Jay's Notes: From Peak Woke to Peak DOGE
Summary: Jay’s Notes is a new weekly (ish) space where our Executive Director, Jason Mangone, can sling his takes.
I left Twitter four or five years ago and recently rejoined. I’m very bad at Twitter and I’ve never had more than a few dozen followers, so my departure and return weren’t an attempt to make a statement—it was mere utilitarianism. When I left, I was just spending too much time scrolling and my job had nothing to do with the stuff I was reading. I’ve come back because I’ve figured out how to manage my digital addictions and because my job involves understanding and engaging in political discourse.
The timing of my departure and return has been clarifying: unobstructed by whatever the platform was in the intervening five years, I only see what it was then and what it is today. Unsurprisingly, I’m struck by the extent to which X in 2025 is a mirror image of Twitter in late 2020. In both cases, there are deeply thoughtful and nuanced thinkers, they just take a while to find, and they’re why I’m grateful for the “Lists” function.
The uncurated experience, though, is just Monday Night RAW circa 2001.1 The key difference, of course, is that in 2020 the left had all the power and in 2025, the right does. If late 2020 was “peak woke,” early 2025 feels like “peak DOGE.”
These movements begin with popular ideas and sound impulses (our government has been such a poor steward of resources that it’s stifling progress; racism is a part of American history, and that has consequences today). Inspired by their own virality, the leaders of each of these movements sell their ideas with puritanical zeal. In the pursuit of power, messy truths with blurred edges turn into sexy screenshots and adherence to causes at odds with most Americans’ intuitions.
This piece will lay out four ways that wokeism and DOGEism are similar projects, and point to what that might mean for a way ahead.
(1) They’re cultural signals
Wokeism and DOGEism both start with particular claims that come to stand in for broader cultural movements. When I perceive that someone is affiliated with either of these movements, I have a tendency to presuppose their views on a host disconnected political and social issues.
For example, on X today I can reasonably assume that if a user is either against transgender women participating in girls’ sports, pro-tariff, or has any opinion whatsoever about combat sports, then they also have positive impressions of DOGEism and Elon Musk. On Twitter five years ago, I could reasonably assume that if a user was for eliminating the SAT, pro-mask mandate, or seemed to really enjoy bicycles, then they also had positive impressions of wokeism and Ibram X. Kendi (or the host of other figureheads atop that movement).2
(2) They lead to echo chambers that make movements less wise
The reality is of course more complicated than this: there are lots of people who believe that transgender women ought not participate in girls’ sports (definitively a majority viewpoint) and that Elon Musk has too much power in his current role at DOGE (a very polarized viewpoint, but lots of Americans certainly believe this is true).
People who hold such viewpoints get crowded out by those who are able to claim complete purity to the cause. This is useful in the accrual of online power, but a poor mechanism for the pursuit of the truth. And the more claims the movement takes on —and therefore the more diverse and unconnected the viewpoints requiring adherence—the less wise the movement becomes. Stated more simply: virality begets stupidity.
A common symptom of either the woke or DOGE mind virus is ad hominem attacks being leveraged to stamp out good-faith critiques. For example, see below where Joe Rogan suggests that no attempt at a criticism of Musk could possibly be done in good faith:3
(3) They’re mostly cynical
Wokeism and DOGEism are cynical in different ways. Wokeism insists that oppressor/oppressed is the key frame for understanding the world, and that the best response to this condition is a never-ending struggle in the hierarchy of oppression. The most nihilistic expression of this ideology comes in its belief that immutable characteristics such as race represent the totality of who we are or who we can hope to be.
The cynicism of DOGEism comes more in its execution—an obsession with burning it all down, an insistence that all of our institutions are out to get us, dismissing any emphasis on renewal. It’s the reason Elon Musk is gaining more traction for his efforts than someone like Jen Pahlka, who has a constructive vision for what government ought to be.
To be fair, you can find constructive visions if you look hard enough within each of these movements. For example, if you watch the video of Musk's recent Oval Office press conference, he does make a constructive argument when he describes the goals of DOGE as (1) restoring the balance of power in government to elected officials and away from an unelected bureaucracy; and (2) reducing the federal deficit such that the US remains solvent. Similarly for wokeism: the stated goal of the now-defunct Center for Antiracist Research at Boston University was to “build a world where racial equity and social justice prevail.”
