Front Burner - Trade war update // What happened to 'woke' politics?

Episode Date: August 20, 2026

In 2020, the politics of racial justice appeared to be everywhere: the killing of George Floyd sparked one of the largest protest movements in American history, and progressive ideas about policing, prisons, racism and inequality moved into the political mainstream.But many of the central demands of the millions who took to the streets were ultimately not met.Six years later, some of the politicians and activists who came of age during that period now appear to be distancing themselves from it. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez recently described the politics of that era as “Woke 1,” saying: “Woke 1 was crazy.”So, what happened?Scholar, professor and author Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor joins Front Burner to talk about the legacy of that protest movement, and what happened to the wave of progressive ideas that followed it.For transcripts of Front Burner, please visit: https://www.cbc.ca/radio/frontburner/transcripts

Something is happening in Dawson Creek. A wave of violence has swept over this community of just 13,000 people. It's like the kind of stuff you only hear about on TV. 15 murders in the last five years. Some criminals, I put them into the category of supervillains. I'm Timothy Sawa and from CVC's On Cover and the Fifth Estate, an investigation into deaths and disappearances in Dawson Creek and what's behind it all. I'm not saying another word, leave me alone.

The Mile Zero Murders, available now on CBC Listen or wherever you get your podcasts. This is a CBC podcast. Hi, everybody, Jamie here. If you listen to yesterday's show, I know that I mentioned we were planning an episode for today with politics writer Aaron Wary and pollstered David Coletto of Abacus Data about this deal the U.S. and Canada are finalizing. We're still doing that, but the details have been coming in drips throughout the day and into this evening. And so we decided some more time would give us the chance to craft a more thoughtful conversation about what this all means. So please do stay tuned tomorrow.

In the meantime, I do want to give you the latest news because I know this is so top of mind for a lot of us right now. Here's what we know as of around 9 p.m. on Wednesday night. U.S. President Donald Trump told reporters earlier in the day on Wednesday that's subject to the finalization of documents, we have a deal with. Canada. It's good for everybody, but our farmers are going to be thrilled. Our manufacturers are going to be thrilled. And basically, we have no tariffs going into Canada anymore. Canada was charging us tremendous tariffs. We no longer have any tariffs. But Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney was a bit more circumspect. In a statement released in the afternoon, he congratulated his U.S. Canada trade minister, Dominic LeBlanc and U.S. trade representative Jameson Greer

on the significant progress they've made in negotiations. and said we are now moving towards an agreement. As for LeBlanc and Greer, they also spoke briefly to reporters on Wednesday. Greer described an agreement that... That will not only continue to protect American workers, American jobs, American supply chains, but really strengthen the North American economy. It create a situation where North America will continue to be an energy powerhouse, a manufacturing powerhouse, and line on important things like economic security and digital security.

LeBlanc's comments were more focused on a single issue, dairy. The Prime Minister was very clear. We needed to protect supply management. We needed to ensure that the supply management regime remained entirely intact. And I'm confident that that's the case. Later in the afternoon, Carney held a cabinet meeting and then a meeting with the premiers to brief them on the situation. Nova Scotia Premier Tim Houston came out of that meeting saying that Carney had asked them to put U.S. booze back on the shelves and to not exclude the U.S. in their provincial procurement policies. In return, we're hearing that the U.S. imposed tariff on steel and aluminum is going down to 25% from

50% and that they would lower their tariff on Canadian-made vehicles to 15% down from 25%. With exemptions for U.S. made parts, the rate would apparently look more like half that, 7.5% in practice. But the White House stressed in a statement, any reporting about details of this possible deal should be regarded as speculation until and unless officially announced by the administration. In his truth social post Tuesday night, Trump said that the contentious Keystone XL pipeline project could be revived.

