certainly don’t mean all left-wing politics, and I don’t mean all criminal-justice reform.
What’s dead is—not only is the Democratic Party trying to memory-hole calls to defund the police, but there was a social pressure to get on board with that language that is completely gone. And so I’m talking about something a little bit more hard to pin down, but something that a lot of people felt and responded to.
The reason I say it’s dead—and I wrote this piece in response to a book by Nellie Bowles called the Morning After the Revolution. It was sort of satirical, but it was also so exaggerated that it was kind of ridiculous. Like at one point she says, I heard people saying that roads were racist. And that didn’t come from some asshole teenager; that came from Robert Caro writing about Robert Moses. But I think that, in part, just to either justify her project or to inflate its importance, she said, This movement hasn’t calmed down because it lost; it’s calmed down because it won.
And I think that for some people that means they have to go to various HR workshops or whatever. But let’s just look at the evidence: You see company after company dismantling their DEI initiatives, states banning DEI in colleges. One of the examples I gave in that column was a school named after a Confederate general that had changed its name and then decided to change it back.
Target, for example, responding to these right-wing backlashes, taking Pride merchandise out of a lot of its stores—there was a sense, at one point, that corporate America wanted to ride the social-justice train. And it might have been hypocritical, but it also suggested that they saw these views as ascendant and something that they wanted to latch onto for their own purposes. I don’t think they see things like that anymore.
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Demsas: All right. We’re going to take a quick break. More with Michelle when we get back.
[Break]
Demsas: I just want to run my theory for you why there was such a focus on discourse policing and on language versus these policies. I think that often—and I found that it felt a little disingenuous sometimes—you’d ask people, Hey, it seems like your organization’s really focused on these language things. Why are you policing whether someone says they’re Latino or Latinx, or something like that. And they would say, Well, we’re actually focused on all of these issues that impact people on the material level. And it’s like, Yeah, but what are you tweeting about? What is it that you’re actually talking about in public constantly? What is your driving ethos?
And so, when I see this, I don’t think of it as disingenuous. I think a lot of people have read this as sort of a disingenuous thing, that people don’t actually care about changing the material reality of people that they’re working for. But I think it’s actually just that the structures of movement organizations have changed so dramatically, such that movement building is now both really easy and really hard.
Any individual person can put up a flyer or an Instagram graphic and say, Hey, we’re gonna do a protest here. And that doesn’t require an organizational capacity to really get someone out and be a part of a group. And that means that people are just showing up for something—or not showing up for something—and it’s completely unrelated to whether they’re being drawn into a broader group.
In the past, you had an NAACP that could speak credibly and say, We actually have organized the groups and the individuals who care a lot about racial justice in this country. And if you don’t vote X or Y way on a bill, that means that we’re going to turn up and we’re going to protest you. But now they can’t credibly say, No one will protest you if you do X or Y, because anyone can do it. And in many ways, that’s great.
Goldberg: Did you read this book—a great book by my colleague Zeynep Tufekci—called, Twitter and Tear Gas?
Demsas: I have not, but I’ve heard it’s a great book.
Goldberg: That’s what the book is about.
Demsas: Can you tell us about it?
Goldberg: So the book—I mean, she could obviously speak to it better than I could, but the book is basically about how before social media, your ability to muster a large protest was an outward sign of your organizational capacity, right?
It meant that you had members. It meant that you had people working on all the stuff that it takes to get people out, and that you were building relationships. And you also had to build an internal structure just in order to get this stuff done, and that structure would be there after the march was over.
Now you have these protests that come together very quickly and virally. But there’s nothing to buttress them. And then the issues that I mentioned earlier, with “The Tyranny of Structurelessness,” come up. Because, especially in left-wing spaces, there’s often an aversion to hierarchy, which makes sense to a point, but you need some lines of organization in order to keep something going. When you don’t have that, you do still have people emerge as leaders, but the way that they emerge as leaders is either about cultivating celebrity or shivving other people for not being radical or committed enough.
Demsas: Yeah. I think the horizontal nature of a lot of social movements now, it leads to the point where it becomes actually quite difficult to be a credible partner to or credible bargaining-table member with politicians. Because if they say, We’ll do what you’re asking us, but that means you have to mobilize your people in support of it, and if you can’t credibly do that, then it becomes politically disadvantageous for any politician to work with you.
And that doesn’t mean I agree with that. I think they should just do what they think is right. But at the same time, what ends up happening then is the places where you can see a lot of pressure is just around virality and around these issues where you don’t actually need to work through the formal systems of political power or electoral power. You can work discursively.
