Trump killed woke. For now.
Tuesday's election was not a landslide, but it was at least a temporary triumph over wokism.
Written by Bo Winegard.
Was that the death knell of wokism? On Tuesday, voters decisively elected Donald Trump, elevating to the presidency a political iconoclast who has violated virtually every standard of woke decorum and who has declared with vulgar glee that “Everything woke turns to shit.” His disdain for wokism is not some strange eccentricity; it is a crucial part of his movement and his appeal. A vote for Trump was emphatically a vote against wokism.
Trump’s win, though not a landslide, was comprehensive. This was no squeaker in the swing states or fluke of the electoral college. Trump is currently on pace to win the popular election by roughly 2%. Virtually every county, from urban to rural, moved to the right. What is more, Trump performed reasonably well with core Democratic groups, including Hispanics—especially Hispanic men.1 As Rich Lowry at the National Review put it:
Donald Trump assembled the biggest, most diverse GOP coalition in decades while running further to the right on immigration, crime, and the culture than perhaps any major-party presidential candidate in U.S. history.
One can forward various plausible theories to explain Trump’s remarkable success on Tuesday, for an election is a complicated social phenomenon with multiple causes. But not all theories are equally plausible, and we should guard against using the election as some enigmatic inscription upon which we can impose our preferred reading. Voters did not decide that we need to reconsider the role of the individual in history or reconceptualize the metaphysics of masculinity; and they did not reject Kamala Harris because they are sexist or racist.
The three most plausible, data-supported causes of Trump’s win are (1) anger about inflation; (2) discontent with mass immigration and a chaotic border; and (3) antipathy toward wokism.
Of these, anger about inflation was probably the most important. Inflation reached a peak of 9.1% in the United States, largely driven by exogenous supply shocks from the COVID pandemic, but also exacerbated by an enormous ($2 trillion) and likely unnecessary stimulus package, the American Rescue Plan. From early 2022 to the middle of 2023, food prices increased even more steeply than overall inflation, which is especially rankling to people since they are reminded of grocery costs every week when they shop.
In exit polls and surveys, voters consistently rated inflation as the most important issue. Unsurprisingly, those voters overwhelmingly chose Donald Trump over Kamala Harris, who, because of inescapable circumstances and her own incompetence, was unable to distance herself from Joe Biden, the senescent symbol of economic volatility and rising costs. Voters in the United States, as elsewhere around the globe, wanted change. And Harris, the vice president, the candidate who could not think of something she would have done differently from Joe Biden, seemed like more of the same failed status quo, which like a dying mechanical clock is somehow both tedious and erratic.
Immigration is probably the second most important cause. Joe Biden’s immigrant-friendly rhetoric and reckless dismantling of Trump’s border policies led to an unprecedented surge in immigration. Throughout the Biden administration, illegal immigration rates have been high and, more importantly and disconcertingly for conservatives, the pace of demographic change in the United States has increased dramatically. From March of 2022 to March of 2024, the foreign-born population grew by a staggering 5.1 million.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, this inundation of immigrants coupled with crime and chaos at the border has been accompanied by a shift to the right in the public’s attitude about immigration. In a June Gallup poll, 55% wanted a decrease in immigration, whereas only 16% wanted an increase. By contrast, in May of 2020, 28% wanted a decrease, whereas 34% wanted an increase. Meanwhile, Axios and the New York Times both found majority support for mass deportations.
Donald Trump fulminated about the border and raged against illegal immigration, while Kamala Harris, once tasked with “stemming the migration at our southern border,” spoke in stilted and unconvincing terms about her history of prosecuting transnational gangs and her administration’s support for James Lankford’s immigration bill. Voters did not believe Harris. And they did believe Trump. In one exit poll, 90% of people whose most important issue was immigration voted for Donald Trump.
Running Kamala Harris, the quondam “border czar,” in such an electoral environment was a bit like running Hannibal Lecter to be the head chef at a new restaurant. In some sense, the surprising thing is not that Harris lost, but that she did not lose by more.
Wokism is probably the third most important cause, but the one upon which I wish to focus for the remainder of this essay.
Starting perhaps in 2011, a bizarre identitarian ideology spread from universities and other elite institutions through the country more broadly, aided by new technologies and eager status-seeking journalists and politicians. Some have called this ideology wokism and have called the era of its apparent triumph The Great Awokening. Others have diligently avoided the term ‘woke’, opting instead for radical progressivism or some other less polemical epithet. However, Noah Carl has persuasively argued that woke is a useful and perhaps indispensable term. He defines wokism as:
a specific ideology which sees identity groups like sex and race as the primary units of society; which attributes to some groups the status of victims and to others the status of oppressors; and which posits that various ‘structural’ and ‘systemic’ forces stymie members of the former groups while conferring ‘privilege’ on members of the latter.