He shared this bizarre AI-generated image of him, lifting a big pipe out of a grave with a headstone that read buried by Biden. we haven't heard much from the Canadian side on that, though Alberta Premier Daniel Smith put out a statement saying, Alberta wants to build new pipelines, west, east, north, and south, and we are always in discussions with industry to support those opportunities. A source close to the negotiations told the CBC that Canadian officials planned to have the deal fully finished Friday night. Now on to today's show. Earlier this month, New York Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez was asked about a Democratic candidate in Wisconsin, who supported abolishing the police and prisons in the past. Her response was pretty blunt.

I have a local city councilman that has this saying, woke one was crazy. Look one was crazy. Okay, that's true. And I think that what's important is that we have to assess what a... She's talking about politics from around 2020, the enormous protest movement that followed the police murder of George Floyd and the wave of progressive ideas that followed it. For a brief moment, questions about policing, prisons, racial inequality, and more moved from the margins of American politics into the mainstream.

But six years on, much of that discussion has receded. Today, a closer look at woke one. And what actually happened to the politics. from that time. Keanga Yamada Taylor is a professor of African-American history at Princeton University and the author of a number of acclaimed books on race and American history, including from Black Lives Matter to Black Liberation. Kiena, it is such a pleasure to have you on Frontburner. Thank you so much for making the time. Thank you for the invitation. Very happy to be here. So why don't we begin with the comments made by New York Congresswoman Alexandria or Cassio-Cortez on ABC last week?

Just for our listeners, she was asked about some of the positions previously held by Francesca Hong, a former Wisconsin state representative who ran unsuccessfully in the state's democratic gubernatorial primary. Specifically, she was asked. What do you make of those controversial statements? I'm sure you've seen. I mean, she's, you know, the Thanksgiving dust up. She says she doesn't, you know, still believe that. But, you know, the abolished prisons, abolished police, which is also positions that have been taken by a lot of the progress. candidate two of one. How do you get around that? Yeah. Those are not positions that are supposed. AOC responded. Woke one was crazy.

And then she kind of laughed it off. There's a lot going on here. But why don't we start with your general assessment of that comment from AOC? What do you think she's getting at by saying that? Well, I think there were a couple of things with that. One, I think that she was actually trying to do hung a service by contextualizing both her comments, but also trying to explain, you know, whether you agree with it or not, just trying to explain the distance that she had traveled.

I mean, I think that a lot of these races, even right now, they'll have a tendency to be nationalized. Yeah. But these races ultimately are local and all politics are local. My understanding is that Francesca Hong has made clear her present standing. to her electorate. Yeah, she's moved away from a lot of that. Right, she's moved away from it. Hong had been asked the question of whether she still supported police abolition and seemed to have moved away from that. So I think AOC was trying to give us some kind of context for that. I think the comment about Woke 1 is crazy that, you know, touched off a firestorm of debate

has to be unpacked. I think part of what AOC and other people, progressives, people on the left were saying about this thing called Woke 1 in some ways is about the form and practice of politics in terms of its advocacy for various positions. I think some of the content that people are talking to that I think is worthy of debate is whether something like defund the police falls into that. as in and of itself a self-righteous position. I think the larger context for this conversation is that six years ago, there were roughly 25 million people on the streets participating in demonstrations

against racism and police brutality in the United States. And six years later, that movement clearly lost. And there has been a complete retreat from the notion that police brutality, is bad from the state perspective that we should do something about that. That's one part of what is happening. The second part is that the Democratic Party is in complete crisis. The Democratic Party is roiled by infighting. It is roiled by political disagreement and debate. And there is an effort underway to try to assign blame for that. So there is a faction within the Democratic Party, and it may be larger than a faction that believe that what they would

describe as the political excesses of 2020 have contributed to the decline of the party, and that in order for the party to connect with regular people, that they have to disavow these hyper-left positions that they believe have alienated the party in the eyes of regular people. And so I think that's how they view this debate over, well, what were those politics and what influence did it have on the current travails that the Democratic Party is experiencing today? The policy prescription of defunding the police, it does seem to be the policy prescription most used to communicate kind of whatever woke one was. It is the thing now constantly cited by Republicans and centrist Democrats when attacking progressives. And I just wonder if I could ask you what it means materially to defund the police. Like, what would that actually look like in material terms?

