When Anti-Woke Becomes Pro-Trump
On the wishful thinking of those who think a second Donald Trump presidency would weaken “woke” and bolster liberalism.
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Over the past ten years in the United States, the rise of illiberal progressivism—the ideology colloquially known as “woke,” driven by identity, grievance, and a utopian vision of “social justice”—has generated an “antiwoke” pushback, often centrist to moderate left in political outlook and intended to reclaim a more classically liberal vision. (While the labels have become somewhat cringeworthy by now, I will use them for simplicity’s sake.) Much of this pushback has been oriented towards the laudable goal of promoting a race- and gender-neutral vision of equality, countering hyperbolic and divisive claims of pervasive oppressions in modern Western societies, and affirming the free exchange of ideas unfettered by strictures against “harmful” speech.
But in recent years, and perhaps especially in this election season, there has also been a troubling rapprochement between parts of the formerly liberal “antiwoke” movement and the blatantly illiberal right, specifically Donald Trump’s “Make America Great Again” brand of populism. The unfortunate result is that a movement which should be opposing right-wing authoritarianism as much as the left-wing kind is, too often, de facto boosting Trumpian populism—by attacking only the left while ignoring threats to a free society from the right; by taking an “anti-anti-Trump” stance that saves most of its hostility for Trump critics; and, in some cases, by actively embracing Trump, either as “the enemy of my enemy” or even as an active good.
This phenomenon isn’t new. In 2015-2016, when illiberal progressivism was still known mainly as “political correctness” or “PC,” some “anti-PC” figures who styled themselves “cultural libertarians,” like then-Breitbart writer Milo Yiannopoulos, not only hailed Trump as a battering ram against politically correct taboos and cultural nannying but flirted with the worst fringes of the Trump base—the openly racist, antisemitic “alternative right.” After Trump’s 2016 victory, podcaster Dave Rubin, a self-styled classical liberal and free speech champion who had voted Libertarian, urged giving Trump a chance while insisting that he would be “the first to hold Trump’s feet to the fire” if he did something “wrong or illegal.” By the time Trump did so—trying to steal the 2020 election by declaring that he won—Rubin had already announced that he was voting for Trump as “the last bulwark to stop the radical left.” Post-election, Rubin jumped with both feet on the “stop the steal” bandwagon.
Prominent “antiwoke”-to-MAGA converts in 2020 also included James Lindsay, a critic of social justice progressivism and “grievance studies” in the academy who boarded the Trump Train after Trump’s executive order banning diversity training based on “critical race theory” at federal institutions. Like Rubin, Lindsay soon devolved into promoting stolen-election theories and January 6th apologetics; he also became a full-on COVID conspiracist. Canadian psychologist Jordan Peterson and former Evergreen College professors Bret Weinstein and Heather Heying have followed a similar route from antiwoke activism to Trump apologism. And one could even add to this list tech tycoon Elon Musk, whose obsession with the “woke mind virus” has taken him from centrist Democrat to MAGA convert. (Of course, Musk is sui generis, if only because he stands to gain substantial power if Trump wins.)
And this is just the extreme end of “antiwoke” opinion. Other examples include the journalist Christina Buttons, a former Democrat whose focus on problems with youth gender medicine led her to move rightward, and who now believes her previous negative view of Trump was largely a product of left-wing media indoctrination. She has also moved from a “neither Trump nor Biden” stance to a pro-Trump one—partly because she hopes he will rein in “gender-affirming care” for minors, but also because she believes a Trump administration would stand for classically liberal values such as prioritizing merit and individual rights over racial or sexual identity.
Buttons’s cautious support for Trump is extremely restrained compared to that of writer and activist Ayaan Hirsi Ali, who was once a liberal hero and who seconded calls for Trump to resign after January 6th. To the dismay of many of her fans, Ali now urges Americans to vote against “the anarcho/tyranny” of Biden/Harris and for “a return to the Rule of Law, Common Sense and a veneration of the American Constitution” that Trump will supposedly bring.
