Fighting liberal ‘wokeism’ can unite fractured GOP

Much has been made about the bitter differences among Republicans from the 2022 midterms to the Speaker battle and how 2024 also is likely going to lead to a knock-down, drag-out brawl. 

That may be right, and ideological diversity, by the way, isn’t a bad thing. But recently, something funny happened on the way to a supposed GOP civil war that hasn’t gotten a lot of notice. Donald Trump, the now anti-Trump Club for Growth, and the establishment NRSC, set aside their differences and all endorsed the same candidate for what was expected to be a hotly-contested open Indiana Senate seat. The various party factions endorsed Jim Banks, a Hoosier now in his fourth term, who recently chaired the Republican Study Committee, the largest caucus of House conservatives. There he argued in a high-profile memo that Republicans should focus on growing the working class constituency. President Trump had delivered them by building on the politics and policies that had so appealed to those Americans. 

A pivotal part of his argument was that wokeism threatened the values and interests of everyday Americans of every kind and that it was imperative for Republicans to fight wokeism in their defense. Congressman Banks has distinguished himself as an anti-woke warrior. Days before declaring his run for the Senate, he announced he would be founding the anti-woke caucus.  

Banks said that wokeism posed the greatest domestic threat to America today, and that his caucus would expose its march across every federal agency and seek to defund it. No bill that spends taxpayer dollars on leftist activities should pass out of committee without a recorded vote on an amendment to defund wokeness, he said. 

With Banks essentially making fighting wokeism central to his candidacy, something others haven’t done, but that garnered support across the GOP spectrum, this raises a question. Could anti-wokeism be the glue that holds the party together? For the good of America, it should be. 

Wokeism is a Marxian tool of power and control achieved through dividing us by identity to pit us against each other and conquering. The one identity that wokeism won’t abide is the uniting transcendent one, American, which the woke treat is irredeemable and evil. Wokeism, which has taken over every institution, threatens our peace and prosperity by breaking our common bonds and eviscerating liberty and justice in the name of false virtue and righteousness. As Banks writes, “Under wokeism, all the so-called oppressor groups must be punished for their past and present alleged sins.” 

There are many steps to punishing them: inducing self-hatred through indoctrination, stripping away their rights by not enforcing the laws on their behalf, public humiliation, hatred, expropriation, and ultimately violence. 

On the other hand, the oppressed, retain, quote, “privileged status, exemption from certain laws and norms and the public recognition that their views are unimpeachable. They cannot be contradicted by reason. They cannot be doubted.”

So Americans are held to different standards based on characteristics they have no control over, having nothing to do with their character or capabilities. What can be more unjust and un-American than that kind of unequal treatment? Americans see wokeism every day and know in their hearts it’s an assault on our way of life and portends a grim future for our kids. We see it in every DEI initiative at the office, every Maoist  struggle session in our kids’ classrooms and every drag queen Story Hour at the local library. 

We see it in surging violent crime, overrun borders and the targeting of engaged parents and faithful Catholics alike as terrorists. We see it in our military’s embrace of racist anti-racism and our Transportation Secretaries chiding of white workers while our infrastructure crumbles. And then a Supreme Court nominee’s unwillingness to define women. 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. Bank 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.