Voters in favor of such changes have been supportive as politicians in red states give speeches against local universities, legislators circulate viral clips denouncing campus ideology, and college presidents suffer ritual humiliation when called to explain what, exactly, happens in an Office of Inclusive Excellence. These voters imagine their representatives are putting an end to biased hiring practices, shutting down alienating classroom polemics, and making campuses safe for conservative speech. 

The reality, however, is much more complex. The opponents of DEI have weaponized regulation and are creating a Pandora’s box of tools that can be used and reused by successive administrations — all to the detriment of higher education. 

A look at new state-level bills being enacted — the certification language, the reporting dates, the audit authority, the clauses decreeing that money may be withheld and not later restored — reveals much more than the substitution of one ideology for another. Instead, we are seeing the establishment of a new system of governance. It is much bigger than DEI and the current political moment. 

Ohio is the clearest place to witness the shift, because the state has already moved beyond messaging into the mechanics of enforcement. Gov. Mike DeWine signed Senate Bill 1, the “Advance Ohio Higher Education Act,” into law on March 28, 2025. The statute bars public institutions from establishing or continuing DEI offices; prohibits DEI training and orientation except in narrow circumstances; forbids institutions from recreating the same functions under another label; restricts universities from stating official positions on “controversial belief or policy”; and requires a three-credit course in American civic literacy. The law took effect last June.

More from this author

The cancelled prophet of the racial Right 

By Richard A. Greenwald

One issue is the law’s vagueness, which masks matters of fundamental importance. What is a “controversial belief or policy,” and what is the curriculum of the new required course in “American Civic Liberty,” and who gets to decide? In the usual functioning of universities, faculty would, for better or for worse. But under Ohio’s law, politicians — with few if any qualifications — will be empowered to reject curriculum. 

Universities will have no metrics by which to judge their own compliance and will operate under constant surveillance. Any student could report any faculty member to the state at any time: an enlargement and statewide codification of a DEI measure in place at some universities, except now in the opposite ideological direction. It is nigh impossible for any teacher to uphold a requirement to stay within unknown bounds on any “controversial belief or policy” as judged by any student. The rule is bound to severely impact teaching.

Moreover, under existing arrangements, faculty have already been rigorously reviewed by their peers; their courses are also peer-reviewed; and universities receive extensive and serious peer-review through national and state accreditors, plus discipline-specific reviews. It isn’t a perfect system, but it is a system nonetheless, and could help address student concerns, if that is the desire. Instead, in order to correct one perceived problem, the state has instituted a new system that will destroy student-faculty relations and drain the coursework of meaningful content: essentially, each student will be dragooned as a potential informant on professors, who will have a strong incentive to steer clear of any controversial topic (Proust and homosexuality? Foucault’s diagnosis of power-knowledge? Aristotle on natural slavery?).

And this system will have teeth. Consider the Ohio bill now following behind Bill SB1. House Bill 698, introduced in February, would require each public institution to annually certify that it is complying with the statutory obligations created by SB 1. Beginning in fiscal year 2028, if an institution fails to submit that certification, the state university chancellor “shall withhold” the university’s share of a designated set-aside of funds that pay for classes. If a certification is found to be “recklessly false or fraudulent,” the chancellor may withhold the entire share. More striking still, the bill says withheld funds might not later be released even if the institution comes into compliance. Meaning, even if the errors are minor and corrected quickly, the instructional funds withheld might be lost forever. The state has built a lever and attached it to an essential revenue stream.

HB 698 is invasive in another way, too. The bill would require institutions to produce a public inventory of employees who, on Jan. 1, 2025, had DEI-related duties and were reassigned by Sept. 25, 2025. Universities would have to identify those employees by name, list their former and new titles, describe old and new duties, detail compensation changes, and provide a justification report explaining why the reassignment complied with the law. The president and board chair would have to certify that report. The bill aims to prevent universities from renaming, relocating, and redistributing functions, and it is designed to catch them doing so. This is understandable from the perspective of lawmakers but represents an unprecedented penetration of the state into granular aspects of university life — where it will have new abilities to impose political ideology. 

Such changes on local campuses are the first consequences of the new administrative order. At the University of Cincinnati, the implementation page simply states that “all four” identity centers have closed. Another university page says the central equity and inclusion office has also closed. At Ohio State, cultural and awareness observances — such as Black History Month, Women’s History Month, Pride Month, Juneteenth — may continue, the university says, but administrative support is permitted only under certain conditions, and funding can only be sourced from donations or gifts to the university. The university also says that it has paused communications that move beyond recognizing such occasions while it reviews the law’s restrictions on institutional statements.

This represents a transfer of authority inside the institution: the center of gravity is moving away from the administrator, the faculty committee, the dean’s meeting, and the campus debate, and toward general counsel, compliance staff, HR, and whichever office must eventually certify to the state that the university has obeyed. Lawyers become the curators of permissible language. Budget officials become interpreters of ideological risk. These laws do not simply ban. They reorganize decision rights. The change will also require the hiring of another layer of administrators to ensure institutional compliance, which will further constrain university budgets and siphon money away from student instruction.

The money matters because Ohio’s State Share of Instruction fund, which underwrites teaching, is not a decorative line in the budget — it is the core public subsidy for public higher education. SSI was funded at about $2.16 billion in fiscal year 2026 and $2.18 billion in fiscal year 2027. The Ohio Legislative Service Commission’s analysis of HB 698 says the state budget has already set aside $75 million of SSI funds (intended to support student instruction) for fiscal year 2027 to be distributed under the bill’s compliance framework (meaning the funds will go toward compliance mechanisms). One does not need to know the precise exposure of every campus to see the point. We can only expect the share of funds diverted toward compliance to grow. 

In Iowa, this logic has moved beyond public universities. There, House File 2488, passed by the state house on Feb. 24, 2026, but not yet law, would apply not just to state institutions but to private colleges, as well, if they participate in the Iowa Tuition Grant program — which is to say, almost all of them. The bill would prohibit participating private institutions from establishing, sustaining, supporting, or staffing DEI offices or doing DEI work, with some carve outs.

Similar to the design in other states, under the Iowa bill, any person may report a suspected violation on any college campus to the attorney general. The attorney general must notify the institution and the state department of education within 15 days. The institution then gets 30 days either to  prove it has fixed the matter or persuade the attorney general that no violation occurred. If it fails, it becomes ineligible for the Iowa Tuition Grant program beginning with the next academic year. 

Texas offers a preview of where such initiatives tend to end up. The Texas State Auditor’s Office issued the first required higher-education audit under that state’s DEI restrictions in February 2025. The auditor reviewed the Texas A&M University System’s 20 components and five community colleges. Most entities were found compliant, but the audit still flagged Texas A&M University-Central Texas over contract language and McLennan Community College over an employee training video. The findings themselves were small. The institutional meaning was not. Once the state creates auditable categories, someone eventually begins checking contracts, websites, trainings, handbooks, and organizational charts against them. To combat this, universities will need to hire their own internal policing and compliance staff.

Suggested reading

How censorship seized America

By Jacob Siegel

That is why the present moment can’t be understood simply as a dispute over whether DEI offices had become too large, too jargon-heavy, or too detached from the core educational mission — though they plainly had. They expanded carelessly. They confused student support with progressive catechism. They made themselves vulnerable through mandatory trainings whose claims outran their evidence and whose language alienated even sympathetic audiences. When anti-DEI clips go viral and red-state politicians grandstand, most audiences (though too few academics) can see exactly what the problem is. 

To admit all this, however, is not to concede the larger point. The danger, which is being hidden by the cultural unpopularity of DEI on the Right and the adoption of new, more pressing causes on the Left, is that state governments are building a reusable apparatus for directing universities through appropriations, attestations, complaint systems, public reporting, and audit authority.

Today, the target is DEI. It will not stay there. Once the mechanism exists, it can be turned toward rules governing anything. The state need not relitigate the culture war each time. It need only redefine the category, set the reporting date, and threaten the funding. For some states, this would require revision of the law; in others, the laws are vague enough that any administrative interpretation could set a yo-yo in motion. 

Universities still tell stories about themselves that belong to an older age. They imagine governance as a matter of argument: faculty debate, committee process, a report circulated for comment, a meeting running long in a room with bad carpeting and weak coffee. That world has not vanished, but it is no longer where power most decisively sits. Under this new dispensation, power lies with the office that certifies compliance, the official who can trigger an inquiry, the auditor who can define a violation, and the budget language that quietly waits for someone to miss a deadline.

The new university leash is not a slogan. It is not even, in the end, an idea. It is a system of control to be yanked by anyone who holds the leash. And it tugs whether anyone is persuaded or not. 

He has “reposted” or approvingly quoted posts claiming that South Africa is our future; that the United States is at risk of turning into a “Global Favela”; that the Left is “import[ing] a new voting block from the Third World”; that “all other [racial] groups show extreme in-group preference and particular hatred for white people”; and that New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani seeks to “eradicate white people”. 

The agents of collapse are unassimilated immigrants, aggrieved black Americans, and progressive elites who have inflamed resentment through years of identity-based moralizing. The implied endpoint is civil conflict, for which he wants whites to prepare themselves.

These claims would be alarming coming from anyone. From a man of Musk’s unparalleled resources and influence, they warrant loud and unambiguous rejection. The hundreds of thousands of likes and millions of impressions garnered by Musk’s posts suggest that his views are shared by more than a few others. Despite flashpoints over immigration and high crime in a handful of American cities, the conditions in the country are generally peaceful. The streets are generally safe. The crime spike we endured in 2020 has fallen off. So why has “the race war is coming” proven to be such an attractive rallying cry?

I thought I had an answer. In my inaugural essay for UnHerd, I offered a short genealogy of our present political moment. I argued that President Trump’s rise had been abetted by a backlash against progressive overreach, especially on matters of race, and I expressed concern that the reactionary energy unleashed in 2016 — and again more intensely in 2024 — would culminate in a repudiation not only of racial politics, but of blackness itself. 

More from this author

How woke and anti-woke erase blackness

By Glenn Loury

But the “backlash” frame, while not inaccurate, isn’t what is most important about the present moment. It captures the direction of political motion but misstates its mechanism.

Backlash suggests something like a political analogue to Newton’s third law of motion: progressive excess produces an equal and opposite reaction; grievance is answered by grievance; and if the reaction takes on a racial coloration, that is only because the initial action was racially tinged. In this view, Trump’s return appears as a kind of inevitability — an elastic band released after being stretched too far. But this way of thinking drains politics of agency. Human beings are not rubber bands. They choose, within limits, how to respond to strain. Those limits are shaped by politicians, institutions, and the culture at large. These organize raw dissatisfaction into strains of discourse, thought, and belief, with varying degrees of coherence. 