Meanwhile, there are those who offer full-throated defenses of Trump while also acknowledging his flaws. In a recent essay along these lines, Martin Gurri paints an impressionistic, mostly detail-free picture of the Democrats as “the party of control,” in charge of “virtually all the institutions that hedge the life of the voters”: “[T]he White House, the Senate, the media, the universities, the mainstream churches, the federal and state bureaucracies, most corporations, most digital platforms, and the entirety of American culture.” The House of Representatives, the Supreme Court, the right-wing media ecosystem, conservative churches, GOP-dominated legislatures and statehouses, X/Twitter, and Republican megadonors don’t exist in this picture.
While some of Gurri’s points about the controlling model of progressivism are valid, they are hyperbolic: a two-day Twitter ban on a story about the Hunter Biden laptop is equated with a Chinese-style “censorship apparatus.” Meanwhile, controlling behavior on the right, such as broad-reaching abortion bans, is ignored. Trump’s legal troubles are treated as, self-evidently, political persecution. Trump himself, according to Gurri, is an “agent of chaos” who can take a wrecking ball to the “forces of control” but also, maybe, somehow “restore seriousness and discipline to the federal agencies in Washington.” If this sounds incoherent, that’s because it is.
The Free Press, which published Gurri’s essay, is not exactly pro-Trump (it also ran an anti-Trump essay by veteran journalist Joe Nocera on the same day, though it got about one-sixth the “likes”); but its general tenor exemplifies a milder form of Trump-enabling. The site was founded by former New York Times writer and leading antiwoke figure Bari Weiss as an ostensibly liberal “heterodox” magazine, and has published some admirable work on social and cultural issues such as its recent trenchant critique of Ta-Nehisi Coates’s pronouncements on Israel and Gaza. Yet its political coverage over the past year brings to mind Weiss’s own sharp criticism, in her 2018 piece on the “Intellectual Dark Web,” of people who “talk constantly about the regressive left but far less about the threat from the right” and claim to care about truth but rarely show concern about Trump’s lies.
Despite occasional criticism of the right, there is no question that the vast majority of the site’s critical coverage and commentary is reserved for Democrats and progressives. A recent column attacking CBS News for a supposedly misleading edit of a Kamala Harris interview briefly mentions a Trump rant calling for the network to “lose its license”—but merely calls it “overblown” and says that “the media invites such criticism” when it acts unethically (which there is no evidence CBS did). It’s not that The Free Press never challenges pro-Trump narratives (a recent investigative piece debunked Elon Musk’s conspiracy theory that the Biden administration was shuttling illegal immigrants to swing states in order to turn them blue). But the site’s overall anti-anti-Trump leanings—conservative activist Chris Rufo even called it a “beautiful off-ramp” for people defecting to the anti-woke right—are unmistakable.
Some liberals, alarmed by Trumpian authoritarian populism, and appalled by “antiwoke” support for Trump, tend to regard “wokeness” as a mostly made-up or inflated problem. I strongly disagree; I think illiberal progressivism not only poses dangers in itself but also makes it harder to combat right-wing authoritarianism. (The fact that many Democrats only weakly condemned the riots and looting in the summer of 2020, for instance, has likely undercut the impact of January 6th on independent voters.)
But the idea that “wokeness” will be vanquished under Trump is extremely misguided, considering that it surged during Trump’s first administration—and is widely believed to be receding today, as Harris’s noticeably non-woke campaign would seem to confirm. A new Trump administration’s heavy-handed attempts to ban workplace diversity training, purge “woke” from education, or entirely ban youth gender medicine (which even critics of its misuse such as science journalist Jesse Singal acknowledge is sometimes appropriate) would very likely cause liberal institutions to circle the wagons around bad ideas. This is especially probable considering that the racist and sexist toxicity emanating from Trump World would seem to validate a lot of progressive claims about the persistence of white supremacy, misogyny and other forms of bigotry in America.
