Coop Scoop- Woke Is not dead and it's in the way of resisting Trump

We need to unify, not segregate

December 17, 2025

By Marc Cooper

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I’ve waited a 6 weeks to write this note, as there have been many more consequential events since the election that have taken precedence and deserved a lot more attention.

Now, I have decided to share a rather disappointing experience I had during election week, partly prompted by two other essays I read Tuesday morning on the same subject, which I highly recommend.

Check out his piece by Max Sawicky and this longer take by Freddie de Boer. I am not going to summarize them, but you should read them. I urge you to do so. Do it.

Both writers, though separated by a generation, address the issue of “wokeness,” and both are quite critical, though from slightly different angles. And both are on the Left. Their critiques are theoretical—in a good way. But I want to tell you—using a woke term—about my recent “lived experience.”

Much of the Left claims that "woke" is a red herring used by the Right to dog-whistle racist views. True enough. Much of the Left responds that "woke" is a made-up term that doesn’t really exist. And that is also not true.

I can tell you that it does live on, and I was confronted with a bucket full of it precisely five days before the November 5 election, and it was deeply disappointing.

I saw a post on Facebook that was a call to an open community meeting sponsored by a number of what appeared to be liberal and social justice non-profits in my city of Vancouver, Washington. The wording of the call was quite moderate and avoided specific political terms. I assumed this was deliberate, to avoid scaring off less ideological people.

This was quite exciting for me, as though my city of 190,000 is exactly one mile across the Columbia River from Portland, the prevailing culture in Vancouver is profoundly apolitical—at least by comparison. It’s a very light blue city in a reddish county. Our Congresswoman, Rep. Marie Gluesenkamp Perez, an auto mechanic and a Blue Dog Democrat, displaced the Republican incumbent in 2022 and was then re-elected against an extremist MAGA candidate in November. And that was good news. Sje;s pro-choice but pro-gun as nearly everybody here has one and concealed carry is available on request if you have no felony record. And mostly, she is an authentic working class woman who is not a professional pol. She talks and looks and lives like her constituents.

I digress for a moment to say that Rep. Perez has been scorned by some Beltway Democrats because she is a moderate who sometimes votes with Republicans. But I can assure you that in this area, if she had campaigned even two degrees more to the Left, she would have been crushed.

My city, which grew up as a refuge for older military veterans, has fortunately seen them passing on. Younger, somewhat more liberal types—very somewhat—have moved in, and the city has been revitalized and is vibrant compared to similar but struggling small towns in the Pacific Northwest. The non-partisan city mayor is a Democrat, but the county board is majority MAGA. The local family-owned newspaper is centrist with a slight liberal tinge.

There’s barely any visible political activity in the city. There’s been a couple of church-based vigils for the homeless. And other church sponsored events for our ample Ukrainian population. During election season, there were a smattering of political lawn signs, mostly conservative ones. There were almost none for the winning Rep. Perez, as locals knew they would probably be torn down. I supported the campaign but did not put out a sign, as I didn’t want my home vandalized.

On the streets, it’s hard not to still see those MAGA-ized pickup trucks rumbling around, flying huge Trump banners and flags. And it seems like one out of three or four cars has a Thin Blue Line disfigured American flag bumper sticker. In many residential areas in Portland, you’ll see house after house with a Black Lives Matter poster in the window.

You see none of those here in Vancouver, but there are plenty of American flags hanging on porches, and on my street, there are two houses with prominent “I Pray for America” banners out front.

In the next town over, there is an active extremist Moms for Liberty chapter that has been militant and disruptive. School board meetings sometimes turned into shouting matches. During the height of the pandemic, there were some MAGA hooligans in my town going around public schools, ripping masks off students as they were going home.

Not in my city per se, but the general area has been an incubator for groups like the Proud Boys and other “patriot” militias. Much of the extremist militia leadership comes from the surrounding areas.

But here in the city, things are mostly placid. The city is 70% white. A whopping 50% of residents are 65 or older. Black residents make up a tiny 3%, Latinos are 17%, and there’s a rich mix of Hawaiians, Thai, Samoans, and other Pacific Islanders and Asians. There is no “black neighborhood, and neither a Latino one. The city has paid extraordinary attention to the homeless and has built three small house villages for them. The streets are clean and safe. Violent crime is low. Property crime is higer because like most semi-rural places in America meth is quietly abundant.

