“Today’s progressivism is more or less a secular form of religion with its own high standards,” Matt Lewis, a conservative columnist, wrote this spring. “Eventually,” he concluded, “the revolution devours its own.” Bill Maher, host of HBO’s Real Time, urged Democratic presidential candidates to “Get out of Woke-ville, for a day.”
“Wokeness,” in this rendering, is an overly rigid commitment to identity politics and social justice ideology. And in their zeal, these woke Democrats are pushing the Democratic Party away from the voters it needs to beat President Donald Trump in 2020.
If this were actually true, you would expect real traction for the wokest candidates in the Democratic presidential race.