Few topics highlight the differences between the GOP and Democrats more than the hot-button issue of liberal “wokeism.” In fact, the two parties can barely agree on what the term even means. Being woke, a concept that gained popularity in the early days of the Black Lives Matter movement, was originally used to describe people who were aware of the racial and social inequities facing Black Americans. But some in the Republican Party adapted the concept to describe a culture that promotes what they consider dangerous progressive policies like transgender rights and critical race theory. Straight Arrow News contributor Ben Weingarten explains how Rep. Jim Banks (R-IN) and Governor Ron DeSantis (R-FL) are crusading against “wokeism” in an attempt to unite the Republican Party. 

Wokeism makes man God and, as he rolls over his fellow man, bending society to woke whims, violates nature, perverts justice, and transgresses morality. It’s how you tear a country apart and bring on its demise. It would be both unconscionable and political malpractice for Republicans not to defend the unwoke, almost assuredly silent majority against wokeism by targeting it in all of its manifestations. 

This begins with, as Banks has highlighted, purging the state of wokeism. Not a one penny should fund an ideology of national suicide.

Targeting wokeism has proven effective for candidates as diverse as Trump nationwide in 2016, Glenn Youngkin in Virginia in 2021 and Ron DeSantis in Florida in 2022. These figures may have targeted different areas of wokeism, and in different ways. They bring their own talents to the table and their own tenor, but whatever differences they might have, they were united at minimum in understanding that Americans–on the most fundamental things–know the woke elites are wrong, dangerously wrong, and they don’t want to suffer because of it. Banks recognizes this. A very diverse coalition of Republicans has endorsed him. We’ll see if we can draw a line from Trump to Youngkin to DeSantis to Banks in 2024.

Divisions will no doubt remain. But if America is going to endure, it’s going to require a Republican Party at very minimum united in its opposition to a wokeism that threatens to put this country out of business to the detriment of Americans of all stripes.