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A Repudiation of Woke
Trump’s victory
could augur a counter-revolution.
After every election, the losing faction conducts a
post-mortem, or an examination, into the cause of death. This year, with
Trump’s decisive victory, this necessity is even more urgent than ever.
Democrats will inevitably discover a discomfiting truth: voters repudiated
woke ideology, which had become the centerpiece of their movement.
What does this mean for the next few years? How can the Trump
administration capitalize on this shift in opinion? And what happens to
American institutions moving forward? All that and more in this week’s
podcast.
The following transcript of the episode has been lightly
edited for clarity:
After every election, the losing faction conducts a
post-mortem, or an examination, into the cause of death. This year, with
Trump’s decisive victory, this necessity is even more urgent than ever.
Democrats will inevitably discover a discomfiting truth: voters repudiated
woke ideology, which had become the centerpiece of their movement. What does
this mean for the next few years? How can the Trump administration capitalize
on this shift in opinion? And what happens to American institutions moving
forward? All that and more in this week’s podcast.
At the outset, we can look at political campaigns and politics
in general in two dimensions. The first is the material dimension. The second
is the ideological dimension. This campaign was no different, and we can see
these dimensions at play in real time.
First, the material considerations. This is the heart of most
democratic politics: issues like the economy, immigration, spending,
employment, consumption, all of those big ticket items that affect people’s
material life—what they can buy, what they can sell, what they can earn, what
they can trade. This, no surprise, has long been the most important set of
issues in American politics. When the economy is going well, incumbent
politicians benefit. When it’s going poorly, they suffer. That seems to be, in
general, a pattern of the vote following economic conditions.”
My response: Yes, bread and butter issues matter and people
often vote their pocket book.
R: “
But there’s always another element at play. Over the last four
years, this element has become more and more significant, even if it remains
in a secondary role. That element is the ideological. It creates a
multidimensional politics that is not simply, as it was for a brief period
following the Cold War, variations on a theme—bottom-up economics, top-down
economics, tight monetary policy, loose monetary policy, higher taxes, lower
taxes. That seemed to be the one-dimensional polarity that American politics was
focused on for many years. But in 2016, and then very much so after 2020, it
opened up a secondary ideological dimension. These are concerns that affect
our material life, our tangible or physical life, but they’re really in the
realm of the intellect, of ideas, of language. In my work—as those of you who
have been following have seen—it involves the left-wing ideology that has
come to be called “woke-ism” or “wokeness,” versus a counter-revolutionary
ideology that is opposed to critical race theory, gender ideology, DEI, and
other ideological programs of the left.”
My response: Just above Rufo defines woke-ism.
R: “While President Trump certainly foregrounded the issues of
economy and immigration and inflation—which delivered him the majority of his
votes, because that is the concern of the majority of voters—the ideological
issues were also very important. He beat up on his opponent, Vice President
Kamala Harris, on her radical positions. If you trace the arc of Kamala
Harris’s career, you can really see the history of woke—starting from her
time in California, in San Francisco, and then as state general, and then as
a California senator, and then finally her final ascent to vice president of
the White House, where she was pushing the most radical DEI policies of any
democratic political figure. There was an advertisement that even outlets on
the left conceded was devastating to Vice President Harris. It was an
advertisement that really focused on her comments from a number of years ago,
where she said that she supported government-funded sex changes for illegal
immigrant prisoners. There’s an old game called “Mad Libs,” where you select
words—nouns, adjectives, verbs—at random, and then you assemble them together
in a way that becomes surprising and humorous. This is left-wing, woke Mad
Libs: government-funded sex changes for illegal immigrant prisoners. You can pluck
out all of those phrases and do a whole analysis of each word that represents
a left-wing ideological position and a left-wing ideological literature. When
you string them all together, it’s the reason that ad was so effective. The
tagline was something like, “Kamala Harris is for they/them. Trump is for
you”—they/them, of course, being the non-binary gender pronouns. The reason
it was effective is because it represented what we could think of as an
apotheosis of woke. This is the maximal position. Government-funded sex
changes for illegal immigrant criminals represents, at least in the context
of this election, the end of the line ideologically. It’s a reduction to an
absurd and really menacing conclusion, castrating illegal immigrant prisoners
in the name of compassion. It’s just an unbelievable image. Why that ad was
also powerful is because it came from her own spoken words. This was a video
clip of Kamala Harris herself.
