The GOP Is Building Mini Fascist Laboratories in Red States Nationwide
The GOP is consolidating its power in Red states by asserting control over elections, purging tens of millions of voters off the rolls, destroying public schools, and arresting Black voters and parading them before cameras in shackles.
Republican Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis speaks at a press conference Titusville, Florida on May 1, 2023.
(Photo: Paul Hennessy/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images)
THOM HARTMANN
Jun 14, 2023
Common Dreams
Increasingly, the Republican Party is consolidating its power in a minority of states and turning them into little laboratories of neo-fascism. This is tough on people in those states — particularly people who are Black, queer, or female — but what is its larger impact on America?
“Power tends to corrupt,” Lord Acton famously noted, “and absolute power corrupts absolutely.”
This is the great danger at the state level for both American political parties as the GOP sinks deeper and deeper into its mire of regionalism, violence, racism, homophobia, misogyny, gun deaths, pollution, and victimhood, led by corrupt politicians like Trump, DeSantis, Kemp, and Abbott.
Reestablishing a national political dialogue like we had before the Trump presidency is thus now a singular challenge facing our nation, particularly since we’re one of only 7 democracies in the world that essentially forces a 2-party system through first-past-the-post winner-take-all elections.
The differences between Red and Blue states are increasingly stark, and growing month-by-month as Red states pass more and more laws to regulate every intimate detail of people’s private lives.
(By contrast, in parliamentary systems whichever party gets, for example, 12 percent of the vote ends up with 12 percent of the seats in Parliament; the result is a robust multi-party system.)
When our two political parties are so highly regionalized that their control is largely uncontested, the normal push-and-pull of politics fails. Sclerotic, corrupt little empires of power emerge, as we see today with parts of the Democratic Party in New York State and the GOP across the South and up through several Midwestern states, particularly Ohio.
While there are regional economic and cultural differences between Red and Blue states, the deciding factor is increasingly the willingness or unwillingness of the two parties to enfranchise or disenfranchise Black and young voters while meeting or violating the needs of the state’s citizens.
Generally, Red states are committed to making it difficult for all but middle-aged white people to vote (and trying to block the vote of college students); Blue states welcome the participation of as broad a cross-section of society as possible.
Red states embrace guns, book and abortion bans, and pollution; Blue states are leading the way into pluralism, a clean energy future, and rebuilding their schools and infrastructure.
The contrast is startling: a child living in Mississippi is fully ten times more likely to be killed with a gun than a child living in Massachusetts.
Everybody in Oregon votes by mail and has for more than a quarter-century; Texas Republicans just made it extremely difficult for people in Houston to do the same, so they could force citizens in that very Blue city to take time off from work and stand in line for hours.
A woman in California can get an abortion any time within the constraints of Roe v Wade; a woman or her family in Texas can get stalked, hit with $10,000 lawsuits, and even go to prison if she tries to do the same.
Minnesota is joining 18 other states to become sanctuaries for trans people; being publicly trans in Florida can get you imprisoned or even killed.
The differences between Red and Blue states are increasingly stark, and growing month-by-month as Red states pass more and more laws to regulate every intimate detail of people’s private lives.
Thus, America is being balkanized, much like it was in the early 19th century.
Donald Trump and the fascists he has empowered are the main force leading the GOP into this doom spiral, with considerable help from billionaire-owned rightwing media. But this is not the first time this has happened in American history.
America is being balkanized, much like it was in the early 19th century.
In my book The Hidden History of American Oligarchy, I chronicle how the invention of the Cotton Gin — which could do the work of 50 enslaved people — led to a widespread and massive consolidation of wealth and power in the deep South. The plantation families, made fabulously wealthy by the Gin, then took over both the economics and the politics of the South, turning it into what today we’d call an oligarchic fascist state.
They also took over the Democratic Party in the process (it was founded by Thomas Jefferson and had always had its base largely in the South) and turned it from a national player in American politics into a corrupt regional power-broker focused almost entirely on immunizing the morbidly rich while keeping down Black people, working class whites, and women.
