Woke 2 Must Build Institutions

Wokeness. Intersectionality. Marginalization. It feels like everyone who has followed politics since 2016 has at least heard of those words. These words are some of the most common phrases associated with a certain politics, a politics of relentless critique of our society. But it has been just that—critique. Useful critique, yes. Highly productive critique, yes. And this author finds herself in agreement with the vast majority of this critique, conceptualized in theory, and lived in practice. But as we have seen in the past decade, as we continue to respond to the fascist reaction that has defined the last decade, critique is by no means enough.

The reality is that when we talk about “marginalized people”, we speak of real, quantitatively measurable, empirically testable experiences. We speak of real suffering, real struggle, real pain, simply because we have built a society in which structural violence and systemic marginalization is the norm. When we speak of intersectionality, we speak of how different areas of discrimination overlap and reinforce each other, affecting real life outcomes. Wokeness is fundamentally a theory about how power acts on us, or acts for us, based on who we are. 

Make no mistake, there is hard data on this. Statistics on how disabled people are left behind. Data on the gaps between Black and white Americans. Information on the life outcomes of trans people. We know that undocumented workers are systematically exploited, and then demonized, abused and deported, just for being on the wrong side of an artificial binary. We know these systems produce suffering. And I, personally, have lived this suffering, as a Black trans woman in America—because of this, these questions take on a particular urgency for me.

But knowing is not fixing. To reveal is not to reform.

As we move deeper into this reactionary era, marked not just by Trump, but by a worldwide fascist backlash, and the congealing of a global Fascist International, we find ourselves not merely wanting to embrace the legacy of the first woke paradigm—what we might call a Woke 1.0—but wanting a stronger, more aggressive, more confident Wokeness—a Woke 2.0 with teeth, a Woke 2.0 that engages deeply and honestly with power. But the path to getting there is first to interrogate why Woke 1.0 failed to do this.

This article, first and foremost, serves as a follow-up of sorts to the brilliant article by my colleague Samantha Hancox-Li, “What is Woke 2”. But it also serves, ironically, as a critique of the critique—of how and why the victories we won in the prior period of wokeness were so seemingly easily swept aside, why power was able to so quickly reassert itself. It was not because the critique was empty—it was because the critique didn’t sufficiently build its own foundation.

It is very true that Woke 1.0 did the work of excavating these realities, surfacing them, and forcing them into public consciousness. It broke the false consensus of what could be called the “Long 90s”, in which formal equality was accepted in exchange for ending the argument on structural inequality. It gave names to these power structures—names for things we experienced, and understood, but could not express, for things that we previously could not have acknowledged in discourse. Racism, patriarchy, queerphobia, transphobia, ableism—these were not merely words made up by the academy; they mapped to real experiences. Changing discourse was a form of power, and it did create cultural change, rapidly and more lasting than anyone could have imagined 20 years ago. That work was real, and it mattered. The culture shifted in ways that would have seemed impossible a generation ago. Pronouns in emails. Employee resource groups. Robust corporate disability processes. There were some real gains. But the critical failure here was that Woke 1.0 did not truly account for power. It gestured at it but did not build a program around it or rebuild institutions to defend against it. And when power is challenged enough, it responds with even more violence.

The task of Woke 2.0 is to build these institutions, to build these structures, because we are at war, and Woke 2.0 must be wokeness at war.

Critiquing without building: The institutional asymmetry

The famous Natalie Wynn quotation “They don't want power, they want to endlessly critique power” is a pithy but accurate summation of what went wrong with Woke 1.0. Critiquing power is vital and necessary. But it is insufficient. Make no mistake, this is not merely a criticism of one faction or another within the coalition. It is a problem with the epistemic framework that governed the coalition.

Woke 1.0 was far better at naming injustice than designing remedies or building power. And because of this, the gains we made in the past decade proved all-too-fragile in the face of a sustained assault from the existing power structures.

Trans rights, and in particular, trans women in sports, illustrates this failure with particular sharpness. The fact is, when Lia Thomas swam a college season with other women in 2021-2022, the science was not ambiguous: the IOC had permitted trans women to compete under testosterone threshold criteria since 2003. For twenty years, what Lia Thomas did was accepted at the highest levels of competition, and trans women didn’t even come close to being dominant. But it didn’t matter, because the fascist right had institutions, and we didn’t. They had coordinated legislative templates, media infrastructure, and message discipline. We had justified outrage and activists on Twitter. We had no institution ready to speak with unified, credentialed, powerful authority in real time and hold that line under sustained assault. So it didn’t matter that the actual facts of her career debunked the smears. At the same NCAA Championships where Thomas won one event, cisgender swimmer Kate Douglass broke 18 NCAA records, to virtually no national attention. The lie traveled around the world before the truth got its shoes on.

