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.

And yet. ICE is snatching people off the street and invading American airports. The Trump administration’s policies are pushing the economically disadvantaged into deeper poverty. The US has launched a globally disastrous war with Iran that lacks even the flimsiest pretext. None of that squares easily with a narrative about wokeness resurrected. It’s tempting, Ongweso says, to hope that “woke is not only back but that it had power in the first place,” because “the reality is, every single day, more and more horrors reveal themselves and we are increasingly powerless to thwart them.”

Ongweso says the idea of Woke 2 started as a “leftist joke” aimed at “a certain type of liberal” drawn to empty and alienating performative gestures rather than the substance of social reform. (Picture former House speaker Nancy Pelosi and other Democrats kneeling in kente cloth at the height of the George Floyd protests in 2020.) While it’s hard to tell how earnest any of the Woke 2 cheerleading is, he says, “I like to think the knives really are out for public figures who try the old playbook of co-opting social justice language and symbols.”

There’s also a revenge fantasy at play. Because Trump’s campaign theme was payback—“I am your retribution,” he told a CPAC crowd in 2023—the turnabout makes perfect sense.

Leftists dream about a correspondingly radical political order, still out of reach, that will swing America into a utopia with infinite gender identities, a strong social safety net, the complete abolition of AI, and Nuremberg-style trials for their enemies. It’s a world in which anyone who aligns themselves with the Department of Homeland Security is “sent to a gulag where [they will] forever run on a giant hamster wheel that generates electricity for a high speed rail station,” as one X user suggested in their vision of a country remade under Woke 2.

Until then, vengeance can be as simple as hitting the trolls where it hurts. Mohammad Abbasi, a fitness influencer who can often be found mocking right-wingers on X, says that part of the Woke 2 ethos is becoming meaner in political disputes. After footage of FBI director Kash Patel awkwardly partying in the locker room of the US men’s Olympic hockey team leaked, Abbasi posted, “nice that the make-a-wish foundation got kash money patel the fbi director job.” When Red Scare podcaster and actress Dasha Nekrasova was dropped by her agency over her interview with white nationalist Nick Fuentes in November, Abbasi piled on: “did you think woke could be killed? you people have NO IDEA what’s coming,” he wrote.

“A lot of reactionaries have these Freudian-like and out-in-the-open insecurities that rarely get pressed on while they dish out their own vulgarities,” Abbasi says. He senses that Woke 2, such as it exists, has largely done away with tokenizing identities, and he hopes that going forward, leftists will spend less time worrying that an insult directed at a specific target will hurt a larger group of people. As a shorter man, Abbasi says, he isn’t stung when people mock Ben Shapiro for his height (Shapiro had said he is 5’9”), since it’s less a value judgement about stature and more of a cutting response to the right-wing pundit’s “performative masculinity.”

June Sternbach, a writer for The Onion and cohost of the podcasts Kill the Computer and Ill Conceived, doesn’t think Woke 2 will “really manifest in any measurable way.” Still, she also sees an opportunity to move past the endlessly recycled online conversations that “drive a wedge between all of us that have shared interests, especially around class.”

“I think the best possible manifestation of Woke 2 would be complete trans rights” on a federal level, Sternbach adds. To the extent that Woke 2 is ever achieved, she says, it’s “going to have to be much more strategic, a lot more compassionate.”

As with Woke 1, the true meaning of Woke 2 is in the eye of the beholder. Its theoretical nature—few actually believe it has arrived—leaves its particulars up for grabs. And without control of Congress, the White House, or the Supreme Court, leftists can only dream about rolling back Trump’s police surveillance state, persecution campaigns, reckless deregulations, and defunding of science.