The Right’s response to progressive identity politics has not chiefly taken the form of repudiation. It has taken the form of adoption. A focus on racial identity remains the coin of the political realm. What we are witnessing is not merely a backlash. It’s a convergence.

For years, identity politics was treated — rightly — as a pathology of the Left. It displaced the individual as the bearer of moral and political claims, and instead proposed group membership, defined by race, gender, and sexuality, o as the proper grounds for justice. Classical liberals warned that once politics was organized around groups rather than persons, the state would become an arena of zero-sum contestation among identities, with predictable consequences for social cohesion. During the “racial reckoning” of the late 2010s and early 2020s, we saw enough of that dynamic to last a lifetime.

Yet in the months since Trump’s return to office, it has become clear that identity politics has not been defeated. It has just been rebranded. An insurgent movement on the Right has concluded,  quietly but unmistakably, that identity politics is not a moral error so much as it is a powerful political technology. As a democratic ideal, it is corrosive. As a tool of mobilization, it is extraordinarily effective. What I had previously described as backlash (against overly aggressive anti-racism) now looks more like a realization: the right has decided it can no longer afford to leave the weapon of race-identitarian politics unused. 

Enter Elon Musk. 

Before dismissing the Tesla and SpaceX boss’s vision of open racial conflict outright, it is worth steel-manning it — internet parlance for presenting the strongest version of an argument before proceeding to contest it. Musk’s framing resonates because it speaks to genuine disorder that many associate with race. Crime has risen in some cities. Immigration has strained administrative capacity. Progressive elites have often appeared more interested in moral signaling than in competent governance. Many citizens reasonably feel that institutions no longer enforce rules impartially or tell the truth about trade-offs. Against such a backdrop, warnings about social fragmentation do not sound like hysteria. They sound like realism.

But realism requires discrimination and discernment. Musk’s diagnosis leaps from institutional failure to demographic destiny, from policy breakdown to fighting in the streets. That leap is not evidence-based; it is interpretive. And it is here that thoughtful analysis must reassert itself.

As I see it, the imagery Musk deploys draws on two sources: conspiratorial narratives about demographic “replacement”, and his own reading of civilizational failures in post-apartheid South Africa. In one widely circulated episode, Musk endorsed a post claiming that if white men were to become a demographic minority, they would face slaughter, and that only white solidarity could ensure survival. The meaning was unmistakable. This was not a critique of identity politics; it was a remarkably disquieting embrace of it.

Not long ago, open calls for white solidarity from a figure of Musk’s stature would have been politically radioactive. Today, they are met with a mix of alarm, rationalization, and — in some quarters — approval. That shift itself is the real story. Musk did not invent white identity politics. But he legitimizes them. His importance lies less in the sincerity of his beliefs than in his role as a permission-granting figure. When ideas migrate from fringe spaces into elite discourse, they change character. Errors that might remain contained at the margins become dangerous when voiced by powerful actors. Such is the case here.

Musk’s central error is conceptual. He is importing a post-colonial model of race politics into Western multicultural societies where it does not apply. Post-apartheid South Africa was not renegotiating the status of racial groups within a stable constitutional order; it was adjudicating the inheritance of the state itself. Questions of sovereignty, land ownership, elite replacement, and historical authority were all in play at once, in a context of racial domination and dispossession and a setting in which institutions were weak and legitimacy was racially compromised. Under those conditions, identity became destiny — because in the end, there was no other dimension along which to mediate political conflict.

Today’s pluralistic Western societies are not in that position. However bitter, their race-related conflicts take place within settled, universalist constitutional frameworks with entrenched property regimes and comparatively high-capacity institutions. Their arguments are about distribution, recognition, and status, not the wholesale transfer of political power. To read these conflicts as incipient post-colonial struggles is simply a grave category mistake.

What makes this mistake so consequential is that it is structurally enabled by a political culture already organized around identity. Once politics is understood — on Left and Right alike — as a contest among morally freighted groups, the temptation to treat race as a civilizational variable becomes overwhelming. In that context, Musk’s rhetoric is weirdly logical. It mirrors the structure of progressive racialism while reversing its moral valence. History still marks groups, in this view. Power still reproduces itself through institutions. Racially disparate outcomes still function as moral evidence. Only the identities of the winners and the losers, the offenders and the victims, have changed.

Suggested reading

Save us from the crank Right

By Sohrab Ahmari

Whether Musk genuinely believes in white cultural superiority is beside the point. What matters is the effect on the discourse. Once race is treated as destiny, society reorganizes itself accordingly. Institutions, insofar as they operate according to the disavowed pluralist precepts, fade into irrelevance. Demography becomes fate. Politics become a struggle for survival among groups. Race war seems to be imminent.

Institutional realism provides the best alternative to this logic. A serious response to rising crime asks whether policing, prosecution, and punishment are functioning coherently. A serious response to immigration asks whether borders are enforced, asylum systems administered, and newcomers integrated through work and civic obligation. A serious response to inequality asks how education, housing, and labor markets actually operate, rather than how they are symbolically narrated. These are institutional questions. They admit of failure, reform, and learning. They do not require racial metaphysics or “civilization-or-barbarism” histrionics.

This is also, in part, a story about the evolution of the American Right. Identitarian, white racial paranoia on the Right has filled the vacuum created by an earlier ideological unraveling. After World War II, the so-called fusionism associated with William F. Buckley and his National Review magazine attempted to unite three distinct, occasionally contradictory strands of American conservatism into a single governing philosophy: economic libertarianism, a hawkish foreign-policy , and moral traditionalism. The viability of that alliance depended on general conditions of peace and prosperity in the United States, and a kind of gentleman’s agreement that adherents of each strand would mostly overlook their disputes with the others. They were stronger together than apart. And it helped that they were together in the trenches against a common foe: Soviet Communism and those who sought to expand its influence in the West.

But then Communism collapsed; the shared enemy went away. The forever wars and financial crises of the millennium’s early decades broke the accord, with neoconservatism discredited abroad, libertarianism discredited at home, and religious traditionalists left to pursue their own ends. The rise of Trumpian populism marked the definitive end of the fusionist project. But Trump’s distaste for consistency created an ideological vacuum, and a need for a coherent program to organize the resentments he brought to the surface. 

It would now appear that identity politics rushed in to occupy the space, because it is emotionally energizing and cognitively cheap. It offers a mirage of moral clarity without institutional analysis, and solidarity without responsibility. Racial fatalism on the Right thus functions as a substitute for a serious account of institutional decay.

The deeper tragedy is not that identity politics has migrated from Left to Right, but that it has become the shared grammar of political conflict itself. We now argue loudly about which identities deserve protection or priority, but we no longer argue about whether identity is the proper battlefield. That tacit agreement is more troubling than any particular tweet. For once that terrain is fixed, escalation becomes inevitable.

Liberalism’s achievement was never the denial of any group’s level of historical suffering, but discipline in managing the present. It sought to thin out identity enough that a sense of shared citizenship could survive our grievances and differences. That achievement is fragile, and it is now under open assault — from a Left that moralizes identity and a Right that weaponizes it.

If the most influential figures in our public life continue to teach citizens to read pluralistic democracies through the lens of post-colonial struggle, the consequences will not be confined to rhetoric. Today’s permission structures become tomorrow’s political programs. Ideas that begin as tweets harden into expectations. Right-wing advocates of identity politics promise a restoration of order. What they will more likely produce is the acceleration of distrust and a descent into chaos.

Severance is a classic “mystery-box” show. Prototyped by J. J. Abrams’s Lost (2004-2010), mystery-box narratives offer audiences a series of puzzles, with the promise that they will all be satisfyingly resolved eventually. In real life, there are no writers scripting our reality (so far as we know). However, the paranoid forms of political explanation taking shape on both the contemporary Left and Right share an affinity with the speculative uncertainties of the mystery-box show. 

Conspiracy theories (“fan theories” about reality) abound, and not just on the fringes of the far Right and far Left, but among the sensible denizens of the establishment center as well. The spread of a conspiratorial worldview reflects our current crisis of authority. But more than this, it distorts our understanding of what is really happening. We find ourselves searching for hidden hands and shadowy conspirators rather than facing our problems.  

In Britain since Brexit, neither the Conservatives nor Labour seem to have relished being in power. Prime Minister Rishi Sunak sometimes seemed as if he were trying to pass himself off as the leader of the opposition, promising to “put things right” after the next election, rather than when he lived at No. 10 Downing Street. 

Since Labour came into power in August 2024, both it and large portions of the British media have often behaved as though Reform UK (with five MPs) and the far Right (with no MPs) were the actual government, and Labour only the beleaguered opposition. As with The Board’s speaker in Severance, it is by no means clear where the voice of authority in Britain is actually radiating from. The suspicion that political power always lies somewhere else, and that whoever purportedly possesses it is actually power-less, provides perfect conditions for conspiratorial thinking.

Suggested reading

How the Right sold out

By Sohrab Ahmari

In the United States, meanwhile, the sense that power itself is out of power is a mainstay of political discourse. The Trumpians and the online-Right more generally are fond of speaking of an amorphous “they” directing the course of events. “They” don’t want you to know. “They” want you to live in fear. A permanent elite called “the regime” — a Left-leaning cabal comprising elements from the media, Big Tech, education, the NGOs, and “woke capital” — really controls things. The background assumption behind such rhetoric is that although it controls all three branches of government, the Trump GOP is, in fact, still at the mercy of malign and hidden forces.  

Like the world of Severance, our political imagination appears to be fundamentally adrift in time. Many on the Left have convinced themselves that their Right-wing political opponents are literal throwbacks to 20th-century fascism. Conservatives have succumbed to the same tendency: for them, the political opposition are really communists. For the Right, corporate DEI, “woke” capitalism, the use of critical race theory in schools, the increased emphasis on heritage justice issues, and the new zeal in progressive circles for open borders — all have become signs of old-school Marxism. 

Conservative commentators seem unable, however, to explain why supposedly extreme Left ideas have been so successful at capturing what were until recently slow-moving, conservative institutions and corporations. So they offer us spy-novel scenarios in lieu of political explanation. Conservative writers such as Christopher Rufo describe a multi-decade “long march through the institutions” by a global cadre of far-Left conspirators, who are now supposedly poised to bring about the revolution. As with the “Right-wingers are really fascists” thesis, there is a sense of time-slippage at work in these narratives. We are being invaded by the forces of a nightmare past. Unmask your opponents, and the eternal enemy will stand revealed.