What’s more, many people in the anti-anti-Trump space seem to construct their own fantasy version of Trumpism based on wishful thinking. They casually assume that Trump doesn’t mean it when he makes illiberal promises—for instance, to ban flag-burning and come after political opponents through the courts. Yet they also take at face value rhetoric from Team Trump about not categorizing people by skin color and other immutable characteristics—even though the often blatant racist overtones of Trump’s, and his supporters’, bashing of migrants from nonwhite nations hardly squares with such principles.
Plenty of people who have spoken out against progressive illiberalism, speech suppression and identity politics—John McWhorter, Anne Applebaum, Sam Harris, Garry Kasparov, Nicholas and Erika Christakis, Steven Pinker, Christina Hoff Sommers—have not gone the pro-Trump or anti-anti-Trump route. Those who have taken that route, by contrast, are fighting illiberalism with illiberalism: championing freedom of speech while shrugging off a presidential candidate’s threats to muzzle journalists he dislikes, and denouncing the race- and gender-based identity politics of the left while casting their lot with people who rant against “childless cat ladies” and Haitian immigrants who eat their neighbors’ pets. Should Trump win, I think those among them who genuinely hope for a comeback of classical liberalism are in for a nasty surprise.
Cathy Young is a writer at The Bulwark, a columnist for Newsday, and a contributing editor to Reason.
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Hear, hear. Weiss's Free Press seemed to begin life as a worthy check on progressive excess. I cheered that, because I thought such excess was wrong on its own merits but also because it enabled the likes of Trump. I never thought that it would become a quasi-pro-Trump outlet itself. It's very disappointing; it's the worst example of a smart "heterodox" figure losing the plot.
My sixth grade science teacher once asked us to perform an experiement - to pick any common word and begin repeating it in our minds, over and over and over. As he knew, and we soon found out, the word became simply a meaningless sound, lacking any connection to whatever object or reality it had once had.
As an American of nearly 80 years and a life-long Independent, I’ve collected a basket of words common to American political discourse that have long since fallen into that category of meaninglessness. They include woke, Marxist, communist, socialist, libertarian, progressive, fascist, Republican, Democrat, conservative, Christian, Muslim, radical, atheist, and liberal among others. Now I can add ‘garbage’.
And no, I'm not saying that any of those words don’t have actual dictionary meanings - they all do - but in our public discourse they have all too often become political, social, and often religious weapons rather than letter collections with specific meanings. Too often they apply to whoever we like or don’t like rather than to strict dictionary meanings.
What matters here in our present political, social, and religious madhouse is not buzz words, but character. What matters here are actions, not just the avalanche of words repeated so often without regard to what they actually mean.
In any measure of character and action, Donald Trump and JD Vance fall far below Joe Biden, Kamala Harris, andTim Walz.
Ms Harris is not perfect - no human being ever born was or is But she does have the well-being of the country she loves at the heart of her campaign. She isn’t sure how to achieve that well-being (I know of no one who really does, despite all the rhetoric flying around), but she does intend to try. Donald Trump does not. He intends only his own well-being. He does not love this country, only himself. He does not love or honor his fellow Americans, only himself.
Everyone and his brother and sister and sibling and neighbors and everyone else with a media presence is busy predicting a Harris presidency for better or for worse. But the fact is, and it is well proven, that predicting what a candidate will do once in the Oval Office is a very risky endeavor. The office puts its own stamp on those very few Americans who have occupied it because one cannot know for sure what the reality of that increasingly awesome responsibility will do to all the campaign rhetoric or to the character of the one actually faced with it.
But we have the advantage of knowing what Donald Trump has already made of that responsibility. He shirked it, as he did the responsibility of military service to the country he claims to so love. His occupancy of that office was all about himself, not the country. For him, the presidency was just one more publicity stunt, a cash cow, and a way to thumb his nose at all those whom he felt had not given him his due amount of respect and admiration.
So the choice seems utterly clear to me.