The Left’s transition from Woke 1.0 to Woke 2.0 isn’t going well.
They’ve gone from amplifying extreme policies such as defunding the police and promoting transgender ideology to supporting the acts of Palestinian terrorists and importing Third-Worldism to America. And their top influencers are increasingly getting caught saying things that are on the wrong side of the 80-20 divide.
Take the recent antics of the streamer Hasan Piker, the Left’s chief online spokesman. Piker is mocking Charlie Kirk, the Christian conservative who was killed by a transgender shooter nearly a year ago, on his live podcast tour. Top Democrats such as House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries and Democratic National Committee Chairman Ken Martin recently condemned him for comments about American Jews. Piker’s continued popularity on the Left makes Democrats increasingly vulnerable in November and beyond.
Then there is Michigan U.S. Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed, who beat out the establishment Democrat, Haley Stevens. During a combative Fox News interview with Jesse Watters, El-Sayed equated circumcision with transgender surgeries. This came in the wake of news that he had deleted 100 videos from his YouTube account because they supposedly no longer reflect his current views.
In the run-up to the 2016 election, Michelle Obama said with a straight face that “When they go low, we go high,” decrying Donald Trump and the supposed Machiavellianism of the Republican Party. While a false characterization then—the GOP actually has something to learn from Old Nick, as do Protestants—it’s clearly an even more inapt description of the Left now. They keep going lower and lower and lower.
A new study from the University of Cambridge Political Psychology Lab shows this to be the case. Over the past four decades, the Left has become far more radical than the Right. Senior researcher Dr. Lee de-Wit and his team found that the Left “was 31.5% more socially liberal in 2024 compared to 1988, while the US right was only 2.8% more conservative.” The Right has “remained fairly stable in their positions for the last 35 years, and may feel left behind as half the country has shifted towards an ever more progressive outlook on many issues.”
Consider the findings of another major study commissioned by the Department of Health and Human Services and conducted by researchers from Rutgers University, the Manhattan Institute, and Network Contagion Institute. It concludes that “gender ideology is associated with [left-wing authoritarianism] and [a] willingness to justify political violence.”
With the rise of a new wave of Democratic Socialists of America candidates, the Democrats have recently made another great leap forward in radicalization. Gone are the Blue Dogs and the anti-abortion Democrats (the last remaining Democratic congressman who fits that description is Texas’s Henry Cuellar). Replacing the old guard is a group of candidates who don’t seem to like our country very much and seek to overturn America’s basic traditions and history.
New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s efforts to build taxpayer-funded grocery stores, kind words for murderers and terrorists, and obvious attempts to dox and bully wealthy New Yorkers are evidence that their vulnerabilities are stacking up by the day, even if they may win some elections. Despite some talented communicators in their midst, the record of the DSA rookies so far is unsurprisingly not very good.
All of this presents Republicans with an immense opportunity to stem their losses in the midterms and get into shape for the post-Trump era. One immediate pitfall they must avoid is an undue focus on esoteric discussions of the ideological roots of communism and socialism, as tempting as that might be.
The Trump Administration is already doing good work on this front, so there is no need to replicate it.
A July report from the State Department, “Cuba: The Capital of 21st Century Communism,” dives deeply into how Cuba has waged a constant series of sophisticated intelligence operations against the United States since Castro’s coup in 1959. Over the course of nearly 70 years, the report notes that “Cubans perfected a new model for a long war of attrition, organized around espionage, infiltration, sabotage, proxy networks, and a revolutionary infrastructure designed to turn America against itself.”
These reports buttress the administration’s sustained efforts to break up far-left networks abroad that pose a threat to the United States. Part of this effort includes Secretary of State Marco Rubio hosting a Ministerial on the Resurgence of Political Terrorism, featuring representatives from over 60 countries and focused on combating the Left across the globe.
On Wednesday, Rubio announced that the U.S. levied sanctions on several leftist networks, including Autistici/Inventati. According to Rubio, that group is “a major far-left tech collective whose services are used by the most active and violent Antifa cells in the United States and across the world.”
The Trump Administration’s actions show that now is not the time for the Right to get sidetracked into historical disputes about the character of Cuban Marxism. Doing so would be a bona fide failure because it confuses electoral politics with the academic lecture hall, a perpetual lure for the Right.
This was one of the key failures of the Tea Party era. The Right devoted far too much time to sometimes labyrinthine discussions of the roots of contemporary leftism in Woodrow Wilson and the early Progressives. This academic focus, however, didn’t translate to electoral success against Barack Obama, a uniquely vulnerable president in 2012. Unemployment remained high, and wages were stagnant, among a host of other suboptimal economic indicators. But Obama still handily beat Mitt Romney in the Electoral College while also winning the popular vote.
While the Right was too busy debating the finer points of Barack Obama’s socialism and holding rallies that never captured the media’s attention as Occupy Wall Street did, the Democrats won back the Senate and gained seats in the House.
Correctly understanding the ideological foundations of Woke 2.0 is important on a theoretical level—but this task should now be left to a handful of academics and political theorists inside and outside the administration. The Right’s efforts need to be focused instead on how the Left’s slate of policies will only make life worse for Americans.
The rise of the DSA in the Democratic Party should be viewed less as the harbinger of an ominous new threat than as evidence of a party in such disarray that people with major electoral liabilities are taking advantage of a weakening party apparatus.
The opportunity is there—the GOP needs to refocus and take advantage of it. And under Woke 2.0, they will have many chances to do just that.
