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Notes -
Evidence to the contrary
Eric Adams winning in New York on a tough on crime, skeptical of progressives message
Youngkin winning in VA
NJ gov race
the DA and progressive members of the SF city council being sweeped in elections
These are all examples of more moderate candidates beating progressive candidates in historically blue areas. and just in general social dialogue simply is not as militantly progressive as it was in 2020 and 2021. really the number of truly progressive people seems to be smaller. Things are more complicated than it's won or it hasn't.
The fact that ideas like "abolish the police" or "$1 million dollar reparation checks for all black people" are part of the mainstream debate is a sign of how far they've come. They might be a little less powerful than in 2021 but they're still far more powerful than they were in 2019. Wokeness has come in waves for a long time, the pattern is that they push society 2 steps left and then the conservative reaction pushes it back 1 step right. We might be in the "1 step right" phase at the moment but the media isn't going to stop pushing wokeness, the university professors and administrators aren't going to resign, the HR ladies aren't all quitting. All of their institutional power is still intact and preparing for the next offensive.
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Elections are a bad gauge because, if sufficiently democratic, they are close to being public-opinion polls. When people talk about wokeness being powerful, they usually mean it is disproportionately powerful compared to its popularity (or at least compared to its success, if they think public opinion on something is being driven by dishonest media coverage). It routinely gets institutions to act as if its dictates are universally popular, just the way society has decided things are done nowadays, even when they are unpopular or at least highly controversial. By comparison, essentially nobody talks about how pro-agriculture ideology is influential. When a public opinion poll finds that colleges discriminating against white/asian people is unpopular, but they do it anyway, that isn't cited as evidence that wokeness is weak. Now, it is true that elections have more direct impact than public-opinion polls. But lots of sources of power aren't elections - corporate policies, sympathetic media coverage, unelected government bureaucrats, etc. It didn't take an election for hospitals to ration healthcare based on racial "equity" or for the CDC/ACIP to recommend a COVID-19 vaccine-distribution plan that they estimated would result in thousands of additional deaths so that a larger fraction of those deaths would be white. So long as wokeness holds such a disproportionate influence over unelected institutions, I don't think it makes a lot of sense to assume it is waning just because it is unpopular with the general public and thus sometimes loses elections.
Elections are a good gauge because, if sufficiently democratic, power is popularity.
If what you mean is ‘disproportionately powerful relative to its popularity’ powerful is not the word that characterizes your view of it. Something can have marginal influence but that influence is still greater than its actual popularity.
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Seems like these instances are just a correction, obviously people care about crime in their neighborhoods. A momentary victory of rationality in a lost war against woke ideology. These victories aren't really that big of a deal and I don't believe change the momentum at all.
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