Woke is the New Disco

Hollywood and the Harris Campaign

Woke is the new disco, and nowhere is this cultural shift more evident than in the parallel decline of Hollywood and the collapse of Kamala Harris's presidential campaign. Both share a fatal flaw – an insistence on catering to an ideological bubble while alienating vast swaths of the potential audience. For Hollywood, this miscalculation carries existential implications. It’s time to move on.

For the past seven years, every prospective film and television project has gone through an ideological filter before two or three Standards and Practices apparatchiks massage it further into conformity. This aligns all projects (with rare exceptions) with a subset of Americans and alienates the rest, which is not ideal for a business trying to be popular and make money. Consider the audience Hollywood has chosen to disdain and ignore: half the country's voters, 40% of Americans who own guns, another 40% who attend church monthly, and the 74% who live outside the West Coast, New York or New England. Add to this the roughly 50% of Americans who are male. This isn't just a demographic miscalculation – it's an industry-wide blind spot that precisely mirrors the Harris campaign's fatal error. Both Hollywood and Harris speak to an America that exists mainly in Hollywood HR departments, Columbia’s faculty lounge, and at CNN and MSNBC. America is changing the channel on all that.

The Harris campaign's disconnect from reality was nowhere more evident than in its messaging to men. Despite having Hollywood's top creative talent at its disposal, the campaign produced this embarrassing appeal:

You would think that a campaign infused with Hollywood people would be able to make a commercial. But this failure reveals a deeper problem: the underlying contempt for the audience. Wokeness, both in politics and entertainment, carries within it a strong and explicit element of hostility – particularly toward white people and men. While this approach initially gained compliance through social pressure and corporate acquiescence a few years ago, such accommodations were, of course, temporary. Amongst the people, and in courtrooms, by 2024 wokeness has become toxic. To a large part of the audience, it is an embarrassing, widely resented, relic of the past, and the people need to see that acknowledged by candidates. They, especially men, need to see wokeness disavowed.

At this point, it is not enough to be not woke. One must be anti-woke. 

What does anti-woke mean? It means having a preference for meritocracy, ambition, freedom, and humor. It also means, in an era where cancellations have become ideological weapons, handling accusations with fact-based, level-headed judgment to avoid witch hunts and injustice. It means preferring to think about ambitious plans rather than petty grievances. Despite mainstream media resistance, this cultural tendency gained momentum over the past few years. One key reason: the achievements of the not-woke simply overwhelmed the constant carping and non-achievements of the woke. Ultimately, people want their country to do well. 67% percent of voters knew that the country was on the wrong track partly because this woke philosophy had gained some purchase. Many seem to agree with Quentin Tarantino, Chris Rock, Donald Glover, and Kevin Hart that the obsession with politics holds TV and film back.

It did not appeal to the people when the Democratic Party broke all precedents and began to accuse everyone in the Trump administration of crimes, facilitate massive civil cases against them, or repeatedly violate the attorney-client privilege.

It did not appeal to most people when the Democratic Party organized social media censorship at scale.  

People eventually did get sick of those accusations against men that seemed obviously manufactured and false. People care about real, serious, and substantiated allegations, but no one can take Julie Swetnick seriously, Jean Carroll seems like a nut with weird fantasies, and Stacey Williams’ last minute Trump accusation fell apart in less than one news cycle. 

Few believed that Trump was a legitimate felon. You could not convince 100 random Americans that the “felonies” Trump was accused of were legitimate felonies. These criminal accusations were truly a gift to the GOP from the politics gods (second only to “defund the police”). Nothing better illustrates that the D party lives in a bubble than their inability to anticipate the public reaction to his indictments. 

No one outside the bubble believed that Trump or the whole GOP was “fascist,” a “Nazi” or “literally Hitler.” One hundred percent of the time devoted to that name calling eroded credibility and was time wasted (especially while the left coddled anti-semitic protestors who actually were pretty close to being “literally Hitler”). 

People on the whole did not believe that there was a right wing insurrection on January 6. If there is a right wing insurrection, to be honest, you will know it. 

You can pretend that the audience is your fantasy audience, but it is not true and you do so at your peril. Kamala Harris was the wokest of the woke - an identity that by 2024 had become 'problematic.' The assumption was that people outside the bubble either didn't matter or would be forced to live in the new cultural world. But, as it turns out, if you live in a bubble, you lose.

Back in Hollywood, executives made a similar assumption: that audiences had no alternative to their messaging because every major network was pushing the same ideology. In a difficult time, this has unnecessarily made the business more difficult. Important genres like comedy have been particularly suppressed, as they don't easily conform to ideological restrictions. There are no good consequences to not giving customers what they want. US Box Office is down, churn has been high, and, while there are multiple reasons, creative constraints are one reason.

Suddenly when the wokeness came, new American series that customers thought were great (IMDb > 8) became fewer and fewer. 

In my very first Substack, I wrote that 

If you are happy with today’s criticism and with resultingly simple minded, middle of the road and mediocre shows, then you may be an Essayist. You must believe that everything in our modern life — our art, our flirtations, our fashion, everything, should be governed by whatever politics prevail today. You believe in consensus and control first, not art first. You must choose one. And if you choose politics over art, if you embrace unfreedom as your core creed, you are denying art and the voice and humanity of those artists. That is an expression of hate. Don’t fool yourself into believing that this is a new or innovative idea. Goebbels had it before you. And other oppressors before him. 

To succeed in art, you have to put art before politics. There are few exceptions.  

Why did Hollywood people embrace wokeness with such fervor? For most people it is conformity. Hiring decisions are subjective in Hollywood, so there is always pressure to conform. In addition, at this point some people believe that if not for wokeness they would not have their jobs. (They’re probably right about that.) 

Hollywood is having a difficult time partly because, like Kamala Harris, it has been denying the reality of the audience. It has not been meeting customer expectations, mostly because it disdains them. It is time to focus on doing well, making great shows, hiring the best people, and responding to customers. Meeting customers where they are. Giving the people what they want. Because making customers the enemy of your industry is never viable.

The Kamala Harris campaign, and indeed Kamala Harris’s political career, is over and cannot be saved. But Hollywood can be – and must be – saved and it is time to save it. 

In 1979, disco dominated radio and the Billboard Top 100. Then Comiskey Park had disco demolition night and disco died, to be succeeded by punk and new wave. Things change.

Personally, as you likely know, I got the very shortest end of the woke stick. Perhaps more than anyone (who wasn’t actually guilty of something). Seven years ago on this very day, I was supposed to get married. That did not happen. Whatever children might have been, never were. My case is the most absurd of all Hollywood woke purges, as I discussed at length here. Hollywood should make more fun movies and pursue excellence without restraint. It should serve everyone and meet the culture where it is. The super woke may have to leave, or perhaps some can walk it back. But Hollywood could also start by confronting the original sin of this recent era by distinguishing between those excluded for legitimate reasons and those purged in a feral moment of vindictive frenzy to capture power.

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Roy Price was an executive at Amazon.com for 13 years, where he founded Amazon Video and Studios. He developed 16 patented technologies. His shows have won 14 Best Series Emmys and Globes. He was formerly at McKinsey & Co. and The Walt Disney Co. He graduated from Harvard College in 1989.