To fight wokeness, vote Harris

The left's worst ideas flourish under Trump

Today’s post is from Jeff Maurer. Jeff was Senior Writer for Last Week Tonight with John Oliver and currently writes the political comedy Substack I Might Be Wrong.

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Photo by Paul Hennessy/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images

Trump wants the election to be about wokeness. He rails about wokeness constantly — it’s in his speeches even more than Hannibal Lecter, feckless whinging about the Biden-Harris switch, or the age-old question: “Would you rather be eaten by a shark or electrocuted by a boat?” Fox News covers wokeness more than the Golf Channel covers golf, and there are endless social media accounts dedicated to finding the wokest freak in America and making him a star. The message from the right is clear: To stop wokeness, vote Trump.

I’m voting for Harris. But I definitely understand why people are annoyed by wokeness. Even a liberal like me finds wokeness grating; I feel that the only sane reaction to moments of peak wokeness like the time Gushers solemnly condemned racism or the time Elmo’s Dad expounded on the importance of protest is to think: “What the hell is this crap?” Wokeness might actually be worst for normie liberals, because we tend to hang out in highly progressive spaces. In practical terms, a rancher deep in MAGA country is about as affected by wokeness as he is by Komodo dragon attacks, but liberals often work jobs where we have to wonder how many letters we need to add after “LGBT” in order to avoid an afternoon in the HR gulag.

I used to work a job like that: I wrote for Last Week Tonight with John Oliver from 2014-2020. I was there while the woke wave built and crested, and I was also there for most of Trump’s presidency. In my opinion, the two events were related: Wokeness rose largely because of Trump. There was a causal relationship that was probably most apparent to people who spent that time in deep blue spaces. That relationship creates an odd situation: Republicans want people to strike a blow against wokeness by voting for Trump. But in truth, probably nothing would breathe new life into wokeness more than a second Trump term.

What is wokeness? No one knows — “woke” is a word that resists definition, much like “love” or “artisanal” (which I think just means “made by someone who wasn’t wearing shoes”). But whatever wokeness is, we can surely agree that its origins are in the far left. Before the 2010s, we had fewer words for leftist politics because they were a smaller part of the landscape. Sure, some lefty folks thought Obama was Hitler Part Two, and a few people envisioned a Dennis Kucinich-led renaissance (though that was mostly just Dennis Kucinich). But the left was marginal; if you weren’t running a vegan bakery or in a polycule with a Marxist history professor, you probably didn’t engage much with far-left politics.

In the early 2010s, the far left grew. Occupy Wall Street and the Michael Brown shooting led to protests that mixed legitimate points about America’s lingering injustices with dumbass hippie nonsense. Leftist protest movements are awkward for liberals, because we often partly agree with the protesters’ sentiments, but we differ on specifics and aren’t convinced that the path to justice involves throwing a trash can through the window of a Pizza Hut. We also disagree with the leftist worldview in a fundamental way. Liberals see America as good-but-flawed; if the country was a car, we’d like to make repairs. The far left sees America as irredeemably wicked; if the country was a car, they’d like to load it with dynamite and drive it off a cliff, preferably with the person who built the car still inside.

Trump is the far left’s worst nightmare and dream come true at the same time. He’s everything they hate: A racist, misogynist, uber-capitalist authoritarian. But’s he’s also great for the far left because he validates their “America is bad” narrative. After all: what does electing Trump say about America? I have to admit that it doesn’t say anything good! You can see how this puts people like me in a bind; I don’t think that America is hopelessly racist and sexist, but…we did elect that obviously-racist-and-sexist guy. Once Trump took office, arguing that America isn’t racist and awful felt like arguing that O.J. Simpson was great at anger management: You knew that at some point in the conversation, you were going to find yourself saying “Okay, sure — but other than that…”

During Trump’s presidency, it also felt like talking about anything other than Trump was bad form. That was largely because Trump was the president, and though a woke teacher can tell your kid that triangles are racist, and a woke city council can change Main Street’s name to Indigenous Bodies Straining Under The Yoke Of Capitalism Boulevard, only a president can launch missiles or capture the Justice Department. During the Trump years, concerns about left-wing illiberalism were invariably met with “but surely Trump is the bigger threat.” And…yes, he was! It did not seem like the right time to “punch left”. You don’t complain about the food on the Titanic, you don’t whine that they’re out of mini-license plates with your name on them in the Jurassic Park gift shop, and you don’t raise a fuss about lefty campus shenanigans when the president is shredding democratic norms.

