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Culture War Roundup for the week of May 18, 2026

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Your claim that woke ended in 2019 makes me think that our definitions of woke are completely different. You seem to be defining woke as a temporary electoral strategy used by a few Democratic candidates. So, once Biden won and the most aggressively progressive campaigns fizzled out you determined that woke politics died.

All it really showed was that kind of excessive campaigning was electorally toxic. It does not show that the underlying ideology disappeared. Democrats are smart enough now to lick their fingers and gauge which way the wind is blowing so they've backed off, but our elites have not. It means the Democrats rejected the most explicit version of it. Meanwhile, the institutional version continued spreading. What I see as woke did not peak in 2019. It peaked after 2019, especially around 2020–2022, when DEI, intersectionality, equity policies, and identity based moral grandstanding became much more popular across our mainstream.

You say suburban Democrats are not woke, yet suburban Democrats are mostly college educated, and higher education is one of the main providers of this worldview. Suburban Dems may not act like campus activists anymore (unless you're in Somaliapolis), but a lot of them still support the institutional assumptions like equity, disparate outcomes as proof of discrimination, etc.

Also, Black church ladies and Hispanics pursuing their own self-interests are not indicators that woke is dead. Most voters aren't ideologues. Again, it's the institutions, and that is where this worldview lives. Higher and general ed, HR departments, foundations, activist nonprofits, media organizations, school administrations, professional associations, entertainment companies, and bureaucratic agencies.

Public backlash eventually arrived and these institutions did not willingly abandon wokeism. Some backed off. Others have begun to repaint it. They rename things. "Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion” becomes “Academic Culture and Community”, ideological screening can just be worded as “values alignment.” Their goal remains the same, it's just that the strategy just needs to be updated.

Woke became less useful for political campaigns, but that is very from it ending. What ended was the open branding. The institutional ideology remains, and it is adapting to embed itself more quietly.