Woke Isn't Back

Donald Trump’s victory in the 2024 presidential race wasn’t just a prelude to mass deportations and geopolitical chaos. The MAGA faithful also saw it as the final, definitive rebuke of “woke” ideology.

By that point, the term had been fully wrested from its origins. As it emerged from African-American vernacular English in the context of civil rights movements, “woke” described a state of active engagement with these social issues. Then, during the Black Lives Matter protests against racialized police brutality that began in the 2010s, the idiom came to denote an awareness of systemic injustice—and was more broadly adopted by liberal groups.

Eventually, right-wingers perceived anything “woke” as insidious propaganda against their own constricted norms around race, gender, and sexuality—and weaponized the word in ways that robbed it of specificity. These culture warriors likely couldn’t define “woke” to save their lives, but they knew with utter conviction that the term could be applied to whatever they didn’t like, as fuel for cycles of exaggerated outrage that centered their reactionary politics.

What exactly did society look like after a second Trump victory sounded the death knell of wokeness? In short, the winners believed they were free to offend without fear of consequence. As a Wall Street banker told the Financial Times ahead of Trump’s second inauguration: “We can say ‘retard’ and ‘pussy’ without the fear of getting cancelled … it’s a new dawn.”

Meanwhile, progressives hunkered down for another long four years. But even in the darkness of a nakedly corrupt, authoritarian regime, they can’t help seeing a glorious light at the end of the tunnel. They fantasize about a resurgent “Woke 2,” a phenomenon already eroding Trumpism before our eyes, with millions turning out for nationwide “No Kings” protests and polls showing that key groups of Trump voters—including independents, young men, and the working class—are abandoning the president. This apparent drift has already occasioned many think pieces; the video game and internet culture website Aftermath just dedicated an entire week to celebrating the return of wokeness.

But can this add up to anything meaningful, particularly given data showing that Trump’s unpopularity hasn’t converted into positive attitudes toward the Democratic establishment? That’s a thornier question. “It is fun to pretend like when good things happen in this world incidentally, there’s a design,” says Edward Ongweso Jr., a writer and researcher with the policy initiative Security in Context and cohost of the podcast This Machine Kills who occasionally riffs on the nature of Woke 2 on X. “But the thing it all has to go back to is organizing workplaces and communities in real life.”

Liberal commentators (and shitposters) can hold up any number of artifacts as evidence of a nascent Woke 2. It’s everything from Bad Bunny performing an all-Spanish concert for Super Bowl halftime, which set a viewership record despite MAGA tantrums, to the success of TV shows like the gay hockey romance Heated Rivalry and The Pitt, a nerve-shredding medical drama that picks apart inequities in health care. Sinners and One Battle After Another, two films derided as woke by the right for grappling with America’s living legacy of racist violence, were commercial and critical hits. The week of the Oscars, UCLA researchers came out with a study showing that movies with diverse casts perform better with audiences. Elsewhere, “alt” figure skater Alysa Liu inspired “woke agenda” memes after winning gold at the Olympics; Muslim socialist millennial Zohran Mamdani became mayor of New York, then instantly converted the president himself into an infatuated fan.