Did you wake up to “wake up”? It seems pundits and politicians can’t stop talking about it.

Arkansas Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders’ Republican response to President Joe Biden’s address to the U.S. Congress warned of an “awakened crowd.” Former South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley, announcing her 2024 Republican presidential candidacy, promised that the country would not be “weak and awake.” And Rep. Jim Banks of Indiana organized an “anti-revival caucus” in the House of Representatives.

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis has made protesting “awakening” a rallying cry for his 2022 re-election campaign in Florida, often saying, “Here the awake dies.” DeSantis even signed a “wake-up law” – the Stop Wrong With Our Children and Employees Act (Stop WOKE), which bans classroom teaching in Florida that causes students “guilt, distress, or any form of psychological stress” from -for their race, color, sex or national origin. A federal judge blocked it in November.

Biden, who has faced heavy criticism from conservatives for denouncing “MAGA Republicans,” can’t avoid the “Wake One” even if he’s not in the room. At a White House press conference on Feb. 14, James Rosen, a reporter for the far-right broadcaster Newsmax, asked press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre if “the president is awake.” Jean-Pierre declined to answer.

What is “awake”? Definitions seem to vary by speaker, making it hard to know what people really think about it, Poll experts say.

Margaret Brennan of CBS and Chuck Todd of NBC asked guests to define the word “woke up” on their February 12 TV shows. Definition seekers also wanted answers; On February 16, they moved “woke” to the top spot on Merriam-Webster’s Top Searches list. (The dictionary website, mw.com, defines “awake” as “aware and actively attentive to important social facts and issues (especially issues of racial and social justice).”)

Many sources trace “awake” to black jargon. In 1923, Jamaican political activist Marcus Garvey wrote in 1923 “Wake up Ethiopia! Wake up Africa!” to call the black diaspora to social activism.

Blues singer Huddy Ledbetter, also known as Lead Belly, used the term in his 1938 song “Scottsboro Boys” as a warning to black people to beware of racism.

Perhaps prophetically, William Melvin Kelly singled out “awake” in 1962 in a New York Times essay about white people appropriating black slang terms and distorting their meanings.

“Woke up” seems to have lost its place as a signal for the black community. In February, University of California, Berkeley law professor Chiara M. Bridges, black, wrote: “Slang among blacks is the language of love… There is something really sinister about the fact that this term is not only taken from us, but expanded. against us. It’s a double offense.”

And “woke up” moved beyond racial social justice to also apply to LGBTQ rights and feminist causes.

The British lexicographer and linguist Tony Thorne said that he interprets “awake” as “alert and aware of issues of social justice”. Since the 2000s, he told PolitiFact, it has meant something like “an activist or militant for equality, diversity, social justice.”

Thorne said at one time liberals may have referred to themselves as “awake” to reiterate their commitment to social justice during the Black Lives Matter and Me Too movements. However, according to him, conservatives have turned the word “woken up” into a universal condemnation of their opponents, often meaning something along the lines of “complacent leftists.” In this sense, according to Thorne, “woke up” combines the words “politically correct,” “abolish culture,” and “the metropolitan liberal elite,” as terms that conservatives use against their opponents.

“If you use such a term, it acts like a trigger word or ‘dog whistle’ because once you say it, you don’t have to say anything else,” Thorne said. “The word will be accepted by your base, rejected by your opponents, and there will be no further discussion.”

Here’s what PolitiFact found out after months of observing “woke up” in the wild.

One “woke up”, many definitions

Political definitions of the word “wake up” are everywhere.

In December 2022, DeSantis was asked by Mother Jones magazine to define being awakened through a representative. Answer: “Slang term for activism…progressive activism” and a general belief in systemic injustice in the country.” In November, when asked under oath what “woke up” means during a trial, Ryan Newman, DeSantis’ general counsel, said, “In general, the belief that systemic injustice exists in American society and that it needs to be addressed.” And in his recent book The Courage to Be Free, DeSantis himself added a third definition: “What constitutes ‘awakening’ is open to debate, but for the left, the fundamental attribute of awakening is the subjugation of facts and evidence.” to anecdote and ideology”.

Banks of Indiana, who recently announced his run for the Senate, gave a vague definition of “woke up.” In January, he called for a recorded vote in the House of Representatives on an “amendment to ban ‘wake’ funding” of any bill that spends money on “left-wing activities.” So far there has been no introduction or vote on such an amendment.

Senator Tommy Tuberville, Republican of Alabama, didn’t make it clearer that he woke up on March 2 during the Conservative Political Action Conference. Although his discussion was titled “Firing Walker,” he mentioned the term only once in descriptions of liberal stances on transgender athletes, the school curriculum, and the separation of church and state. “All this has woken up,” he said.

