The Not-Quite-Anti-Woke Caucus

The LedeDemocratic members of Congress are fed up with their party’s discourse on identity, but they can’t get on board with Donald Trump’s campaign to destroy D.E.I.Illustration by Anson ChanAdam Smith is a standard boomer Democrat—born in 1965, technically a year after the generational cutoff, but he still uses an AOL account, which pushes him over the line. He likes to read books about the high stakes of democracy: he recently finished one about America’s divisions after the Civil War and another about how China is taking over the Western world. His parents were working class, which is central to his self-mythos; he came into his own during the Clinton years, and has never quite let go of the now unfashionable idea that politicians should talk up hard work and personal responsibility. To be sure, he opposes Donald Trump’s agenda, but recently he’s been feeling alone in his own party—so much focus on identity, the evils of capitalism, and concepts like “settler colonialism” instead of on more immediate problems in people’s everyday lives. The main difference between Smith and the rest of his kind is that he’s been in Congress, representing Washington State, for nearly three decades. And he’s been on a long mission to convince other members of his party that they need to change. “This is a project—like, four years,” Smith told me recently, in his D.C. office. “The new left is a very concerted and well-organized effort around a series of policies that have utterly and completely failed. Trying to fix it and get people to pay attention to it has been difficult.”According to Smith, the Democrats’ main problem is that they can’t govern. In large progressive cities such as Seattle, part of which lies in Smith’s district, “we’ve got a real problem with crime, homelessness, drug abuse, and affordable housing,” he said. Smith said that he’s tried meeting with various local agencies about these problems but has encountered bureaucratic incompetence and ideological retrenchment. The region’s homelessness authority, based in Seattle, for instance, has at times failed to pay its contractors promptly, which has threatened to put some nonprofit providers out of business. Or another example: Smith pointed me toward the Web site of a King County-funded program that offers alternatives to incarceration for young people who are accused of crimes. “This work is about removing power from the County and returning it to communities—it is a move towards getting rid of the criminal system,” the site says. “This work is about undoing the culture of white supremacy, colonialism, cis-hetero-patriarchy, and all other forms of oppression.” Smith was skeptical: “You will note in all of this the complete rejection of personal responsibility, accountability, or consequences for the person committing criminal acts.” King County, meanwhile, has brought in someone from a firm called Bonfire Consulting, “which I thought was kind of funny—it’s like she’s just looking right at you and saying, ‘Give me your money. Yeah, I’m gonna literally set it on fire,’ ” Smith said. “Also, she was a self-identified witch.” As Smith remembers it, “she described, in one of her meetings, the ‘false urgency of now’ ” as a critique of an unhealthy, deadline-driven workplace culture. The exchange stuck with Smith because of the phrase’s obvious echo: “the fierce urgency of now” used by Martin Luther King, Jr., in his “I Have a Dream” speech, to describe the importance of ending segregation and addressing racial injustice. (The name “King County,” Smith noted, honors M.L.K.) The consultant told me that the echo was unintentional.Smith sees ideology as the driver of Democrats’ governing failures. As he wrote to me recently, from his AOL account, “Too many people in power in these places seem to spend too much time pushing an extreme left ideology by policing language on things like pronouns, what given ethnic groups should be called and in general reeducating everyone about the evils of capitalism and all the systemic failures of America over the course of 400 years.” In his quest to figure out what happened to his party, Smith recently picked up a copy of “America’s Cultural Revolution,” a book by the conservative activist Christopher Rufo. In the book, Rufo argues that left-wing intellectuals successfully co-opted America’s cultural institutions and spread radical ideas about racial oppression and hierarchy. After he read it, Smith thought, “I’m a member of Congress. This guy might talk to me. I’ll find him.” In late 2023, Rufo and Smith had a Zoom call. Smith was persuaded by at least part of Rufo’s thesis. “A lot of young people are being educated in the far-left way of looking at the world,” Smith told me. Efforts to foster diversity, equity, and inclusion, or D.E.I., which Rufo has launched a public campaign to abolish, go “off the beam, to my mind, when they imply that racism, bigotry, and settler colonialism is the unique purview of white people,” Smith sai

Feb 5, 2025 - 02:25
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The Not-Quite-Anti-Woke Caucus
Democratic members of Congress are fed up with their party’s discourse on identity, but they can’t get on board with Donald Trump’s campaign to destroy D.E.I.
DEI Trump people
Illustration by Anson Chan