Following the Civil War, Democrats largely ceased to be a national party for two generations. The 1868 party platform still clung to the South’s embrace of racism and the oppression of Black people, stating bluntly:
“In demanding these measures and reforms we arraign [accuse] the Radical [Republican] party for its disregard of right, and the unparalleled oppression that and tyranny which have marked its career. … Instead of restoring the Union, it has, so far as in its power, dissolved it, and subjected ten States, in times of profound peace, to military despotism and negro supremacy.”
The Democrats — then openly the party most devoted to white supremacy — essentially said, “Screw the rest of the country; we’ve got our piece of it in the South and parts of New York and that’s all we care about.”
Grover Cleveland was the only Democrat elected president between 1860 and 1912, and he was the exception that proved the rule: he won the election of 1886 by being an above-partisan-politics anti-corruption candidate in a nation dominated by two increasingly corrupt parties. For example, he vetoed more bills than every president before him combined.
Today it’s the Republican Party that’s openly committed to white supremacy — but no Grover Cleveland-style anti-corruption, national-vision-for-the-country Republican candidate for the presidency is anywhere in sight today.
Instead, Republicans fall all over themselves in a mad rush to deliver more tax cuts to their billionaire owners, more pollution from the industries that fund their campaigns, more voting restrictions in parts of the states they control with large Black populations, and more guns to their citizens.
Yesterday, The Washington Postnoted, House Ways and Means Committee Chairman Jason Smith (R-MO) introduced legislation that would reinstate massive corporate tax loopholes, kill the new tax credits for electric vehicles and clean energy, and end a tax on toxic waste sites used to fund their cleanup.
The Texas legislature this month handed control of elections in dark-blue Houston (3 million voters) to Republican partisans, who can then ensure long lines and challenges to people who insist on casting a ballot.
At the same time, Republican politicians from Florida to Arizona to Iowa are openly embracing the rhetoric of political violence. In Idaho, the party recently hosted a “Trigger Time With Kyle” event where donors could pay to shoot assault weapons with Kyle Rittenhouse.
This is why the GOP is shrinking. And, in the process, retreating into Red state enclaves that reject the proclaimed values of America.
Embracing abortion restrictions, book bans, promoting guns, and hating on queer people aren’t, it turns out, good politics for a party that wants to hold power nationally.
Neither is promoting fascism a useful political strategy: yesterday Republican-aligned protesters with pro-DeSantis signs and giant swastika flags showed up outside Disney World in Orland; odds are voters were not amused.
In this regard, it’s a good thing for America that today’s GOP is collapsing nationwide.
The bad news, however, is that the GOP is consolidating its power in Red states by asserting control over elections, purging tens of millions of voters off the rolls, destroying public schools, and arresting Black voters and parading them before cameras in shackles.
At the moment, their main advantage nationally is that the Party still has the support of the CEOs of the nation’s largest social media companies, oil companies, Vladimir Putin and MBS, bigoted white evangelicals, and most billionaires.
But will that be enough to avoid becoming a regional faction resembling the Confederacy? Increasingly, it looks like the answer is “no.” For six years the Republican Party has been telling America who it is, and broad swaths of the electorate are now believing them.
Today’s GOP must make a choice.
Will it continue down the fascist road that Trump, DeSantis, and Abbott have paved, devolving farther and farther into a corrupt, hateful, violent whites-only regional presence?
An amplification of the reemergence of the old Confederacy, this time as the GOP?
Or is it capable of change?
Now, we discover, it turns out I’m not the only one who’s noted this bizarre new dynamic. The rightwing billionaire Koch network Tuesday morning released an ad against Donald Trump claiming that he’s “Joe Biden’s secret weapon.”
Apparently, they don’t just want regional power: they want to control the entire country. After all, it takes nationwide federal power to get looser pollution controls and more tax cuts.
But will the GOP repudiate fascism, misogyny, and racism and offer contrasting ideas to voters that aren’t just amped-up voter suppression, more guns, and the destruction of public education — with or without Donald Trump?
I’m not holding my breath.
