Whenever we get a new clip of some Democratic official, journalist, social media poster, cartoon character, guy from another country, Republican, etcetera saying something woke, an avalanche of pundits make the same point: this is why Democrats can’t win. So when Kamala Harris gave us her pronouns and described what she’s wearing at a meeting on disabilities, it was only a matter of time until guys like Kinzinger above made the same point.

And whenever I see this, I always think the same thing. Does anyone really believe that if Democrats were providing Medicare for All, universal childcare, UBI, free college, and so on — that voters would throw all that out the window because Kamala Harris talked about her blue suit? If you could have real economic security, would you actually trade that away because a politician said “birth giver” instead of “mother”?

Socialists have long insisted that workers are not going to accept egalitarian rhetoric and gestures as a substitute for real economic gains, and that Democrats are going to lose working class voters if they proceed otherwise. The right loves this point; they’ve been so aggressive about co-opting it in recent years that I doubt many of them even remember where they first heard it.

But there’s a second half of this critique that you almost never hear: if you give voters real material security, people who get annoyed about wokeness will still support you.

This is probably the most threatening point you can make in contemporary politics. Liberals hate it because it embarrasses the economic agenda of Democrats and suggests that reactionaries can in fact be persuaded not to vote like reactionaries. The right hates it because it shows just how superficial support for their agenda, and for the GOP, really it. Pundits hate it because it reminds everyone that their obsession with culture war — something that even the laziest, most ignorant poster can write about ad nauseum — misses the central issue of contemporary US politics under capitalism.

And yet this point isn’t just true; it’s obviously true. There just isn’t significant evidence that wokeness drives voter behavior, and there’s strong evidence against it. The biggest is basically every issue poll in history, which almost always look something like what Monmouth released just this week:

Lump “abortion” and “guns” together as “woke issues” and wokeness still can’t hit double digits among the top ten voter concerns. It is absolutely bonkers to look at a poll like this and conclude that candidates can’t win elections without antiwoke positioning. They can, and of course they do, all the time.

The exercise in introspection I touched on earlier is, in my view, even more compelling. There are plenty of things that most people describe as “woke” that I find ridiculous and even obnoxious; for instance, I have been told that calling a woman “dude” is a form of misgendering even though it became a gender neutral term long ago. (People would look at you like a crazy person if you used the word “dudette” in 2022.) But if we get a candidate in 2024 who credibly promises to pass Medicare for All and to outlaw referrring to women as dudes, I am going to be slightly annoyed but I am obviously still going to vote for them. What kind of weirdo wouldn’t?