Defeat flowed from “trans women in sports” to “trans children” to “trans bathroom bills” to “trans ID revocation”. We had and have the science. But we didn’t have the institutions. And it doesn’t matter whose fault it was that we didn’t have the institutions. It is certainly not the fault of trans athletes, or trans people. But without an explicit ideological and institutional project to match that of the reactionary right, the rollback was inevitable.

The pattern repeated itself with the Cass Report—the deeply flawed, methodologically dubious UK review of gender-affirming care for young people that has been used internationally to justify stripping trans youth of access to life-enhancing and life-saving medicine. The reality is that gender-affirming care, at any age, is one of the most effective medical interventions in existence. Fewer people regret it than nearly every other intervention, and the quality-of-life increase is extraordinary. But none of this mattered, because the Cass Report was a weapon, not a neutral scientific study. We know this. But where were the litigation shops? The advocacy orgs? The policy networks? Yes, we know that billionaire money was poured into these campaigns. We know that J.K. Rowling staked her personal fortune and creative brand on the success of this transphobic movement, funding organizations and shaping media narratives with the institutional weight of a one-woman think tank. But it was all the more effective because we didn’t have our own institutions ready to counterattack. This was a failure not just of specific political entities or groups, but of a political culture that claimed to speak for the marginalized and then failed to do the institutional work that defends the marginalized.

Whatever we, as trans people, as trans thinkers, and trans activists could have done better, could have been done far more and far more effectively by the broader liberal-left movement, within which we have some of the least power and the least resources.

And this was not the only backslide. In many other areas, from DEI and civil rights history to labor market flexibility, poorly institutionalized and poorly defended gains slowly eroded. But one of the most telling phases of this backslide was remote work.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, millions of workers—including enormous numbers of disabled people, neurodivergent people, people with chronic illness, and caregivers (a group that heavily skews towards women)—suddenly had access to something transformative: work that was not structured around the preferences of the neurotypical and abled. Work that was not dependent on one’s ability or desire to own a car. Work that gave them, for the first time, some level of access to the professional world, on something like equal terms. Labor force participation among disabled women jumped 16% between 2019 and 2022, and remote work drove significant mental health and quality of life gains for Black workers, as well as caregivers.

Many people dismiss remote work as merely “convenience.” For many disabled and neurodivergent workers, remote work was the single greatest disability accommodation of their professional or academic lives—above any IEP framework, any ADA regulation, any formal HR process that was often not worth the paper it was printed on. And it happened not due to political pressure, but because a pandemic forced capital to implement it on an emergency basis to maintain productivity. When the emergency passed, employers took it back—but not because it was less productive. The literature shows neutral to positive productivity gains. Revoking it was useful as a tool of soft layoffs, and there was little institutional backing, even among progressives, to defend it. RTO mandates swept through the economy, and the people who had benefited most—the people for whom remote work was not a preference but a lifeline—had no institutional recourse.

No litigation infrastructure. No legislative framework classifying remote work as reasonable accommodation. Not even a theoretical framework. No organized political constituency with the standing and resources to fight back.

And the irony—the gains that have proven more defensible, the gains harder to roll back, were the ones made by the last generation of institutions—HRC, GLAAD, and similar,  all founded in the 80s and 90s in response to the hostility of the political environment of that era. But institutions calcify. The founders age out, the required tactics change, or they simply lose relevance to a new generation. What was needed was a new, modernized set of institutions, built to fight and win in this era, not the last. These weren’t created nor were the old ones revitalized.

The gains evaporated because they had never been institutionalized. They existed at employer discretion, which is another way of saying they did not exist as rights at all.

This is what the absence of a program looks like in practice. Not a dramatic defeat, but a slow erosion—gains made informally, without institutional backing, evaporating when power decides to take them back. Which power always eventually does.