We know that there was a repudiation of woke in this election
cycle, even before the election took place. How do we know that? First of
all, because Kamala Harris immediately tried to run away from her positions
from the past, whether it was about trans ideology, border enforcement,
fracking and energy production, abolishing ICE, defunding the police, or
supporting Black Lives Matter rioters. She tried to run away from that and
reversed all of her previous ideological positions because the polling indicated
that those positions were deeply unpopular with the American people. But she
was unable to run away from them for two reasons.”
My response: Kamala is a cynical politician but also seems
genuinely a true-believer in woke, so, if she were President, she would
complete the transition to a soft-Marxist dictatorship and one-Party Rule in
America, a trend started under Barack Obama.
R: “One is because she had built her career on these ideas.
She was a weathervane. She’s not an innovator, she’s not an intellectual,
she’s not an original thinker. Rather, she licks her finger, puts it up to
the wind, and then follows whatever the furthest left faction of her party
deems the most popular or most high-prestige opinion of the time. And
secondarily, she had nothing else to replace it with. During the campaign, we
even saw her adopting Trump’s positions, such as no tax on tips, in a
shameless mimicking or copying of positions that were held by her opponent
that she deemed to be popular enough that she wanted to at least co-opt. But
she could not do it. It was not enough. Consequently, she lost the election
in a decisive way. Again, first because of the material conditions of the
country, but secondarily because of her ideological positions that were
suddenly far out of the mainstream.
This shift in dynamic from 2020 to 2024 is more significant
than just Kamala Harris. I’d like to talk a little bit about why that’s so.
This shift represents an iron rule of leftism: left-wing enthusiasm cannot
last. It’s always this flowering of enthusiasm or resentment or passion or
violence that burns itself out over time and then often ushers in a
counter-revolutionary or reactionary force. We’ve seen this in the entire
history of modern left-wing ideology, beginning with the French Revolution,
the Paris Commune, Marxist observations about the revolutions in the 19th
century, and then all the way through the 20th century to the present. We see
this surge in enthusiasm that burns itself out, then ushers in a
counter-revolutionary movement. This is no exception to that rule. Part of
this is timing. Harris could not outrun her own ideology. She could not
outrun her own ideology’s unpopularity by 2024 when she finally had the
moment to run for the presidency.
Even for me, it’s been fascinating to watch the ideas that I
was advocating in 2020—which were perceived as dangerous, fringe, high-risk,
and unpopular—move steadily from the right into the center and now to the
center-left. You have center-left columnists writing the same pieces that I
was writing in 2020. This signals the triumph of our ideas, the victory of
our ideas over the insanity and the excess and the enthusiasm of 2020. This
is a broader principle of the pendulum swinging back.
Where does that leave us now? What are the decisions that we
have to make? And what are the decisions in particular that the Trump
administration must consider? Well, we have first and foremost a dilemma.
There is this model of politics to which many people subscribe. The basic
outline is this: public opinion is sovereign, politicians follow the will of
the voters, and that opinion translates into administrative policy by some
invisible hand. But that is not actually a good model of how things work in the
real world.
The dilemma that we’re facing is this: woke ideology is
unpopular, but it is also entrenched in our bureaucracies.”
My response: Note that Rufo shrewdly highlights that it is not
enough that the pendulum has swung back to the center or the right, in a
popular rejection of wokeism. It is entrenched in our bureaucracies, public
and private. It is also entrenched in the minds of tens of millions of
Democrats, Leftists, intellectuals and young people. To sway them to realign
themselves with traditional values is a hard sell.
I suspect the best way to make the counterrevolution
entrenched for the next 100 years is to take the traditional values, and to
teach the young, with their parents permission or to the training to be
carried out by the parents, to grow into being individuating supercitizens.
I will digress for a moment. I receive free subscribed emails
from The Atlas Society, and they quote thinkers at the bottom of most of
their emails. The one I got on 10/24/24 was a quote from Elon Musk: “The duty
of a leader is to serve their people not for the people to serve them.”
I could not agree with Elon more, but I trust no
politician—and especially no leader too much, too far, or for too long—we are
born depraved and are easily corrupted by centralized power, the power of
powerlessness.
I do not rely on leaders to be noble and leaders of integrity
that willingly serve their people without taking bribes, without seeking more
and more power, without being corrupted by years at the top.