Increasingly, the Republican Party is consolidating its power in a minority of states and turning them into little laboratories of neo-fascism. This is tough on people in those states — particularly people who are Black, queer, or female — but what is its larger impact on America?
“Power tends to corrupt,” Lord Acton famously noted, “and absolute power corrupts absolutely.”
This is the great danger at the state level for both American political parties as the GOP sinks deeper and deeper into its mire of regionalism, violence, racism, homophobia, misogyny, gun deaths, pollution, and victimhood, led by corrupt politicians like Trump, DeSantis, Kemp, and Abbott.
Reestablishing a national political dialogue like we had before the Trump presidency is thus now a singular challenge facing our nation, particularly since we’re one of only 7 democracies in the world that essentially forces a 2-party system through first-past-the-post winner-take-all elections.
The differences between Red and Blue states are increasingly stark, and growing month-by-month as Red states pass more and more laws to regulate every intimate detail of people’s private lives.
(By contrast, in parliamentary systems whichever party gets, for example, 12 percent of the vote ends up with 12 percent of the seats in Parliament; the result is a robust multi-party system.)
When our two political parties are so highly regionalized that their control is largely uncontested, the normal push-and-pull of politics fails. Sclerotic, corrupt little empires of power emerge, as we see today with parts of the Democratic Party in New York State and the GOP across the South and up through several Midwestern states, particularly Ohio.
While there are regional economic and cultural differences between Red and Blue states, the deciding factor is increasingly the willingness or unwillingness of the two parties to enfranchise or disenfranchise Black and young voters while meeting or violating the needs of the state’s citizens.
Generally, Red states are committed to making it difficult for all but middle-aged white people to vote (and trying to block the vote of college students); Blue states welcome the participation of as broad a cross-section of society as possible.
Red states embrace guns, book and abortion bans, and pollution; Blue states are leading the way into pluralism, a clean energy future, and rebuilding their schools and infrastructure.
The contrast is startling: a child living in Mississippi is fully ten times more likely to be killed with a gun than a child living in Massachusetts.
Everybody in Oregon votes by mail and has for more than a quarter-century; Texas Republicans just made it extremely difficult for people in Houston to do the same, so they could force citizens in that very Blue city to take time off from work and stand in line for hours.
A woman in California can get an abortion any time within the constraints of Roe v Wade; a woman or her family in Texas can get stalked, hit with $10,000 lawsuits, and even go to prison if she tries to do the same.
Minnesota is joining 18 other states to become sanctuaries for trans people; being publicly trans in Florida can get you imprisoned or even killed.
The differences between Red and Blue states are increasingly stark, and growing month-by-month as Red states pass more and more laws to regulate every intimate detail of people’s private lives.
Thus, America is being balkanized, much like it was in the early 19th century.
Donald Trump and the fascists he has empowered are the main force leading the GOP into this doom spiral, with considerable help from billionaire-owned rightwing media. But this is not the first time this has happened in American history.
America is being balkanized, much like it was in the early 19th century.
In my book The Hidden History of American Oligarchy, I chronicle how the invention of the Cotton Gin — which could do the work of 50 enslaved people — led to a widespread and massive consolidation of wealth and power in the deep South. The plantation families, made fabulously wealthy by the Gin, then took over both the economics and the politics of the South, turning it into what today we’d call an oligarchic fascist state.
They also took over the Democratic Party in the process (it was founded by Thomas Jefferson and had always had its base largely in the South) and turned it from a national player in American politics into a corrupt regional power-broker focused almost entirely on immunizing the morbidly rich while keeping down Black people, working class whites, and women.
Following the Civil War, Democrats largely ceased to be a national party for two generations. The 1868 party platform still clung to the South’s embrace of racism and the oppression of Black people, stating bluntly:
“In demanding these measures and reforms we arraign [accuse] the Radical [Republican] party for its disregard of right, and the unparalleled oppression that and tyranny which have marked its career. … Instead of restoring the Union, it has, so far as in its power, dissolved it, and subjected ten States, in times of profound peace, to military despotism and negro supremacy.”