Adam Smith is a standard boomer Democrat—born in 1965, technically a year after the generational cutoff, but he still uses an AOL account, which pushes him over the line. He likes to read books about the high stakes of democracy: he recently finished one about America’s divisions after the Civil War and another about how China is taking over the Western world. His parents were working class, which is central to his self-mythos; he came into his own during the Clinton years, and has never quite let go of the now unfashionable idea that politicians should talk up hard work and personal responsibility. To be sure, he opposes Donald Trump’s agenda, but recently he’s been feeling alone in his own party—so much focus on identity, the evils of capitalism, and concepts like “settler colonialism” instead of on more immediate problems in people’s everyday lives. The main difference between Smith and the rest of his kind is that he’s been in Congress, representing Washington State, for nearly three decades. And he’s been on a long mission to convince other members of his party that they need to change. “This is a project—like, four years,” Smith told me recently, in his D.C. office. “The new left is a very concerted and well-organized effort around a series of policies that have utterly and completely failed. Trying to fix it and get people to pay attention to it has been difficult.”

According to Smith, the Democrats’ main problem is that they can’t govern. In large progressive cities such as Seattle, part of which lies in Smith’s district, “we’ve got a real problem with crime, homelessness, drug abuse, and affordable housing,” he said. Smith said that he’s tried meeting with various local agencies about these problems but has encountered bureaucratic incompetence and ideological retrenchment. The region’s homelessness authority, based in Seattle, for instance, has at times failed to pay its contractors promptly, which has threatened to put some nonprofit providers out of business. Or another example: Smith pointed me toward the Web site of a King County-funded program that offers alternatives to incarceration for young people who are accused of crimes. “This work is about removing power from the County and returning it to communities—it is a move towards getting rid of the criminal system,” the site says. “This work is about undoing the culture of white supremacy, colonialism, cis-hetero-patriarchy, and all other forms of oppression.” Smith was skeptical: “You will note in all of this the complete rejection of personal responsibility, accountability, or consequences for the person committing criminal acts.” King County, meanwhile, has brought in someone from a firm called Bonfire Consulting, “which I thought was kind of funny—it’s like she’s just looking right at you and saying, ‘Give me your money. Yeah, I’m gonna literally set it on fire,’ ” Smith said. “Also, she was a self-identified witch.” As Smith remembers it, “she described, in one of her meetings, the ‘false urgency of now’ ” as a critique of an unhealthy, deadline-driven workplace culture. The exchange stuck with Smith because of the phrase’s obvious echo: “the fierce urgency of now” used by Martin Luther King, Jr., in his “I Have a Dream” speech, to describe the importance of ending segregation and addressing racial injustice. (The name “King County,” Smith noted, honors M.L.K.) The consultant told me that the echo was unintentional.

Smith sees ideology as the driver of Democrats’ governing failures. As he wrote to me recently, from his AOL account, “Too many people in power in these places seem to spend too much time pushing an extreme left ideology by policing language on things like pronouns, what given ethnic groups should be called and in general reeducating everyone about the evils of capitalism and all the systemic failures of America over the course of 400 years.” In his quest to figure out what happened to his party, Smith recently picked up a copy of “America’s Cultural Revolution,” a book by the conservative activist Christopher Rufo. In the book, Rufo argues that left-wing intellectuals successfully co-opted America’s cultural institutions and spread radical ideas about racial oppression and hierarchy. After he read it, Smith thought, “I’m a member of Congress. This guy might talk to me. I’ll find him.” In late 2023, Rufo and Smith had a Zoom call. Smith was persuaded by at least part of Rufo’s thesis. “A lot of young people are being educated in the far-left way of looking at the world,” Smith told me. Efforts to foster diversity, equity, and inclusion, or D.E.I., which Rufo has launched a public campaign to abolish, go “off the beam, to my mind, when they imply that racism, bigotry, and settler colonialism is the unique purview of white people,” Smith said. “You don’t need to imply that all white people are racists, and that all white people are oppressors.” (Rufo texted me, “Over the years I’ve worked with many moderate Democrats behind the scenes and I’m glad to see that they now feel comfortable coming forward publicly.”)

Still, Smith is quick to differentiate himself from Rufo. “Here’s the problem,” he said. “Racism is a thing. Misogyny is a thing. Lack of opportunity for people is a thing. As a historical matter, our society has privileged straight white men. And you can’t just wake up and go, ‘O.K., now everything is going to be fair.’ ” As the ranking member of the House Armed Services Committee, Smith has spoken passionately before Congress about how diversity strengthens the American military. Smith is also critical of President Trump’s recent executive order eliminating all programs and policies related to diversity, equity, and inclusion within the federal workforce and among government contractors. “It’s terrible,” Smith said. “It is just broad brush saying any sort of outreach to underserved communities cannot happen. I think you’re going to miss out on people who are talented.”