A more plausible explanation can be found in the writings of the Left-conservative French philosopher Jean-Claude Michéa. Rather than a battle between communism and fascism, Michéa sees a struggle taking place within contemporary capitalism. Two forms of contemporary liberalism — economic liberalism (or neoliberalism) and cultural liberalism (progressivism or so-called “wokism”) — are working together and reinforcing each other, in order to enable global capitalism to function. Indeed, according to Michéa, it is “dual liberalism” that typifies the current establishment.

Michéa, in his 2007 book, The Realm of Lesser Evil, describes contemporary neoliberalism as a “vast, humanity-crushing machine” that is busily “dissolving the extraordinary diversity of existing cultures into the icy abstraction of the global market.” Neoliberalism dictates that there must be unrestricted flows of capital, goods, and labor across borders. To achieve this, it redefines the world in terms of transparency and metrics. During the ’80s and ’90s, under the New Public Management or so-called audit culture, public sector bodies were compelled to recant their previous objectives and justify their existence in value-for-money terms. The long-term result has been a kind of capitalist version of the Leninist permanent revolution. When applied to institutions, it produces a new normal of continual restructuring. All existing organizational structures are turned upside-down and inside-out. Whatever was there before must be reformed. All sense of prior mission and long-term stability is lost.

Rather than resisting neoliberalism, Michéa observes, many progressive elites have allowed themselves to be recruited into its service. Whereas socialist politics was once concerned with protecting the interests of working people and safeguarding national populations, the progressive or neoliberal Left is hostile to the nation-state and any sense of continuity with the values of past cultures. Elites have thus created a highly selective, pared-down version of Left-wing ideology that is compatible with the needs of global business, and manifests itself as the current iteration of “woke” cultural liberalism. 

This new liberalism embraces the principles of openness and boundary-breaking, and focuses on overcoming what it identifies as society’s dominant norms. In doing so, it claims to free people from the oppressive structures that restrict human potential. In reality, it is attacking the last vestiges of the pre-capitalist traditions that once made societies distinctive entities. Unburdened by past values or cultures, nations can be redeveloped in the standardized terms of the new global capitalism. 

Schools and universities have accordingly aligned their teaching curricula with environmental sustainability goals and “global challenges,” and now go about the business of producing outward-facing global citizens, rather than passing on traditions. Heritage institutions, such as museums and art galleries, have sought to make themselves relevant to the current moment by critiquing their own former missions, turning their collections into exercises in moral repentance rather than commemoration. Dissent has become compulsory, so long as that dissent is aimed at the status quo. Of course, what this means is that our actual dominant norm is the compulsion to attack dominant norms — which conveniently fulfills the larger neoliberal project of dissolving all prior structures. 

Cultural liberalism and economic liberalism are not opposing forces. Rather, they work together to further the interests of the current system. Once we view the contemporary workplace through the lens of this dual liberalism, much that might have otherwise seemed puzzling begins to make sense. Corporate DEI and environmental and social governance frameworks are not, as many on the Right would have it, forms of “Marxist” indoctrination that have somehow captured the corporate sphere. Instead, they enable the extension of managerial logic into new domains, both legitimizing private enterprise and providing new opportunities for growth. 

The “woke” capitalism that emerged in many corporate workplaces during the 2010s was a particularly evocative example of dual liberalism at work. Corporate managers once defended the value of the work they did in the old “audit culture” terms of efficiency and value for money. After the 2008 financial crash, however, capitalism sorely needed a new justification. The restatement of corporate missions in moral terms, as well as the new corporate tolerance for workplace activism, reassured progressive employees that their workplaces and professions had meaningful responses to contemporary crises. And management’s newly compelling moral framework silenced dissent. How could anyone defy managerial decision-making when management had become fluent speakers in the languages of social inclusion and environmental justice?

Suggested reading

Grindset is the new Protestant ethic

By Michael Cuenco

By the end of the 2013 film The Congress, much of humanity has mentally migrated into a simulated world, leaving their withering bodies (and the physical world itself) neglected and abandoned. Our current tendency to operate within a dreamland of historical analogies is strikingly similar. The ubiquitous accusations that one’s political opponents are really fascists or communists are an easy means to win an argument — but also to evade reality. 

In truth, dual liberalism creates problems for both Right and Left. As Michéa observes in The Realm of Lesser Evil, Right-wing conservatives champion free markets and then purport to be shocked by the world those markets create. Their focus on communism allows them to not follow economic incentives to their logical conclusions. And it also allows them to blind themselves to the fact that woke is simply what neoliberal capitalism had evolved to look like in the late teens. Right-wing populism of the sort offered by Reform UK has no intention of breaking with economic liberalism, and thus no answer to economic problems. Instead, the party proposes reviving exhausted Thatcherite economic policies. There is no recognition that these policies have already been tried and that they led here, to this precise — and problematic — moment.

The realities of dual liberalism are just as disquieting for the Left. While progressive rhetoric might resist marketization, progressive principles — choice, openness, autonomy — inevitably create spaces and opportunities for the free market to exploit. Relaxed border policies and the low-wage precarity of the gig and outsourcing economies are inextricably linked, as much as moral defenders of the former might decry the social consequences of the latter. Whereas anti-globalization was until recently a mainstream position on the Left, suggestions that we should reimpose restrictions on cross-border labor flows are now increasingly labeled “fascist” or “far Right.” The influence of the economic strand within dual liberalism — a deep commitment to flows and radical progressive change for its own sake — has rendered the contemporary Left strikingly different from previous Left-wing traditions.

One of the complaints from viewers of mystery-box shows is that their final reveals are usually disappointing. The buzz surrounding online fan theories conceals the less-appealing reality that the writers don’t have the answers, and are making it up as they go along. We can have answers, if we choose to, but we must wrench ourselves out of the dream world of rhetoric, and confront the escalating problems that face us in the real world.

I happened upon the portrait on my “X” (formerly Twitter) timeline this week, because the woman in it had been canned from her job. A popular Right-wing account crowed about the termination, and thousands of X users reposted the news, often accompanied by messages like, “Bye, loser” and “FAFO” (“fuck around and find out”). 

The fuck-around that led to the find-out: the woman in the photo told her small group of followers on social media that she was happy Charlie Kirk had been killed. The conservative activist had “spread harmful rhetoric about marginalized communities and actively worked to strip those communities of their rights.” His assassination, she went on, meant there would be “one less man with power and influence teaching our youth that these beliefs are OK.”

Hers is one of numerous cases of the kind: a ferocious eruption of Right-wing anger targeting Left influencers and ordinary people who greeted Kirk’s killing with chilling callousness or even outright celebration (and some who merely dared to criticize his views, even as they lamented the assassination). Many have lost jobs — not just celebs like Jimmy Kimmel, but random teachers and nurses and lawyers — while others have faced haranguing and harassment. 

The frenzy has drawn comparisons with the aftermath of George Floyd’s killing in Minneapolis that led to a similar canonization of a victim and hysterical hunt for heretics who doubted the new public cult. Cancel culture is back, we’re told, only now it’s practiced by the Right — which is much less shy about using state power, where progressives mostly relied upon corporations, colleges, tech platforms, and other “private” institutions to quash dissent. 

The woke Left, it’s tempting to conclude, has given way to the woke Right. Yet there is something too easy about these 2025-is-2020-redux takes. This is because most of the original critiques of the woke Left were themselves shallow and ahistorical. Some sharper lens is needed to understand these febrile moments, and to defuse the threat they pose to basic civic friendship and social stability.

There is truth to some of the parallels being drawn, to be sure. I’m particularly struck by AI-generated illustrations and videos showing Kirk being embraced by Jesus, or hanging out above the heavenly clouds with JFK, Martin Luther King, and other civic martyrs. These recall the religious imagery used to sacralize 2020’s holy victim, not least a pietà showing the Virgin Mary weeping over Floyd, displayed at a chapel at the Catholic University of America.

More from this author

What America lost with Charlie Kirk

By Sohrab Ahmari

But the question we should ask about this mirroring is: so what? 

Liberal and conservative critics of wokeness have long harped on the religious dimensions of the movement. And it’s true that the woke Left had a credal aspect, a theology upheld by various liturgies: original sin (racism and colonialism); confession of said sin (white activists literally kneeling before black people); a priestly hierarchy (led by the likes of Ibram X. Kendi); the shattering of old icons (Jefferson, even Lincoln); and the persecution of heretics.

But noticing all this wasn’t exactly an earth-shattering discovery of the anti-woke mind. The religious undercurrents of modern secular ideologies has long been a staple of cultural criticism. A classic of the genre is the French liberal intellectual Raymond Aron’s Opium of the Intellectuals, which shed light on the messianic dimensions of Communist ideology. 

Nearly two centuries earlier, the counterrevolutionary thinker Joseph de Maistre noticed that the Jacobins couldn’t rest content with ransacking churches, attacking priests and religious, and restricting public expressions of Catholicism. They also installed statues to the Goddess of Reason, who supposedly guided their cause. 

For a time, an atheistic Cult of Reason gained traction, with several Catholic cathedrals and churches repurposed to serve as its “temples.” This movement, however, was short-lived. The arch-Jacobin Robespierre soon replaced it with the state-sponsored Cult of the Supreme in Being, a more theistic substitute religion that exalted civic duty and belief in a creator.

The iconography and liturgical quality associated with wokeness today merely reaffirm Edmund Burke’s observation, prompted by the events of the French Revolution, that “man is by his constitution a religious animal.” To be shocked by the sacralization of Floyd in 2020 or Kirk in 2025 is to betray ignorance of this basic dimension of human normality: that we members of the species Homo religiosus can’t help but erect altars, whether it’s to God or an ideology or, indeed, the suffering planet Earth.

Ditto for the mania for smoking out heretics, which elicited so much hand-wringing from critics of Left woke-ism in the movement’s heyday, who would describe themselves as “actually liberal, what it used to mean.” The linguist and New York Times columnist John McWhorter, for example, wrote a whole book to explain this phenomenon as a betrayal of Enlightenment values and a reversion to pre-Enlightenment unreason and barbarism.

Yet As I noted at the time, the author displayed a serene unawareness of how Enlightenment values generated persecution (cancellation by guillotine, if you will); and equally, of how the world’s great religious traditions have served, at their best, to  harmonize belief with reason and philosophy — and to regulate a community’s expression of its values. The “real,” “old-fashioned,” “Enlightenment”  liberals are too prone to write off all aspects of religion as fanatical and mindless — ignoring the labors of Aquinas, Averroes, and Maimonides — and then to class Left wokeness as an instance of religious superstition.

