Ron DeSantis is all-in on a war on “woke” strategy that he hopes to parlay into a ticket to the White House, but a conservative columnist is warning the Florida governor’s strategy could backfire.
Matt Lewis writes for The Daily Beast that DeSantis’ recent proclamation that “We will wage war on the woke. We will fight the woke in education; we will fight the woke in corporations; we will fight in the halls of Congress. We will never ever surrender to the woke mob” that channeled Winston Churchill’s famous “We shall fight on the beaches” speech shows the extent to which the Florida governor has made the war on woke the centerpiece of his political agenda.
“We get it. We get it,” Lewis writes. “You’re clearly doubling down on the fact that fighting woke-ism is your raison d'être. This is your Make America Great Again. This is your Build Back Better. But does casting opposition to woke-ism as DeSantis’s bête noire make sense, politically? I’m not sure.”
A recent USA Today/Ipsos poll support’s Lewis’ assertion.
The poll shows a split between those who view “woke” to mean being aware of social injustice, which is considered the Democratic party view of the term, and others who associate the term with political correctness taken to an extreme, which is how Republicans typically characterize “wokeness.”
According to the poll, 56 percent of Americans view the term to mean “to be informed, educated on, and aware of social injustices,” and 39 percent consider it to be “overly politically correct and police others’ words.”
DeSantis isn’t alone in pushing an anti-woke agenda, Lewis writes, noting many other Republican presidential candidates who have expresses similar views.
But even Donald Trump sees the term getting a little stale.
“It’s gotten sick, and I don’t like the term woke, because I hear woke, woke, woke,” Trump said Thursday at a Westside Conservative Breakfast in Urbandale, Iowa.
“You know it’s like just a term they use half the people can’t even define it. They don’t know what it is.”
It doesn’t help DeSantis and fellow anti-woke Republicans that most people don’t even know exactly what the term means.
“It might even be interchangeable with terms or phrases like ‘liberal indoctrination,’ ‘identity politics,’ ‘political correctness run amok,’ or ‘Newspeak,’ Lewis writes.
“Maybe you call it ‘elite paternalism’ or even ‘liberal fascism.’ These ideas are not new, and it’s unclear why we should pretend that they are just because they have been given a new label."
“For broader appeal, why not say Florida is 'where liberalism comes to die' or 'where progressivism comes to die”?
