Who Benefitted from the Anti-Woke Panic?

Over the past week I've been closely watching the ICE invasion of Minneapolis. Scenes of masked, uniformed figures snatching people off the streets recall some of the most terrifying imagery from the 20th century. In widely circulated footage, Renee Nicole Good, a 37-year-old mother of three, was killed during an ICE operation. Predictably, those running the operation are playing Orwellian games with the video, disputing what's clearly visible.

Throughout the Obama, Trump, and Biden eras I read all about the excesses of the progressive left. Woke mobs on Twitter. Woke college students symbolizing the death knell of democracy. Editorials decrying BLM rhetoric as going too far. The 1619 Project challenging conventional narratives of U.S. history. Panics over transgender athletes playing sports, pronoun usage, pop culture diversity, even freakouts over beer ads. It's worth asking now not whether wokeness went too far, but who benefitted from these controversies?

Anti-Woke pundits presented progressive culture as a grave threat to Western Civilization. They described themselves as classical liberals and defenders of institutions, always claiming free speech and "Western values" was under attack. But their obsession with the excesses of progressive ideologies inadvertently fueled reactionary forces. Their outrage was misallocated. They mistook their own discomfort with cultural trends for oppression, but we are now confronted with the real thing.

The concerns of progressive activists were viewed as overblown and not based in reality. Educators, librarians, and activists were often singled out. As those decrying cancel culture and safe spaces enjoyed the lecture circuit and glowing profiles written about them at elite publications, class divisions widened and state power inflated. Even Libertarians got more mileage over mocking the latest progressive trends instead of tracking the authoritarian creep. 

It's not that progressives are above criticism. Not at all.  But anti-woke punditry got lost in the cultural debates, forgetting that being a cultural critic is not about gatekeeping, but realizing art should be in conversation with the past, not keeping it frozen in amber. MAGA poses no threat to these pundits, but a college course on feminist lit theory is seen as a more serious existential threat than militarizing the police or rampaging militias. 

The fixation on progressive policies and campus culture indirectly gave moral cover to authoritarians by priming people to fear cultural change more than state violence. Anti-Woke pundits will occasionally voice tepid criticism of Trump's reckless social media posts or lament his ignorance, but their ire is more often aimed at the Gen Z server from their favorite restaurant who corrected their pronoun usage. 

Meanwhile the citizens of Minneapolis worry about late-night knocks on the door from masked men with military-style weapons or reports of ICE checkpoints at schools or street corners demanding proof of citizenship. It's hard to imagine they are losing sleep over "woke" college students lecturing them about racism or gender identity.