Wokeism Was Defeated in November
Editor's Note
For years, American politics have been defined by the advance of an enemy — variously labelled “wokeism,” “DEI,” “the civil rights regime,” “the deep state,” and more — and the occasional, usually ineffective pushback of Republicans.
With the return of Donald Trump to the White House, that enemy seems for the first time in living memory to be genuinely in retreat. Josh Hammer argues that the combination of effective political power and overwhelming public support means that the woke enemy really has been put to rest for the foreseeable future.
This is the second in a series of opinions on the status of the cold civil war in the second Trump era. Read other contributions as they become available here.
The late Andrew Breitbart famously quipped that “politics is downstream of culture.” What he meant is that in order to win elections and secure conservative policy aims, conservatives must first make inroads in the culture. Breitbart wasn’t wrong, but he was only half-right: Culture is downstream of politics too. And because culture is also downstream of politics, “wokeism” is dead — and unlikely to make a comeback any time soon.
First, consider President Donald Trump’s prolific executive order pen.
In the opening week or two of his presidency, Trump almost single-handedly delivered a knockout punch against the woke threat. Above all, his executive order, “Ending Illegal Discrimination and Restoring Merit-Based Opportunity,” has eliminated and will continue to eliminate the vast majority of the peculiar neo-Marxism known as so-called “diversity, equity, and inclusion” from American public and private life. No more will racial and other group-based discrimination be countenanced as long as the purveyors discriminate in “benevolent” fashion. We’ve already seen countless universities and corporations change course. Diversitycrats are leaving, and DEI bureaucracies are imploding. They won’t be rebuilt easily.
Second, consider the Democratic Party’s present political predicament.
Democrats lost a historic election in November. They lost with an explicit DEI candidate — someone who was literally chosen as vice president in 2020, and thus ultimately as presidential nominee in 2024, due to her sex and skin pigmentation. And Democrats lost with an explicit DEI political agenda — one peddled relentlessly on the campaign trail by the party’s leading 2024 surrogate, the godfather of modern left-wing wokeism: former President Barack Obama. That Democrats got shellacked as they did, losing all seven major swing states, amounts to a categorical rejection of the post-2008/post-Obama woke legacy.
The anti-woke coalition now commands both the highest echelons of power and the broad majority of public opinion. What else could victory look like? Whether due to Trump’s wielding of executive power or the people’s verdict on Kamala Harris as less popular than venereal disease, the woke beast has been slain. Sure, it could one day rise anew, like a fetid phoenix from the ashes. But I wouldn’t bet on it.