WATCH: Bill Maher tells Chris Cuomo ‘wokeness’ is killing the Democratic Party

Cuomo began by attempting to portray the term "woke" as a good thing for the country. "…woke is aware and inclusive and there is no cancel culture. It's just accountability. These are not bad things. They are good things. Disagree?"

Maher quickly refuted the statement. "I don't remember the day that term was born. Although I hear, AOC says only old people use it."

"You gave it to us like five years ago, so sorry, we didn't get the memo right away. You know, it's such a high school thing. 'We're not using that anymore.' 'We all wear pink on Wednesdays.' Okay. Use whatever term you want, I don't care. I just got used to this one and yes, in its best sense, if we're talking about, um, being aware of things that we always should have been aware of, more reckonings that we've had, sexual malfeasance, racial injustice, that's all a good thing, but there's a reason why the term 'woke' has come to a signify…doing things that don't make sense."

"I keep saying this to the Democratic party. The reason why you were so toxic is because you have become the party of no common sense. And people see this on their newsfeeds. I mean, you were saying to me in the break, 'people mostly go on with their lives.' They do, but they see things on their phone or on their Facebook page. People pass things around and it's a constant drip, drip, drip of, oh, these people are nuts."

Cuomo responded by claiming that Republicans want to destroy the institutions of government. Maher replied "I’ve seen surveys. How many people in this country know that there are three forms of government? How can you defend the government and the institutions if people don't know what the government has made, made up of, why is it important? They might ask why we have checks and balances. What are those three branches of government? That's the essence of what made this country great, is that the founding fathers, who have been canceled by a lot of people, which again, strikes a lot of people as crazy, is that we check each other."

"And so, you know, that kind of person is not going to care as much about that as something that is much closer to what happens in my home. If my kid comes home from school and tells me, 'they're telling me I'm a racist, what does that word mean Mommy,' a kid, a young kid, old enough to process that."

"Or… comes home and says, 'I think I'm a girl now.' And the school says that I think in California, you have to go by that. If the child wants to change his name to a girl's name, that stuff is right in your home. That's at your kitchen table."

Cuomo dove deeper into the school discussion with Maher and attempted to debunk critical race theory being taught in schools. "You can explain it away as ignorance of what CRT is. Here's my problem with it, and I want to get your take, CRT means nothing to anybody. They don't know what the acronym stands for. It's really not taught anywhere...critical race theory. And the people on the left will mock the ignorance. They're too stupid to know. They still get to vote for you and feel overwhelms facts all the time in elections."

Maher responded, "It's not a Phantom either. There's something going on in the schools that never went on before. Now, I'm not in schools. I have no interaction with children whatsoever, but I do understand this issue because I read accounts from parents, from educators, from people, and this is all over the country."

"If you say that on MSNBC, people think that's a great thing because they're finally teaching and honest history of racism in this country, which I know no one who is against that, I'm certainly not against that, I remember what my education was with American history. We learned about the civil war…they mentioned racism, we understood slavery and Lincoln and blah, blah, blah. Um, but they didn't really go into it any more than gone with the wind goes into it. It was there, but you didn't feel it viscerally."

"Now we're doing that. And I think that's a good thing. People should understand that that's different than teaching that racism is the essence of it. That's what people get upset about or involving children who are probably not old enough or sophisticated enough to understand this very complicated issue with a very complicated history. So, it's that you have families. And we saw this resonate in Virginia, uh, and I have people on all the time who reject this premise, but we just saw it play out. So, it must be real to a lot of people… want to make white kids feel badly about what happened before them and that their lives should be a function of making up for it."

"The kids are taught and sometimes separated into groups, oppressor and oppressed. Again, does a kid even know what those words mean? Would they gravitate toward that? If you hadn't told them? I mean, you're taking something that was getting better, race relations in America… thinking in my view that still a lot of work needs to be. Remedial efforts need to be taken. Still. Racism is part of America, but I did a thing one night about progressive phobia…liberals got afraid to acknowledge progress."

"It's two thoughts in your head. At the same time, you can acknowledge that we have made great progress on all the social issues. And yet there is still more work to be done. We're not saying mission accomplished, just saying, let's live in the year we're living in. You can't come up with good solutions unless you're realistic about what the problem is. I mean, it was only like 10 or 20 years ago that no state in America. I would vote for gay marriage. It was on the ballot like 35 times now it's the law of the land and no one is against it."

"When I was a kid, I grew up in New Jersey, which is not a Southern state, and it was a completely white town. Now a vast majority of Americans want to live in a racially diverse native. That is a sea change just in my lifetime. Again, not mission accomplished, but can we just acknowledge how far we've come and where we are right now?"