If we want the leaders to be faithful to their political and
ethical function in leading a people that they always serve the people, and
do not seek to acquire illegitimate power by forcing the people to serve
them, the power in society must be held at the bottom of society among
individuating supercitizens so that they, with their unity of purpose, govern
the country and rule their leaders so that their leaders realize and operate
according to the will of the people, mostly a majority of voters, supercitizens
wielding a healthy, decentralized, individualistic pattern of power
relationships, the power of powerfulness.
R: “We’re seeing a
conflict between opinion and administration. Even though our own public
opinion polling shows that 80% of Americans favor a colorblind society over a
race-conscious society, the 20% of the electorate that supports
race-conscious, left-wing, DEI concepts are still dominant in many
institutions—in government, in academia, in many corporations, in K-12 school
systems, and certainly in many of the NGOs and non-governmental entities that
have an increasing sway over our politics. The trick is to translate opinion
into administration—to use the power of the public and the power of public
sentiment to start actually going through the administrative levers,
discovering the administrative choke points, and cleaning out the pockets of
entrenched woke ideology from within the institutions. There is no magic
going from A to Z. It has to be done sequentially, it has to be done
intelligently, and it has to be done patiently.”
My response: If 80% of the masses are not anti-woke, and 20%
of the population is still woke, we need to be cautious here, because many,
perhaps most of these hardcore believers in wokeism, will be
college-educated, and, thus by extension, part of the managerial-ruling class
that continue to run the institutions, so they are not swayed by popular will
(they have dictatorial powers of managers and elite globalists), so they
carry punch above their weight, and that means we have to take back every corporation,
every public institution, every college, every denomination, the military,
and the legacy media, lest these woke fundamentalists and ultraists undermine
our counterrevolution which is what they secretly or overtly lust after.
R: “If we’re to analyze this, let’s look at an optimistic
scenario and a pessimistic scenario. What is the optimistic scenario? It’s
what I think of as a general tide theory of culture: that the key work of
culture is to try to change the general sentiment, mood, and opinion, and
then let that general tidal shift saturate, overwhelm, and gradually erode
the opposing ideology—in this case, left-wing woke ideology. Under this
theory, the work is really to shift status hierarchies. If suddenly DEI—which
was popular, high-status, and high-prestige in 2020—becomes unpopular,
low-status, low-prestige, and loaded with reputational and professional
risk—under this theory, executives and administrators and university
presidents will start to shift automatically. They’ll start to shift the
gears away from DEI and toward something more functional—a colorblind,
individual-achievement-oriented way of judging individuals and rewarding and
punishing people, not on the basis of their ancestry, but on the basis of
their work.
While I was skeptical for a number of years about the general
tide theory of culture, I undervalued its importance. I say that because as
the ideas that we’ve been pushing since 2020 move into the mainstream and
even into the center-left, I’m starting to see real shifts. We started to see
it actually before the election—newspapers refusing to endorse Kamala Harris
that were expected to endorse Kamala Harris, corporate executives praising
former President Trump when it was unthinkable a number of years prior,
technology firms easing the censorship, even capitulating to the demands for
a free and open internet in anticipation of, not a certain Trump win, but a
potential Trump win, and the general emergence of the more reasonable
center-left starting to question woke ideologies and boxing out some of the
people who were empowered from the left-wing fringes over the last few years.
These things matter. They’re not official policy, but they create the
cultural infrastructure within which those policies are made and those
decisions are made and those management structures are built. In that case,
this dramatic shift in public opinion will have an effect, and that effect
will accelerate under a Trump administration. We shouldn’t discount this
general tide theory of culture.”
My response: I agree with Rufo that this general tide theory
of culture seems real and applicable. It optimistically assumes if
conservative advocates kept reaching out, especially to the young as Charlie
Kirk and Turning Point Action did,
R: “Second, what does the pessimistic theory look like? It
looks like a continuation of the dynamic that we’ve seen in recent years
leading up to the present. This is a trench theory of culture. Culture is not
about a general tide or a shift in public opinion. It’s actually this
decentralized, massive network of laws, institutions, ideas, and incentives,
and the faction that wants to win the culture war must penetrate and overcome
this almost impossible-to-diagram network of trenches and fortifications. Under
this theory, administration matters. Policy matters. State power matters. The
law matters. And legislation matters. Under this theory, the work is really
to purge, capture, and replace the institutions that have been corrupted.
This is something that I’m going to be working on in the coming weeks as I
think about how the Trump administration could tackle this issue of left-wing
ideological capture. It’s pessimistic in one sense that culture doesn’t
change through the spontaneous recomposition of opinion, but culture changes
through the conscious and deliberate reshaping of policy that has a leverage
or an impact on not only the particular institutions but the general culture
as a whole.”
