Anti-woke activists are winning the culture war in America.

"Two years ago it seemed that a conservative movement against "wokeness" was taking over America's schools. Seen by many on the right as an insidious liberal outlook emphasising race, gender and sexuality, wokeness has many guises: among them critical race theory (CRT), gender theory and queer theory. According to its opponents, it all amounts to the same thing, it is thriving in schools and it has to go.

Activists set out to uproot it, and quickly made their mark. Moms for Liberty, a conservative group founded in 2021 that opposes CRT and other supposedly progressive policies in schools, says that in 2022 over half its candidates won their school-board elections. Other anti-woke groups claimed success, too. But is their momentum waning? Tiffany Justice, co-founder of Moms for Liberty, says that its candidates won 43% of its elections this year. News outlets reported that the movement was losing steam.

The reality is not so simple. An analysis by the Wall Street Journal of the November 2023 school-board elections found that the group exaggerated its success, winning about one-third of its elections. The Moms also seem to have been weakening before last month's elections. A separate analysis by The Economist shows that less than one-third of the group's endorsed candidates won their elections in spring 2023.

To Randi Weingarten, head of the American Federation of Teachers, the country's second-largest teachers union, the recent elections show that families are siding with educators. "I know people look at this as R[epublican] versus D[emocrat], but I think this is deeper than that," she says. "People who believe in children and the humanity of everyone…won out over those who are trying to divide and demonise."

Ms Justice disagrees. "They're liars," she insisted, referring to those who say the anti-woke cause is struggling. "The unions have run the ground game on these elections for 50 years…and they've been completely uncontested normally, so they're freaking out."

Although her movement's election success is debatable, its impact is not. Teachers have lost their jobs for being too woke. A teacher in Florida was recently dismissed for using "Mx", a gender-neutral version of Ms or Mr. Another, in Georgia, was fired for reading a book about a gender non-binary child called "My Shadow is Purple" to her pupils. A librarian in Colorado lost her job (and won a $250,000 lawsuit) for promoting anti-racism and LGBT workshops for teenagers.

Two Advanced Placement courses (which give high-schoolers college credits) in African-American studies and psychology by the College Board, the maker of the SAT, have been banned from high schools in Florida. (Arkansas dropped the African-American-studies programme, too.) Florida also changed its history standards to require pupils to be taught about the supposed benefits of slavery, such as teaching skills to African-Americans, to ensure a balanced view of human bondage.

Broader education policy is yielding to similar pressure. According to Education Week, 44 states have introduced bills or taken other steps to restrict CRT since January 2021; 18 have imposed bans or limits. Conservative activists may have lost most of their school-board battles, but in many ways they are winning the war.” [1]

The wokeness, which divides people into groups and turns them against each other, will also end in Europe. The first shock has already passed.

·  ·  · 1. "Anti-woke activists are winning the culture war in America." The Economist, 9 Dec. 2023, p. NA.