Because I do think that this can be confusing for people. The whole notion of defunding the police was not some hair-brain knee-jerk response to the murder of George Floyd. If anything, it was the cumulative outcome of a decade-long process of failure. the failure of the political class in either party to do something about police racism and police brutality. Did you see what looked like Alton to be reaching for his gun? No, not at all. Did you hear him say, I'm going for my gun, or did you hear him threaten the officers? Not at all.

Not while he was standing up, nor while he was bent down. A surveillance camera captured a deadly confrontation between police and a 12-year-old boy carrying what turned out to be a fake toy gun. Demire Rice's family says they are saddened and disappointed by the grand jury's decision, but they add they're not surprised. The Minnesota police officer who fatally shot Philando Castile during a traffic stop last year has been found not guilty. Judge's verdict in the third trial of a police officer charged in the death of Freddie Gray. Officer Caesar Goodson today found not guilty on all counts. Three officers have now been tried without conviction. So much so that now the police continue to kill people at an even greater pace, at even higher numbers than they did in the years preceding 2020 or in the year 2020.

And so that problem, which is what was at the root in some ways of the protest movement. in 2020 has not gone away. What I think is confusing, and this is a problem, I think, for activists and organizers, is the conflation of defunding the police with the abolition of police. Those are two distinct things. They don't even sound similar. To defund the police is not the same as completely getting rid of the institution of policing, which can be up for a different kind of debate.

I think the discussion about defund the police and what would that look like is a central part of the process that activists had articulated for that decade demanding police reform, which is to say that less money should be dedicated to the institution of policing and more money should be,

invested in the practices, policies, agencies, and institutions that could get to the underlying roots of crime and violence in our society, which is to say that we should have more investment in housing. We should have more investment in health care. We should have any investment in child care. We should have investments in access to food. We should have investments. We should have a greater investment in the, in the, in the, in U.S. cities, they call them violence interrupters, which are groups of people who go at the point of violent confrontation and practice skills of de-escalation. We should have greater investment in all of these programs and practices that have been empirically shown to have a greater impact on crime reduction.

than mindless, endless investment in policing, so much so that when in 2021 and 2022, when public agencies and services in the United States were collapsing because of the impact of COVID, there were huge crime spikes. The murder rate was escalating. Shootings were escalating, assault and battery, people enraged. Well, what happened in by the end of, of 2024 by the end of Joe Biden's term. Historic lows in crime. Well, what happened in the intervening period?

What happened was in March of 2021, Joe Biden signed into law the American Rescue Plan. It's clear that an overwhelming percentage of the American people, Democrats, independents, or Republican friends have made it clear the people out there. made it clear they strongly support the American Rescue Plan. Yesterday, with the final passage of the plan in the House of Representatives, their voices were heard. Which was a $2 trillion. It was the second largest domestic spending investment in American history.

$2 trillion that went to an assortment of things, but it included the agencies and institutions that had been credit. by the pandemic, and it reinvested in those. And what was the outcome? Historic lows of crime. So the idea that this was some strange plan, right, a strange proposal from the activists to divest from policing, to invest in community programs,

was not only not strange, but when enacted, at least the second part, the investment part, had a dramatic impact on lowering crimes to historic 50-year lows. Something is happening in Dawson Creek. A wave of violence has swept over this community of just 13,000 people. It's like the kind of stuff you only hear about on TV. 15 murders in the last five years. Some criminals, I put them into the category of supervillains. I'm Timothy Sawa and from CBC's Uncover and the Fifth Estate,

an investigation into deaths and disappearances in Dawson Creek and what's behind it all. I'm not saying another word. Leave me alone. The Mile Zero murders, available now on CBC Listen or wherever you get your podcasts. I want to zero in on Zora Mamdani and how he's speaking about this. for a moment and just get your thoughts. You know, he is kind of the avatar of the electoral left right now. He's governing over the largest city in the U.S., America's largest police department.