It will be even easier to do the same thing in regards to the “woke Right,” since the conservative iteration of the movement is often married to the precepts of more traditionally familiar faiths (hence, those AI pictures of Kirk hugging the Lord Jesus). 

But what such analyses miss is the fact that all culture is, to some extent, cancel culture. The word “culture” has roots in cult (the Latin cultus), which in turn comes from colere, meaning care, cultivation, tending to a garden or an ancestral hearth: acts that involve, among other steps, pruning, rejection, throwing out. It takes an especially pinched view of cultural history to imagine that the only people “guilty” of doing such things were those mad witch-burning medievals — and racial progressives in 2020 or Trumpians in 2025.

In reality, not even the most supposedly high-minded, coolly disinterested liberals can avoid some degree of cancellation (or excommunication, if you insist). The liberal philosopher John Rawls, for example, had his infamous footnote excluding from the realm of public reason “any comprehensive doctrine that denied this right [abortion],” i.e., easily a good chunk of the world’s population. More sensibly, even anti-woke liberals generally exclude overt racists and anti-Semites from their mastheads and conferences.

The point is this: if you noticed a religious and cancel-culture aspect to 2020’s Left woke-ism, and you now see the same forces at work in Charlie Kirk mania, it might be worth wondering if these movements merely instantiate fundamental, enduring and necessary human qualities. Not an abnormality or deviation from the ordinary course of things, but only the latest expressions of deeply normal patterns. I, as a practicing Catholic, find comfort in my tradition’s acknowledgment of these necessities, and the centuries of wisdom and scholarship brought to bear on them. 

This isn’t to discount the achievements of modern democratic pluralism: the way it allows multiple expressions of these cultic impulses to share the same community in relative peace; the procedural protections it affords heretics and dissidents; and the demands of public reasonableness it imposes on all — even if, as Pope Benedict XVI insistently argued, the moderns have defined “reason” too narrowly to mean only that which can be scientifically measured and mathematically expressed, leaving out the great metaphysical questions.

More from this author

Eddington: no country for woke men

By Sohrab Ahmari

Still, if the passion to sacralize holy figures, invent ersatz cults, and persecute dissidents continues to erupt with regularity in democratic, pluralist systems like America’s or Britain’s, then it suggests that some fundamental itch isn’t being scratched.

Is it the case that, having dethroned the authoritative religious traditions, the ones that spent millennia grappling with the tension between faith and reason, Western societies are now menaced by more unreasonable faiths, a more pitiless breed of Homo religiosus? Or could it be that our present social and economic arrangements are so brutally competitive that many people, especially the striving professional classes, are compelled to use quasi-religious victimologies to attack rivals and bolster their own position — whether the religion in question is Black Lives Matter, gender ideology, or cornpone MAGA evangelicalism?

Which brings us back to the woman in the photo. That smile, those words, her repellently cheerful disposition toward murder — these things stir two sets of incommensurable reactions in me. The first is bad memories from half a decade ago, when people like her had the whip hand and scourged those even slightly to their Right: mainly liberals and Leftists who rejected full-spectrum 2020-style progressivism, but also conservative friends who lost jobs and book deals. I also remember the well-founded anxiety that my own book contract with one of the big imprints was one woke campaign from being canceled. “Fuck around and find out” — now others have the whip hand.

This bundle of dark recollections and vengeful yearnings is met by countervailing intuitions, however: pity, or something like it, for that dumb fanatical smile; the conviction that we can’t go on treating each other this way. I can’t give myself credit for this generosity, however. It arises from my Christian faith. It’s had its own fanatic eruptions across two millennia, to be sure, but I see no other way. 

Well, so much for that.

“If you’re passing legislation that is effectively giving huge tax cuts to the rich and stripping away Medicaid, that speaks for itself,” Khan tells me in an interview Thursday, referring to President Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill. “It’s difficult to paint that in any type of populist brush…. It’s very much a continuation of the kind of Reagan-Bush-type philosophy: ‘Let’s concentrate wealth upwards, and maybe it’ll trickle down.’”

She worries that the same corporations that used “woke” and “ESG” (environmental, social, and governance) tropes to legitimate their market power over the last decade are now deploying anti-woke rhetoric to do the same thing. And the Trumpians are letting them get away with it.

As chairwoman of the Federal Trade Commission under Joe Biden, Khan went further than perhaps any one official in giving teeth to post-neoliberalism. She reawakened the FTC, which for decades had lain dormant, enchanted by Reagan-era lullabies about how corporations can do no wrong. She went after firms that slapped false “Made in USA” labels on foreign-made goods; sued Facebook over its monopolistic practices; attacked fee-skimming middlemen in the drug industry; banned non-compete clauses used by employers to prevent workers from seeking better opportunities elsewhere; and much else of the kind.

Her crusades garnered praise from JD Vance, who, during the 2024 campaign, suggested she could stay in her job in a second Trump administration; young GOP staffers took to calling themselves “Khan-servatives.” And while she didn’t, in fact, get to keep her job once President Trump took over a second time, Khan saw early promise.

“In the first few months, and with some of their appointments, and certainly with their rhetoric, it did seem like there was going to be much more continuity” with the Biden approach, recalls Khan. As secretary of labor, Trump tapped Rep. Lori Chavez-DeRemer of Oregon, one of only three GOP lawmakers to cosponsor the PRO Act, the top legislative priority of the labor movement, which would reverse the decade-long hollowing out of collective bargaining.

On antitrust, Trump nominated Gail Slater, a former Vance Senate aide, to lead the Department of Justice’s antitrust unit. Antitrust types on both sides of the aisle viewed Slater as someone who gets it, an impression reinforced at her Senate confirmation hearing, in which she warned about the possibilities of market-based coercion and “private tyranny.” Trump’s antitrust team, moreover, retained the merger guidelines put forth by their Biden predecessors — standard practice, but enough to enrage the US Chamber of Commerce and the neoliberal Wall Street Journal comment pages (where, full disclosure, I used to work).

But then, as the honeymoon phase passed, says Khan, “we saw, just going back to this era of greenlighting really problematic mergers [and] accepting really flimsy promises for merging companies that create a huge risk of failure.” There were also “very troubling allegations about lobbyists kind of now taking over the process … and antitrust decisions being made not based on the facts and the laws, but based on what Trump lobbyist companies could get.”

She’s alluding to the DOJ’s controversial settlement in the merger between Hewlett-Packard Enterprise and Juniper, the second and third largest providers, respectively, of networking solutions for large institutions (universities, hospitals, sports stadiums, and the like). Early on, the Trump II DOJ sued to block the merger before putting the case on a settlement path.

But as contentions arose over the terms, HPE retained a pair of MAGA lobbyists to petition higher-ups in the department, circumventing Slater’s team. The final deal, as UnHerd first reported, was hashed out in a literal clubby backroom over cocktails, and two of Slater’s deputies who raised objections were fired. As one of the fired deputies, Roger Alford, wrote in an essay for UnHerd: “MAGA-in-name-only lobbyists and the DOJ officials enabling them are … determined to exert and expand their influence and enrich themselves.”

Reflecting on all this, Khan asks, “I think ultimately, a real realignment and a real commitment to economic populism require a willingness to make rich and powerful people upset, right?”

Not, it turns out, if the rich and powerful are willing to mouth the culture-war pieties du jour. During the “peak-woke” era, a firm like Amazon would march at the forefront of the Black Lives Matter column — even as it brutally suppressed the nascent Amazon Labor Union and called its African-American founder, Christian Smalls, “not smart or articulate.” Likewise in 2025, the Federal Communications Commission clears mergers between Paramount and Skydance Media based on the firms’ commitment not to pursue diversity, equity, and inclusion.

Khan is critical of both mirroring tendencies: the power of big business to adapt itself to prevailing cultural conditions, depending on who’s in power. “I’ve long been a skeptic of ESG-type initiatives,” she tells me, and when she took office as FTC chair, “I made very clear that there’s no ESG exemption to the antitrust laws. If companies come to me and say, ‘Hey, let our illegal merger through, but don’t worry, we’ll make some nice, full commitments,’ I tell them that was not what the FTC did.”

Put another way: You can’t act monopolistically and get away with it just because you hire a trans disabled CEO or donate to climate-change initiatives.

But are Republicans equally alert to how business uses anti-woke as a shield against regulatory scrutiny? Says Khan, “It is interesting and quite perverse, candidly, that we are now seeing [how] companies will make certain commitments to shut down their DEI projects…. And suddenly, you know, potentially troubling mergers” win approval.

Fair enough. But given the post-neoliberal thrust of much Biden economic policy, why did Trump and the GOP end up walloping Democrats in last year’s election, especially among working-class voters? Khan’s answer, in short, is that the Bidenites didn’t have enough time.

More from this author

Abdul El-Sayed: Democratic bro whisperer

By Sohrab Ahmari

“There’s no secret that people were very concerned about cost of living,” Khan says, by way of explaining Kamala Harris’s failure. “Initially, there was a surge in pricing during the pandemic, because there were legitimate supply-chain issues. As those supply-chain issues got resolved, prices didn’t come down as quickly. We have seen companies be quite open about how, be it the supply chain issues, be it tariffs, these can be very useful covers for inflating prices.”

Neoliberalism, she says, was too entrenched for post-neoliberalism to overcome in short order: “Big picture, the [Biden] administration in a whole bunch of economic domains really did break with the 40-year Reagan-Bush-Clinton neoliberal playbook…. But at the end of the day, you’re going to need more than four years to fully undo the destruction of that 40-year regime.”

Not all Democrats agree. The so-called Abundance movement — a cohort of pundits and intellectuals led by the likes of Ezra Klein, Matt Yglesias, and the newly founded Argument magazine — traces the party’s troubles to too much populism and not enough deregulation, especially when it comes to building up housing and transportation in blue cities and states. They’ve courted, and received, the backing of some major donors in Silicon Valley and elsewhere.

What does Khan make of Abundance? “I haven’t seen any credible analysis that suggested why Democrats lost was we didn’t have enough donors on our side,” she says. “I just haven’t seen that presented in a convincing way.” Indeed, Harris had the backing of one tech heavyweight, LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman, who called for Khan’s head as the price of ongoing support. “There’s some prominent tech donors who are opposed to the antitrust and competition work that we were doing.” Some of those donors are now throwing their weight behind Abundance.

