Is Trump America-Pilling the Left?

Why the return of MAGA to the White House might not make us more woke

One argument made by those who have endorsed Kamala Harris is that Trump returning to office will make wokeness rise again. Here’s Anatoly Karlin, Scott Alexander, and Noah Smith.

One of my first articles for this Substack was on how Trump’s election in 2016 helped drive the left insane. So it’s not like I don’t believe backlash effects can be real and important. In this case, however, I don’t think we’re going to see a repeat of what happened during the first administration. There are three main reasons why.

1. Wokeness goes in cycles

Nathan Cofnas seems to believe there is only one variable in the world that explains how woke we are: the degree to which elites accept the reality of inherent racial differences in IQ. If they reject the possibility, we just get crazier and crazier until reaching full blown race communism. But if we are brave enough to tell the truth, then we can have merit, economic growth, social peace and harmony, and all other good things.

In my book on civil rights law, I argue that we’ve actually been through a few iterations of this before. There were bursts of enthusiasm for racial egalitarianism in the late 1960s and early 1970s, the late 1980s and early 1990s, and then finally the Great Awokening circa 2012-2021. Wokeness abated in earlier eras, and it is starting to do so again, but not because anyone has ever listened to researchers talking about race differences in IQ. Rather, we gradually realize that wokeness simply doesn’t work. Go soft on crime in the name of equity, and urban disorder increases. Start lowering the standards in academia and corporate America, everyone notices that incompetent individuals are getting ahead and institutions have a hard time doing their jobs, and there is a backlash. People continue to mouth egalitarian rhetoric, but gradually lose their enthusiasm for the project of equalizing outcomes between the races. Reading Cofnas on wokeness, one gets the impression that he believes that society simply proceeds along in a straight line from empirical beliefs to cultural and policy outcomes.

In reality, most of the feedback people incorporate, whether as individuals or in institutions, is pragmatic and subconscious. You make police afraid to do their jobs and start talking about defunding them, cops take a step back, crime goes up, and voters and pundits begin talking about how we need to do something different. This doesn’t require that anyone stand up and explicitly say they’ve changed their views on the ultimate origins of racial differences in behavior. Eventually crime goes down, people forget how more extreme forms of affirmative action failed and led to a backlash, new generations come of age, and we go through the cycle again.

The point here is that this stuff has its own rhythm and flow. The Great Awokening was crazier than its earlier equivalents because of social media and the internet. Trump came along and supercharged the process. But I suspect without him, we would’ve gone through this cycle anyway and eventually realized that wokeness doesn’t work, and it would then be on the wane again. Trump’s first term probably increased wokeness’ intensity and delayed the recovery by a few years. But him coming back won’t return us to 2018-2021. The memory of that era is still too fresh.

2. Liberals want to win and are capable of learning

Part of the left turning away from wokeness has been the result of electoral strategy. They realize this stuff isn’t popular, not even with minorities. So in Arizona, they run Ruben Gallego, a former Marine who rejects the “progressive” label and detests the term “Latinx.” Kamala acts tough on the border and has spent the campaign running from her previous stances on things like transgender surgeries for illegal immigrants. This is not to argue that liberals still believe in wokeness but are only moderating their campaign rhetoric. Parties often adopt political positions for pragmatic reasons but end up believing in them, or empowering those who hold pragmatically correct views out of conviction.

Republicans have not shown the same ability. In Arizona, against Gallego they run Kari Lake, who has all of the insanity of Trump but none of the electoral advantages. Democrats getting Biden to step aside was a demonstration of them living in a healthy epistemological ecosystem. Republicans, in contrast, have no ability to coordinate against Trump. Their base doesn’t believe that polls, data, or elections are real, except perhaps for fake pollsters that tell them what they want to hear. This is why I think Trump will still be the nominee in 2028 if he loses this time, while Democrats will continue to make smarter political decisions. The Democrats’ ability to learn is based on them being smarter, more connected to reality, and having norms of open debate, all characteristics of Elite Human Capital.

3. Trump’s anti-democratic tendencies overshadow his racism

In 2016, Trump ran on the idea that foreigners were destroying the country, and the focus of the Democratic and mainstream media critique of his movement was that it was racist. Biden even said that he decided to run in 2020 because of what happened in Charlottesville.

The anti-foreigner message is still there in the Trump 2024 campaign, but in the wake of the attempted coup of 2020, and the things he’s been saying on the trail, the racism angle has been overshadowed by the idea that the man is a threat to democracy. He does absolutely nothing to try to dissuade people of that view. Trump says that he would win California if not for vote fraud, openly talks about locking up his opponents and their donors too, and even calls for terminating the Constitution. Racism no longer seems that big of a deal. It’s funny watching people like JD Vance try to sanewash Trump and bring up the Hunter laptop story or whatever, when his running mate basically rejects democratic elections as a matter of principle if he doesn’t win them.

Every generation of liberals now reacts to whichever conservatives seem to control the Republican Party. The success of the “New Atheists” of the aughts and early 2010s was based in a reaction to George W. Bush and the perceived power of evangelical Christians. If you watched some routine of a standup lefty comic of the time, religious fundamentalism was the main thing they harped on. The Trump 2016 campaign was centered around white identity politics, so anti-racism took off in the larger culture.

Now, the main message of the Trump campaign in the elite imagination is that he is the guy who wants to abolish democracy, throw out the Constitution, and rule according to his cult of personality. What does the backlash to that look like? Well, if Trump openly detests American institutions and its founding documents, then it makes sense that liberals would become more pro-America.

The liberal establishment’s reaction to the invasion of Ukraine clearly represented a turn away from wokeness. Conservatives tried to own the libs by pointing out that some Ukrainian soldiers and militiamen used fascist iconography. Leftists didn’t care. They started talking more about the glories of NATO, and the indispensability of America and her Western allies for maintaining the world order. This is a fundamentally conservative message.

They were so convincing that Richard Spencer now endorses Harris because he says Ukraine is his number one issue. More importantly, the left’s embrace of Liz Cheney, a conservative on every issue except her rejection of the Trump cult, shows that it is building a broad coalition against Trumpism, which will by necessity require being more moderate. MAGAs pretend that Cheney turned against Trump because he’s anti-war, ignoring the fact that she was fine with him until the events of January 6.

People talk about “woke militarism,” but the two parts of that equation really are in tension. America can’t be a racist hellhole that constantly tortures people of color and also the indispensable nation whose moral superiority gives it the right to tell other countries how to live. In the last few years, as Trump’s contempt for our institutions and the order that America has built comes to the forefront, liberals have started to polarize towards patriotism. If he wins again, I expect another scandal plagued administration characterized by attempted abuses of power, some successful and some not, and the open praise of dictators. With MAGA genuinely becoming a multiracial coalition and Trump’s racism no longer warranting that much attention, a return to 2020-level wokeness is not the most likely cultural response.