> Very few disagree with DEI programs and LGBT issues.
Americans as a whole are close to evenly divided on DEI programs. A recent YouGov/Economist poll found 45% support abolishing DEI programs in education and government, 40% opposed; a Reuters/Ipsos poll found 44% supported “closing all federal government DEI offices and firing federal employees working on the issue” with 51% opposed. [0] Unfortunately I don’t have detailed crosstabs (which tend not to be very reliable anyway), but I expect they’d show that there is a decent minority of Democrats and Biden/Harris voters who are opposed to DEI programs
“LGBT issues” are a whole bunch of different issues, and attitudes vary depending on which of them we are talking about. A Gallup poll from May last year [1] found 69% of Americans support same-sex marriage, a slight decline from 2022-2023 but still close to an all-time high. Yet, the same survey also had 51% of respondents labelling gender transition as “morally wrong” [2]. And in 2023 the same survey found 69% of Americans opposed transgender athletes being able to compete as the gender they identify with [3]. So it seems like the average American supports some “LGBT issues” but opposes others
> If those are "woke" I suppose Women's suffrage 120 years ago was also "woke".
It all depends on how you define “woke”. The African-American anti-woke Marxist Adolph L Reed Jr defines “woke” [4] as a form of progressivism that rejects the traditional Marxist analysis that class oppression is the root cause of non-class-based oppression. He wouldn’t call women’s suffrage “woke” because most Marxists historically supported women’s suffrage as a means of empowering working class women, and saw it as fundamentally compatible with their class-first analysis of society’s problems; but he does criticise a lot of contemporary “wokeness” as being in fundamental contradiction to that analysis
[0] https://www.forbes.com/sites/bowmanmarsico/2025/02/03/how-po... - I think the difference in results may be partially due to the question asked - I expect some respondents would have said “Yes” to the first question but “No” to the second, because while they support shutting down government DEI programs, they’d prefer to see the government workers involved reassigned to other tasks rather than simply fired. Asking a question “Do you support A and B?” is problematic because you don’t know if people answering “No” oppose both A and B or only one of them
The context here is "democrats", so you'll see a much more skewed result if you filter for those people.
>It all depends on how you define “woke”.
I'd defer to modern discussion to try and define that. It's pretty clear that if they think women hires are DEI, than women's issues has some degree of "woke".
> The context here is "democrats", so you'll see a much more skewed result if you filter for those people.
Again, it depends on the issue. The 2023 Gallup poll I cited [0] found that 48% of Democrats opposed allowing transgender athletes competing under the gender they identify with, with 47% supporting - a notable shift from two years earlier when a clear majority of Democrats (55%) were supportive. By contrast, in 2023, independents were 67% opposed, 28% supportive; Republicans were 93% opposed. A 2024 Pew survey found 75% of Democrats support corporate DEI initiatives, 21% oppose; [1] while 75% is a supermajority, 21% is a substantial minority rather than a minuscule or irrlevant one
> It's pretty clear that if they think women hires are DEI, than women's issues has some degree of "woke".
I don’t think anyone considers the mere fact of hiring a woman to be “woke”. Is Trump “woke” for nominating Pam Bondi to be United States Attorney-General, or Elise Stefanik to be US ambassador to the UN, or putting Amy Coney Barrett on the Supreme Court? Were the Tories “woke” when they elected Margaret Thatcher as their leader in 1975? Is Alternative für Deutschland “woke” because one of their two co-equal leaders is Alice Weidel?
Those sound like expected numbers to me. People in general will be split if they have little opinion, because only the extreme cases will chime in.
>while 75% is a supermajority, 21% is a substantial minority rather than a minuscule or irrlevant one
not for polling. As a reference, Nixon's ratings leaving office was 25%. I wouldn't take that to mean "a quarter of the nation supported Watergate".
60+ is pretty high, 70+ is basically overwhelming support. 90% is almost unheard of and only really happens in maritime efforts or very early pollings.
So 75% supporting DEI initiatives is very high. ~50% being split on sports shows the interest is fairly low and pretty much "whatever". I wouldn't be surprised if the drop was simply because 2022 had some huge incident and then 2023 had none.
I more or less feel the same way about trans athletes; meh. it's a private organization adjusting rules for money at the end of the day and rarely about "sportsmanship". They'll do whatever makes them more money in the end. In the grand scheme of the world this will disappear into nothing as transitioning technology improves to make people biologically identical to their chosen gender.
>I don’t think anyone considers the mere fact of hiring a woman to be “woke”.