Still, Khan grants part of the Abundance argument. Says Khan, “To the extent that there are arguments about making government more effective, more efficient, absolutely, let’s do that.” But even that, she goes on, depends on taking on oligarchic power and monopoly, since it’s often the largest firms that benefit most from byzantine bureaucracy and from deliberately gumming up economic governance as means to discredit it.

Asked which active politicians today she finds most congenial to her agenda, Khan doesn’t hesitate: Dan Osborn, the independent union organizer running to unseat a Republican senator in Nebraska; Abdul El-Sayed, the Bernie protégé running for Senate in Michigan; Nathan Sage, a progressive running for Senate in Iowa; and Zohran Mamdani, the socialist New York mayoral hopeful (and likely shoo-in).

The upshot of her analysis: given that the Trumpians are drifting away from robust antitrust, protection of entitlements, and friendship with organized labor, the future of post-neoliberalism turns on battles within the Democratic Party.

Around a decade ago, in the fallout from the financial crisis, some of the world’s wealthiest individuals and biggest corporations started deploying the Left’s “woke” tropes to legitimize their own power and to disarm popular grievances. Since then, and especially in the wake of last year’s election, they have adopted the edgy aesthetics and rhetoric of the online Right in service of the same ends.

In both cases, the underlying message is remarkably similar, notwithstanding the enmity between Left and Right, between woke and anti-woke. The message is that all collective action is ultimately in vain; the individual — be he the anti-racist HR specialist of the Left or the heroic gym bro of the online Right — is the only realistic locus of change.

Take wokeness, which roughly emerged back in 2013, when George Zimmerman was acquitted for the killing of an African-American teen, Trayvon Martin, in Florida. This triggered the first Black Lives Matter protests. It was also the year a PR exec named Justine Sacco tweeted a tasteless joke before hopping on a flight to South Africa (“Hope I don’t get AIDS”), only to be fired before the plane hit the Cape Town tarmac. In the ensuing years, wokeness and all the adjacent movements, from DEI to #MeToo, swept through and took hold of our mainstream institutions, reaching a fever pitch in 2020.

More from this author

Trump reclaims the Jacksonian spirit

By Travis Aaron

Most conservatives associate wokeness with progressive utopianism, only the most recent attempt to revive Marxism. But this is a mistake. The woke, to be sure, demanded dramatic changes to our public language, monuments, and institutional practices: “unconscious-bias” trainings became de rigueur at workplaces; newspapers began to capitalize the races; Churchill statues were vandalized. But wokeness was far from utopian — quite the contrary, it amounted to an intensely pessimistic worldview. Drawing from the academic tradition of Afro-pessimism, as the scholar Geoff Shullenberger has pointed out, wokeness ended up “inscribing black oppression into the very fabric of reality”.

In the American context, this served an immediate purpose for a Democratic Party seeking to displace blame for the devastation of the black middle class in the Great Recession. It wasn’t that neoliberal Democrats had bailed out big banks while abandoning African-American homeowners to the vagaries of the market. Rather, blacks were immiserated because racial tyranny was and remains “a metaphysical — even ontological — condition”, as Shullenberger neatly puts it. A metaphysical crisis can’t be blamed on any one policy mix or even remedied by normal politics, and that was the point.

Woke cultural actors thus dismissed the legitimate achievements of civil rights and similar movements in Britain and elsewhere: colourblind justice — the ideal that inspired the likes of Martin Luther King Jr. — was framed as racist. Future progress was similarly foreclosed by the racism that stamped the modern West at its material and psychic origins. Even (and especially) those who denied harboring racial animus were, in fact, irredeemably racist.

The only thing left to do was for people to “work” on themselves as individuals: to “unpack” hidden biases, confess their role in structures of “supremacy”, and lower their expectations regarding things such as objectivity and punctuality, now condescendingly recast as white values. Crises which had concrete fixes, such as chronically low wages, were ditched in favor of vaguely defined ones such as “racial capitalism”, with US firms like American Express and CVS lining up to self-flagellate — even as they resisted antitrust, unionisation, caps on interest rates, and other tangible reforms as ferociously as ever.

Who could fail to notice this dynamic when Hillary Clinton assailed Bernie Sanders by suggesting that the Vermont socialist’s proposed bank regulations wouldn’t undo “systemic racism”? Or when the chief diversity officer at the US outdoor-gear chain REI opened a company podcast by making a land acknowledgment — before launching into an anti-union tirade? Or when a vegan-food firm warned its diverse workforce that unions are for “old white guys”?

The role of wokeness as a prop for institutional power is so familiar now as to be cliché, even among many progressives. Much less understood, however, is how corporate power is putting the edgy online Right to the same use today.

The online Right took shape amid the stresses of lockdown and corporate-approved race riots in 2020 and 2021. The streams that fed it included Right-wing populism; the manosphere starring Andrew Tate; crunchy moms, vaccine skeptics, and “chemtrail” watchers; along with sundry edgelords whose anti-woke provocations soon gave way to overt racism, among other tendencies.

There was always an element of bootstrapping individualism here, especially in the American variety of the online Right. Yet in their more productive forms, these subcultures mounted systemic critiques of oligarchy and a “deep state” that included not just government actors, but also corporate power. Pervasive censorship — carried out not by governmental agencies, but Silicon Valley firms — had alerted them to how overweening private actors can imperil freedom. Ditto so-called debanking, a sinister new private-censorship method road-tested on Right-wing populists such as Nigel Farage.

More from this author

Elon Musk is a danger to Trumpism

By Travis Aaron

As a result, taming “Big Tech” censorship was all the rage among Right-wing populists on both sides of the Atlantic. Republican lawmakers, for example, took up Section 230 reform, threatening to revoke the special legislative license that permits social-media platforms to censor or promote content but without the defamation liabilities that traditional publishers carry.

Other conservatives, most notably Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, mused about treating such platforms as “common carriers”, the ancient common-law doctrine that bars firms operating things like public toll roads and rail lines from discriminating against customers. Just as your land-line provider can’t drop you based on what you say on the phone, the argument goes, so the likes of Facebook should be barred from un-personing users based on their viewpoints.

It wasn’t just social media. If Silicon Valley giants could amass a vast and unaccountable power, some on the Right wondered, were there other market actors that deserved similar scrutiny? When he was still a relatively sane anchor on Fox News, for example, Tucker Carlson devoted a long and penetrating segment to the asset-stripping of a beloved Midwestern sport-goods chain by Elliott Management, the hedge fund controlled by the uber-hawkish GOP donor Paul Singer. Some on the populist Right in America even took to calling themselves “Khan-servatives” in homage to Lina Khan, then-President Joe Biden’s crusading anti-monopoly czar.

But it all came to naught. That’s because, beginning in 2022 with Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter (now X), the oligarchy pulled off a rapid and astoundingly successful ideological shape-shift: rebranding itself as the enemy, and the chief victim, of woke middle managers.

Musk is, of course, the figure who best embodies this alchemy of corporate power. Having once promoted DEI in his own firms, he now routinely and positively interacts with X accounts that traffic in explicit racism and antisemitism — agreeing with one, for example, that Jews are behind multiculturalism.

Spicy stuff. But take a closer look: his purchase of X and, I suspect, his toying with edgy memes motivated the Right to abandon Big Tech reform. One of “their own”, after all, was now in charge of the most politically sensitive platform. It didn’t matter that the basic power asymmetry between platform and user remained unchanged. Indeed, censorship still goes on — only now it takes place at the behest of one man, rather than being directed by a bureaucratic class with a clear set of rules and an appeals process with a human being (rather than a robot) on the other end.

Nor were many on the Right bothered by Musk’s blending of governmental authority (the Department of Government Efficiency) and private power (X) that so alarmed them when the ancien régime did the same thing during the pandemic. Seen this way, it becomes clear that Musk rescued not so much free speech as the very narrow class of men who own the social-media platforms.

More from this author

How Elon Musk lost the plot

By Travis Aaron

Musk is far from alone. Another richly instructive example is Jeff Bezos. Not too long ago, the Amazon boss placed his firm at the forefront of corporate America’s Black Lives Matter push. Moreover, Amazon for years banned When Harry Became Sally, a scholarly critique of gender ideology by the conservative thinker Ryan Anderson.

Yet now Bezos has inexplicably un-banned Anderson’s book and directed The Washington Post, the newspaper he owns, to promote free-market and libertarian ideology. His new friendliness with Donald Trump’s GOP earned him and his fiancée an invitation to join the 45th and 47th President on the inauguration dais. The new administration has also handed Amazon a raft of deregulatory wins, not least an early attempt to cripple the National Labor Relations Board, the New Deal agency tasked with enforcing collective bargaining, including at Bezos’s Dickensian warehouses.

Again, the power asymmetry between Amazon and its workers remains unchanged under the firm’s new ideological dispensation. But with rare exceptions, the Right has ceased to speak out about workers oppressed by his mega-firm.

Perhaps most astonishing is how the oligarchs managed to reframe even populist regulators as agents of a woke deep state. Soon after the election, tech oligarchs led by Musk and Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg (another censorious wokester-turned-Trump bestie) began to complain about the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, or CFPB, established in the wake of the financial crisis to combat banking scams, especially those targeting downscale customers, the type who tend to pull for Trump at the ballot box.

Sure enough, one of the new administration’s first steps was to “delete CFPB” (as Musk had called for), compelling it to drop its legal cases — including against banks that insisted on the right to debank customers — and putting the agency under Office of Management and Budget director Russell Vought, an old-school pro-business Republican.

In a memo setting out its reasoning, the White House described the CFPB as a “woke, weaponized arm” of the deep state that had given “itself the right to regulate Americans’ checking accounts”. Which sounds pretty bad — until you realize that by regulating checking accounts, they meant banning banks from piling on fee after fee on low-income customers who overdraw their accounts. Also cited as an example of the CFPB’s “woke” tyranny was a rule requiring the removal of medical debt from credit reports.

In short, the populist Right’s anti-woke edginess and solicitude for the put-upon “anon” was absorbed, commodified, and elevated into a new “dialect of power”. In the bargain, the movement was divested of its radical policy energies. Much as the Left had cashiered its more radical economic demands for more diversity training, so the Right learned to content itself with CEOs who would “own the libs”.

All that remains now of the online Right is the bootstrapping self-help element: bodybuilding; the consumption of raw milk and animal protein; “trad” marriages that smack of kink; vaccine avoidance; and the like. But here, too, the movement has been of service to the oligarchs, by generating fantasies of the genetically superior CEO or entrepreneur onto whom millions of temporarily embarrassed non-CEOs could project themselves.

