South Park Mourns the Death of Woke
An adult cartoon that reveled in the anti-woke backlash reckons with its impact.
Opinion, by Evan Urquhart
It’s hard to feel sorry for Eric Cartman. While all four of South Park’s leading fourth graders are foul-mouthed little assholes, it’s Cartman who the show often portrays as genuinely malevolent. But in the most recent episode, “Sermon on the Mount” it’s Cartman who is the first to object to, and the most deeply affected by, the excesses of the Trump administration.
The episode holds a mirror up to institutional capitulation to the evil of the Trump administration, but it begins with Cartman despondent that his favorite NPR show (to laugh at) has been canceled by the president.
What follows is as scattershot and low brow as the South Park I remember from my college days, back when the show’s politics were still kinda anti-religion and pro-gay rather than kinda anti-woke and pro-MAGA. Cartman’s depression at the death of woke forms the B story, while the A story has the rest of the town rising up against Trump for imposing Jesus (the literal guy, who is a character) on their elementary students, only to back down under pressure in the form of Trump screaming “I’ll sue you!”
There’s a feeling of catharsis to the A story. For all its absurdity, at core it’s just reflecting exactly what we’ve seen in the first few months of the second Trump presidency. The president has unilaterally declared the end of the previous cultural era, repeatedly ignored or broken laws that ought to have protected the freedom of his opponents not to go along with it, extorted settlements from his ideological enemies, and the most powerful people and institutions in the country are simply knuckling under.
The catharsis of the A story, of a kinda MAGA-coded cartoon reflecting reality in ways most liberal-coded institutions haven’t been, may briefly ease the pain of watching it all unfold for many in Blue America. However, for my money it’s the B story, where the death of woke lands Cartman in a deep depression and he decides to kill himself (ineffectively, with the emissions from an electric car), that feels a bit more chewy.
The bugbear of South Park in recent years has been the excesses of wokeness. Predictably this has meant being extremely unkind to trans people, perpetuating the myth that including trans women in sports means allowing men to dominate women athletes.
Creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone have followed the trend of describing cultural clashes over what is too offensive for mass culture as an attack on their free speech. As with other figures from the right, the show took the position that right wing speech can only be free if no one from the left ever criticizes it.
In the episode, Cartman realizes that woke is dead, and it leads to an identity crisis. In a world where everyone is expected to be racist and homophobic and spewing slurs he’s lost the only thing that made him special. His role seems obviously that of a self-insert for the creators, and as such, the subtext betrays a longing for a world so recently dominated by woke, and the ability to tweak and make fun of wokeness safely.
What this subtext leaves out is agency. Cartman in the show’s world didn’t cause the death of wokeness or even wish for it. He’s one hundred percent innocent (much more so than the character is in many storylines). He wanted to laugh at NPR’s sad African lesbians, he’d never dreamed of canceling them!
At no point does the show hint that the excesses of the anti-wokeness crowd or their years of work conflating criticism and cultural change with censorship could ever have contributed to this new era of outright government censorship and repression. There’s a sense of sorrow, but no hint of responsibility.
Of all of the cultural products of anti-wokeness, South Park is so far the first to have treated the free-speech absolutism they once espoused as a principle worth standing by in the Trump era. Maybe that should be enough. But I can’t stop thinking that they’re the ones who did this! They made wokeness into the culture’s greatest bogeyman. They demonized minorities asking for equal treatment, pooh-poohed social change, perpetuated lies, and coddled a growing reactionary movement who, despite its violence and its open Nazis, were never taken seriously.
The widespread belief that NPR lesbians and trans women in sports were a greater hazard than Nazis and extremist Christians was the most catastrophic failure of conventional wisdom in my lifetime. I’m glad South Park is willing to risk cancellation to tell the truth about this Trumpist world we’re stuck with, but I can’t resist the urge to say: You assholes caused this.
Evan Urquhart is the founder of Assigned Media.