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.