The NYPD spends more annually than many nations around the world do on their militaries. And he now pretty consistently rejects defunding the police. I've made very clear that I do not believe in defunding the police, that I will not be defunding the police. and that to me, delivering critical public safety also looks like working with our police department alongside many other partners. And we've seen over the first seven months of this administration what that can look like when we're talking about the fewest murders on record in New York City, the fewest shooting incidents on record in New York City. And that, to me, is how we measure a lot of our public safety. What might you say to someone like Zoron?

Well, I mean, I think that politics and electoral office is, conservatizing. You know, I think that, you know, Zohan Mandani talked about defunding the police in 2020 is elected as mayor in 2025. And, you know, I certainly, I don't live in New York City, but, you know, I certainly cheered him on from afar. And so one, I think when you actually have to govern, like no candidate governs. A person is elected into office and is confronted with a whole new series, questions, challenges, relationships that have to be negotiated that have a conservatizing effect. I believe that greater investments in the kinds of social services that he's attempting to do are really the key to unlocking the potential crisis of crime and violence

in our cities, as well as dealing with some of the other sources. of bigger, more consequential crime that almost always go ignored in American cities and American society. And so really, the conversation is almost always relegated to the lowest levels of crime that the people are talking about. And so one thing I think that Mamdani is doing that is important is at least addressing some of these other issues of crime, including the criminal behavior of landlords who allow their housing to devolve into squalor that has a harmful, much more harmful impact on the lives of ordinary people in that city than the kinds of petty crime that the right and the Democratic Party are fixated on. To me, the changing politics of

elected officials don't really change what to me is an obvious point that if we, as a society, we're serious about addressing the issues of crime and violence that we would deal with the social roots of them, that policing is the least effective way of dealing with crime and violence in any society. And it is really indicative of a society that is not serious about dealing with the issues of crime and violence. Just to come back to the moment around 2020, 2021, there are like, particular touchstones that people might recall. For example, you had Robin DiAngelo's book, White Fragility, which was this book written by a white woman, basically exploring white,

white people struggle to talk about racism. Worth noting DeAngelo went on to speak at company retreats and lead seminars, I think it was quite lucrative for her, or the fact that major corporations were publishing statements saying that they supported black voices and stood in solidarity with black people. And what do you think was lost when the politics of racial justice, all of that enthusiasm for social change, became co-opted by industry and corporations, at least to an extent. Oh, 100%. And I think it was probably even more nefarious than that, which is to say that when the pandemic first was unfolding in March, in April, the number one concern, at least in the United States, had to do with the fate of the United States. The number one concern,

of people who had been unofficially designated as essential workers. And these were basically people who were in low-wage service jobs, who did not have the protection of sick days, did not have the protection of time off, and did not have the savings to refuse to do that. So there were big questions about inequality in the United States and who got to stay home and who was forced to work. And this mapped on to a discussion about how in the first two months of the pandemic, that the disproportionate number of people who were dying were black.

And that mapped onto the disproportionate number of essential workers were black and brown people. And so, you know, there was a brief period of time in which corporations were caught with their pants down and said, okay, we will give hazard pay to some of these workers, we'll give them bonuses, because the greed of their companies had been exposed to everyone. And so for a brief period, in some cases, two or three weeks, corporations were giving extra pay to these workers to compensate for their life-threatening task of continuing to show up to their jobs. And then George Floyd was killed. And almost overnight, these corporations, some of whom had begun to renege on their promises to continue hazard pay, had rescinded hazard pay, a company like Kroger in the United States,

a grocery store, had actually threatened to sue workers who had accidentally been overpaid this hazard pay, switched from talking about things like hazard. pay and sick days and all that to Black Lives Matter. And so they pivoted from this debate about what was essentially about issues of race and class to a very narrow discussion about race alone that was really stripped of any content about class, which had to do then with the racial wealth gap that had to do with increasing black homeownership and that had to do with creating a kind of DEI that would facilitate upward mobility into these private corporate elite structures as a way to appeal to a certain class within Black America, that there were many