You get the picture. It’s a culturally moderate, sprawling suburb that could pass for what was once a typical “all-American” Midwestern town. Some Portlanders get a kick out of calling us “Vantucky,” which might have been close to the truth 25 years ago, but is now far from reality.

A typical Vancouver street.

I give you this background because it’s germane to my story. As I’ve been politically arguing over the last several years, I believe more social justice can be achieved by focusing on local organizing that is networked across states and the nation than any other way. Bottom-up, not top-down. Not hoping to be rescued by national Democrats or web-based nonprofits that have displaced mass movements.

With this, I hope you can imagine the excitement I felt when I saw the call on the web for this community meeting. It was the first one I’d heard of, and it was coming less than a week before the election. Harris had lost her momentum, Trump was gaining, and while I didn’t anticipate the full results of the election, I was still convinced, as I am today, that Trump is a mortal threat to American democracy. I Thought Harris might win but so might Trump.

I was amped up for the meeting. Finally, some real community organizing! Late for the election, only five days away, but a good way to start preparing for resistance to a possible Trump victory.

When I arrived at the venue, a community center, I saw a turnout of about 50 people. A good start if not overwhelming. Even more striking, about half the crowd was non-white, and I had never seen so many people of color in one place before in the city except at a Cinco de Mayo celebration.

The meeting began with a harbinger of what the rest of the night would be. A sexually ambiguous young woman covered in piercings and a nose ring (common in Portland, but rather exotic in my town) gave us a five-minute patronizing lecture on how to behave politically correct in a meeting. She handed out a one-page printed handout with rules and protocols. “Be ready to be uncomfortable. You can disagree with anybody, but be polite and understand that not everybody sees the world like you do.” And pick up your trash after recess too!

Then came the three- or four-minute spiel about how we are here to build community. Then came the big woke surprise of the night.

She introduced two other young people, costumed pretty much like her, and announced they would be our “facilitators.”

“Robbie will facilitate the people of color who will remain in this room, and Terry will facilitate the white people in the adjoining room,“which was walled off.

Ten minutes into this thing, I was already getting the heebie-jeebies. I couldn’t figure out why, in a city that is mostly white, and because we were there to “build community,” why were being segregated by skin color? There are so few people of color in this city, I was really interested in hearing from them, as they have zero political representation.

So, there I was with the 20 or so rather plain looking white people, and I sat next to the facilitator, who was about 25. She first asked us to go around the circle and tell us who we are. Though she didn’t ask, everybody stated their name, what they do… and their pronouns.

I found this in itself to be odd and frankly off-putting. Judging by pronouns, you can pretty much guess who people sleep with, and their personal sex life was of no interest to me whatsoever. I did not offer any pronouns, as I find that to be absurd (sorry). Also, having lived in this city for five years, I can swear that I had never encountered the issue in any other public or private venue.

Then the facilitator—who was white—started the discussion by reading us an excellent poem by Maya Angelou (just in case none of us privileged white people had never heard of her). It was poignant and moving, and its theme was that wherever we go, whomever we meet, we are all basically the same—just people like everybody else.

Those who know me can imagine my reaction. Shall we say I’m not shy? As soon as she finished, I immediately piped up, using my polite-professorial voice rather than my strident polemical one, and said: “You know, your poem directly contradicts the situation you’ve created. If we are all the same, why are we being segregated by skin color?” She had no direct answer but promised that after we had met separately, the two groups would be brought together in the end to interact. I continued, saying, “I might not look like it, but I am technically half-Southwest Asian (my father’s Jewish family is thought to be Azeri). I also added that my wife is Chilean who was not with me, has lived in the U.S. for 45 years, is totally assimilated, and her skin is whiter than most of the people in this room. Where would you put her?” Again, no answer to that second question, but she said that, given I was half-Asian, I could sit with people of color in the other room, if I wanted. Hilarious. I am A White Man.

This was becoming like an acid trip. I stayed with the white people because I was already too fascinated by the spectacle. Again, they went around the circle. This time, people were asked to define what “community” means.

I was ready to pull out my iPhone and start playing Angry Birds after 5 minutes, but I restrained myself. The other folks, who ranged in age from their twenties to maybe fifty, none with any piercings or nose jewelry, gave pretty pedestrian, milquetoast answers, saying things like “community means looking out for each other and helping people in need and I care.”