This is the dilemma for Democrats like Smith: though they may have strong objections to the ideological culture of the left, they’re also uncomfortable with Trump’s program to destroy it from the right. The President blames D.E.I. for all manner of problems in America. Last week, during a press conference after a commercial flight and an Army helicopter collided over the Potomac River, killing sixty-seven people, Trump suggested that diversity efforts at the Federal Aviation Administration were responsible for the crash. “The right wing wants to demonize certain groups of people,” Smith said. “My frustration is we’re freaking giving it to them, because we can’t govern.” Smith disagrees with the President’s efforts to limit medical care for transgender children, and he recently voted against H.R. 28, a bill to ban transgender student-athletes from participating in girls’ and women’s sports. “The bill basically said you have to prove your gender to participate in girls’ or boys’ sports,” Smith said. “Is this the biggest problem we’ve got in the world?” He opposed the Laken Riley Act, a piece of legislation recently signed by Trump that calls for the detention of undocumented immigrants who are arrested or charged with crimes, including potentially minor violations such as shoplifting. “That’s a horrible use of our resources, and terrible policy,” Smith said. “I’m not going to vote for terrible policy just to make it appear that I’m not in favor of the left.”

Right now, however, Democrats have little choice but to “play on the other side’s turf,” as Smith put it. He recounted a recent meeting of the Congressional Progressive Caucus. “We had a very long, very passionate discussion about everything that Trump is doing wrong, and about how, you know, he’s helping the billionaires and not the average people,” he said. “We’ve got our message, and we’re gonna go win, right?” At another meeting soon after the election, for the ranking members of the Democratic caucus, “everyone was talking about how important it is for us to be unified—how we can’t be turning on each other.” Smith doesn’t think a show of unity is enough: “We as Democrats have to talk actively about our shortcomings and work to fix them, when we’d much rather talk about Donald Trump’s shortcomings and criticize him for it.”

Smith identified a few allies in the House—people who largely align with his prescriptions for the Democratic Party, although they might describe the problems differently. He name-checked Joe Neguse, of Colorado, notable because he’s the assistant House Minority Leader. (Neguse declined to comment.) Pat Ryan, the forty-two-year-old representative from a highly contested district in New York’s Hudson Valley, told me that he sees a “void” in the Party which has been filled by “people that are disconnected from fucking reality.” He said, “There’s no current language for how to describe this. ‘Moderate versus progressive’ is not correct. ‘Liberal versus conservative’ is not correct. It’s, like, are you for the people, or are you for the élites? I would put the people you’re talking about, who are focussed on these ivory-tower issues, in this élite category.” He believes the path forward is “patriotic populism.” “People want to have belonging and feel that they’re part of something that they can be proud of, and bigger than themselves. We have increasingly not offered that to voters,” he said. “Centering love of country and patriotism has to be a big part of the future of the Party.”

And then there’s Ritchie Torres, of the Bronx. “I represent a district that is overwhelmingly Latino and African American,” he told me. “I’ve never had a constituent approach me and say, ‘Congressman, my highest priority is diversity, equity, and inclusion, or critical race theory, or environmental sustainability and governance.’ ” He added, “I personally support all these programs, but my point is that I do not think Democrats should run on obscure three-letter acronyms that mean different things to different people. We should run on lowering costs, lowering crime rates, and making government work for working people.”

All the members I spoke with were jumpy about what to call the thing that they’re against and the thing that they’re for. When I asked Ryan whether he and his allies could be described as “anti-woke,” he replied, “With respect, I think that’s a made-up word that the far right uses to just make bogeymen that are not real.” Torres, much like Ryan, sees discourse about wokeness as “inside baseball”—an esoteric debate for élites. “I find anti-wokeness to be even more brain-dead than wokeness,” he said. “I want no part of it.” Same for Smith. “I hate labels, because I don’t know what you mean by that. You want to call it ‘woke’? You want to call it ‘America’s Cultural Revolution,’ as Christopher Rufo did?” he said. “Call it anything you want to call it, but the way we Democrats have chosen to govern over the course of the last ten years has not succeeded.”

However clearly Smith sees Democrats’ failures, the rest of the Party doesn’t seem as interested in introspection. “We’ve got the right message,” the newly elected chair of the Democratic National Committee, Ken Martin, said recently. I asked Smith whether he’d alienated colleagues with his recent crusade. “I’m not really that sociable a person to begin with,” he said with a shrug. ♦

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