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In addition to my Tuesday and Thursday essays, which are free to all, I put out a Weekend Reading piece for paid subscribers. These are a bit more reflective. I also include a few reading links and recommendations at the end, for anyone looking to go further. Happy Saturday.

I’ve been grateful for the response to my recent piece naming the performance that so much of Democratic politics has become—especially when it comes to addressing the actual, material concerns of people’s lives. It seems to have touched a nerve. And I think I know why.

Today’s piece picks up that thread and talks about what “wokeness” has become for Democrats—not as a moral vision, but as a kind of cover. A story they tell to avoid a harder truth.

A lot of us feel uneasy with where liberal politics has gone, even if we still vote for Democrats, still believe in equality, still want a more just world. It’s not the values that feel off. It’s the way they’ve been flattened into slogans, into vibes, into something that feels more like branding than belief.

You know the feeling. The moment when your bank starts posting about “diversity.” The slick, wordy political speeches that use all the right language—equity, inclusion, lived experience—but somehow leave you wondering what they’re actually offering. It's not that the language is wrong. It’s that the politics underneath it has gone missing.

There’s a version of “wokeness” that began as an attempt to name real structures of power and exclusion. But once that vocabulary was adopted by consultants and comms teams, it got retooled—not to change power, but to manage perception. To make it look like something was being done. In many cases, “woke” language has become a kind of moral insulation for people and institutions unwilling to do the harder work of material repair. It’s talked about more with the Republicans, their project of courting religious voters starting in the 1980s with the “Moral Majority” all while they passed things like the Bush tax cuts. What’s less talked about, however, is the Democrats’ willingness to carry out their own project of deploying identity politics to attract and even shame voters.

This is what I mean by branding. Not just the aesthetics of politics, but the substitution of performance for substance. Democrats often gesture toward injustice with great rhetorical polish, but they rarely follow that gesture all the way through—especially when it leads to uncomfortable places: corporate power, wealth extraction, bipartisan complicity.

Instead of asking hard questions—about who has power, who’s profiting, and what would have to be given up to build a more just system—we’re often presented with highly curated messages that feel emotionally potent but politically empty. Representation becomes a stand-in for redistribution. Rhetorical solidarity replaces structural change.

And when people notice that gap—when they start to feel that maybe the politics of “representation” isn’t fixing their rent or their grocery bill—they’re often met with a moral scolding. As if the discomfort is a sign of backwardness, not discernment. The framing is clear: if you're not fully on board, it's because you "don't get it." But what if people do get it—and just don’t buy the performance?

I live in one of those places where the landscape itself tells you everything. One town is a liberal bubble—“Resist” signs, “In This House We Believe in Science” placards, Pride flags, pro-Palestine banners. Drive fifteen minutes north and it’s a different theater entirely: “Don’t Tread on Me” flags, Trump signs, American flag decals on lifted trucks.

It’s easy to look at this and see division. But then you go to the shopping center that sits in between these two towns. Cars from both places are parked side by side. Inside the grocery store, it’s a different scene altogether—people making small talk in the checkout line, helping each other with carts, cashiers beaming at young kids. You start to feel it in your body: we’ve been played.

What a con it is, the idea that we’re supposed to hate each other. That decency, kindness, and care for strangers only exist on one side of a red-blue divide. That the most defining thing about a person can be summed up by the bumper sticker on their car.