Goldberg: I also should say: Somebody who’s deep into progressive organizing once told me that they saw this also as just a form of work avoidance. And maybe people don’t mean this, but it’s just the path of least resistance. The easiest thing to do is to complain about the word somebody is using.
Demsas: But the most cynical argument that I think has been advanced by, especially, a lot of people who are on the right or in the center is that a lot of the movement on liberalization on these views has come from white Democrats, a lot of whom are materially advantaged already. So you have, for instance, people who are maybe homeowners in, or live in, really high cost-of-living cities, and they make a lot of money. And maybe they don’t want to see material changes happen, because that would actually affect their lives.
For instance, I do a lot of reporting on the housing crisis. And it’s clear that a lot of people who consider themselves progressives, who fight for a lot of these causes and seem very genuine and caring about that sort of thing, often will revolt if you say, I think that you should allow for affordable housing to exist in your community.
And I think that there’s some people who take that dynamic and attribute it largely and say, Yeah, the reason they’re focusing on whether you’re saying the right words is because they don’t want to focus on the sorts of material changes that would require something actually being taken from them.
Goldberg: I don’t think it’s that intentional. I find it very hard to imagine that somebody is saying, I don’t want zoning reform in my suburban neighborhood, so I’m going to distract people with a fight over whether it’s ableist to say that we’re standing up for ourselves. I just don’t think that’s how people work.
I do think that people who both went to elite colleges, where these concepts are really prevalent, and are highly verbal and work in fields where communication is a central part of the work they do—it’s not that surprising that they default to questions of communication when they’re involved in politics. And so I think that people have blind spots.
But, again, I think the right-wing version of this is often that it’s a conspiracy to deflect from real challenges to the material privilege of rich, white liberals. And I don’t think it’s a conspiracy.
Demsas: Yeah. I think your previous frame is more likely correct—that it is more a path-of-least-resistance argument. But that also, I think, still implicates people in this, Why is it the path of least resistance for you not to want to allow people who make less money than you to live in your neighborhood? Why is that so difficult to mobilize people around? And maybe it’s not intentional, but that is just a harder thing to do.
And so you see organizers at the local level—they’re often like, Well, we can get people to sign onto an agreement to get the city to raise a Pride flag, but we can’t get people to change the school-boundary lines near them to make it more inclusive to lower-income kids where they go to school. So there is a reason why I think progressive activists get pushed in a direction. And I do think that there’s probably some truth to the idea that the material changes would be much less politically popular.
But I want to turn a little bit because a lot of your writing is about feminism that I’ve followed for years now. And you wrote an article called, “The Future Isn’t Female Anymore,” and that’s very much in line with what we’re talking about today, so I’m hoping you talk a little bit about that piece. In it, you cite a poll from the Southern Poverty Law Center that asks respondents whether they agree that “feminism has done more harm than good.” And you write that while only four percent of Democratic men over 50 thought feminism was harmful, 46 percent of Democratic men under 50 did. And nearly a quarter of Democratic women under 50 agreed that feminism has done more harm than good.
And so you see this split here, where you have older Democrats still towing the familiar line that feminism is, of course, on net, beneficial, and then younger folks increasingly feel that their feminism has done more harm than good.
And that’s among Democrats. What’s happening there, and why is this space really polarizing people?
Goldberg: I don’t think it’s younger folks. I mean, yeah, there is a section of women, but, in general, I think it’s younger men. I remember when I quoted that poll, a lot of people were suspicious of it, and you can always have one poll that’s an outlier, but there’s been a few polls since then that show that young men, specifically, are moving to the right. And there’s a growing political chasm between young women and young men that was really showing up a lot in the polling around the upcoming election. And I also just think there was a broader backlash.
It’ll be interesting because we’re at a different inflection point now. When I wrote that, there was a backlash to the idea of the girl boss. It had suddenly become really embarrassing to a lot of people, which, on the one hand—a backlash against unfettered ambition and burnout-inducing devotion to your career—I get that. But it came along with the rise of tradwives and stay-at-home girlfriends and these old forms of female subservience in hip, new clothing.
And you see this again and again in the history of feminism, right? Because it’s hard to work. It’s hard to work and be a parent and fulfill all the expectations of ideal womanhood. People will look at being a kept woman of various guises and think that that’s an out. You saw this with Susan Faludi’s Backlash, and then you saw it with a whole bunch of articles about women stepping back from the workplace.
Demsas: And who is Susan Faludi?
Goldberg: Susan Faludi wrote one of the classics of modern feminism in a book called Backlash, which came out in the early 1990s and was about basically a decade of backlash propaganda telling women that feminism had made them miserable and that women wanted to return to cocooning and wanted to return to domesticity.