Wokism has arguably always been unpopular among the broad populace, but by 2015, it had become the bien-pensant ideology among professionals in the knowledge economy. Enthusiasts of this ideology began promulgating strange doctrines about the pervasiveness of sexism and racism in the United States while searching diligently for thought crimes and microaggressions which they could punish. They also elevated race-obsessed “intellectuals” such as Ibram X. Kendi and Robin DiAngelo, who were feted by the media and treated as seers who had penetrated the lies and illusions of American liberalism to expose its ugly racist sexist ableist homophobic and transphobic heart.
By 2019, the woke revolution was so successful that trivial offenses such as appropriately using the word “niggardly” were threats to a person’s career. Many endured auto-da-fé in which they apologized for their affronts to sacred woke dogmas. Righteous fervor continued to swell until the woke revolution exploded into the streets during the 2020 Black Lives Matter riots, leading to the destruction of billions of dollars worth of property and over twenty deaths. Woke was regnant, and Democrats embraced it, often with ardor—including Kamala Harris, who said “You have to stay woke!” while eventually adopting many bizarre woke policies during her abortive 2019 run for president. (More on these later.)
There were always signs that woke was not so popular with ordinary Americans as with professors, pundits, and media mavens. And in the 2019-2020 Democratic primaries, after much jockeying, one of the least woke (though by no means not woke) candidates, Joe Biden, a 77-year-old white man from a small town in Pennsylvania, prevailed to face Donald Trump.
Many national voters thought that Joe Biden was a pallid and inoffensive centrist. They wanted a normal, moderate administration. Those who followed politics closely knew this was misguided since Biden did not in fact run as a cultural centrist. He ran as an out-of-touch old white man who desperately needed to placate the activist part of his party. He was too wizened and feeble to battle the zealots. Therefore, he advertised his knowledge of intersectional logic, vowing to appoint a black woman to the Supreme Court and to the Vice Presidency. He did both. And he chose a transgender person, Rachel Levine, as assistant secretary for health. Levine would become a vocal advocate for “gender affirming care” for minors, claiming that such care is “safe and necessary.”
Biden continued to capitulate to the activists in his coalition, routinely espousing woke wisdom while releasing executive orders and presidential memoranda full of woke buzzwords. On his first day, for example, he released an “Executive Order on Preventing and Combating Discrimination on the Basis of Gender Identity or Sexual Orientation,” which is replete with intersectional logic:
Discrimination on the basis of gender identity or sexual orientation manifests differently for different individuals, and it often overlaps with other forms of prohibited discrimination, including discrimination on the basis of race or disability. For example, transgender Black Americans face unconscionably high levels of workplace discrimination, homelessness, and violence, including fatal violence.
On February fourth he released a “Memorandum on Advancing the Human Rights of Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Queer, and Intersex Persons Around the World,” which seemed to ensconce the principles of wokism in official American foreign policy:
When foreign governments move to restrict the rights of LGBTQI+ persons or fail to enforce legal protections in place, thereby contributing to a climate of intolerance, agencies engaged abroad shall consider appropriate responses, including using the full range of diplomatic and assistance tools and, as appropriate, financial sanctions, visa restrictions, and other actions.
Biden also hyperbolically denounced a perfectly reasonable collection of voting rules in Georgia, calling them an “atrocity” and “Jim Crow on steroids.” What is more, Biden’s wokism bogged down his signature legislative achievements. In an article entitled “DEI killed the CHIPS Act,” authors Matt Cole and Chris Nicholson noted:
Commentators have noted that CHIPS and Science Act money has been sluggish. What they haven’t noticed is that it’s because the CHIPS Act is so loaded with DEI pork that it can’t move.
The law contains 19 sections aimed at helping minority groups, including one creating a Chief Diversity Officer at the National Science Foundation, and several prioritizing scientific cooperation with what it calls “minority-serving institutions.” A section called “Opportunity and Inclusion” instructs the Department of Commerce to work with minority-owned businesses and make sure chipmakers “increase the participation of economically disadvantaged individuals in the semiconductor workforce.”
Biden was a woke Wile E Coyote being destroyed by his own dynamite. Perhaps this is why a June 2024 Gallup poll found that 56% of Americans found Biden too liberal, whereas only 44% found Trump too conservative.
History has a grim sense of humor and in July, Biden’s intersectional choice for vice president, Kamala Harris, succeeded him as the Democratic nominee after his obstinate ego finally relented to the reality that his own party was willing to embarrass him publicly if he refused to step down. Harris, however, lived down to her critics who claimed she was a DEI hire. She was never capable of speaking extemporaneously and though she ran a disciplined campaign, her lack of talent and close association with Biden were probably dispositive.