Reasonable people can agree or disagree with these aims. The point is that these occasional attempts at expressing a constructive vision for wokeism or DOGEism are completely overwhelmed by the viral, cynical cacophony online. The most prominent leaders of these movements opt for leaning into cynicism and virality—that is, they choose a strategy of accruing power, rather than choosing the more temperate path of building something better than what we have today.
(4) They’re not that popular
While it didn’t feel like it at the time, wokeism was ultimately unpopular. And while it still has time to rechart its course, on its current trajectory I’d project that DOGEism will prove unpopular as well. This is an easy prediction because Twitter is not real life. Within the echo chamber, you only hear the loudest, most online voices. You become unpopular without realizing you’re becoming unpopular.
In 2020, More in Common released its American Fabric report, which relied on polling conducted in July of 2020—the height of wokeism. In the midst of the protests over the murder of George Floyd, we found that 74% of all Americans and 70% of Black Americans reported that they were “proud to be American,” compared to only 34% of progressive activists.
When asked “if I could choose to live anywhere in the world, I would still pick America,” 79% of Americans, 77% of Black Americans, and only 46% of progressive activists agreed. This is not to suggest that the particular claims around the George Floyd protests were unpatriotic. It’s just that the vibes online made it feel risky to suggest any amount of optimism about the country. The progressive activist view was popular on the internet, but their rhetoric was at odds with majorities of every other group of Americans.
As Derek Thompson recently suggested, I suspect that the backlash to DOGEism will come from its celebration of cruelty. And if an obsession with political correctness to the point of making the world less funny was part of wokeisms’s undoing, the wanton cruelty of things like making explicit racism cool again will be a part of DOGEism’s fall.
Most Americans like to laugh, and they prefer compassion to cruelty.
Memes or governance?
Each of these movements will ultimately be undone by their own bad ideas. That phenomenon is at once hopeful and damning. Hopeful in that our system still allows for a widespread flow of ideas, such that the worst impulses of cultural and political movements create strong backlash and are often defeated. Damning in that we seem unable to find a stable equilibrium that creates space for progress—in the midst of such instability, effective governance is exceptional, rather than the norm. We whipsaw from extreme to extreme, never with enough time to build, our energy instead devoted to the quicker tasks of tearing down or fighting back.
Both wokeism and DOGEism are cultural movements that attempt to wield political power by social media fiat. If either the left or the right wants to arrive at a stable governing coalition that can rebuild the country in its image, it will mean foregoing the easy work of meme-and-executive-order-drafting, or of antiracism training, and accepting the difficult work of building a majority coalition of Americans.
In the 2024 election, Trump won 49.8% of the popular vote and Harris 48.3%. No President since Reagan has won the popular vote by more than an 8.5% margin. In providing a voice to those that are as turned off by wokeism as they are by DOGEism (or that appreciate aspects of both!), part of More in Common’s work in the years ahead will be working with Republicans and Democrats alike, helping each to understand what might make their parties appeal to an incremental 12% of Americans.
Our bet is that any majoritarian movement is much preferable to the alternative (the past four decades of slim-majority polarized governance) to the extent that it’s likelier to produce a country more aligned with its values, more prosperous and pleasant for its citizens, and better-poised to solve the challenges we face.
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This is a professional wrestling metaphor. If you just click on the link you’ll get it.
The woke movement has many more figureheads than the DOGE movement. But for now, it’s clear that Elon is the most prominent, even as others will emerge the longer DOGE is in effect, and I suspect that DOGE will remain as a cultural force even if Musk leaves his official post as its head. I’m not trying to pick on Kendi here, he’s simply a figure that most people understand as a leader of wokeism. I could’ve chosen many other figures, and for what it’s worth I think his project is much more interesting than other leaders identified as “woke.”
And if you listen to this full podcast between Joe Rogan and Bridget Phetasy, while it’s overwhelmingly supportive of DOGE, it’s also much more nuanced than the tweet would suggest. For instance, Rogan acknowledges in the first few minutes that some of the stuff that Musk and his supporters are posting is “just not true” (listen from minutes 9-13).