Woke isn’t over yet

Americans are living in a rare historical moment, when a decades-old political project looks like it’s finally coming undone. While signing executive orders last month, US president Donald Trump revoked innumerable federal action plans, regulations and programmes related to diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) and ended the need for DEI compliance for federal contractors.

The spell is broken, it seems. Carefully engineered, often concealed networks and funding channels are being scrutinised by forces that the left had hoped to drum out of Washington forever. Democratic house-minority leader Hakeem Jeffries vows to ‘fight’ the Trump administration ‘in the streets’ over DEI. Is this an idle threat, like last year’s warnings about the return of fascism under Trump, or should Americans expect something incendiary to come?

There’s no doubt the Democrats are in disarray. The New York Times says, ‘There is little consensus on how – or even whether – to prioritise the party’s traditional concerns like abortion rights, LGBTQ equality and climate change’. Of course, these are not exactly what most of us would call the Democratic Party’s ‘traditional’ programme.

Nevertheless, what a reversal. Two years ago, the progressive left thought it had finished Trump off. He was ‘not my president’, an ‘insurrectionist’ and on his way to becoming a felon. He was supposed to have been jailed and bankrupted by now, reduced to working stadiums full of flyover yahoos. Racial identity politics, reparations, gender surgeries, defunding the police were all in vogue and urgent. Then, whoosh, the high and mighty watched the worker-bee nation vote hard in Trump’s direction.

That whoosh is a calamity for the entire administrative class inside the US government. High-end losers include K Street lobbyists, lawyers, academics and clergy, mainstream media and showbiz. Silicon Valley is finding it easier to creep away from progressive furies.

The Democratic Party does not understand why its conduct, core assumptions, complaints and reform plans have come to repel a majority of voters. Maybe it won’t ever. No marketing lipstick from the Democratic National Committee can fix this malady, as long as identity politics remains a holy grail for the party. And this is where things get trickier.

Writer David Samuels calls late-stage DEI, which was riding high by 2020, a social contagion, ‘like a fever was spreading, and no one was immune’. Coached by persuasive media figures, and eager to be progressive, ‘spouses, children, colleagues and supervisors at work began reciting, with the force of true believers, slogans they had only learned last week’, he writes. It ought to have become clear these views weren’t shared beyond the elites when in 2023, Alissa Heinerscheid, a graduate of Groton and Harvard, tried hiring a cross-dresser to sell Bud Light to the proles.

One reason the contagion spread so easily is that some of woke’s core tenets became entrenched far earlier than in the 2020s. In fact, when identity politics took hold among US metro elites during the earlier culture wars of the 1980s and 1990s, social critic Christopher Lasch and others warned even then that America’s thinking class, educators and core media were positioning themselves against the individuals, institutions, belief systems and worldly activities that had created the American nation. The elites ‘shelter behind a set of beliefs impervious to rational discussion’, Lasch wrote in his 1995 book, The Revolt of the Elites and the Betrayal of Democracy. ‘It is no longer necessary to argue with opponents on intellectual grounds or to enter into their point of view’, he added presciently. ‘It is enough to dismiss them as Eurocentric, racist, sexist, homophobic, in other words, as politically suspect.’

The Democratic Party, which had already captured major media and universities by then, ignored Lasch’s warnings. ‘We must never, ever believe that our diversity is a weakness’, said President Bill Clinton in his 1997 State of the Union address. ‘It is our greatest strength.’

Moving into overdrive during the Barack Obama years, the surging diversity juggernaut came to insist that it embodied virtue itself. Feminists, gender radicals, Islamists, disabled people and greens fastened themselves on to this identity politics. At some point, DEI claimed to deliver social justice for all the underserved, even if, in practice, it seemed mainly interested in letting a new elite take power and pursue its own interests.

In top institutions, progressives have become exclusionary. Loyalty to the DEI project might be a matter of self-interest or faith, or a mixture of the two. Entering sought-after circles of power has always meant holding the right ideas, dropping the right words and voicing the right convictions. For many board members and trustees, as well as their selected functionaries, fidelity to the DEI project became the entry ticket to power and glory, smoked salmon and private jets.

Take a look, not just at Harvard University. Look almost anywhere at higher education and you’ll see the same dreary catechisms. It’s a closed ideological shop. It’s no wonder so many outside the guild feel left out or alienated.

DEI’s adherents and beneficiaries have no plans to abandon their ample offices and titles, budgets, sinecures, affinity groups and articles of faith. There are few remorseful second thoughts. Having upended institutions, having ‘done the work’, the DEI complex retains a sympathetic press and legal establishment backing it up, along with a tangle of mandates at all levels of government.

The brightest among DEI’s legions know they are defending the indefensible. Yet they have no intention to cede their accumulated (‘hard won’) power to those they regard as morally inferior and bigoted.

Yes, DEI’s adherents may be disoriented right now, especially the recently defeated Democrats. But this ideology is not vanquished or contrite. Its ambitions are unfulfilled. There is far more of the culture war to come.

Gilbert T Sewall is co-author of After Hiroshima: The USA Since 1945 and editor of The Eighties.