upwardly mobile black professionals who were certainly receptive to. But these concerns were really different from the concerns of the black essential worker, which had to do with how do I stop my family from being evicted? How do I get access to stick pay, to pay time off, to child care? And so that whole discussion completely disappeared into this very abstract, disaggregated discussion about race that was suddenly unmoored from these questions of class. I feel like you just so eloquently express this argument that I often see or hear from people, that the problem with the politics of 2021 and 2020 was not that the underlying concerns about racism or inequality were illegitimate, but instead that like a relatively small, highly

educated kind of professional class developed a certain political language around those issues that just ordinary voters did not recognize as as their own concerned, right? They leaned into identity politics and not material demands. Like, is that, do you think that's a fair summation of what you were just saying? To me, the larger issue is that you have a political party and the Democratic Party that has always painted itself as a party of ordinary people. that is increasingly out of step with the desires of ordinary people. And so in some ways, yes, it means that they have become more attuned to upwardly mobile professionals and have become completely out of step with the desires of ordinary people on the ground,

because I think that the Democratic Party, perhaps not to the degree as the Republican Party is also captured by the billionaire class because of the way that the Supreme Court has allowed money to flood into American politics in a way that perhaps exists nowhere else on earth in a country that purports to be a democracy. It has created this kind of structural problem. To me, the whole discussion about identity politics makes it appear that the Democratic Party took on the issue of racism and it alienated white voters. The Democratic Party didn't take on the issue of racism. If you go to 2020, 2024 when Kamala Harris lost the race, or even looking back in 2020, the Democratic Party has never really said much about the Republican attack on

DEI. Democratic Party didn't really say anything about the Supreme Court's abolition of affirmative action. Right. And so, you know, I think in many ways, this is part of the kind of rereading history in a way that doesn't quite sink up. That somehow the Democratic Party reflected these woke racial politics. And it's like, I'm not sure the Democratic Party had much to say about racism from 2020 to 2024. I will say. in both the 2016 election and the 2020 election. And this might be what you're referring to. And I do think this is worth talking about.

There was a concern in the party that without Barack Obama at the top of the ticket, they might have a problem getting black voters to actually come out and vote. And so I do think in the 2016 race, you have, Hillary Clinton making all of these kind of solicitous gestures to upwardly mobile black voters where she's talking about she carries hot sauce in her purse. What's something that you always carry with you? Hot sauce. Really?

Yeah. Really? Are you getting information right now? Hot sauce. Hot sauce in my bags, whack? Hot sauce. Really? Yes.

Now, listen, I want you to know. people are going to see this and say, okay, she's painting the black people. Okay. Is it working? He's going to Harlem. She gives a couple of signature speeches on racism, where she uses the phrase systemic racism. So let's put ourselves in the shoes of young black and Latino men and women who face the effects of systemic racism and are made to feel like Their lives are disposable.

And also as part of these speeches, she talks to an imagined white audience, that we white people have to listen more. And so she's doing that while at the same time refusing to campaign in the auto belt, the Rust Belt of the United States. So Ohio, Michigan, in Pennsylvania. In 2020, the Democrats have proof of,

concept. The black voter turnout in 2016 was at a 20-year low. And so they now know that we do need to be concerned about black voter turnout. And so it is true that Joe Biden makes all of these strange gestures that are intended to get the attention again of black professionals. So he announces... I committed that if I'm elected president have an opportunity to appoint someone to the courts will be, I'll appoint the first black woman to the courts. It's required that they have representation now. It's long overdue. Secondly, if I'm elected president, my cabinet, my administration will look like the country. And I commit that I will in fact appoint a, I'll pick a woman to be vice president. He wins and he thanks black voters for putting

him over the top. I meet it, especially those moments, and especially, of those moments for this campaign was that his lowest end, the African American community stood up again for me. You've always had my back, and I'll have yours. His first day in office is like a blizzard of executive orders saying that there's going to be DEI in every department to ensure racial equity. And the problem is that it looks like a lot more is happening than what actually happens on the ground. But it does feed into a Trump narrative that, look, these people will bend over backwards to support these blacks. And they won't do anything for you. They won't come campaign where you're from, but they'll go to a black church in Harlem every other.