The Democrats — then openly the party most devoted to white supremacy — essentially said, “Screw the rest of the country; we’ve got our piece of it in the South and parts of New York and that’s all we care about.”
Grover Cleveland was the only Democrat elected president between 1860 and 1912, and he was the exception that proved the rule: he won the election of 1886 by being an above-partisan-politics anti-corruption candidate in a nation dominated by two increasingly corrupt parties. For example, he vetoed more bills than every president before him combined.
Today it’s the Republican Party that’s openly committed to white supremacy — but no Grover Cleveland-style anti-corruption, national-vision-for-the-country Republican candidate for the presidency is anywhere in sight today.
Instead, Republicans fall all over themselves in a mad rush to deliver more tax cuts to their billionaire owners, more pollution from the industries that fund their campaigns, more voting restrictions in parts of the states they control with large Black populations, and more guns to their citizens.
Yesterday, The Washington Postnoted, House Ways and Means Committee Chairman Jason Smith (R-MO) introduced legislation that would reinstate massive corporate tax loopholes, kill the new tax credits for electric vehicles and clean energy, and end a tax on toxic waste sites used to fund their cleanup.
The Texas legislature this month handed control of elections in dark-blue Houston (3 million voters) to Republican partisans, who can then ensure long lines and challenges to people who insist on casting a ballot.
At the same time, Republican politicians from Florida to Arizona to Iowa are openly embracing the rhetoric of political violence. In Idaho, the party recently hosted a “Trigger Time With Kyle” event where donors could pay to shoot assault weapons with Kyle Rittenhouse.
This is why the GOP is shrinking. And, in the process, retreating into Red state enclaves that reject the proclaimed values of America.
Embracing abortion restrictions, book bans, promoting guns, and hating on queer people aren’t, it turns out, good politics for a party that wants to hold power nationally.
Neither is promoting fascism a useful political strategy: yesterday Republican-aligned protesters with pro-DeSantis signs and giant swastika flags showed up outside Disney World in Orland; odds are voters were not amused.
In this regard, it’s a good thing for America that today’s GOP is collapsing nationwide.
The bad news, however, is that the GOP is consolidating its power in Red states by asserting control over elections, purging tens of millions of voters off the rolls, destroying public schools, and arresting Black voters and parading them before cameras in shackles.
At the moment, their main advantage nationally is that the Party still has the support of the CEOs of the nation’s largest social media companies, oil companies, Vladimir Putin and MBS, bigoted white evangelicals, and most billionaires.
But will that be enough to avoid becoming a regional faction resembling the Confederacy? Increasingly, it looks like the answer is “no.” For six years the Republican Party has been telling America who it is, and broad swaths of the electorate are now believing them.
Today’s GOP must make a choice.
Will it continue down the fascist road that Trump, DeSantis, and Abbott have paved, devolving farther and farther into a corrupt, hateful, violent whites-only regional presence?
An amplification of the reemergence of the old Confederacy, this time as the GOP?
Or is it capable of change?
Now, we discover, it turns out I’m not the only one who’s noted this bizarre new dynamic. The rightwing billionaire Koch network Tuesday morning released an ad against Donald Trump claiming that he’s “Joe Biden’s secret weapon.”
Apparently, they don’t just want regional power: they want to control the entire country. After all, it takes nationwide federal power to get looser pollution controls and more tax cuts.
But will the GOP repudiate fascism, misogyny, and racism and offer contrasting ideas to voters that aren’t just amped-up voter suppression, more guns, and the destruction of public education — with or without Donald Trump?
I’m not holding my breath.
Here's What It Means to Be Anti-Woke: You're Pro-Bigot
In very simple terms, the word "woke" means being aware of discrimination and social crises and wanting to repair them in order to make a more happy, loving, and egalitarian society.
Republican Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis takes the stage in front of a sign reading "Awake Not Woke" at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) on February 24, 2022 in Orlando, Florida
(Photo: Joe Raedle/Getty Images)
THOM HARTMANN
Jun 06, 2023
Our work is licensed under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0). Feel free to republish and share widely.