However, there was another problem. In 2019, Harris was woke. Real woke. So woke that your lifelong Democrat parents didn’t even understand what she was talking about. And by 2024, the woke revolution was retreating. The electorate had changed. People were sick of pronoun policing. People were sick of self-flagellating. People were sick of genuflecting to the intolerant god of wokism.
Trump and his campaign immediately began to assail Harris for being too progressive, running advertisements in which her own previous opinions—restructuring ICE, banning fracking, defunding the police, et cetera—were used against her. Perhaps their most effective advertisement ridiculed Harris for her extravagant views on transgender reassignment surgery in 2019:
Kamala supports taxpayer funded sex-changes for prisoners… It’s hard to believe but it’s true. Even the liberal media was shocked Kamala supports taxpayer funded sex-changes for prisoners and illegal aliens… Kamala is for they/them. Donald Trump is for you.
Astonishingly the advertisement was not mendacious. Harris had in fact supported such policies, as she wrote on the 2019 ACLU questionnaire:
It is important that transgender individuals who rely on the state for care receive the treatment they need, which includes access to treatment associated with gender transition.
The important thing about this advertisement is not that taxpayer funded sex-changes are a crucial problem in the country or a crushing burden on taxpayers, but rather that it illustrates how culturally alien the Democratic Party is from ordinary Americans. Kamala Harris is a person who wants to take your money to pay for an exotic and unnecessary surgery for a criminal or an illegal alien and then force you to call the person who is obviously a man a woman.
Kamala Harris and her team realized early that the woke revolution had in fact waned and worked hard to moderate her positions. She rarely talked about divisive identity issues, changed her mind about fracking, ICE, and policing, and stressed that she would be a president for all Americans. Harris’s convention speech only used the term “race” once, and used it not to highlight a specific identity but to accept the nomination on behalf of all Americans of all races. Too little. Too late. Americans did not buy Harris’s transmutation into a moderate anti-identitarian politician. In one survey, swing voters who cast their ballot for Trump reported that “Kamala Harris is focused more on cultural issues like transgender issues rather than helping the middle class” was their top reason for voting against her.
And so Kamala Harris lost the election to Donald Trump, a candidate whose rhetoric did not just violate woke shibboleths but shattered them into thousands of splinters. Some examples:
On Arnold Palmer and his manhood: “When he took showers with the other pros, they came out of there. They said, ‘Oh my god. That’s unbelievable.’”
On the Civil War and negotiation: “The Civil War was so fascinating, so horrible… So many mistakes were made. See, there was something I think could have been negotiated, to be honest with you. I think you could have negotiated that. All the people died, so many people died. You know, that was the disaster… Abraham Lincoln, of course, if he negotiated it, you probably wouldn’t even know who Abraham Lincoln was.”
On immigrants and their baleful effects: “They’re poisoning the blood of our country.”
On Haitians and their unusual culinary habits: “In Springfield, they’re eating the dogs. The people that came in. They’re eating the cats. They’re eating…they’re eating the pets.”
A vote for Trump was unequivocally a vote against woke. And Trump won both in the electoral college and in the popular vote. Trump killed woke, which was already wounded, already perhaps even dying. But not yet dead.
Some might be skeptical of this bold claim. Nathan Cofnas, for example, wrote an incisive piece, Wokism is Just Beginning, in which he contended, “Regardless of who wins the 2024 presidential election, wokesters are on a path to achieve absolute power in the next ten to thirty years.” In a striking analogy, he argued that people who have asserted that wokism is receding are like a scholar in the year 1101 who claims that Christianity is retreating because the “number of killings perpetrated in the name of Christianity… fell precipitously in 1100. Production of swords with cruciform hilts also dropped off, and the percentage of Europeans aged 18–60 who agreed with the statement ‘It is important to wage Holy War for Christianity’ had gone down slightly from its historic high in 1095.”
According to Cofnas, the apparent decline in wokism is more illusory than real, more a result of victory and consolidation than defeat. The young who are the future are more woke than the boomers and gen Xers who currently control institutions and protect them from complete “wokification.” Thus the future looks woke because the young are woke.
In Cofnas’s view, only a hereditarian revolution can actually kill woke because so long as people believe in the equality thesis, they will be vulnerable to woke ideology. Trump may have shattered woke shibboleths, but he has not promoted hereditarianism in a sustained or serious way. Thus he has not killed woke. Perhaps at best he is like Julian the Apostate, the Neoplatonic emperor who opposed Christianity in Rome and attempted to resurrect ancient traditions. As we know, he failed. Christianity triumphed. So too will woke.
