Donald Trump is the West’s last chance of survival

The president-elect can reverse the woke cultural revolution. But only if he uses government power to do so

Copy link
twitter
facebook
whatsapp
email
Copy link
twitter
facebook
whatsapp
email
Will the election of Donald Trump reverse America, and the West’s, woke cultural revolution? Much depends on whether he resists the libertarian urge to slash the federal government and moves toward the difficult work of reform. The Gordian knot cannot be cut, it must be painstakingly unpicked.
In my recent book The Third Awokening/Taboo, I define woke as “the making sacred of historically marginalised race, gender and sexual minorities”. From this sanctification of some groups and demonisation of others comes a philosophy of cultural socialism which seeks equal outcomes and emotional harm protection for totemic victim groups. 
According to its doctrines, discriminating against white people, males and Asians, known as “Diversity and Equity”, achieves equal outcomes. Punishing free speech that offends the hypersensitive – such as saying “mother” or “anyone can make it in America” – is said to promote “inclusion” through emotional harm protection, hence the acronym DEI.
Since the 1960s, the Right has often won on the economy but – for good or ill – lost on culture. From diverse immigration to diversity in the curriculum, from the decline of religion to the decline of the family, public attitudes and policies moved in only one direction. 
Leading social scientists Ron Inglehart and Pippa Norris see this as a process of Left-liberal value change, in which progressive new generations overcome their reactionary elders to move the culture steadily Left-wards. Cancel culture, trans affirmation and critical race theory are the most recent steps in this seemingly inevitable process.
Consider that two-thirds of under-25s in both America and Britain think that Google was right to fire programmer James Damore for his internal memo on why women are less common in programming. Almost half of young Americans back Hamas over Israel. They want schools to teach that the US is a racist country and are evenly split over whether JK Rowling should be dropped by her publisher. In all cases, few over the age of 50 take the woke position. Can a free, patriotic, truth-based society survive the rise of Gen-Z?
Trump’s avowed goal is to change the culture, but how?
Much depends on whether, as Andrew Breitbart said, “politics is downstream from culture”, or, as Chris Caldwell and Richard Hanania aver, culture is downstream of politics. The former view holds that intellectuals, education and the media have shaped people’s tastes and beliefs, one step at a time, until our society ended up woke. There is no fixing the problem unless conservatives reconquer the meaning-making institutions: the media, film, universities, schools.
Against this, Caldwell and Hanania argue that the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and its bureaucratic agencies created legal incentives for institutions to adopt affirmative action quotas and censorious speech codes. This forged woke culture the way smoking laws created norms against lighting up. The solution: repeal Civil Rights guidelines and laws while gutting or scrapping its agencies.
Even if you think, as I do, that culture comes first, government action remains vital. It can tie federal funding of universities, student loans and research to eliminating DEI, and legislate at state level to get critical race theory and gender ideology out of schools. It can focus on implementing a new national history curriculum that compels pupils to place western sins in the context of Arab slavery, Comanche genocide, Nigerian human sacrifice, and Aztec settler colonialism.
The American Right’s libertarian instinct is to slash and burn, devolving power downwards. Trump has suggested that he will abolish the Department of Education. This may be satisfying, but is a mistake. When power is fragmented toward other agencies, they become harder to control. When it flows to the states, half goes to places which oppose you. The rest moves to red state politicians who often care little about culture, and, with a few exceptions like Ron DeSantis, have lacked the stamina and policy chops to bring institutions to heel. 
Finally, when the state withdraws, as with school choice, it hands power to private providers which can be more woke than public schools and are no longer bound by the wishes of the electorate. If choice is the answer, why are universities, where people can vote with their feet, so woke?
The alternative is to retain public institutions but make a concerted effort to repopulate their upper ranks with friendly appointees, bind them with directives, alter their recruitment patterns to restore political balance, while firing employees who pursue their own agenda. When the other side wins and tries to restore woke hegemony – as with Biden rescinding Trump’s critical race theory ban – this becomes a political issue that can cost the Left at election time. 
The aim is to expose what happens behind closed doors to scrutiny in order to iteratively shape a new bureaucracy that acts as the servant rather than master of a democratically-elected government. 
Trump cannot govern without the state. He must learn to tame it.
Eric Kaufmann is a professor of political science at the University of Buckingham, and the author of ‘The Third Awokening’ 
Copy link
twitter
facebook
whatsapp
email