THOM HARTMANN
Thom Hartmann is a talk-show host and the author of "The Hidden History of Monopolies: How Big Business Destroyed the American Dream" (2020); "The Hidden History of the Supreme Court and the Betrayal of America" (2019); and more than 25 other books in print.
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In very simple terms, the word "woke" means being aware of discrimination and social crises and wanting to repair them in order to make a more happy, loving, and egalitarian society.
Republican Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis takes the stage in front of a sign reading "Awake Not Woke" at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) on February 24, 2022 in Orlando, Florida
(Photo: Joe Raedle/Getty Images)
THOM HARTMANN
Jun 06, 2023
Common Dreams
Ron DeSantis says he’s going to save America from “wokeness,” proclaiming to a Los Angeles fundraiser:
“So in Florida, we say very clearly, we will never ever surrender to the woke mob. Our state is where woke goes to die.”
Nikki Haley declares:
“Wokeness is a virus more dangerous than any pandemic, hands down.”
Donald Trump is more nuanced, preferring to simply say racist things aloud without using the DeSantis shorthand.
“I don’t like the term ‘woke,” Trump told an Iowa audience, “because I hear the term ‘woke woke woke’ — it’s just a term they use, half the people can’t define it, they don’t know what it is.”
Trump notwithstanding, their competitors for the GOP nomination for president — along with Republican politicians across the country seeking their own re-election this year and next — are falling all over themselves to condemn “woke” and promise to be even tougher on “wokeness” than the last guy.
But what do they mean?
In 1938, Lead Belly sang a song about the “Scottsboro Boys,” a group of young Black men and boys who were falsely charged with rape and sentenced to the death penalty in Alabama in 1931. In the song, he talks about meeting the Scottsboro defendants, saying:
“I made this little song about down there. So I advise everybody, be a little careful when they go along through there — best stay woke, keep your eyes open.”
Republican politicians across the country seeking their own re-election this year and next... are falling all over themselves to condemn “woke” and promise to be even tougher on “wokeness” than the last guy. But what do they mean?
The phrase had a major revival in the Black community, as NBC News notes, in 2014 after Michael Brown was murdered by Ferguson, Missouri white police officer Darren Wilson.
“Stay woke” meant “keep an eye out for white cops who want to kill you” and to stay alert to and aware of other aspects of structural racism in American society. More recently, the term has expanded to being aware of and trying to do something about homophobia, misogyny, and our nation’s social ills.
Woke, in other words, means being aware of these social crises and wanting to repair them, to make a more happy, loving, egalitarian society.
Which is exactly why Republicans are using “woke” as their latest hate-filled dog whistle.
While these shout-outs to white racists, fascists, and haters go all the way back to the founding of the republic, most people are familiar with their more recent incarnations.
In the 1968 election and for his 1972 re-election, for example, Nixon rolled out his “War on Drugs” and talked constantly about “law and order” to signal to white people that he was going to come down hard on the Black community.
It was integral to his successful Southern Strategy to bring disaffected Dixiecrats — racist white Southern Democrats pissed off that LBJ had signed the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts into law in 1964/1965 — over to the GOP.
As Nixon‘s right hand man, John Ehrlichman, told reporter Dan Baum:
“You want to know what this was really all about? The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and Black people. Do you understand what I’m saying?
“We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or Black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and Blacks with heroin and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities.
“We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news.
“Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.“
And it worked:
Source: adapted from Wikipedia on US Incarceration rates
Nixon, as you can see, had considerable success in his generation’s version of today’s “war on woke.” Literally millions of careers were disrupted, people imprisoned, and lives brutally ended by his campaign to seize and hold political power. It echoes to this day, particularly in Red states where a joint can still get you years in prison.
Republican use of language to demonize people who aren’t straight white men have bridged America’s modern political history.
— Reagan referred to “welfare queens” and “young bucks buying steak” with food stamps.
— George HW Bush had Willie Horton, the “unrepentant rapist and killer” of white women.