Weyrich’s long game—The Heritage Foundation

In 1973, Paul Weyrich co-founded the Heritage Foundation. In 1982, he helped found the Federalist Society. These were not responses to immediate crises—they were investments in creating an ideological infrastructure to implement nationwide conservative governance. What is key here is that conservatism was ascendant. Heritage was built mid-Nixon. The Federalist Society was built in the Reagan years. But in the conservative worldview, these victories were insufficient, because their perceived popular mandate was not reflected in their power over institutions. Conservatives' relative lack of power within civil law and the administrative state functioned as a check to translating massive political success into durable institutional change. Thus, these groups became a means of consolidating the reactionary project. The Heritage Foundation would workshop policy; the Federalist Society would train judges and create legal theory. All this formed institutional architecture that converted right-wing think tank papers to a 6-3 conservative Supreme Court majority—the majority that would overturn Roe v. Wade and implement Project 2025.

Where has ours been? The simple, sad truth is that it barely exists.

Have you heard of the Democracy Alliance? Probably not. It’s channeled over $2 billion into left-wing causes. There’s an American Constitution Society—our answer to the Federalist Society, founded in 2001. But even the most engaged liberals and progressives barely know what it is, and they certainly don’t have the mindshare and public profile of their right-wing counterparts. And why is that? Because they were designed that way. The Democracy Alliance was so committed to secrecy that it built its operations around it: NDAs, anonymous donors, private security to keep journalists out of their conferences. Meanwhile, the Federalist Society trumpets the right-wing billionaire money that pours in. That creates mindshare and attention. That builds on itself. You cannot build a movement, or the institutions to make that movement concrete, if you refuse to name yourself. You cannot build power by hiding from the public.

The American Constitution Society? From the surface, it seems to have the institutional structure—chapters, a webpage, regular conferences. But does it have a coherent idea of what liberalism is supposed to do? What liberalism is supposed to be? The Federalist Society had a coherent idea of the world they sought to build, and a project to create that world—skew American jurisprudence towards their reactionary framework of “originalism” and fill the federal judiciary with lawyers that would uphold that framework. The ACS never had that level of concerted, long-term effort.

And one might retort—“The money was never there!” But it was. There was a billionaire donor class. For all the fearmongering that the right-wing does about George Soros (much of it antisemitic either implicitly or explicitly), he was a member of a liberal donor class. Tom Steyer, Peter Lewis, the Pritzkers—the resources did exist. And on top of this, since the Dean and Sanders campaigns, the wellspring of small-dollar donations has grown into a real source of political power.

What was missing was the will to embrace liberalism as an institutional project, to state liberalism as a superior vision for American life, to be public and accountable in the ways that are needed to build durable political institutions. Beyond this, we operated in a failure mode that valorized naming injustice over building workable means of countering injustice. We valued performance over meaningful gains. We looked at Martin Luther King as a man who gave an incredible speech rather than a brilliant, disciplined organizer and leader. We saw revolutionaries as commanding an inchoate mass of popular anger, not organizations as a general would, or building institutions as an administrator would.

Without those institutions, the ability to mediate between politicians and the masses atrophies. 

There are very few statues of Bayard Rustin, even though his organization made the March on Washington possible. Liberal-left political culture elevates the prophet over the project—to our detriment.

Not merely failure—but harm

This lack of institution building did not merely result in a failure to adequately defend our gains. The failure to build institutions—accountable, fair, professional and disciplined institutions around these analyses—ended up harming those that Woke 1.0 purported to help. CHAZ/CHOP, of course, is well-documented as an example of how movements can fail those who they are supposed to help. As a Black woman in America, seeing a movement for racial justice end so tragically was deeply emotionally devastating to me—and it was a harbinger of yet another cycle of consciousness-raising about the structural harms marginalized people face, without durable change to address it.

But it speaks to a different problem. The neurotic relationship with power does not replace power. It does not replace hierarchy. It hides it behind inclusive rhetoric, “decentralized” structures, and the desperation for community by those who have been shunned by society. It hides hierarchy, and then reproduces it, in the same abusive forms that have been visited on us. Thus, disabled trans women are subject to Hot Allostatic Loads and devoted feminists are subject to Trashing. The whisper networks deployed in hostile institutions to protect marginalized people without risking backlash get weaponized against those same marginalized people to protect social standing; the same concepts of justice used to critique society’s oppression are used to reproduce that oppression—of the oppressed, by the oppressed. There have been numerous instances of abusive dynamics within queer subcultures, almost perfectly reproducing the same dynamics within broader society.  And of course, social media has only made the intensity and velocity of this worse, as a perusal of Twitter (or Bluesky), including those subcultures that center around inclusivity, can attest. 