They should probably tell that to that pilot that died while Trump blamed it on "DEI".
That was part of my point. "Woke" is just a bad dogwhistle stretched beyond meaning. Pam Bondi can be not woke but Danielle Sassoon may be if that's how they frame it.
> They should probably tell that to that pilot that died while Trump blamed it on "DEI".
I thought Trump’s comments were about the FAA not the female helicopter pilot. Her name and gender weren’t released until several days after the accident, by which point I think Trump had largely stopped talking about it. And part of the background to Trump’s remarks about the FAA is a longstanding legal and political dispute about FAA DEI policies going back to the Obama administration, into which Trump had intervened by signing a presidential memorandum a week before the crash. [0] An outstanding class action lawsuit [1] alleges the FAA replaced a program under which it accredited college courses in air traffic control with a “biographical questionnaire” engineered to discriminate against qualified white applicants. Whatever the rights and wrongs of that underlying situation, I think it was wrong for Trump to “jump to conclusions” by blaming an air crash on it when the investigation into its causes was only just beginning; but my recollection is Trump’s DEI-blaming was about the FAA’s hiring policies not the female helicopter pilot; part of Trump’s claim is that the FAA created for itself an artificial staff shortage by refusing to hire qualified applicants simply because they were white.
> "Woke" is just a bad dogwhistle stretched beyond meaning.
There is no one single definition of “woke”. Some definitions are very vague, others much more precise. I keep on coming back to Adolph L Reed Jr’s definition, which is reasonably precise and concrete, yet also undeniably pejorative. Of course, one can reject his orthodox Marxist premises, but I don’t think the word as he uses it (and as many of his antiwoke Marxist fellow travellers use it) is a mere meaningless dogwhistle
> Pam Bondi can be not woke but Danielle Sassoon may be if that's how they frame it.
I haven’t heard anyone call Danielle Sassoon “woke”. Given she’s a Republican, a Federalist Society member, and she clerked for Scalia, I doubt it is going to happen. Some conservatives admire her courage, others may view her as foolish or disloyal, but I doubt any of them will call her “woke”-unless she goes in a very different direction in the future.
Americans as a whole are close to evenly divided on DEI programs. A recent YouGov/Economist poll found 45% support abolishing DEI programs in education and government, 40% opposed; a Reuters/Ipsos poll found 44% supported “closing all federal government DEI offices and firing federal employees working on the issue” with 51% opposed. [0] Unfortunately I don’t have detailed crosstabs (which tend not to be very reliable anyway), but I expect they’d show that there is a decent minority of Democrats and Biden/Harris voters who are opposed to DEI programs
“LGBT issues” are a whole bunch of different issues, and attitudes vary depending on which of them we are talking about. A Gallup poll from May last year [1] found 69% of Americans support same-sex marriage, a slight decline from 2022-2023 but still close to an all-time high. Yet, the same survey also had 51% of respondents labelling gender transition as “morally wrong” [2]. And in 2023 the same survey found 69% of Americans opposed transgender athletes being able to compete as the gender they identify with [3]. So it seems like the average American supports some “LGBT issues” but opposes others
> If those are "woke" I suppose Women's suffrage 120 years ago was also "woke".
It all depends on how you define “woke”. The African-American anti-woke Marxist Adolph L Reed Jr defines “woke” [4] as a form of progressivism that rejects the traditional Marxist analysis that class oppression is the root cause of non-class-based oppression. He wouldn’t call women’s suffrage “woke” because most Marxists historically supported women’s suffrage as a means of empowering working class women, and saw it as fundamentally compatible with their class-first analysis of society’s problems; but he does criticise a lot of contemporary “wokeness” as being in fundamental contradiction to that analysis
[0] https://www.forbes.com/sites/bowmanmarsico/2025/02/03/how-po... - I think the difference in results may be partially due to the question asked - I expect some respondents would have said “Yes” to the first question but “No” to the second, because while they support shutting down government DEI programs, they’d prefer to see the government workers involved reassigned to other tasks rather than simply fired. Asking a question “Do you support A and B?” is problematic because you don’t know if people answering “No” oppose both A and B or only one of them
[1] https://news.gallup.com/poll/646202/sex-relations-marriage-s...
[2] https://news.gallup.com/poll/645704/slim-majority-adults-say...
[3] https://news.gallup.com/poll/507023/say-birth-gender-dictate... - I can’t find 2024 figures but I assume they haven’t substantially changed
[4] https://newrepublic.com/article/160305/beyond-great-awokenin...