It may seem counterintuitive to interpret the present moment as a vindication of social causes like feminism, gay rights, and racial equality. The 2024 re-election of Donald Trump as US president is generally agreed to have been a conclusive rejoinder to years of official pieties around social justice and identity politics. As promised, Trump has issued executive orders cancelling federal Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) programs and the admission of transgender athletes in sports, while various authorities inside and outside his administration are moving to overturn any policies tarred with the now-toxic label of “wokeism.” Indeed, some liberals otherwise opposed to Trump’s economic program and/or diplomatic agenda can be heard to argue that the president’s victory in the culture wars is worth his blundering incompetence elsewhere. Inflation can persist, disease can spread, and the international order can collapse, but at least there will be no more kneeling at football games or pronoun-specifying email signatures.

Yet much of the anti-woke rhetoric from the MAGA quarter carries the tacit acknowledgement that the pre-woke iterations of the same causes were actually pretty persuasive. Followers applaud Trump for dismantling DEI guidelines that stretched, rather than established, the basic definitions of the terms—the Trump administration may consist of hapless stooges and unqualified sycophants, but it’s certainly diverse, including women (press secretary Karoline Leavitt, Attorney-General Pam Bondi, and Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard), Hispanics (Secretary of State Marco Rubio), and South Asian Americans (FBI Director Kash Patel). For better or worse, people like these would never have been appointed to such prestigious positions a few generations ago.

In September 2023, the New York Times columnist Ross Douthat asked, “Is ‘Peak Woke’ Behind Us or Ahead?” He noted that “The wave of cancellations and resignations and public-monument removals has receded,” and that “The mood in elite journalism is less ideologically committed and more skeptical and critical.” By that time, there was already a growing backlash against the rigid progressive orthodoxies delineated in books like Ibram X. Kendi’s How To Be Antiracist and Robin DiAngelo’s White Fragility; against the clinical diagnoses of “gender dysphoria” in children and adolescents; and against campus policing of “microaggressions” and “cultural appropriation.” Nor did the backlash come solely from conservatives. In numerous books and articles, a growing number of liberal moderates were lamenting the groupthink and hostility to dissent that had infected the social-justice movement. Examples of this trend included John McWhorter’s Woke Racism: How a New Religion has Betrayed Black America (2021), Greg Lukianoff’s The Cancelling of the American Mind (2023), and Nellie Bowles’s Morning After the Revolution: Dispatches From the Wrong Side of History (2024). 

All this criticism, however—from ordinary citizens as well as the commentariat—developed during the US presidency of Democrat Joe Biden and the prime-ministerial tenure of Canadian Liberal Justin Trudeau. Donald Trump, ousted by the American electorate in November 2020, had little to contribute. Even during Trump’s first presidential term, critics worried that wokeness was merely providing him with rhetorical ammunition. In July 2020, a “Letter on Justice and Open Debate” was published in Harper’s magazine and signed by liberals like Margaret Atwood, Salman Rushdie, Yascha Mounk, Steven Pinker, and Matt Yglesias. “[R]esistance,” the letter’s signatories warned, “must not be allowed to harden into its own brand of dogma or coercion—which right-wing demagogues are already exploiting.”

In other words, the “Great Awokening” was bound to recede in time, no matter who was in office; the pendulum of public opinion was always going to swing back. The debate now is over where the equilibrium lies. Yes, grave problems arose from progressive overreach, with which readers of this publication will already be familiar—the stifling of heterodox opinion, the grim emphasis on grievance and victimhood, the rush to medicalise ideological beliefs about the body and the self, and the academic tendency to divide society into permanent classes of oppressors and oppressed. These serious developments precipitated an industry of rebuttal in books, videos, print and online magazines, and via social networks. But the rebuttal sometimes focused on relatively minor instances of political presumption—a junior professor’s attack on Western civilisation here, a small-town drag story-reading there—that were turned into profit-driven “angertainment” and hyped out of all proportion to their real-world impact. In other cases, controversies were contained entirely within the media itself, as clumsy ad campaigns or a celebrity’s intemperate post set off storms of electronic outrage that consumed everyone except average people. There were some very troubling implications to wokeness, but there were also some very cynical exploitations of it, by advocates and opponents alike.

Without any definitive leaders or concrete statements of principle, it is difficult to pinpoint the inception of the species of radical progressivism now known as “wokeism.” It might be dated from the Black Lives Matter protests that grew in response to the violent deaths of Trayvon Martin in 2012 and Michael Brown in 2014, or Canada’s “Idle No More” wave of indigenous activism that began in 2012, or the 2015 publicity surrounding transgender celebrity Caitlyn Jenner, or the 2017 ascent of the #MeToo hashtag that identified female victims of sexual assault or harassment by men, or George Floyd’s 2020 death at the hands of Minneapolis police. Each of these developments ignited heated controversy in the media, business, and government, but they all arose long after the historic legal and cultural breakthroughs of the 1950s, ’60s, and ’70s—civil rights for minorities, the banning of racial and sexual discrimination, the relaxation of divorce laws, women’s mandated access to birth control and career opportunities, and so on. Even same-sex marriage, sanctioned by jurisdictions around the world over the 1990s and into the 2010s, seemed to predate wokeness. Many people today may be put off by the perceived radicalism of “the woke Left,” but the radicalism of prior decades has long since gone mainstream.