Because of where I was sitting, to the immediate left of our facilitator I went last. I remained polite, but I was pretty lit up inside. I curtly said, “If you look at the root of the word ‘community,’ it means common unity. I’m more interested in WHAT we can do as a community to resist what might be coming,” and gave a three-minute political rap on the danger of Trump, only five days away from being elected. “Wouldn’t it be more useful,” I said, “to explore ways that THIS community thinks about how we’re going to respond to the coming threats, especially to the POC in the other room who are going to stand out like green thumbs for deportation? Or how we’re going to respond to the threats to LGBTQ people (a group to whom the facilitators were clearly part of)? It seems to me we’re wasting time playing a semantic game with the word ‘community,’ instead of discussing how we’re going to “organize, resist, and survive.”

I saw maybe six or seven fellow white people nodding their heads in agreement with me, but they had no chance to speak. Our woke facilitator immediately jumped in to make sure they didn’t. Again, with no hostility, as if dosed on Lithium, she said to me, “Well, if you’re uncomfortable here, you’re free to leave anytime.” I will say that, at this moment, I amazingly remained calm and restrained. I said, “I thought our ground rules said we are supposed to be uncomfortable and accept other points of view. Maybe you’re too uncomfortable with my point of view, and you should leave. I’m staying.”

The facilitator did not bat an eye and continued babbling about the meaning of community. And so it went for another twenty excruciating minutes. And I hate to be flip, but it was just more wanking about the word itself.

The election, Donald Trump, organizing, or anything even remotely similar was not discussed. It remained a circle jerk dissecting the word “community,” with frankly no particular valuable insight. A lot about me, me, me and how “I care.” Big deal.

I looked at my watch and saw it was 7:17 PM. We had been told the meeting MUST end at 7:30 sharp. That meant if the two segregated groups were really to be merged, it would be for a grand total of maybe five minutes, as the white people babbling about community were still going full blast.

I decided to leave. I waited for a pause, then stood up in the middle of the circle and apologized for leaving early—and of course issued a parting shot.

I said, as the “village elder” here, who has been involved in political organizing for the last 50 years, I strongly suggest that if you do any outreach organizing and door knocking in this city, you do not start with your pronouns, as most people in this city have no idea what you’re talking about.

And then I left and had a meatloaf dinner at the diner with the old farts wearing their VFW hats. A much lighter and open atmosphere, I might add, and I even had a nice discussion with the MAGA old man next to me wearing a Vietnam Veteran cap at the counter about the futility of most American military interventions. He agreed, saying he never could figure out what we were doing in Iraq, and he had counseled his son not to enlist. He mused for a moment as then said, he still had a similar question about his service in Vietnam. I told him from the outset I was one of those “radical left Democrats,” and we left shaking hands. I figured if I had been more honest and said I was a socialist it might be a bridge too far. Nor did we exchange pronouns.

I later found out that the major force behind the “community” meeting I went to earlier was a small nonprofit that recruits volunteers to help poor people (“the underserved”) find healthcare. But they had no interest in tying the coming MAGA politics to that crucial issue. I still don’t get it. NO discussion of possible coming cuts to medicaid, medicare and the ACA? Give me a break!

I do understand and accept generational differences, and I know very well that I come from the Stone Age of ’60s politics, where I believe in building multi-racial, independent mass movements. I know many —but hardly all— young people now speak a different dialect but it is dismaying to see it also affects their thinking. And much of what I said that night (that did not seem to upset anybody except the facilitator) also failed to ignite any discussion of pragmatic, real-life politics. It seemed to me that finding a room full of like souls was the community they wanted and were satisfied as is.

It’s not a good idea to generalize from specific anecdotes, but I can strongly affirm that Woke is far from dead, and it even has a glimmer of life out here in Vantucky that votes barely Democratic amid the sea of American flags. Wokeness and its restrictive protocols are very much in the way of what our present priorities should now be. This sort of meeting would not have surprised me one bit if it happened in Portland or in New York, where there is a much larger constituency for this kind of stuff, but it would have at least been much more political, if still insular and mostly self-referential.

It was a good lesson in social bubbles and how out of touch someone inside a bubble can be with those outside their own little tribe. And I’m hoping against hope that when Trump starts his outrages there will be somewhat more fulfilling of a local response.++

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