Trump didn’t wage a contested fight against the ‘woke’ moment’s excesses. The battle was over before Trump even took office.
The promise of America’s “racial reckoning” has “unraveled,” Axios’s reporters mourned on Friday. “The America that marched for George Floyd five years ago is gone,” the three-bylined dispatch lamented, “buried beneath a backlash that has hardened — for now — into a new political and cultural order.”
Gone are the days when a revolutionary moment compelled every American individual and institution — private and public, cultural and commercial — to audit their public contributions to racial equity and make public amends for their shortcomings as determined by the moment’s uncompromising commissars. That has all been “eclipsed by a reactionary movement backed by the full force of the U.S. government.”
The sequence of events Axios lays out bears little resemblance to reality for anyone who lived through them. Its reporters regret the passing of that period as though it was stolen from them — indeed, from us — by malign interests. Rather, we engineered our own liberation.
The “racial reckoning” to which the activists consigned American institutions looked more like Maoism than an age of enlightenment. It was a time when professors were hounded out of colleges for failing to flatter their students’ egos and validate their emotional incontinence. It was an era in which discriminatory racial hiring practices were encouraged, and the distribution of social goods based on race, even if they conflicted with the Constitution’s equal protection clause, was welcomed. It was a time when enterprising activists could make a name for themselves by divining the racism in harmless fare. From interior decorating to knitting, from bird-watching to jogging, from fusion cuisine to Thanksgiving — it was an age of wonders for mediocrities just clever enough to carve out their niche in the anti-racist ecosystem.
Indeed, the very concept of “anti-racism,” an idea that was once so universally lauded that it was popularized in children’s books and codified in college syllabi, is incompatible with egalitarianism. As Ibram X. Kendi, one of that philosophy’s foremost promoters, put it: “The only remedy to past discrimination is present discrimination. The only remedy to present discrimination is future discrimination.” It is a testament to sanity that this pithy play on Al Smith’s famous locution isn’t the only thing that has been ditched by polite society. Its author, too, has fallen on hard times. Having produced almost nothing of note from his perch at the lavishly funded sinecure that Boston University gifted Kendi, one of the primary architects of America’s “racial reckoning” has had to find other work.
How would Axios’s reporters explain the extent to which burdensome concepts like diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) went into retreat well before Donald Trump was restored to the presidency? Why were commercial enterprises abandoning this expensive sop to the activist class throughout 2022 and 2023? Why was it that the hucksters selling costly indulgences for America’s original sin found no takers even before Trump took the oath of office? And when Trump implemented an executive order restoring merit-based hiring to its proper place, why was it that public and private interests sloughed off that burden so eagerly and with nary a bleat of protest from the Democrats who were once so beholden to the “reckoning’s” shibboleths? The answer is obvious: Trump didn’t wage a contested fight against the “woke” moment’s excesses. The battle was over before Trump even took office.
The activist class isn’t taking its defeat lying down. “No one is resting,” NAACP President Derrick Johnson told Axios. “We’ve earned the right to reflect. But we are still organizing, still fighting — because not only do our lives depend on it, this democracy does too.” They’ll be back. And who knows, maybe they will return with something like the force they mustered in the summer of 2020. But I doubt it — at least, not for a generation.
To the majority of Americans who strive for true equality between the races, the “reckoning” to which they were consigned looked like a step backward. Axios’s sources correctly observe that cultural evolution doesn’t follow a straight line. “It swings like a pendulum,” Johnson said. Backlashes against moral panics invariably invite their own unique excesses, and some of the nostrums that prevailed during the “reckoning” may once again find adherents if the cure for the ills of anti-racism ends up looking worse than the disease.
For now, however, there is little appetite for a restoration of the regime under which we languished during America’s cultural revolution. If anyone should recognize their defeat, it should be the anti-racist activists. After all, as one artifact from this bizarre age — “Critical Race Theory” teaching aid titled “a primer for white people” — declared, “You can’t stop progress.”