My response: One always learns from Rufo: I like his contrast
between the optimistic and pessimistic approaches to fighting wokeism, and he
is right that we need to fight wokeism by both tactics as subsumed under our
general strategy of taking back our country, restoring the values of our
Founders, and make America great again.
R: “We can think of the “optimist and pessimist” or “the
general tide versus the trench warfare” dichotomies. In this old question on
the right: is culture downstream from politics, or is politics downstream
from culture? I’ve in the past been more persuaded that culture is downstream
from politics, but I realize, having observed the cultural shifts in recent
years, that it is certainly mutually reinforcing.”
My response: I think culture is downstream from philosophy and
that politics are downstream from culture, but, indeed, as Rufo has
concluded, these forces at work in society are mutually reinforcing.
My vision of the future is for the average, typical voter, an
individuating supercitizen, to be well-trained and self-educating in
philosophy, so that she will be so originally, critically and independently
thinking, that when the majority of supercitizens agree on what public policy
will look like, on all levels of government, the masses running things from
the bottom up will be able to keep the country well run, and rather humane
and free.
R: “It’s a tide that
goes in and out, and it’s a fight that is waged on multiple dimensions, and
you can’t neglect one or the other. The best approach is to unite both under
one umbrella, under one theory of how to influence culture. That is the
direction that we should be taking—and certainly the ideas that we should be
contemplating—as the Trump administration starts to materialize. We have a
fight to build on this voter repudiation of woke ideology to then make
tangible progress within our laws and institutions to reduce the salience of
that ideology and flip the system of incentives that has, for the recent
years, rewarded that ideology. I won’t go into policy details of how that
might happen—I’m going to be tackling that in the coming weeks—but I would just
leave on a note of the broader historical scope.
These interim moments, like the lame duck period between
presidencies, are oftentimes a good point of reflection on these broader
trends before we dive into the specifics, the details, and the policies, and
before we wage all of the battles that we’re going to wage once the
administration gets up and running. Our historical moment—building on this
idea of an iron rule of leftism in which enthusiasm cannot last—we’ve seen
this play out in an American context over the course of the 20th century and
now the beginning of the 21st century. There have been cycles of leftism in
the United States. If you read the history, you see this surge in leftism in
the early 20th century, then going dormant as we entered the late 1930s and
then into World War II. You see another resurgence of leftism in the 1960s
and early 1970s, and then being put dormant between the Nixon and George W.
Bush presidencies—this long stretch of dormancy. Then you see another
resurgence in the 2020s with Black Lives Matter, trans ideology, DEI, and
George Floyd. What we’ve learned in the past—and it’s a pattern that will
hold into the future, at least in the immediate future—is that nothing is
guaranteed. Reversal is always a possibility. We may in fact be at that
inflection point now. We can look to the past as well for models for our own
movement. You can look to the great work of James Burnham, Joseph McCarthy,
J. Edgar Hoover, Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan, all of these figures who were
fighting the left-wing ideologies of their time and then helping put it into
a dormant stage.
It can never be
totally defeated. I’ve long argued that this temptation on the right to
permanently defeat, dismantle, and destroy leftism once and for all is a
totalitarian instinct that should be avoided.”
My response: We do
not want to defeat the woke Leftists to such an extent that they are
silenced, driven underground, outlawed, imprisoned, or exterminated. We need
their divergent point of view, but we must work to keep Leftism in a minority
point of view.
For conservatives to
become ideological Fascists and enforce political purges upon the woke and
the Marxists would be to destroy America, and all that is free, good and
beautiful about it. Rufo is right here, completely.
R: “In fact, it’s a leftist instinct because
it doesn’t see the United States as a balance of forces, but seeks to reduce
it to a one-dimensional, right-wing, ideological force that can only be
achieved through undemocratic means. We should not put our hopes in such a
program, which would be infeasible but also undesirable. We should accept
that there will be a leftist tendency because there is a leftist tendency
inside of human nature itself. It can’t be eradicated. But what we can do is
we can counterbalance it. We can restrain it when it becomes excessive. Then
we can put it into a dormant period when it’s proven unpopular, unproductive,
and irrational. This repudiation of woke that we’ve seen writ small in this
election could signal—with the right work on the general culture, as well as
the administration—a repudiation of woke historically moving forward. That’s
my hope. I’m laying down this as a marker, and we’ll see what happens in the
coming weeks and months.
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