The fate of woke and anti-woke alike is a testament to corporate elites’ capacity for absorbing oppositional trends, symbols, and ideals, thus turning potential threats into a means for the upkeep of institutional power. It’s also a reminder of the limits of culture-centric politics for confronting the power differentials generated by markets. Not to put too fine a point on it: capital is happy to grant your pronoun requests — and equally happy to throw Roman salutes — so long as wages and unions are kept down and antitrust regulators are brought to heel.

On the day he resigned, August 10, 2021, Cuomo was famously photographed, coffee cup in hand, entering a helicopter alongside his daughter Michaela. His mayoral campaign launch visually called back to that moment. It’s a testament to how rapidly the cultural atmosphere has shifted: though Cuomo remained largely unapologetic, at one point blaming his handsiness with women on his Italian heritage, he did resign. Now, a little more than three years later, the ex-governor is more brazen, expecting forgiveness for his sexual lapses.

He isn’t alone. In 2017, the comedian Louis CK was accused of masturbating in front of female comedians. But since being canceled, he has toured the country, appeared on several podcasts, and sold out a show at Madison Square Garden. Today, tickets to his upcoming Los Angeles performance are going for several thousands of dollars. #MeToo, it seems, is sunsetting along with the woke era.

It would be tempting to look at this turn of events and conclude that #MeToo failed completely. It would also be wrong: the movement succeeded in dethroning big-time, violent abusers and in raising barriers to the sort of harassment that used to be routine in many workplaces. However, the path to redemption created by the movement has been less than satisfactory, especially for accused men without the benefit of money and fame.

The re-election of Donald Trump and events since his inauguration have confirmed the decline of wokeness. For many people, that means no longer living in fear of the Left’s lifestyle and language police. While #MeToo is in some ways a different phenomenon from woke, the two were blended in the public mind, as part of the same culture of accusation and interrogation. But no more. Comebacks like Louis CK’s and Cuomo’s will proliferate amid the vibe shift, even as the collateral of the #MeToo movement is still settling.

Seven years since the movement first emerged, the men accused in #MeToo fall into three categories: the imprisoned, the forgotten, and the forgiven. Those who have been accused, tried, and convicted of the worst crimes, such as Harvey Weinstein with his numerous assault charges, have been managed and dealt with. The forgotten include men who weren’t all that relevant to begin with, like the actor Scott Baio; men only relevant to niche corners, like the former Paris Review editor Lorin Stein; or men we don’t even recall being accused of in the first place, like Morgan Freeman. However, it’s the third category, those whom we’ve “forgiven” — or at least, those men allowed back into the public eye, men who continue to be afforded opportunities, visibility, and money — that we continue to reckon with.

Suggested reading

How MeToo became too cringe for America

By Kat Rosenfield

Most of the biggest villains of #MeToo, those accused of drugging and raping women, remain either in custody or entirely shunned from society. We felt the ripple effects of those men in more recent exposés about Neil Gaiman and Sean “Diddy” Combs. But for some of the rest — those who perhaps made unwelcome advances upon women, made them uncomfortable, exploited their position of power for otherwise consensual sex, etc. — the cultural and political gates have re-opened.

When we look to how our culture has reintegrated men whose transgressions have largely been nonviolent and semi-consensual, perhaps we can begin to trace #MeToo as a broader project, one that remains unfinished. As a movement, #MeToo has succeeded thus far in reorienting how we view both perpetrators of sexual violence and victims. It is indeed harder now for men in positions of power to quietly continue hurting people thanks to that power. For this, #MeToo should be considered a triumph.

Which brings us to the downsides of #MeToo. In some cases, these have been either been overestimated or largely remedied — with some critical exceptions. There is a dominant cultural narrative among #MeToo’s critics that the movement’s biggest impact has been in making young men more fearful of approaching women and pursuing romance. According to Gallup data, however, this has not panned out: young men report being unaffected by #MeToo, while the share of women who “often or sometimes” worry about being sexually assaulted has risen 15%.

As Daniel A. Cox at the Survey Center on American Life explained: “#MeToo effectively undercut victim-blaming narratives that perpetuated the idea that sexual assault is the result of poor decisions, miscommunication, or unlucky happenstance…. In the wake of #MeToo, there was recognition that sexual assault and harassment were pervasive problems in American society. Many have come to believe it could happen to anyone”.

This, too, is a triumph, but one that requires more interrogation. Women are now more fearful of sexual assault. Are they right to be? Has the awareness element of the campaign made us any safer? Are we ultimately any less likely to be assaulted, and are those who commit assaults any more likely to be caught?

Our legal system rarely convicts rapists, and reporting your boss for sexual misconduct is very different for someone without the resources of some of Weinstein’s famous accusers like Gwyneth Paltrow. But the kind of justice found outside the legal system, in the social isolation of being cancelled, has had awful consequences for normal people, like the Oxford student Alexander Rogers, who took his life after being ostracized for a bad sexual encounter.

Stars with the platform to do so can rebuild their image. In certain cases, like Louis CK’s, their cancellation can even serve as material for their redemption. A politician like Cuomo, meanwhile, will no doubt persuade some voters to overlook his personal shortcomings to save their city from its crises. Whether Cuomo has a good case to make in this regard is a different question. As it is, his pitch amounts to: forget about my personal lousiness — Gotham is going to hell.

Not everyone is so lucky. #MeToo traveled a long way beyond the rich and famous. In our anti-woke era, we have mostly turned away from the routine of cancellation the movement brought out, but the instinct from which it emerged — our desire to uncover and arbitrate the most personal details of someone’s life and to place them under moral scrutiny accordingly — endures. It isn’t just women of Hollywood who experienced sexual violence or threats of it, and it isn’t just famous people whom we place under this culture of surveillance. Perhaps celebrities can be uncancelled now. But what about the nameless?

Sometime around the end of the second Obama term, people started to discover that Dr. Seuss — Theodor Seuss Geisel — had drawn crude images of Asian, black, and Jewish people. Those images had been there all along, sitting uneasily with his famous books, which consistently champion liberal and environmentalist values. Only now, the “problematic” drawings started to overshadow the good doctor’s achievements.

When First Lady Melania Trump sent a collection of 10 Dr. Seuss books to a Massachusetts library in 2017, she received a furious response. “You may not be aware of this, but Dr. Seuss is a bit of a cliché, a tired and worn ambassador for children’s literature”, the recipient of the books, librarian Liz Phipps-Soeiro, lectured in a blog post. “Another fact that many people are unaware of is that Dr. Seuss’s illustrations are steeped in racist propaganda, caricatures, and harmful stereotypes.”

That was hardly the end of it. The NAACP called for “censorship” of all Dr. Seuss books (yes, the organization unabashedly used the “c” word). Dr. Seuss Enterprises, which publishes his works, pledged to remove six of the author’s most offensive titles from future publication.

More from this author

How lawfare destroyed liberalism

By Alexander Nazaryan

But the real scandal came when, a little more than a month into his first term, President Joe Biden failed to mention Dr. Seuss in his announcement for Read Across America Day, which customarily involves a president and/or first lady reading a Dr. Seuss book to schoolchildren. The outrage was instant: “Dr. Seuss Is Canceled”, went one headline at the libertarian Reason magazine. 

Spoiler alert: Dr. Seuss wasn’t canceled. His books have spent so much time on the Amazon bestseller list, the Atomic Habits guy is jealous. But Biden’s opponents saw it as an attempt to move the culture to the Left, the first of many. They seethed as he invited transgender influencers to the White House, showered accolades on progressive icons like Bruce Springsteen and George Soros. They vowed to restore sanctity to American culture once they had a chance.

Well, how’s that working out?

We now have the Gulf of America, while the US taxpayer has clawed back the $47,000 that United States Agency for International Development splurged on a Colombian “trans opera”. Inveterate Twitter troll-cum-diplomat Ric Grenell has been appointed the president of the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, a position for which he is as suited as I am to translate Dr. Seuss into Bulgarian.

I am not saying that the supposed cancellation of Dr. Seuss is why we have a second Trump term. Nor is that controversy congruent to the consequences of four more years of MAGA. But minor as that affair may seem, it is a neat microcosm of our ineffective, herky-jerky politics, the main goal of which is increasingly only to undo whatever the other side has been doing.

Constant whiplash between political and cultural extremes isn’t what people signed up for. You could certainly argue that the Biden administration went too far in some of its diversity initiatives, but the branding of every black person in any position of institutional power as a “DEI hire” is a MAGA tic most people don’t endorse, as River Page pointed out in The Free Press.

People wanted normal, which shouldn’t be surprising, since Americans have for centuries been a pragmatic people. Even today, we are actually far less polarized then news reports would have you believe. It’s rather that the activists at the poles have megaphones the size of Kansas, which they buy with the cash raised from ideologically motivated billionaires (Soros, the Koch Brothers, Bill Gates, Elon Musk — take your pick). Those groups can then boost candidates who need both publicity and cash. The rest of us are like the archetypal guard in a bank-heist movie, bound and gagged with masking tape, helplessly watching the scene unfold.

When he was attorney general of the United States under George W. Bush, the dour John Ashcroft covered up the Spirit of Justice statue because its naked breast offended his evangelical sensibilities. In which case, he should have quit. We don’t elect censors or moralizers. To their credit, the new Trump people don’t share Ashcroft’s moralizing spirit. Their supposed enemy is wokeness, a term that could mean anything from cringeworthy shows of political posturing to worthwhile efforts to acknowledge past injustices.

The Trumpians seem to genuinely believe that the country is in the grip of a Leftist cultural revolution. In their fervor, they forget that at least half of Americans — the ones who vote for Democrats — flatly reject that view. And that, wide-eyed activists excepted, most liberals simply seek after a decent life: a measure of financial stability, happy and healthy kids, and, yes, the fundamental American right to worship as they please (or not at all) and to speak their minds.

Trump’s counterreaction has itself been immoderate, as evidenced by the harsh language of the new administration’s executive orders targeting transgender protections. Just as most Americans were never going to burn their Dr. Seuss books, most also are perfectly capable of living and working alongside people who hold different beliefs and espouse different values. We’ve never wanted anything but normal, but normal seems to be increasingly elusive in American politics.

