Is Warren Woke?

She’s better than Bernie, but not to the point of being woke.

Sanders is essentially a Marxist. He views politics as being a manifestation of the class struggle. Identity politics, for him, are at best an annoying distraction, and at worst are an effort by a ruling plutocratic class to divide the working class. As a result, he writes columns like the one in the WaPo last week in which he argued that the best way to resolve racial issues is to rein in the economic and political power of the one percent.

That, of course, means that African-Americans have to view reactionary white workers as being their allies, and invisible people on Wall Street as their enemies. That is both counterintuitive and the antithesis of being woke.

Warren is not a Marxist, and is more intellectually flexible than Sanders on racial issues. She is capable of having a discussion on identity issues that does not run through the class struggle. That said, she is still primarily a class-based politician, and her principal enemies are rogue capitalists, not racist white workers. And so, in spite of her best efforts, you can’t really call her woke; she doesn’t believe that identity drives everything, or even the most important things.