This must have been what it was like to live through the French or Russian revolutions. Our old assumptions are crumbling. The hierarchies, doctrines, and habits we held up as praiseworthy a few months ago are suddenly detestable.
The speed of the vibe shift has been vertiginous. Affirmative action in universities has been ruled unconstitutional. What seemed like the irresistible march of diversity, equity, and inclusion has turned into a full-scale rout. Almost every major company that had invested in DEI programs is now scaling back, including Ford, Walmart, Molson Coors, Harley-Davidson, and Toyota.
What changed? The short answer is the 2024 presidential election, which pitted a candidate who was herself a product and a champion of identity politics, someone who used the word “Latinx” without irony, against a man who sold himself as the instrument of vengeance against the whole racket.
President Donald Trump’s victory at the polls catalyzed an immediate change — not just in the mood but, as his executive orders began to flood out, in the law. There were only two genders! English was the country’s official language! Anti-Christian bias was illegal! We can argue about how many of these matters were within the competence of the federal government, but we can’t argue about their secondary effects, as state and local authorities, nongovernmental organizations, and corporations rushed to adjust their behavior.
Might things look different had the Democrats found a more credible candidate and edged the result? Yes and no. Trump’s superpower is his immunity to criticism. He may be thin-skinned, but he has a unique ability not to be deterred by censure. In that sense, he was the perfect tool to break open the DEI scam.
Then again, elections don’t happen in a vacuum. A backlash was already gathering force as identity politics overreached. Twenty years ago, it was recognized that racial slurs were unpleasant, but no one suggested that they be expunged from old novels. Ten years ago, sacralization was underway. The words were now treated as magic spells that could not be printed. By five years ago, a professor of Chinese in California could be suspended for using a Mandarin phrase that sounded a little bit like the N-word.
Something similar happened over gender. We went from wanting the sexes to be treated equally to claiming that even the differences that led to men and women playing separate sports were social constructs. There comes a point when ideas become too silly for even the most fashion-conscious people.
The backlash is global. In Britain, a gender-critical professor, Kathleen Stock, was hounded out of her job at Sussex University. Now, her former employer has been fined nearly $1 million for failing to defend free speech.
In 2020, the future prime minister, Sir Keir Starmer, was photographed taking the knee. That was the old, comfortable world, in which anything done by conservatives could be condemned as racist, and the Left glowed with self-righteousness. Now, Starmer is scrambling around to find an overseas destination to take illegal immigrants, and it is suddenly OK to ask whether his predecessor, Rishi Sunak, was “really English.”
European politicians who were dismissed as a far-right fringe as recently as last year are advancing in Spain, Sweden, France, and Germany. As Viktor Orban, Hungary’s strongman leader, told a Make Europe Great Again rally last month, “Yesterday, we were the heretics. Now, we are the mainstream.”
Consider the Netflix series Adolescence. Announced as recently as March 2024, it observes the old pieties. A drama about the abuse of women in a northern English town ignores the rape gangs scandal, disregards the fact that knife crime is an almost exclusively black problem, and casts the killer as a white child from a stable two-parent family. That is what all dramas used to do. There was a convention that bad guys had to be white (which, apart from anything else, made for very predictable stories.) Already, it feels dated.
The big change was not Trump’s election victory but Elon Musk’s purchase of Twitter, which ended the preference falsification that had made unpolitical people go along with extreme wokery.
A SHORT HISTORY OF THE WOKE RIGHT
The problem is that the identity politics of the Left is being replaced by a conservative version, every bit as intolerant, unthinking, and collectivist. People are still categorized by group, but the good and bad guys are switched. Different words are banned. It’s now fine to say manpower or midwife but not birthgiver or Latinx.
The old conservative ideal, that the government should do as little as possible, has been replaced with the notion that the state should be mobilized against people you dislike. Freedom, alas, remains as unpopular in this age as in every other.