Some of Cofnas’s arguments are plausible and should give pause to anybody who believes (as I do) that Trump has killed wokism. However, the analogy to Christianity is misleading and Cofnas leaves out theory and data that point to a real cultural change.
In 1101, as Cofnas himself noted, he could have been excommunicated or potentially even killed for criticizing Christianity. Today, one can pillory wokism without worry of prison or torture or official excommunication. Furthermore, in 1101, there was no organized public resistance to Christianity. Today, the entire Republican Party, which just won control of the presidency, the Senate, and likely the House, routinely mocks wokism, with one prominent Republican governor calling woke a “mind virus.”
In his piece, Cofnas wrote, “Not mentioned by the Economist is the fact that the woke agenda is being championed by the Democratic Party—the political party that represents America’s establishment elites.” But this is only partially true. As noted above, Kamala Harris ran a decidedly unwoke campaign, one that largely avoided talking about racism or sexism or transgenderism or other identitarian issues. Certainly she was not out on the stump telling voters to stay woke in 2024! What is more, the woke policies and rhetoric that Biden/Harris had previously embraced clearly hurt Harris. She paid an electoral price for advocating wokism. And losing elections will do more to change a culture than thousands of essays. Political parties really want to win.
In the aftermath of Harris’s defeat, many Democrats and liberal pundits have argued not that the Democratic Party should move further to the left culturally, but rather that it needs to ditch alienating woke elitism which drives away rural and working-class voters. Here, for example, is Ezra Klein reflecting upon the Democratic Party after the loss:
I do think a lot of Democrats have alienated themselves from the culture that many people, and particularly many men, now consume. I think they lost people like Rogan by rejecting them, and it was a terrible mistake.
Here is Maureen Dowd (not a paragon of progressivism, obviously, but she’s writing this at the New York Times):
Some Democrats are finally waking up and realizing that woke is broke … Donald Trump won a majority of white women and remarkable numbers of Black and Latino voters and young men.
And here’s Josh Barro:
But the truly grim irony about the political cost of this promise is that, of course, the federal government that only got seven electric-vehicle-charging stations built in two years has performed zero transgender surgeries on detained migrants. That’s the Democrats in a nutshell: the party that promises trans surgeries for undocumented immigrants but doesn’t deliver them.
Cofnas is certainly correct that the young are woker than the old, and he is right to worry they will remain that way as they age. On the other hand, young people, especially young men, just turned out for Trump in huge numbers. We will have to wait for exact numbers, but it appears that Trump won around 40% of the vote under 30, which represents a roughly 13-point swing from 2020 and a 23-point swing since 2008, when Barack Obama dominated with the young. In the “blue wall” states (Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania) the youth turnout for Trump was even more impressive.
Many of the young men (and some of the young women!) who voted for Trump listen to Joe Rogan and other decidedly anti-woke podcasts. They find political correctness and woke pieties rankling. And they may represent a wall between institutions and a potential recrudescence of wokism.
None of this is to say that every promoter of woke ideas will disappear or that academic journals will suddenly publish articles about race and IQ or that Harvard will teem with conservative ideas and praise for Western Civilization. The death of woke does not eliminate every trace of woke. It is still out in the air lingering like gun smoke after a battle. And obviously it could still return. The dead do not always stay dead.
It is perhaps fitting that Trump killed woke since he did more than anyone to spread it. No, he did not create it. But he did supercharge it. One should celebrate his victory over it. But one should also worry that he may dig up and reanimate its corpse with his boorish rhetoric and extremism. Right now Democrats are running away from progressivism, but if “the Resistance” returns, galvanized by MAGA overreach, do not be surprised if Gavin Newsom becomes the heroic bête noire of Trump while encouraging Democrats to embrace wokism once again.
Bo Winegard is executive editor at Aporia.
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Analysts should avoid hyperbole about realignments here. G. W. Bush, after all, won the 2004 election with 44% of Hispanics. Nevertheless, Trump’s success with Hispanics was impressive.
"Today, the entire Republican Party, which just won control of the presidency, the Senate, and likely the House, routinely mocks wokism" - A quibble: You can mock wokism, but not the idea that (I claim) inexorably leads to wokism, namely, the equality thesis. Until we can do *that*, the leviathan will live on.
Woke peaked in 2020 and has been in unremitting decline ever since. Even leftist spaces view that period as a bad dream that they would collectively prefer to forget. Academia remains "Woke" in its antipathy to hereditarianism, but that has been the case since the 1970s.
I am much more concerned about the rightoid revanche going too far - not just on account of the damage it will cause by itself, but in its potential to revive otherwise moribund Wokeness.