Is It Time To Move On From Anti-Woke? A Dialogue

Naomi Kanakia and I discuss whether anti-woke is passé in a time of Trump unleashed

This is round one of at least three exchanges between the estimable

Naomi Kanakia

and me. I’ll drop the second and third later this week. Maybe there will be some more if other people weigh in with sufficiently interesting responses. -Dan

---

Dear Naomi,

After my recent podcast conversation with Bill Deresiewicz, you sent me a short DM that said: “Your show spends a lot of time discussing woke people. Do you ever think...maybe you should have a woke person on?”

That kicked off a long back and forth between us about a cluster of issues surrounding wokeness, anti-wokeness, Trump, Palestine, Israel, trans and anti-trans, and the incentive structure for writers who’ve established their brands as dissenters from left-wing orthodoxies. We covered a lot of ground, but for me the questions that really stood out were some version of these:

• Does wokeness even really exist anymore, in any meaningful sense, in any important cultural or political space?

• Even if it does still exist, and is still exerting some influence in certain spaces, is there any point to critiquing it now that Trump and Musk rule the land?

• If you grant that Trump is the primary bad thing, as both of us do, why might it still be worth discussing the woke left? And if not, why are there so many people who ostensibly oppose Trump who are still talking about wokeness so much?

I would summarize your answer to these questions as something like: Sure, there are still some silly woke people out there on the margins, saying silly woke things, but their influence has almost completely dissipated. Compared to the awful things the right is doing, they’re irrelevant. Even if we were willing to grant that they continue to exert malign influence in certain spaces, we can’t really influence them anyway, so we should stop trying. “Can I tell every 23 year old trans woman to stop tweeting?” as you put it.

As to why so many of us courageous, heterodox truth-tellers™ keep talking about wokeness like it’s 2021, when Trump is denying HIV drugs to people in Africa, gutting the federal government, cracking down on free speech, leaning into the massacre in Gaza, and selling our democracy to the highest bidder, your answer is some combination of denial, opportunism, and audience capture.

The most generous interpretation is that we’re in shock at how bad things have gotten so quickly, and are defaulting to criticizing the left because it’s what we know and because it allows us to avoid confronting not just the awfulness of the right but our utter powerlessness in the face of it. Less generously, we’re sticking to anti-wokeness because we have to pay the bills, or get the egoboo, and so we keep doing the thing that we know our readers and listeners want from us, attacking the people they want us to attack, confirming all their priors and soothing their cognitive dissonance. And the corollary: we’re afraid of the criticism, lost subscriptions, and maybe even lost jobs we’d face if we went after Trump with the same verve with which we’ve been going after the wokesters.

Does that sound right to you, as a characterization of your stance? I have my various responses, but I wanted to make sure I understood where you’re coming from before launching into them.

Dan

—

Hi Dan,

I think that’s about right. A lot of people over the last two years decided that wokeness was a kind of overreaction to Trump. So they became very committed to the idea of not overreacting. And they decried things like #resistance liberalism, clicktivism, call-outs, deplatforming, the use of the word ‘fascist’, etc. And now we’re in a situation where the natural reaction is outrage, but since they’ve decided beforehand that outrage is unproductive, they’re just sort of stuck spinning their wheels, going after old targets.

We can discuss the degree to which their preoccupation with wokeness is genuine (perhaps they really think it constitutes a continued threat), but whether it’s a genuine feeling or not, it really seems (to me) quite misplaced.

I also want to note that I have anti-woke credentials too. I was a YA writer. My second novel, We Are Totally Normal, was called out by a popular Goodreads reviewer and harmed my career–you can see the debate reflected all across the book’s Goodread’s page. Just last year, I was subject to a Twitter pile-on by other trans women. I had a book deal canceled because the editor said my book was misogynist. I had an article pulled, a week before publication, because it called out a prominent anti-racist writing guide (I later placed it with an anti-woke journal, Tablet). On Substack, in 2023, I wrote that a writer’s main ethical responsibility is to preserve the possibility of expressive freedom: don’t say things that constrain others from being creative. I also wrote a post defending the work of Dave Chappelle and J.K. Rowling, two transphobic people whose work I otherwise enjoy. In 2024, I noted at the end of several posts that I felt that protests against Israel had something of an antisemitic flavor

I mention all this just to note that I too was affected by left-wing censoriousness. I also hated and chafed under it. And I also decried it. For a while, there was a lane I could’ve pursued, where I became a trans critic of ‘woke’ culture, but I thankfully eschewed that role (it’s currently being filled by Brianna Wu). For me, the reason came down to revulsion: I could not imagine being in the same room as Andrew Sullivan, Bari Weiss, Jesse Singal, or any of these other anti-woke figures that had committed themselves to opposing trans rights. I had critiques of the left, but I always knew that the left was my side, and that if the right won, they’d enact policies that would constrain my own freedom of movement and expression. That was always my perspective. My self-interest always lay with the Democratic party, in whatever form. Other people didn’t see it that way. But now…they’re seeing they were wrong. That the freedoms they claimed to value–intellectual freedom and freedom of speech–are much more threatened by the right than they ever were by the left.

Virtually every anti-woke commentator, if they could press a button, would choose a Kamala Harris presidency over a Donald Trump presidency. So…why not just say so? That for all its faults, the left was better than the right, and that the future lies with the left. That, in fact, left-wing governments still preserve democracy, rule-of-law, and free speech, while our right-wing government is in the process of destroying these things. That all these critiques

William Deresiewicz

made of the left, as being the enemy of freedom, fun, and eros and playfulness–they are exactly wrong, they are exactly inverted, and it’s actually the right that is the enemy of freedom. Why not say what we all know to be true?

Best,

Naomi