— George W. Bush handily lumped all Muslims into the “radical terrorist” category as he ran illegal torture sites around the world.
— Donald Trump referred to “Mexican murderers and rapists” while throwing a sop to “good people on both sides.”
— And now the GOP has settled on the word woke as their way of shouting out to racists, Nazis, and hate-filled bigots.
The simple reality that every demagogue in history has known is that it’s more powerful to declare revenge and war against an enemy than to proclaim a positive vision for the future. It’s why Trump recently told his followers that he is “your retribution.”
Words have the meaning that culture and repetition give them, which gives us the key to using “woke” against Republicans.
While the openly Nazi and racist Republican base knows well how attacking woke is shorthand for hating on Black people, queer folk, and progressive allies, the word has a much more amorphous meaning for most of the rest of America.
And therein lies the opportunity for Democrats.
A week before the 1988 election, the front page of The New York Times carried a story headlined:
“Dukakis Asserts He Is a ‘Liberal,’ But in Old Tradition of His Party.”
Rush Limbaugh had started his show — and his relentless demonization of the word liberal — just four months earlier.
At its core, their effort to turn woke into a pejorative is about the politics of elimination, about erasing large swaths of American history, about pushing queer people back into the closet, about turning schools into indoctrination factories.
By the 1992 presidential election, Bill Clinton won, in part, by running away from the word. The New York Times headline for September 26, 1992 told the entire story:
“Clinton Says He’s Not Leaning Left but Taking a New ‘Third Way.’”
Running for re-election in 1996, The Washington Post’s headline highlighted Clinton’s continuity: “Clinton Says He Is No Liberal.”
It would be thirty years before a Democratic nominee for president could safely assert that he was a liberal (and Hillary continued to avoid the word right up to the day she lost in 2016).
Joe Biden, in 2020, came right out and said it:
“I was always labeled as one of the most liberal members of the United States Congress. … All during my career as a senator and as vice president — the things that we did in the United States — as president and vice president of the United States, I thought they were pretty progressive.”
Meet, in other words, the power of reframing a word.
Progressives and Democrats need to take a page from the old Limbaugh playbook and pound on the GOP’s use of the word “woke” as a slur.
Make it as simple as possible, whenever Republicans invoke the word:“If you’re anti-woke, that means you’re pro-bigot.”
“By attacking people who are woke to our nation’s history, you’re saying you side with the Nazis and the Klan.”
“I’m woke and proud of it. You’re a hater and should be ashamed of yourself.”
“It’s another Republican proclaiming his bigotry by attacking woke.”
Republicans attack woke, in addition to shouting out to the racist base, because they’re trying to hide how deeply they’re in the pockets of fringe groups from the white supremacist movement to rightwing billionaires who disdain democracy.
— They don’t want voters to think they’re owned by the fossil fuel and weapons industries.
— It’s embarrassing to them when we point out that nine of the last ten recessions happened during Republican presidencies, or that their abortion bans are really about controlling the bodies and lives of women and have nothing to do with “saving the children” they’ll deny food or healthcare to the moment they’re born.
— They want their book bans framed as anti-pornography campaigns rather than what they really are: anti-intellectualism, attempts to whitewash history, and a fear of modernity.
Which is why they constantly talk about “woke.”
It’s a word that, at this moment, means different things to different people.
But, at its core, their effort to turn woke into a pejorative is about the politics of elimination, about erasing large swaths of American history, about pushing queer people back into the closet, about turning schools into indoctrination factories.
Rhetoric like this rarely turns out good. Hitler villainized Jews for years before he started killing them; Rwandan Hutus called Tutsis “cockroaches” before the slaughter began; Pinochet called union organizers “communists and parasites,” then started pushing them out of helicopters.
As we saw so vividly with Richard Nixon’s War On Drugs, language has meaning, impact, and the ability to transform societies.
Therefore, job one for Democrats must be to strip the GOP anti-woke message of its ambiguity. To call out their dog whistle of hate and bigotry for what it is. To do so in political campaigns and letters to the editor; in calls into talk shows and C-SPAN; in conversations with friends, neighbors, and even random strangers.