And what you see when you actually look at the people who are pushing this message is either that they’re not doing it themselves—you know, Martha Stewart was certainly never a homemaker, but neither was Phyllis Schlafly, right? These are professional women with high-powered careers. Or else you see women who do do that and then find themselves in really precarious situations if it falls apart. And so, again, there was this moment where, We don’t need girl-boss feminism. We want a soft life. You know, don’t we all? (Laughs.)
Demsas: (Laughs.)
Goldberg: But there was a refusal to see the traps that generations of feminists have identified in that life. Now we’re at a different moment because you’re starting to see women get really, really excited about the prospect of a female president again and getting really, really angry about patriarchy. Obviously, the Dobbs decision that ended Roe v. Wade was a big turning point for that. The Kamala Harris campaign is a big turning point.
It was interesting because when Hillary Clinton ran for president, there was always a dearth of organic enthusiasm compared to, say, Barack Obama. But there were people who were really, really excited about Hillary Clinton and were really, really excited about having a woman president. But a lot of them felt really embarrassed and afraid to admit that publicly.
I remember going to some of the places after Donald Trump was elected, going to some of the suburban communities where these women who hadn’t been very political before had suddenly gotten really political because they were so outraged and disgusted. And often they were like, I didn’t even realize there were other Democrats on my street. And so there was this sheepishness. And now that sheepishness is totally gone. It’s pretty new, but this is the first female campaign for president that is being really carried aloft on a tide of very vocal popular excitement.
Demsas: Yeah. Well, when I think about the wokeness message, the presidential candidate that tried to do this the most was Ron DeSantis, and it didn’t really work out for him. He obviously is not the presidential nominee for the Republican Party, but he also flamed out in a way that I think people were not expecting.
There was a ton of enthusiasm after he won his race by around 20 electoral points in Florida, when he ran for re-election for governor. And he was very clear on the national, at the local, at the state level that he was fighting a war on woke. But then you saw this message falter. You saw it falter in the Republican Party. People were much less interested in polls for voting for someone who’s fighting wokeness than they were for people who were following traditional economic messaging. And obviously he himself did not do well there.
Goldberg: Although, let’s remember—let’s look at who the Republicans chose as their vice president. J. D. Vance—he gave a speech at the National Conservatism Conference in 2021 that was called, “The Universities Are the Enemy,” and it was all about—I don’t know how much he used the word wokeness, but that’s basically what it was about. And he is obsessed with this stuff. It’s part of what makes him weird.
Demsas: I agree with you. I think it’s interesting because it seemed like, at the end, Trump was between the North Dakota governor, Doug Burgum, who’s a much more traditional Republican, and he ends up picking J. D. Vance, who I think is part of this wing of the party that’s defined themselves by wokeness.
During the Olympics, Imane Khelif, who is an Algerian boxer, beat an Italian boxer Angela Carini at the Paris Olympics, and it sparks this conservative outcry. Khelif is a cis woman; she was assigned female at birth and continues to identify as such. But people have really turned on her as being a man. J. D. Vance literally tweeted that Khelif was “a grown man pummeling a woman.” He called it “disgusting” and blamed Kamala Harris’s ideas about gender.
This is obviously a very small vignette in a bunch of different areas in which you’ve seen the right radicalize in this space. But, to me, while of course Trump did pick Vance, it doesn’t seem like this is actually a message that’s a winning message for voters. I think a lot of people feel that this is actually going in the same way that maybe wokeness harmed the Democratic Party in some ways—that this version is actually not palatable to even Republican voters, but definitely not to independents or swing voters.
There’s polling—this is when Biden was the presumptive nominee, from May—by Data for Progress that asked 1,200 voters whether they think Joe Biden’s woke. And 21 percent said they didn’t know what that meant. Twenty-seven percent said they didn’t care. And 22 percent were the only people that said he was woke and that was a bad thing. So how much of this is just a fight that’s really happening but is not actually electorally relevant or even electorally desirable?
Goldberg: Well, I don’t think it’s super electorally relevant in that, yes, vanishingly few people, if you ask them, What are the issues that are important to you? are going to say any version of wokeness. Where I think it’s relevant is around the edges.
I think that people really underestimate just how much of politics is about emotion and how much of it is about how candidates make you feel. And so whether the language that candidates use resonates with you or is alienating to you really matters. Again, this is where I say that a lot of these linguistic changes, I feel like, are irritating and alienating, but that’s very different from saying that they’re part of some totalitarian conspiracy, which is often how the anti-woke side comes off. And so I think it’s why even voters, again, to the extent that they’re even aware of these arguments over linguistic conventions—and I think they are in a vague way.
Demsas: Especially at the office, if you have DEI training or something like that.