So far, Trump 2.0 has shown himself to be just as obsessed with race and gender as the wokest junior staffer in the Biden administration. “Like its antithesis on the Left, the woke Right places identity grievance, ethnic consciousness, and tribal striving at the center of its behavior and thought,” Thomas Chatterton Williams wrote in an insightful essay for The Atlantic. Fort Liberty is Fort Bragg again, though its namesake this time around is World War II hero Roland L. Bragg, not the Confederate general Braxton Bragg. The move will cost several million dollars and will do absolutely nothing to help ordinary Americans with egg prices or medical bills.

Suggested Article

The truth about the Woke Right

By Kathleen Stock

You don’t have to be a genius to see how all this turns out. After four more years of Trump, people will be exhausted, as Trump is an exhausting character. They will want something entirely different (sorry, Vice President Vance). The answer will probably come in the form of a moderate Democrat who shuns the language of the academic and activist Left: someone like Josh Shapiro or Wes Moore or Jared Polis.

Of course, that nominee will still need support from the Left, possibly in the primary, definitely in the general election. Promises and assurances will be made. Once in office, the new Democratic president will placate those liberal groups by reversing many of the policies that Trump is implementing today: pronouns back in email signatures, DEI trainings restored across the federal bureaucracy, no more country music at the Kennedy Center, no more Dr. Seuss. All of which will make the Right seethe once more, preparing us for the next cycle of our reaction-counterreaction politics.

It doesn’t have to be this way. Moderate politics is not only attractive because it accurately describes where most Americans stand on most issues. The more a politician tacks away from the extremes, the less likely he or she is to engender a strong political opposition.

Trolling takes a toll. At first, it seemed like Trump might begin his second term with a measure of popular support, but his early moves have been so sweeping, so striking, that people are protesting again, as they did in 2017. To be sure, many people do support cutting the federal government and making merit the basis of hiring, but unaccountably blaming a plane crash on “DEI” and humiliating the hundreds of thousands of men and women who have chosen to work for the federal government was bound to have major blowback. Already, according to The Bulwark, “Trump’s approval rating is falling fast.” And his second term is barely a month old.

Who will have the courage to change this state of affairs, the courage to be moderate? To borrow from the poor fish in The Cat in the Hat, “this is no fun at all”.

Then it all went downhill precipitously, as the stifling conformity and outright thought control associated with “wokeness” gripped my campus. Strange as this may sound amid the Trump administration’s crusade to extirpate DEI from the executive branch, I have found a relative refuge from these practices and ideologies at — yes — my federal workplace.

A dour brand of identity politics had been a part of American academia long before the rise of wokeness. In the late Eighties and early Nineties, it was called “political correctness” and mostly inspired mockery. Scholars and students who disagreed rolled their eyes and could get on with their academic lives. But the latest iteration was different. It changed the climate on American campuses quickly — and dramatically.

“Wokeness” accelerated. Pronouns became a sort of badge of loyalty, and a way to sift prospective faculty in place of academic merit. My religious students were vilified for expressing principled disagreements about changing social norms. It didn’t matter that they were reasonable, even compassionate in their discourse. I witnessed as one professor labeled as “extremists” Orthodox Jewish students who practiced gender separation. A term typically reserved for suicide bombers now ensnared a perfectly peaceful community.

Suggested article

How McKinsey could exploit DOGE

By John Masko

The hostility influenced the career trajectories of students. A brilliant psychology doctoral student who happened to be an evangelical was pressured by her adviser to leave the program. The adviser feared she would discriminate against LGBTQ people — never mind that her research had nothing to do with sexuality or that she had never expressed a single anti-LGBTQ sentiment; her religious identity alone was enough to cast suspicion on her fitness for academia.

Before resigning, I spent more than a year exploring alternatives to the professoriate. I needed a place where I could earn a reasonable salary, maintain work-life balance, and stay in my current city. I also wanted to work in an environment that allowed for intellectual heterodoxy. I didn’t want to be encircled by ideological conformity, whether from the Left or the Right.

To my surprise, the federal government emerged as my top choice.

Beyond public policy, I knew little about the day-to-day realities of federal work. I personally knew few federal employees. During my rebellious college years, I often railed against the federal government, convinced every single inch of it was riddled with corruption, inefficiency, and bureaucratic excess. Frankly, I also assumed it was a painfully dull place — filled with uninspired suits, yes-men, and offices decorated in Seventies beige. I feared leaving a space dedicated to ideas — however stifled by the woke dispensation — for a slow-moving, bureaucratic machine. Still, I took the plunge because I could no longer stay in academia in good conscience.

It turns out that my fears were justified. Federal work can, indeed, be boring. The amount of paperwork is staggering, and the adoption of modern technology is painfully slow. There are rules for rules. One of my colleagues — another exile from academia — once dryly observed that many federal bureaucrats lack even a basic grasp of political science. They are so absorbed in navigating outdated and sometimes nonsensical regulations that the broader purpose of their work can get lost. It is not that they are incapable of higher-level thinking, but the machinery of government breeds submission to the minutiae.

Yet I also found that the common caricature of the “deep state” as an unaccountable cabal of unelected bureaucrats engaged in shadowy conspiracies is overblown. Nor is the federal workforce a bastion of radical Leftism requiring a scorched-earth response, as some critics argue.

Yes, federal employees have partisan leanings like anyone else, but most ultimately follow the directives of the sitting administration. In my own office, I have heard leadership with Democratic views explicitly state their commitment to carrying out the new administration’s policies — not because they personally agree with President Trump, but because they respect the Constitution and the rule of law. The executive branch, they believe, must be responsive to its head, and the people who elected him.

What often gets overlooked is the intellectual heterodoxy within the federal workforce. My colleagues come from all walks of life. I regularly attend meetings with liberal gay and lesbian colleagues, and in those same meetings, I work alongside conservative evangelical Christians — including pastors and ministers — who say “Merry Christmas” and “Amen” without fear or hesitation.

Having spent years in academia, where self-censorship was often the price of survival, I was stunned by this level of open expression. Conservative employees, in particular, seemed far more comfortable speaking their minds than they ever could on a university campus. This was true under both the Biden and Trump administrations. Unlike in academia, no one has ever forced pronouns on me. Instead, we focus on our jobs and work faithfully to serve the nation.

Now, however, many of these same colleagues — both liberal and conservative — are worried about their jobs. Some of my center-right colleagues live in rural areas, where remote work has allowed them to contribute meaningfully to government service without relocating. But with return-to-office mandates looming, they face a difficult choice: leave their jobs or uproot their families. Ironically, it is often my liberal colleagues, who live in major cities with multiple federal buildings, who will have an easier time complying with these policies.

I understand that, from a high-level perspective, it is difficult to separate the genuinely problematic elements of federal bureaucracy from the rank-and-file employees who are simply doing their jobs. President Trump and Elon Musk, among others, have championed sweeping measures to “drain the swamp”. But my hope is that there is still time to craft a more precise approach — one that targets entrenched bureaucratic dysfunction without indiscriminately dismantling the institutions that, for many of us, have provided a refuge from the excesses of wokeness.

There are federal workers like me who found in federal government service a space for intellectual heterodoxy — one that no longer exists in academia. For that reason, I am hoping for a controlled burn, not scorched earth.

But the woke Left apparently hasn’t received the memo. Witness the social-media mobbing of Vivek Chibber, a professor of sociology at New York University and the editor of the socialist journal Catalyst, after he dared to historically analyze wokeness as an illiberal, authoritarian tendency.

Chibber made his comments last week on a Jacobin magazine podcast titled Confronting Capitalism: The End of Wokeness. It triggered a firestorm of angry “X” comments that ranged from mischaracterizing him as a Right-wing goon to outright obscenity. Ajay Singh Chaudhary, the director of the Brooklyn Institute for Social Research, dismissed Chibber’s critique of wokeness as “tripe” and a “carbon copy” of the Right’s.

Laleh Khalili, a Mideast scholar at the University of Exeter, denounced Chibber as a “brownshirt waving a red flag.” William Clare Roberts, an assistant professor of politics at McGill University, suggested that Chibber is “no different” from liberal writers like Matt Yglesias or Jonathan Chait: “I am weary of having to treat him like he’s a serious thinker on the socialist left, much less a Marxist”. Many other commenters didn’t even bother with full sentences. Instead, they simply called Chibber a “pedophile” and the like.

So much for the vibe shift. But what did Chibber actually say that so incensed the professional Left? Perhaps it was because he dared to point out that wokeness is not popular. Or perhaps it was his definition of wokeness that rankled its acolytes: Chibber defined wokeness as a professional-class movement for social justice that excludes socialism from its political project and that is highly intolerant to boot.

A pile-up on X when a Leftist like Chibber criticizes wokeness is politically significant, because it demonstrates that for much of the Left, there is no difference between the neoliberal micromanagement of diversity in the ranks of the professional class, on one hand, and the struggle to empower the American working class relative to capital, on the other. Progressives in states like California have successfully transformed the language of human resources, while neglecting problems like skyrocketing housing costs and working-class wage stagnation.

If Democrats had been successful on both the language and the wage fronts, there might be less explosive hostility to the party’s politics of hypocrisy. November’s massive shift to the GOP in the Golden State and similar blue areas reflected a silent protest against one-party rule: it is the combination of Democratic identity politics and liberal compliance with the demands of the party’s wealthiest donors that has bred resentment and nihilism among downscale Americans.

Unable and unwilling to contemplate the limits of wokeness in building mass politics, identitarian Leftists have taken out their rage against Chibber. In Chinese, there is a saying that reflects the tyrant’s wisdom when controlling a crowd: “kill a chicken to scare the monkey”. You do a symbolic murder of a critic of woke dogma in order to silence anyone else with doubts in their mind about the priorities of Left politics. The X mob can live off the pleasure of group psychology, following an imaginary woke leader by mobbing an enemy online. It is a disgusting spectacle and bodes ill for the evolution of Left liberalism.

It is critical to attack the authoritarianism at the heart of contemporary liberal politics from the Left: if the Left fails to sound its own alarm about the professional-class takeover of identity and diversity, then the Right will continue to draw upon the rage that animates working-class, non-college-educated people of all races, genders, and sexualities. They have seen liberalism deliver nothing but empty promises of inclusion when they hunger for an actual change in the political field itself. Trump sees the hypocrisy of woke elites and acts as a vehicle for catharsis.

If anything, Chibber didn’t go far enough in his critique. At a key point in the podcast, he dared to ask a question most of us don’t pose any longer: why couldn’t ethnic and gender studies be integrated into existing departments of history, sociology, English, American Studies, and the like when they first emerged in the 1960s? Why did they have to be carved out as separate disciplines? Chibber argued that this owed to “grassroots” demand for separate identity-based departments.