John Fiheri, a Republican strategist who served as press secretary for former House Speaker Dennis Hastert, told PolitiFact that the “revival” started from the left, and the GOP rightly rebukes him.

“People have woken up who have realized that America is a systematically racist place and also realized that capitalism is inherently unjust and unfair,” he said. “Republicans who condemn the revival believe otherwise. They believe that America is inherently a beautiful place and socialism is inherently evil. This is the front line. It’s a good fight.”

Florida Governor Ron DeSantis speaks March 5, 2023 at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library in Simi Valley, California. When he ran for re-election for governor of Florida in 2022, DeSantis often said that his state was a place where he “woke up and died.” (AP)

Polls ask about ‘woken up’, but experts cast doubt

Polls show that “woke up” was hot before the November midterms and is still hot.

• “Woke up” and crime: A majority of 2010 voters, at 64%, answered “yes” when Harvard’s CAPS Harris poll asked, “Do you think the increase in crime is due to awakened politicians or other factors?” (by party it was 52% Democrats and 75%). % of Republicans.) The poll also asked how important it is to “stop teaching wakefulness in schools” and found that 48% said it was very important, while 29% said it was somewhat important. An October 2022 poll did not provide a definition of “woke up”.

• “Woke up” and business: 56% of voters in Morning Consult’s national poll of 2006 registered voters answered “no, definitely not” when asked if they thought politicians should penalize companies “that oppose discrimination.” When asked whether politicians should penalize companies “for withholding financial support from members of Congress who voted against confirmation of the 2020 presidential election results,” 46% of intermediate voters surveyed answered “no, definitely not.”

  The poll, backed by the left-leaning tech industry-focused Chamber of Progress, was conducted in November 2022 and did not specifically mention the word “wake up.”

• “Woke up” and education: Fifteen percent of voters said one of their top three goals was to “make sure schools don’t teach an ‘awakened’ political agenda” in a national Hart Research poll commissioned by the leftist American Federation of Teachers. Twenty-seven percent of 1,502 registered voters polled in December 2022 said they agreed with the statement: “Teachers in our public schools often go too far in promoting an ‘awakened’ political agenda in the classroom.” In contrast, 65% agreed with the statement, “Teachers in our public schools generally stick to teaching appropriate academic content and skills.” The survey methodology showed a roughly equal split among participants from Democrats and Republicans.

Polling experts who did not participate in the surveys we cited noted numerous problems with pollsters’ attempts to ask questions about “awakening.”

• “Woke up” is ill-defined. Margie Homero, a Democratic pollster and head of Washington, D.C.-based research firm GBAO, said the word “woke up” raises an important polling puzzle: if there’s no common understanding of what the word means, can you still check his?

“Despite attempts by Republicans to make the word a battle slogan, voters in the poll (American Federation of Teachers – Hart Research) clearly say (“wake up”) are not eminently concerned—either out of ignorance of the word or out of disagreement. that its use now represents,” Homero said.

• Questions suggest false connections. Justin Gross, a professor of political science at Amherst at the University of Massachusetts, said, for example, that the Harvard Institute’s CAPS Harris poll suggests a plausible causal relationship between “awakened politicians” and crime, which pushes respondents more towards “yes”, higher crime rates and “waking” are related.

• Questions lead the witness. Tatishe Nteta, vice chancellor of political science at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, and a colleague of Gross, said the inclusion of “woken up” primes by survey respondents is for them to apply their own views on the term and the groups associated with it (progressives and people of color). ), and not to objectively evaluate “awakened” politicians or candidates.

• Questions make false assumptions. Gross said that the Harvard CAPS Harris Poll’s question on whether “stopping the teaching of waking ideologies in schools” is an important issue suggests that “wake ideologies” are being taught in schools.

“Even if I don’t know what that means, it certainly doesn’t sound like something I should be happy about,” Gross said. “Try asking this question and see what happens: “How concerned are you about euthanizing puppies and kittens for autopsy in high school biology class?”

Janine A. Parry, a professor of political science at the University of Arkansas who is leading the 24-year Arkansas poll, said she found provocative “culture war” constructs like “woke up” to be both compelling and silly. When concepts like “woke up” become popular, she says, it’s natural for pollsters, politicians, news organizations and others to want to appreciate their broad level of support.

“(But) the reason they are trending is because—despite being conceptually bland—loud sections of the electorate have taken a hyperbolic stance on them,” Parry said. “So when we poll them, we’re really just measuring support for a progressive and conservative worldview, not support for any particular policy.”

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