Goldberg: Right, or even just when I would go to Trump rallies, the thing I would hear over and over again—I remember in 2016, I would try to draw them out. You know, Did a factory close around here? Are you having trouble getting a job? But mostly it was like, No. But you just can’t say anything anymore. There was just so much anger. And then sometimes you would ask them what they wanted to say, and you’d be like, Oh yeah. You definitely can’t say that. (Laughs.) And you shouldn’t be able to say that. But I do think that it grates on people. But there’s a difference between it grating on people and it being an all-consuming fixation.
Demsas: Yeah. Well, how do we then understand the nascent Kamala Harris campaign? Because you’ve been doing some reporting about her campaign. And her candidacy, as you said, it’s a historic candidacy. She’s the first Black woman and South Asian woman presumptive nominee for a major party ticket. She will be only the second woman to achieve that, after Clinton.
One thing I think that’s interesting is Clinton really leaned into her identity as a woman. And there’s some reporting that indicates she was trying to follow the mold of Obama, who clearly made that a part of his historic rise and tapped into that “first” energy to build momentum.
Harris seems to be tackling that quite differently. I know you said that you’re seeing this energy finally out in the open, of women getting to be excited publicly for the first female potential president. But, at the same time, it seems like there’s not as much attempt on the part of her and her team—at least so far—to really lean into that. Are you seeing that?
Goldberg: Right. And she doesn’t need to. Well, no, she doesn’t need to. And I don’t see any reason why she should. The people who are excited about it are getting excited about it.
Demsas: But why not? Why not lean into it?
Goldberg: First of all, because most people I think who are really, really excited to vote for the first woman candidate for president, the first Black woman candidate for president, the first Asian American woman candidate for president—those people are mostly voting for Harris. She doesn’t really need to remind them of the historic nature of her candidacy.
And she does in some ways, right? She speaks to the AKAs, the other members of her Black sorority. But I just think that, for the people that she needs to win over, she needs to convince them that she’s going to make their lives better in some tangible, material way, rather than achieving a symbolic victory for certain identity groups.
Look, obviously the identity component is there. You see people self-organizing these huge Zoom calls. But I guess the difference is that it would have been a big mistake for the Harris campaign to take the lead on doing that kind of stuff. People want to do it themselves. You can see that that’s really powerful.
Demsas: I also think that because she avoided a primary, it was much less important to base mobilization that that rhetoric would sometimes be used. You’d encourage it in that case, right? I think Warren and Harris both leaned into this during the 2020 presidential primaries—their historic nature of their candidacy. There were lots of references to Shirley Chisholm in Harris’s 2020 primary.
Goldberg: Oh, yeah. And I saw people wearing Shirley Chisholm shirts at the Harris rally in Atlanta. People are obviously really aware of it. I think you’re right about the primary. She didn’t need to distinguish herself in that way in a primary.
And the fact that there was (a) no primary and (b) that so many Democrats feel like they were saved from near-certain doom means that the fissures that are usually left over after a really bruising primary just aren’t there.
Demsas: Well, thank you so much, Michelle. I’ve been reading your work for years, and I’m so glad to have you come on the show.
Goldberg: Oh, thanks for having me.
Demsas: I want to ask you our last question, which is: What’s an idea that seemed good at the time but ended up being only good on paper?
Goldberg: I’m going to say communism.
Demsas: Oh, okay. Tell me more.
Goldberg: I mean, I’m honestly surprised that anybody answers anything else. (Laughs.) It just seems so obvious—it just seems obvious to me that, at a time when industrial capitalism was so brutal and exploitative, along comes this utopian theory promising human equality, gender equality, the brotherhood of man, the end of poverty, right? I don’t know if you have kids, but my kids—and I think a lot of people have this experience—when they first learn about communism, they’re like, Yeah, that sounds great. It does sound great. It just has not worked.
Demsas: Yeah. Well, that is the most one-word-only-needed “good on paper” we’ve heard so far. (Laughs.)
Goldberg: (Laughs.)
Demsas: Usually it does require a lot more explanation. Communism—good on paper. Thank you again for coming on the show. We’re so excited to have you on and continue following your work as you write about this issue on the campaign trail.
Goldberg: Thank you so much.
[Music]
Demsas: Good on Paper is produced by Jinae West. It was edited by Dave Shaw, fact-checked by Ena Alvarado, and engineered by Erica Huang. Our theme music is composed by Rob Smierciak. Claudine Ebeid is the executive producer of Atlantic audio, and Andrea Valdez is our managing editor.
And hey, if you like what you’re hearing, please leave us a rating and review on Apple Podcasts.
I’m Jerusalem Demsas, and we’ll see you next week.