Derangement Discourse

Accusations of Trump Derangement Syndrome and Trump himself are both products of the social-media age.

QuilletteGeorge Case

The Left has certainly got a lot wrong over the last ten years or so, but they got a lot right during the previous sixty. During the months when the language of identity politics was at its most strident, commentators of all persuasions cautioned that progressives were moving beyond traditional liberalism towards a post-liberal suppression of thought and speech—a woke Terror after the progressive Revolution. In a June 2020 essay for New York magazine titled, “Is There Still Room For Debate?,” for instance, Andrew Sullivan observes:

It’s very reminiscent of totalitarian states where you have to compete to broadcast your fealty to the cause. In these past two weeks, if you didn’t put up on Instagram or Facebook some kind of slogan or symbol of your wokeness, you were instantly suspect.

Sullivan was right. Liberalism fails when it refuses to accommodate difference. But it is the anti-woke Right that now needs to be reminded of this truth. The state should never be in the business of enforcing any particular ideology, but nor should it be in the business of suppressing it, either.

It is important to recognise how many important changes have already been achieved, and how deeply they’ve been accepted across the political spectrum. Ideally, the Left will defend their oldest and best accomplishments, and the Right will acknowledge whether they want to turn back the clock to 2015 or all the way to 1890. So, race-based hiring and admissions quotas are out, but we still agree that all people are equal before the court and at the ballot box, right? Maybe not every unwelcome approach by a male towards a female constitutes sexual assault, but women are still entitled to choose their own partners and not be crudely demeaned, correct? There are only two sexes, fine, but there can still be many acceptable sexual preferences, can’t there? 

Conservative triumphalism might be pinned down on broader questions too. Freedom of speech should encompass potentially offensive statements, of course, but we can still call out demonstrable lies, yes? In the search for truth, no ideas should be off limits, but we still recognise objective facts and expert authority, don’t we? Schools shouldn’t be indoctrinating students with fashionable political dogmas, but shouldn’t the ideas still be made available for the students to consider and debate? Public policy should reflect popular will rather than the doctrine of a managerial overclass, but do we not still want checks and balances on whoever’s in charge? Government should be efficient, but it should still be based on due process and rule of law, surely?

As the MAGA cultural bulldozer rolls forward, it’s these last considerations that have become most urgent. Donald Trump’s staunchest supporters have made a lot of noise about their aim to “restore” bygone ideals, but they are notably vague about what those ideals are, or how pluralistic is the population that holds them. Another New York Times columnist, David French, has written of the backlash:

In the contest between a love for liberty and a hatred for the left, hatred won. … The anti-woke right spoke the language of liberty when its freedoms were under threat, but now we know the terrible truth: The movement was about power all along.

The Left tried to shut down open discourse to preclude the possibility of giving and taking offence. However, the contemporary Right is now trying to shut down open discourse by cutting funds for university research into politically contentious issues, prohibiting protests over others, and removing troublesome references to prejudice or discrimination from official histories. Do tactics like these really represent bygone nonpartisan ideals long overdue for restoration? Or do they just exchange one suite of self-serving illiberal policies for another? Who are the snowflakes now?

Both sides of the culture wars can learn complementary lessons from the rise and fall of wokeness. Social-justice activists appeared to believe that racism, sexism, homophobia, and other forms of bigotry were ineradicable and therefore had to be aggressively suppressed. They were often unwilling to acknowledge meaningful advances toward tolerance and equality, which is why strict new standards of language and behaviour had to be imposed to combat widespread “privilege,” “supremacy,” and “hatred.” The political and cultural revolt from the Right and the liberal centre showed just how few people were willing to accept these standards, and the premises used to justify them.

A different lesson awaits the anti-woke activists, who have turned out to be just as dogmatic and self-righteous as their opponents. As the sanctimonious jargon of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion becomes obsolete (or a punchline), and as the intensity of the culture wars abates (at least for a while), we will find that we are still faced with intractable political, economic, geopolitical, and environmental problems, not to mention the problems produced by unexpected crises that don’t lend themselves to critical deconstructions in partisan journals, or entertaining wisecracks on social media. Like the apologists for Benito Mussolini a hundred years ago, today’s apologists for national strongmen should reflect on whether the overthrow of fundamental democratic rights is a price worth paying to get the trains to run on time. And perhaps it is time for the traditional-values crowd to join their erstwhile foils and admit how much social justice has long been realised, and to confirm, once and for all, that they too approve of it.