Without real institutions—the institutions that needed to be built to bridge the gap between the progressive institutions of the 80s and 90s, built to fight and win in that environment, to close the gap between legal equality and structural equity—power is unaccountable, and the victims are often the ones least able to challenge power, namely the most marginalized of the marginalized. In many ways, social media, with its siren call of “decentralization”, sapped the movement-building energy that was needed to build those vital institutions. This has not only left us unready to respond to the current wave of reactionary violence, but has left us reproducing that violence within our own communities.

Project 2025—alarm, not action

Project 2025 was published in 2023. It was open. It was not a secret master plan bound by strict NDAs. It was a 900-page document, freely available, explicitly announcing what a second Trump administration intended to do to American institutions. Who it intended to target. Both liberals and leftists read it, shared it, were alarmed by it. But where was our Project 2025? Simple—we didn’t have one.

We didn’t have a ready-made counter-project. We didn’t have a parallel document articulating what a progressive administration would do, to the same level of exacting detail and organizational specificity. We didn’t have a framework that matched the scale and ambition of the reactionary project that Project 2025 represented. We had alarm. Social media shares. Fundraising emails. And most of all, the assumption that surely someone else was working on it. But the reality is that2023 was already too late to have that response ready.

Heritage built the foundation for Project 2025 over 50 years. From think tanks, to legal personnel pipelines, to institutional patience. It was a project in the way liberals, leftists, and progressives haven’t truly replicated. What did we have? Organizations doing good work, but in specific lanes. A collection of issues, but, once again, not a project. And certainly not a governing vision. Woke 1.0’s neurotic relationship with power, and its relationship with the intent and desire to take and wield power, prevented such a vision from truly coalescing.

This is what it means to critique power without building power. It means becoming good at identifying the enemy, but not at developing tools to fight the enemy. At most, we’d get incremental changes through a Democratic administration, or bank on corporate goodwill, or build public awareness through activism. But we never developed a political and institutional program to change the world, and changing the world is what we must do. A proper institutional program would have had a response to Project 2025 ready to go. It would have been able to propagate that vision to the public. It would have made the right-wing project a topic of public debate, tied the Republican party to it, and provided a counter-vision that would have been legible to every gettable voter, from the most engaged to the least engaged. Project 2025 was absolutely worth voting against, both at the time and especially in hindsight. But we needed a response to rally around.

Wokeness at war: We must make up fifty years in five

We are approximately fifty years behind the right, and we must close this gap in five at most—if not sooner. If the progressive project does not build durable institutions in the next five years—real ones, public ones, funded ones, with genuine ideological discipline, modernized communication, a robust personnel and legal pipeline, and a theory of the long game—we will be back here again. In 2032. In 2036. In 2040. We cannot keep doing this. We cannot keep hanging by gossamer over an abyss.

We have the tools. We have theories. But we must build a robust theory of what liberalism is for, who it is for, and what it requires. Outside relatively small niches, this work has simply not been done at the scale it must be. Once that is done, we must deploy this as a project to build these durable political institutions. We must build a war machine for the liberal-left project, because, once again, we are at war, and our wokeness must be one at war.

That means building the litigation shops, and the law school pipelines, and the ALEC-style policy networks. And we must do this fast. We will have to have model legislation, or at least a coherent idea of a liberal-left project, that our politics can be built around. Political developments may go in our favor. But that is only a prerequisite—the task before us is no less than the Third Reconstruction. The stakes could not be higher. Afterwards, we will have to consolidate the infrastructure—the Heritage project in reverse.

Is this doable in so little time? Not under business as usual. We must find brilliant thinkers, smart organizers, and movement-builders outside the traditional channels. We will have to take shortcuts. We must overlook certain gaps in credentials—which would make these institutions more accessible by those who they seek to serve anyway. We must treat this moment like the emergency it is. If we do so, then it can be done.

Critique, we have mastered. The task now is to build, then take, then consolidate power, so that we may build the world we wish to see. But what does that world look like? A more just world, a more fair world, a more inclusive world, a world where nobody has to fear hunger or homelessness. That framework has been, in some way or another, our stated goal since FDR. But what does that world look like in detail? That is the next thing to be written.

Featured image is Kevin Roberts, President of the Heritage Foundation