But this is mistaken, and any serious Left critique of the rise of identity studies — a key vector of what came to be known as woke ideas — must reckon with the granular history. In fact, the establishment of the first-ever ethnic studies departments, at the University of California, Berkeley, and San Francisco State University, was engineered by a lifetime FBI informant named Richard Aoki.

This is notable, because the upshot of Aoki’s work, and that of the wider movement he helped incept, was to defuse campus radicalism and turn would-be revolutionaries into credentialed race professionals of the kind who would soon become familiar to anyone who has faced the business end of a university diversity office or corporate HR department.

Suggested reading

In defence of wokeness

By Tomiwa Owolade

In his 2012 book, Subversives: The FBI’s War on Student Radicals and Ronald Reagan’s Rise to Power, the journalist Seth Rosenfeld used the Freedom of Information Act to extract documents from the FBI about its activities against California militant groups during the Sixties and early Seventies. In the course of his research, he discovered that Aoki, the first Asian member of the Black Panther Party, was recruited by the FBI when he was in the Army during the Fifties to inform on student radicals. Aoki, as it happens, also midwifed the Asian American Studies section of Berkeley’s ethnic-studies department, the first of its kind in the United States.

This origin story sheds a cold light on identity- and grievance-based disciplines, which were designed to emphasize “visibility” and “representation” over critically analyzing and attacking capitalism itself. Other American universities would soon follow Berkeley’s path and create ethnic-studies departments to signal their commitment to progressive causes.

Thanks to identity politics, militancy and activism became institutionalized within the academy and, later, the corporation and the security apparatus. Is it possible that Aoki abandoned his early commitment to anti-Communism and had a genuine conversion to the sort of identity politics he would espouse as a chief promoter of ethnic studies? Certainly. And I am not suggesting that identity politics was solely a product of the American security establishment; life is much too complex and contingent to permit such single-cause explanations. Still, there is no denying that university-based ethnic studies came to supply a new “dialect of power”: a way for the likes of the FBI or Goldman Sachs to deflect questions about their decisions by showcasing the “diversity” of the people who make those decisions.

The point is that those of us on the Left need more discussion of the origins of identity politics, the role it has played in creating nominally progressive liberal institutions, and its complicity with defanging actual radicalism. Chibber’s intervention in this debate wasn’t inflammatory. It was conversational, accessible, and reasonable. Chibber’s work is the answer to the millions of Americans who crave a critique of Democratic identity politics but have only found it on the Right. The viciousness of his critics only vindicates his arguments.

When asked about the inspiration behind Americano last month, two weeks after its first broadcast, CEO Ivan Garcia-Hidalgo cited the 2016 election, in which Trump made massive, surprising gains with Hispanics. Recent polling suggests that the rightward drift of the demographic, on which Trump capitalised, has continued since then. There is a growing audience of conservative Hispanics, Garcia-Hidalgo points out — and what they, and America, needed was a “Fox News in Spanish”.

The first evidence of this political shift was met with incredulity by both Left and Right. But those of us on the ground had known for some time that Hispanic-Americans were turning to the Republican Party in unprecedented numbers. In my working-class Miami neighbourhood, I consistently encountered enthusiastic Trumpists. Sure, Trump was always going to attract traditionally Right-leaning Cuban-Americans, but the fervour — and the youth — of his fanatics back in 2015 and 2016 hinted at the beginnings of a new political realignment. Trump’s unorthodox style and abrasive anti-elitist rhetoric had connected with working-class Hispanics. Friends and family who were previously apolitical or tepid independents with centrist leanings had surprisingly hopped on the Trump train.

Trump may be on the fringes again, but in 2020 he gained even more support among working-class Hispanics than he had in 2016. This was a result not purely of his own qualities: since his election, the Democratic Party had alienated another Hispanic demographic. The BLM riots of 2020 were incisive: after the fire and smoke had cleared, polling showed that Hispanics, traditionally law and order types, were against the protests and strongly rejected the Black Lives Matter organisation. At the same time, Democrats were demanding that regular Americans kneel at the altar of the new social justice religion. Many Hispanic-Americans who had previously considered themselves centrist Democrats were repelled.

They might previously have been turned off by Trump’s inflammatory language; now, they were even more turned off by the actual flames destroying American cities under the guise of wokeness. They might not have been Trump supporters in 2016, but they certainly had a rabid Trumpist tio or abuelo who was now pointing at the fires and looters and saying: “See, Trump was right. Democrats want to destroy America.” Hispanics didn’t wake up en masse, but the Right-wing shift became a phenomenon that wasn’t strictly driven by Hispanic Trump supporters.

According to Garcia-Hidalgo, “the only way to save America is with the Hispanic vote” — a  sly rhetorical move that subscribes his new network to the Trumpian view that America is under attack, while positioning patriotic Hispanics as the antidote. Garcia-Hidalgo understands that conservative Hispanics, even if they still have strong ties to their homelands, essentially identify as Americans above all else. Trump understood this, too, which is why some of his more “problematic” language directed at Hispanics — the “bad hombres” rhetoric — didn’t hurt his chances with the demographic. After all, conservative Hispanics, along with the white working-class, are the last group that is unironically patriotic.

More from this author

The rise of the literary noble savage

By Alex Perez

Trump understood the power of culture war as a binding agent. While the Democrats’ socialism-tinged rhetoric became blatantly anti-American, he continued to offer an unabashedly pro-America shtick. Since many Hispanics have ties to failed socialist countries, their American dream is a simple one: they want to work hard, make some money, and be left alone in their free time. This sentiment is perhaps the greatest tenet of classic Americanism. Hispanics do not believe that the nation is illegitimate, undermined by “whiteness” or “cis heteronormativity”, or in need of a radical restructure.

The summer of 2020 may have solidified the Trump-triggered Hispanic rightward shift, but the Democratic response to the pandemic ensured its short-term viability. According to blue-state governors, it was okay to get fresh air only if you were marching for a liberal cause or torching a small business. After the riots subsided, schools remained closed, as did the small businesses left standing after the summer of BLM. All the while, Democrats elevated disconnected bureaucrats like Anthony Fauci to deity-status and robbed the little man of all agency. Working-class Hispanics, of course, were still carrying out their essential jobs throughout the entirety of the pandemic, connected to the physical reality that the laptop class had had the luxury of abandoning.

Still, now that lockdowns and mask mandates are subsiding, will the Republican’s Hispanic gains last? Outside of Trump — and Florida Governor Ron DeSantis — no politician on the Right knows how to communicate effectively with Hispanics, which is why the long-term rightward shift is anything but a guarantee. Garcia-Hidalgo understands this reality, which is probably why he announced, on the Americano show “La Politica,” that presenter Maria Herrera Mellado will be interviewing Trump today.

Of course, the success of Americano isn’t tied to Trump, per say, and nor is the growing conservatism of Hispanics. Even if Trump doesn’t run again in 2024, there’s no doubt that a Trumpian “America first” sensibility plays well with Hispanics and must hold a significant role in any outlet — or movement — if the rightward shift is to continue.

Suggested Reading

Have the Republicans gone too far?

By Oliver Wiseman

The best way for the Republicans to sustain the rightward shift is to consolidate a fragmented Hispanic demographic. The same goes for Americano. Conservative Hispanics are accustomed to regional outlets catering to mostly localised obsessions: prior to the network’s inception, the Spanish-language news options available to them were regional outlets, like Miami’s Radio Mambi. These stations cultivate their audiences for decades, through a fine-tuned understanding of what their listeners’ desire, resulting in a family-like ecosystem in which listeners and commentators build decades-long relationships. They don’t individually pull in massive numbers, but overall listenership is in the millions.

It’s tempting for a network, or a Republican politician, based in Miami to focus on the concerns of Cuban-Americans — they, and the Mexican-Americans along the Rio Grande Valley, are the two Hispanic demographics usually cited when pundits speak of the rightward shift. But if the Right strictly focuses its efforts on the interests of these groups — which sometimes, but not always, dovetail — their rhetoric will be far too insular to reach a broad-based Hispanic coalition.

In my recent listens to Americano’s programming, it’s clear that the station is in Miami, but not of Miami, which bodes well for its future prospects. Instead of placing too much emphasis on a single Hispanic group, Americano is melding “America first” Trumpian Republicanism with the socially conservative elements that have traditionally appealed to disparate Hispanic demographics. For instance, on the night I caught the 8pm show “Entre Nosotras”, the three female presenters were joined by a former officer from the Phoenix PD to discuss the border crisis and the attendant drug scourge precipitated by President Biden’s porous border policy, which is causing a “domestic war”. The Trump-like takes on immigration — which are very popular with Hispanics — and the machinegun-like, emotionally charged delivery of the presenters will appeal to old-school talk radio veterans.

Suggested Reading

Disney has always spread propaganda

By Geoff Shullenberger

It’s worth noting, too, that many of the network’s stars — including the presenter who will interview Trump — are strong women, which highlights the savviness of the management. Recent polling has shown that Hispanic women have shifted to the Right more than any other demographic; a show that foregrounds educated Latinas is likely to be a hit. It’s also as fine a way as any to make a splash and draw in younger Hispanics, which will be the key to expanding the rightward shift and the station’s reach; younger Hispanics are still skewing progressive.

Meanwhile, Americano’s other programming, including the first show of the day, “Amanecer Con Dios” (Waking up with God), which is hosted by a priest, and “Sabor Caribeno,” which focuses on Dominican and Puerto Rican issues, speaks to a network attempting to attract disparate Hispanic elements.

The Trump campaign was likewise able to bring together the fragmented Right-wing Hispanic coalition. What’s most impressive is that the shift occurred without the help of major networks, which often serve as messaging apparatuses for the parties. In the lead up to 2020, the Trump campaign blitzed South Florida, the Texas Rio Grande Valley, and other Hispanic-heavy areas with targeted ads painting Democrats as light on crime socialists hellbent on reshaping America. But its project certainly would’ve been easier if a national Spanish-language network existed, which is why Americano’s appearance on the scene is such an interesting development. Whether or not it succeeds will reveal whether Trumpism can hold onto Hispanic voters who feel themselves drifting to the Right.

The Republican Party, then, should be watching the network’s fortunes closely. Even if Trump doesn’t run in 2024, his brand of Republicanism is so popular with Hispanics that it will play a crucial part in the election. Meanwhile, the budding Spanish-language media ecosystem can provide an insight into what the ascendant Hispanic-American conservative coalition desires — an insight the Democrats might benefit from, too.