I saw firsthand how this dynamic stoked wokeness. In my office full of young, artsy New York types, you could practically feel the “r” in “Resistance” get capitalized when Trump was sworn in. Here’s how bad things were: Do you remember the Shia LaBeouf/Jaden Smith performance art piece where they protested Trump by chanting “he will not divide us” over and over into a camera? We weren’t sure if we should make fun of that. It was Shia LaBeouf and Jaden Smith (so, one and a half movie stars) doing a cringeworthy, self-righteous performance art piece, and we — a group of comedians whose souls had left our bodies years ago — weren’t sure if that was worthy of mockery. In hindsight, that seems like clear evidence that Trump had scrambled our brains.

Trump gave the far left a sense of purpose and stifled center-left pushback. One incident that I think illustrates that dynamic happened at Last Week Tonight at the height of the MeToo movement. It seemed like the show should do, well, something about MeToo — it was the news of the moment, and all we had done was a short piece on Harvey Weinstein, which was basically just six “he jerked off in a plant” jokes followed by a perfunctory conclusion. There was starting to be some overreach — Al Franken had been run out of the Senate and the Shitty Men in Media List was floating around — and, as a show with unassailable progressive credentials, we seemed to be in a good position to comment. So, I pitched a piece in which we would affirm the movement’s value — it was time to rethink how we respond to sexual harassment — but also highlight the need to let the punishment fit the crime and respect due process. You know: bedrock liberal principles. And, of course, we’d also make a bunch of “he jerked off in a plant” jokes, because it’s a comedy show and that’s what pays the bills.

There are many reasons why a Last Week Tonight pitch doesn’t become a Last Week Tonight piece. The pitch might be muddled, derivative, unfunny, or even a half-remembered West Wing episode that you thought was your own idea. My pitch might have been any or all of those. I don’t remember. And it didn’t air, which is the usual fate of Last Week Tonight pitches. But the way that it died was unusual. I talked about the pitch with my colleagues (not John — it didn’t get that far), and everyone agreed: The atmosphere made the piece an absolute non-starter. We just couldn’t do it. And that was largely because of Trump: In light of his treatment of women, allyship was called for, not a pedantic liberal parsing that could be interpreted as “both-sides-ing”. This wasn’t even necessarily the opinion of the people I was talking to — it was just a matter-of-fact assessment of the climate. And that assessment was probably right; if we had done that piece, the blowback might have been severe. It wasn’t worth jeopardizing everyone’s jobs to do a somewhat-contrarian MeToo piece when a piece about horny space geckos would do at least as well, and probably better. 

These are the types of decisions that allowed wokeness to surge. Liberals bit our tongues — and that’s on us — but we did it in response to the climate Trump created. Trump boosted wokeness by nurturing the far-left narrative about America’s awfulness and by sapping the liberal will to criticize far-left ideas. The result was not unlike the koala bear’s unlikely conquest of Australia: Ample nourishment and few predators allowed them to thrive despite being one of the most objectively ridiculous species on the planet.

It's something close to an indisputable fact that wokeness grew under Trump. And I’m convinced that the surge was not a coincidence; there was a direct causal relationship. I saw that relationship in action, and I hope that it doesn’t happen again. My vote for Harris has nothing to do with wokeness. I’m voting for Harris because she does well on big issues like climate change, Ukraine, and not being a flamboyantly ignorant criminal with the impulse control of a toddler. But if I was voting to end wokeness, a Harris vote seems like the obvious way to go.