Is It the Return of Woke?

By Rich Lowry

Friday, October 16, 2026

 

After sweeping the swing states and winning the popular vote in 2024, Donald Trump took office with a sense that he occupied the center and had dealt the cultural left a grave blow.

 

Nonaligned or heterodox voices in the podcasting world and media had gravitated toward him, alienated by the illiberalism and exotic concerns of contemporary Democrats. Significant elements of Silicon Valley swung his way.

 

Trump won the debate over trans policy, and he made mass deportation, once considered outlandish, a mainstream issue. Sensing which way the wind was blowing, corporations began ditching their DEI programs.

 

There wasn’t the immediate backlash against Trump’s election the way there had been the first time around, and he enjoyed some cultural cachet — NFL players, for instance, did on-field versions of his YMCA dance.

 

All of this was referred to as a “vibe shift,” and it seemed a punctuation mark on what Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez now calls “woke 1.” Today, though, the vibe is bad again and bears resemblance to the environment prior to Trump’s return to the White House.

 

Once again, the elite culture is in the grips of a mass hysteria, this time about an alleged gang rape at a college campus rather than a fatal police interaction with a black suspect, whether Michael Brown or George Floyd. But the triumph of narrative over fact and the abiding belief in the systemic repression of a victim group are the same.

 

Once again, a comedian saying supposedly offensive things has led to widespread condemnations — of the same Shane Gillis who was dumped as a Saturday Night Live cast member during woke 1.

 

Once again, people are being hunted down and canceled for dumb things they said long ago. The Portland Trail Blazers fired their new TV announcer immediately upon learning that he posted a couple of offensive things on social media as a 15-year-old.

 

The culture is unlikely to reach the same level of insanity it did after the death of George Floyd, when seemingly every major institution in American life instantly adopted a DEI mindset, but the woke fever has dissipated, not broken.

 

The most consequential political leaders tend to pull the other party in their direction. This is what Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher did with the Democrats and Labor respectively (via Bill Clinton and Tony Blair). We won’t know how Democrats ultimately decide to react to Trump until 2028 or perhaps 2032, but the party is radicalizing at the moment rather than trying to retreat to a relatively sensible center.

 

This creates the possibility of an even more inflamed, DSA-inflected Democratic Party taking unified control of Washington in 2028, and allying with — and supporting via policy decisions — the woke forces in the culture.

 

President Trump’s standing will have much to do with whether such a thing happens. Right now, 2024 feels like a long time ago, when Trump positioned himself as the commonsense candidate more in tune with everyday concerns and sensibilities than his opponents.

 

He’s currently underwater on nearly every issue, and many of his interests — building projects, naming disputes — aren’t those of the public. The same Trump who has been a check on cultural radicalism could, as his second term enters its third and fourth year, become an accelerant of it.

 

Now, it might be that Democrats won’t have the blowout midterm that they expect, in part because the party is still radioactive. And it’s always possible that the woke ideology is too extreme to regain its ascendancy. But the power of this point of view never depended on public persuasion so much as on having allies in positions of influence and bullying fence-sitters and cowards to go along.

 

What we know is that this tendency hasn’t gone away, and it could be set to flow again rather than ebb. The vibe isn’t the same as it was in 2020, a year of mass irrationality, but it is disquieting all the same, with the potential to get much worse.