By Rich Lowry
Wednesday, May 28, 2025
After hubris comes nemesis, and after the frenzied
excesses of the woke revolution came Donald Trump.
The left didn’t lose everything with Trump’s second
victory in 2024, but it did lose something that will be impossible to recover —
broad cultural acquiescence to a radical agenda that briefly appeared to be
sweeping all before it.
After the death of George Floyd, it seemed unlikely that five
years later media outlets would be running rueful retrospectives about how the
sweeping, nearly irresistible changes catalyzed by that event sputtered out or
backfired.
Here we are nonetheless, and at the center of the
turnabout is Donald Trump.
The populist Republican wasn’t the only factor in turning the page, but he was a
decisive one, both as a symbol of relative cultural normality and as an
instrument to wield federal power to blunt the left’s advances and prevent them
from recurring.
This doesn’t mean that Democrats won’t win again — they
will, and perhaps as soon as next year’s midterms.
Things might not feel so great for the right when it is
defending Trump during his third impeachment in 2027, yet there will be no
taking us back to the years of peak woke.
Democrats may make inroads against Trump’s economic
policy, his executive overreach, or his crypto schemes. They aren’t, however,
going to recover by fighting it out on the issues of gender fluidity or
systemic racism.
After the death of Floyd, the left managed to catalyze
American civil society for its purposes on the basis of fear and groupthink.
Corporations felt compelled to get on board and pony up
funds for woke causes and organizations. DEI trainings were all the rage. Fear
stalked the halls of our universities, where saying or thinking the wrong thing
could end your career. Any institution, person, or phenomenon could plausibly
be accused of racism, and activists sought to change the American landscape by
toppling disfavored statues. “Anti-racism” seemed to be going from a laughably
reductive boutique set of ideas to the American mainstream.
The project had already lost steam a few years after
George Floyd’s death. The country wasn’t interested in a revolution. Corporations realized that DEI practices were a waste of
time and created legal liability. Universities began to wonder what they’d
achieved with their devotion to DEI. Meanwhile, trans-radicalism was running
into a wall of popular opposition.
Part of the power of Trump’s victory was that he was a
pungent representation of where the culture was already heading rather than
being a lone, if high-profile, dissenter.
Still, Trump has shifted the Overton window in the
culture away from woke, and it’s hard to imagine it shifting all the way back.
Corporations aren’t going to play ball again the way they
did after the death of George Floyd. Trump could well lose his legal battle
with Harvard and other schools, but they’ve admitted that they need to change.
DEI and other race-conscious policies may go subterranean under different
rubrics, although that, in itself, is a sign of weakness. Black Lives Matter
has been discredited by scandal, and “anti-racism” now feels more like a relic
than the hot new thing.
Trump’s executive orders and funding decisions can
eventually be reversed, but re-radicalizing every institution in America will
be difficult for any future Democratic president.
Shrewd, ambitious Democrats realize how the ground is
shifting, even if the left of the party isn’t going away. The Democratic
governor of Maryland, Wes Moore, recently vetoed a bill to create a commission
to study reparations, and Gavin Newsom refused to fund a California ethnic
studies curriculum. Both acts would have been unimaginable in 2020 and its
aftermath.
Trump is to the woke ascendancy what Thermidor was to the
French Revolution, and what Richard Nixon was to the anti-war movement. We
can’t know whether his presidency will succeed or fail, but he is likely to
retain his status as the bookend to an era of heedless cultural lunacy.
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