What is ‘woke’? Ron DeSantis says ‘a lot of people’ have no clue

Ron DeSantis fights the 'woke mind virus.' Image via WESH.

Among the highlights of the Ron DeSantis interview on CNN with Jake Tapper was the Governor admitting the definition of “woke” can be elusive even to those complaining about it.

“Not everyone really knows what ‘wokeness’ is,” he said during a discussion of “woke” and his plans to root the “woke mind virus” out of the military. “I mean, I’ve defined it, but a lot of people who rail against ‘wokeness’ can’t even define it.”

However, even the DeSantis administration’s definition of “woke” has depended on the venue in recent months, and the Governor himself has offered illustrations more than actual definitions.

During the 2022 suspension trial of former State Attorney Andrew Warren, DeSantis staffers struggled to explain what the word meant.

Taryn Fenske, DeSantis’ Communications Director, said “woke” was a “slang term for activism … progressive activism.”

Ryan Newman, DeSantis’ General Counsel, echoed the part about systemic injustices, specifically regarding the criminal justice system.

“To me it means someone who believes that there are systemic injustices in the criminal justice system and on that basis they can decline to fully enforce and uphold the law,” Newman said.

Asked what “woke” means more generally, Newman said “it would be the belief there are systemic injustices in American society and the need to address them.”

The Governor, of course, has used the battle against “woke” as a refrain for a couple of years now, though it’s unclear if he’s defined it so much as assigned synonyms to the term.

During a speech in 2022, he went on the offensive against “wokeness,” a “vicious ideology” and a variant of what he called “cultural Marxism.”

“This wokeness is dangerous and we have to defeat it on all fronts,” DeSantis told the Common Sense Society.

“It is, wokeness, a form of cultural Marxism. The goal is to delegitimize the founding of this country. The principles that the founders relied on. Our institutions … our Constitution. To tear basically at the fabric of our society. To replace it with, effectively, left-wing ideology as the founding ethos of America,” DeSantis said.

This year, he’s likewise painted a lot of enemies with the “woke” brush, but has struggled to define it, such as in his commentary on “environmental social governance,” or the “woke ESG agenda,” which he said “devolved into a mechanism to inject political ideology into investment decisions, corporate governance and really just the everyday economy.”

Asked about the prospect of Twitter relocating to Florida this spring, DeSantis worried about “woke employees” who live in an “intellectual cocoon” defiling the state.

“I know Elon Musk, and what I would tell him is like, ‘OK, if you’re going to move Twitter to Florida, are you bringing ‘woke’ employees to Florida or are you bringing just your people?’ If it’s just his people then it may be good,” DeSantis told The Benny Show.

He’s also suggested that federal agencies he would prefer to cut — including the Departments of Education, Commerce and Energy, as well as the Internal Revenue Service — could be used to “push back against ‘woke’ ideology and against the leftism that we see creeping into all institutions of American life.” He specifically named “transgender sports stuff” as something the Education Department could target.

He has also hammered The Walt Disney Co. for over a year, including recently suggesting that theme park workers opposed the “cadre of ‘woke’ executives” who run the corporation.

But after all this, and pivoting his brand on the fight against “woke,” DeSantis hasn’t articulated a clear, linear definition.

Does it matter?

There is precedent for a subjective phrasing of a concept passing for a straight-ahead definition. In 1964, Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart famously explained away obscenity by saying “I know it when I see it.”

That could be the DeSantis template for “woke” as well.

But as the Governor himself stated to Tapper, a definition of this singularly important word seems to elude many of those who denounce it most intensely. And for all of his talking about the term, the Governor’s framing seems to be a Stewart-esque “I know it when I see it.”