week. Or, you know, the optics of 2020, you've got Nancy Pelosi and the Democratic Party leadership on their knees draped in Kenteclaw in the Capitol. Well, during the moment of silence, I'm sure that those who have been hurt by all of this won't mind if you shout out names then. For those who wish to, we will now kneel for our moment of silence. That was the example I was thinking. about. But they won't do anything, you know, for the forgotten working white men. And so it both feeds into that narrative, but without doing anything, right? It's all, it's all rhetoric. It's all promises that are, again, important for that upwardly mobile group of black

professionals who have their legitimate grievances. But for the best majority of black working class people, you know, there's no promise to increase the minimum wage. There's no promise to, you know, create some kind of subsidy for child care. There's no promise for universal health care. The things that would actually transform their lives on the ground so much so that the fall after Joe Biden has been elected, his polls among black voters have begun to take and have begun to take really in unprecedented ways for a sitting Democratic Party president. And it's because of the mismatch between the rhetoric of all of the things that he was going to do to remedy racial inequality, which I,

I'm going to have a black woman be vice president. I'm going to have a black woman on the Supreme Court. And I'm going to make sure there's, you know, equity in our administration. The returns were fairly thin on the bottom. And it helped to create a context that Trump could savagely exploit, which, of course, he did. We have spent a lot of time today talking about. what didn't work coming out of 2020. But I mean, it also, just as a final question,

it was a movement where millions of Americans were kind of willing to imagine that the country could be fundamentally changed. And, you know, I know we've been talking about how six years later, many of the people who participated have been told that it was, like, naive or politically toxic. But are there elements, do you think, of 2020, that survived or elements that,

that we are continuing to live with today? Yeah, I mean, I think that the effectiveness of the movement on one level, which was bringing to the surface the continued problems of racism and inequality in American society, I think is still something that is felt and that there is a movement year,

to be born in opposition to, I think that the mismatch between what Americans want and how we are represented in government has never been more colossal. I mean, 70% of people in this country want some kind of government health care, and it is a complete non-event in U.S. politics today. People recognize 70% of Americans are opposed to these data centers for the continued growth of AI, and it's completely ignored by Democrats and Republicans alike. You have a country where the median family income is around $80,000, but the median wealth of U.S. Congress people is a million dollars. And so this mismatch in politics continues to perpetuate the illusion that the American public is much more conservative than it actually is. But what the American public suffers from is the lack of any meaningful political alternative.

And that is a huge part of the problem. But I do think that we see examples of where the same kind of multiracial, protest, demonstration, and organizing that was at the heart of the 2020 movement continues to express itself. We've seen it in anti-ice organizing. The immigration control enforcement has provoked multiracial networks of people in cities like Los Angeles, in Minneapolis, most well-known, but in Chicago, in Charlotte, the beginnings of that developing, in a small southern city like Memphis and Tennessee. I think there is the potential for this kind of multiracial organizing around the question of

housing. I think we've seen examples of that in the labor movement as well. And so I think that potential exists far and wide. At the heart of politics is the art of persuasion, right? I mean, that's what politics is. You have an agenda and you have to try. to convince people to go with you from point A to point B. And if you can't do that, it's either a bad issue or you have engaged in bad politics.

So we have to rethink about what it means to engage in politics. How do we engage in politics? And the left has to overcome its own cynicism that people can organize across racial difference, across gender difference, across ethnic national difference, and we can build a mass movement. I mean, that's the question that we have to start with, is how do you build the mass movement that is necessary to coerce the elites into satisfying the agenda that we all want?

Kianca, I want to thank you so much for this. It was such a pleasure to listen to you today. Thank you for being so generous with your time. Thanks for the invitation. All right, that is all for today. I'm Jamie Prossom. We'll talk to you tomorrow. For more CBC podcasts, go to cbc.ca.ca slash podcasts.