With Donald Trump, it is perpetually difficult to gauge what matters and what doesn’t — where does the bluster end and the change begin, and how seriously should we take him at all? Will Hillary actually get locked up? Will Greenland get conquered? He has been signing endless executive orders to show he means business, but some of them, like his attempt to end birthright citizenship, seem destined to die in the courts.
Where Trump has gotten aggressive is around dismantling the many diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives that Democrats like Joe Biden have long supported. Trump will eliminate DEI from the Pentagon and has empowered his acolytes in the federal government to ferret out anything that has the scent of social justice. Working from the rubric established by Christopher Rufo, a prominent conservative activist who has warred against critical race theory and other diversity policies nationwide, Trump is rapidly rolling back the identity-based trainings and curricula that have been proliferating in the government for the past four years. Corporate America is already onboard, with companies increasingly abandoning their DEI commitments and channeling their inner Mark Zuckerberg, who recently peacocked for Joe Rogan and promised more “masculine” energy from Meta, whatever that may mean. The state of play was best summed up by an anonymous banker in the Financial Times: “We can say ‘retard’ and ‘pussy’ without the fear of getting cancelled … it’s a new dawn.”
A new dawn, indeed. Two realities can simultaneously be true: The social-justice, or “woke,” left was needlessly insular and language obsessed, alienating large swaths of the public with its commitment to Manichaean moralizing, and the anti-woke backlash, early into the second Trump term, is going to be corrosive. As much as the great swath of anti-woke writers, politicians, and pundits would insist otherwise, they share many of the same pathologies as their intellectual rivals. Ibram X. Kendi, who was for a period the patron saint of the social-justice era, once famously wrote that “the only remedy to past discrimination is present discrimination.” This credo, whether they admit it or not, is implicitly embraced by much of the Trump right.
Anti-woke activists have long couched their advocacy in a kind of color blindness, railing against affirmative action and most other civil-rights-era programs that were introduced in the 1960s and ’70s specifically to address anti-Black racism and drag the United States out of the Jim Crow era. Liberals, in their view, were the true “racists” because they were allowing decisions about employment and education to be made on the basis of identity instead of pure merit.
Yet the anti-woke right is also in the business of speech policing, straining to ferret out whatever texts, communications, and language that might be deemed too social-justice focused or woke inflected. In the forever war against woke, as the writer Geoff Shullenberger recently argued, “meritocracy isn’t as unifying a principle for the right as it might seem on the surface.” This has manifested in several ways. First, there has been the clash over Israel and Gaza on college campuses, where a certain number of anti-woke backers of Israel, like Free Press founder Bari Weiss, have supported speech crackdowns on pro-Palestinian students who are not protesting violently but are explicitly anti-Zionist. Their speech is deemed violence enough. Woke and anti-woke alike take a dim view of free speech when it’s permitted for those they actively despise.
It should be said that anti-woke activism runs the gamut from left liberals skeptical of byzantine theories of intersectionality to far-right white supremacists. Those ranks include a wide swath of corporate America, which tried various forms of the programs and came away disillusioned. DEI trainings were expensive while offering nebulous returns. With time, it became clear enough that the White Fragility movement was doing little more than dabbing the tears of upper-crust Democrats who’d had too much free time during the pandemic.
If in the late 2010s and early 2020s the woke left understated the progress made over the past 60 years against racism — for some activists, it could barely be acknowledged — it’s the anti-woke right that now imagines Jewish Americans are somehow facing down the same kind peril they encountered more than a half century ago when Nazis rallied at Madison Square Garden and a Gregory Peck film was arguably needed to expose widespread antisemitism. It may be fair for the Trump federal government to bestow “minority” status on Jewish-owned businesses — Jews make up less than 3 percent of the population — but they’re merely wrestling with the social-justice left on its own terrain, adding a new protected identity class that is well positioned to practice grievance politics. The same is true on college campuses, where the retreat of DEI may just mean the elevation of new safeguarded identity groups: Jews and Asian Americans. Maybe that’s justice. Asian Americans, in particular, have found themselves losing out in the zero-sum wars of elite-college admissions over the past ten years. The Supreme Court is now on their side. Perhaps Jewish Americans similarly deserve a leg up now. It’s the same logic the anti-woke usually abhor most: that historic (and ongoing) discrimination demands a remedy, and that remedy should be doled out on the basis of identity.
The tussle over H-1B visas late last year, with Vivek Ramaswamy and Elon Musk defending a program that imports highly skilled foreign labor into the U.S. over the furious objections of MAGA’s isolationist wing, rapidly devolved into another contest of identity. Ramaswamy argued, to much mockery, that American pop culture venerates weakness and needs to celebrate more men like him: the children of Indian immigrants who put all their efforts into academics and aren’t tempted by the siren song of “Saved by the Bell.” MAGA’s hard right, in turn, lashed Ramaswamy for daring to suggest America required foreigners to do the jobs of natives — or, in the case for some, white Americans. The third or fourth generation American became a class to be coddled, to be saved from the invasion of H-1B’s. And Ramaswamy himself, who has railed against the left’s cultural influence on America for much of his life, became the zealous defender of a program designed to import the sort of labor, usually nonwhite, that the left celebrates. Trump’s America is never without its ironies.
