Project 2025 — “The Great Awokening”

Ritchie Calvin
5 min readJul 30, 2024

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2025 by Ritch Calvin

Contemporary elites have even repurposed the worst ingredients of 1970s ‘radical chic’ to build the totalitarian cult known today as ‘The Great Awokening.’”
(Kevin Roberts)

At three places in The Conservative Promise, the authors reference “the Great Awokening” (pages 1, 8, 16). I’ll have to admit that that expression is a new one to me. I thought that, perhaps, it was a neologism by Kevin Roberts. But not so. I have come to learn that the term has a history.

First, a refresher on “radical chic.” The term emerged from an essay by Tom Wolfe (author of Bonfire of the Vanities, and A Man in Full). In the essay, which appeared in New York magazine in June 1970, Wolfe describes a group of well-to-do people who took up a particular cause or issue. They did so because the cause was current or fashionable. They were not committed to the cause in any real way, and they did so largely as a way to signal something about themselves. Unlike committed activists or revolutionaries, the radical chic engaged solely to bolster their own social status.

The prime example in Wolfe’s essay is that of Leonard Bernstein. In fact, a party at Bernstein’s NYC apartment prompted the essay and the term. At the party, Bernstein hosted members of the Black Panther Party in their home. Other “fringe” characters attend, as well. They dine on expensive food. They name drop. They make political pronouncements. They trot out their “exotic” and “fringe” guests. They listen as the Black Panthers speak. But it is at least partly performative. They may actually care about the treatment of the Black Panthers and Blacks in America. At the same time, they are not really invested in revolution. After all, they would like to maintain their elite lifestyle. They are concerned about appearing cool. They are interested in how the event, how rubbing elbows with Black Panthers, will elevate their own status.

Roberts, then, is suggesting that those people today (2024) who engage in trans activism, or pro-Palestine protests, or gender fluidity are mere social climbers.

The term “the Great Awokening” is of a somewhat newer vintage. Throughout the Trump administration, he and others employed the term “woke” to call out Democrats, progressives, and activists. In may ways, “woke” as just a re-branding of the term “political correctness,” which had begun to lose any political or cultural suasion. And so, a new term emerged. Calling someone “woke,” or calling a political or social movement “woke” was simply a way to dismiss it is trendy and trivial. Is was a way of suggesting that the proponent were mere sheeple, going along with the trend.

Nevertheless, we know that “woke” emerged within the Black community. Martin Luther King spoke of being “woke.” For MLK and others, to be “woke” meant to be aware, to be tuned into, to be awake and to participate in the revolution going on around. Trump and those on the right took the idea, and turned it into an insult, a put-down.

Like PC, “woke” began to lose some of its political suasion. Content creators and TV personalities began to push back on to weaponization of “woke.” They would ask people to define “woke.” They would either stammer and stutter, or they would say explicitly that to be woke was to be anti-racist, or anti-homophobic, or anti-misogynist. When expressed in that way, it began to lose power as an insult.

Even so, the word “woke” appears in The Conservative Promise 35 times.

The term “Great Awokening” is, of course, quite similar to the more familiar “Great Awakening.” In the history of Christianity within the US, scholars/theologians have identified four historical moments in the 18th, 19th, and 20th centuries in which we saw a re-awakening interest in religion and Christianity. These Great Awakenings were lead by evangelical leaders, and in these Awakenings new denominations were formed.

QAnon proponents also have used the term “Awakening” to describe the growing awareness of their political theories and movement.

However, in 2018, Andrew Sullivan (one-time editor of The New Republic, and author of Virtually Normal, and The Conservative Soul) coined the term “Great Awokening.” In an essay on the emergence of “woke,” Sullivan wrote:

of the “cult of social justice on the left, a religion whose followers show the same zeal as any born-again Evangelical [Christian].” He added that proponents of “woke” would “punish heresy by banishing sinners from society or coercing them to public demonstrations of shame.”

Sullivan is warning businesses from jumping onto the “woke” bandwagon. He might caution, say, Anheuser-Busch from supporting trans rights by putting a trans activist on its beer can.

But a distinction needs to be made here.

The LGBTQ+ community has always been wary of celebrity and corporate support. Many decry the “rainbow washing” of Pride parades, where company after company takes tables and flies banners and offers monetary support. Pride organizers and parade goers often see those corporations like Leonard Bernstein hosting the Black Panthers. They may have some concern for LGBTQ rights. But they are not really invested in a revolution, and they are not really interested in upsetting the status quo — unless it can affect their bottom line. Like Bernstein (as Wolfe argues), they are more interested in the cultural cache than in change.

Just as MLK was not paying lip service to being awake to the political and cultural changes happening, the contemporary on-the-ground activists are not seeking cultural cache. They are not seeking monetary gain. They are not seeking notoriety.

They seek change. Real change.

The gender fluid young people who want to be seen for who they are are not on a bandwagon.

The trans kids who want to live an authentic life are not seeking adulation.

The environmental activists like Greta Thunberg are not doing their work for show.

The anti-gun violence youth who have grown up with lock-down drills and dead classmates are not doing it for appearances.

As Bob Dylan wrote and sang in 1963:

Your sons and your daughters
Are beyond your command
Your old road is rapidly agin’
Please get out of the new one-time
If you can’t lend your hand
For the times they are a’changin’.

So, are the “contemporary elites” (as Roberts writes) in it for show? Are they advocating change because they are “lend[ing] their hand”? Some, yes; some, no. But the youth and the activists are most certainly not in it for show.

Being “woke” is not a bad thing. It’s not the insult that conservatives think it is. And a large scale Awokening, akin to the religious Awakenings of the past, is not a bad thing.

The times they are a-changin’. Get out of the way if you cannot lend your hand….

Ritch Calvin is an Associate Professor of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at SUNY Stony Brook. He is the author of Queering SF: Readings (Aqueduct Press), Feminist Epistemology and Feminist Science Fiction (Palgrave McMillan) and edited a collection of essays on Gilmore Girls (McFarland). His most recent book (2024) is Queering SF Comics: Readings (Aqueduct Press).

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