Turn on a light, the old saying goes, and the cockroaches will scatter. It’s time to bring honest and unflinching light to the Republican Party’s misuse of the word “woke.”
Ron DeSantis says he’s going to save America from “wokeness,” proclaiming to a Los Angeles fundraiser:
“So in Florida, we say very clearly, we will never ever surrender to the woke mob. Our state is where woke goes to die.”
Nikki Haley declares:
“Wokeness is a virus more dangerous than any pandemic, hands down.”
Donald Trump is more nuanced, preferring to simply say racist things aloud without using the DeSantis shorthand.
“I don’t like the term ‘woke,” Trump told an Iowa audience, “because I hear the term ‘woke woke woke’ — it’s just a term they use, half the people can’t define it, they don’t know what it is.”
Trump notwithstanding, their competitors for the GOP nomination for president — along with Republican politicians across the country seeking their own re-election this year and next — are falling all over themselves to condemn “woke” and promise to be even tougher on “wokeness” than the last guy.
But what do they mean?
In 1938, Lead Belly sang a song about the “Scottsboro Boys,” a group of young Black men and boys who were falsely charged with rape and sentenced to the death penalty in Alabama in 1931. In the song, he talks about meeting the Scottsboro defendants, saying:
“I made this little song about down there. So I advise everybody, be a little careful when they go along through there — best stay woke, keep your eyes open.”
Republican politicians across the country seeking their own re-election this year and next... are falling all over themselves to condemn “woke” and promise to be even tougher on “wokeness” than the last guy. But what do they mean?
The phrase had a major revival in the Black community, as NBC News notes, in 2014 after Michael Brown was murdered by Ferguson, Missouri white police officer Darren Wilson.
“Stay woke” meant “keep an eye out for white cops who want to kill you” and to stay alert to and aware of other aspects of structural racism in American society. More recently, the term has expanded to being aware of and trying to do something about homophobia, misogyny, and our nation’s social ills.
Woke, in other words, means being aware of these social crises and wanting to repair them, to make a more happy, loving, egalitarian society.
Which is exactly why Republicans are using “woke” as their latest hate-filled dog whistle.
While these shout-outs to white racists, fascists, and haters go all the way back to the founding of the republic, most people are familiar with their more recent incarnations.
In the 1968 election and for his 1972 re-election, for example, Nixon rolled out his “War on Drugs” and talked constantly about “law and order” to signal to white people that he was going to come down hard on the Black community.
It was integral to his successful Southern Strategy to bring disaffected Dixiecrats — racist white Southern Democrats pissed off that LBJ had signed the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts into law in 1964/1965 — over to the GOP.
As Nixon‘s right hand man, John Ehrlichman, told reporter Dan Baum:
“You want to know what this was really all about? The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and Black people. Do you understand what I’m saying?
“We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or Black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and Blacks with heroin and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities.
“We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news.
“Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.“
And it worked:
Source: adapted from Wikipedia on US Incarceration rates
Nixon, as you can see, had considerable success in his generation’s version of today’s “war on woke.” Literally millions of careers were disrupted, people imprisoned, and lives brutally ended by his campaign to seize and hold political power. It echoes to this day, particularly in Red states where a joint can still get you years in prison.
Republican use of language to demonize people who aren’t straight white men have bridged America’s modern political history.
— Reagan referred to “welfare queens” and “young bucks buying steak” with food stamps.
— George HW Bush had Willie Horton, the “unrepentant rapist and killer” of white women.
— George W. Bush handily lumped all Muslims into the “radical terrorist” category as he ran illegal torture sites around the world.
— Donald Trump referred to “Mexican murderers and rapists” while throwing a sop to “good people on both sides.”
— And now the GOP has settled on the word woke as their way of shouting out to racists, Nazis, and hate-filled bigots.
The simple reality that every demagogue in history has known is that it’s more powerful to declare revenge and war against an enemy than to proclaim a positive vision for the future. It’s why Trump recently told his followers that he is “your retribution.”
Words have the meaning that culture and repetition give them, which gives us the key to using “woke” against Republicans.
While the openly Nazi and racist Republican base knows well how attacking woke is shorthand for hating on Black people, queer folk, and progressive allies, the word has a much more amorphous meaning for most of the rest of America.
And therein lies the opportunity for Democrats.
A week before the 1988 election, the front page of The New York Times carried a story headlined:
“Dukakis Asserts He Is a ‘Liberal,’ But in Old Tradition of His Party.”
Rush Limbaugh had started his show — and his relentless demonization of the word liberal — just four months earlier.
At its core, their effort to turn woke into a pejorative is about the politics of elimination, about erasing large swaths of American history, about pushing queer people back into the closet, about turning schools into indoctrination factories.
By the 1992 presidential election, Bill Clinton won, in part, by running away from the word. The New York Times headline for September 26, 1992 told the entire story:
“Clinton Says He’s Not Leaning Left but Taking a New ‘Third Way.’”
Running for re-election in 1996, The Washington Post’s headline highlighted Clinton’s continuity: “Clinton Says He Is No Liberal.”
It would be thirty years before a Democratic nominee for president could safely assert that he was a liberal (and Hillary continued to avoid the word right up to the day she lost in 2016).
Joe Biden, in 2020, came right out and said it:
“I was always labeled as one of the most liberal members of the United States Congress. … All during my career as a senator and as vice president — the things that we did in the United States — as president and vice president of the United States, I thought they were pretty progressive.”
Meet, in other words, the power of reframing a word.
Progressives and Democrats need to take a page from the old Limbaugh playbook and pound on the GOP’s use of the word “woke” as a slur.
Make it as simple as possible, whenever Republicans invoke the word:“If you’re anti-woke, that means you’re pro-bigot.”
“By attacking people who are woke to our nation’s history, you’re saying you side with the Nazis and the Klan.”
“I’m woke and proud of it. You’re a hater and should be ashamed of yourself.”
“It’s another Republican proclaiming his bigotry by attacking woke.”
Republicans attack woke, in addition to shouting out to the racist base, because they’re trying to hide how deeply they’re in the pockets of fringe groups from the white supremacist movement to rightwing billionaires who disdain democracy.
— They don’t want voters to think they’re owned by the fossil fuel and weapons industries.
— It’s embarrassing to them when we point out that nine of the last ten recessions happened during Republican presidencies, or that their abortion bans are really about controlling the bodies and lives of women and have nothing to do with “saving the children” they’ll deny food or healthcare to the moment they’re born.
— They want their book bans framed as anti-pornography campaigns rather than what they really are: anti-intellectualism, attempts to whitewash history, and a fear of modernity.
Which is why they constantly talk about “woke.”
It’s a word that, at this moment, means different things to different people.
But, at its core, their effort to turn woke into a pejorative is about the politics of elimination, about erasing large swaths of American history, about pushing queer people back into the closet, about turning schools into indoctrination factories.
Rhetoric like this rarely turns out good. Hitler villainized Jews for years before he started killing them; Rwandan Hutus called Tutsis “cockroaches” before the slaughter began; Pinochet called union organizers “communists and parasites,” then started pushing them out of helicopters.
As we saw so vividly with Richard Nixon’s War On Drugs, language has meaning, impact, and the ability to transform societies.
Therefore, job one for Democrats must be to strip the GOP anti-woke message of its ambiguity. To call out their dog whistle of hate and bigotry for what it is. To do so in political campaigns and letters to the editor; in calls into talk shows and C-SPAN; in conversations with friends, neighbors, and even random strangers.
Turn on a light, the old saying goes, and the cockroaches will scatter. It’s time to bring honest and unflinching light to the Republican Party’s misuse of the word “woke.”
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THOM HARTMANN
Thom Hartmann is a talk-show host and the author of "The Hidden History of Monopolies: How Big Business Destroyed the American Dream" (2020); "The Hidden History of the Supreme Court and the Betrayal of America" (2019); and more than 25 other books in print.
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