Unlike many politicians, Donald Trump is averse to describing what he wants to do in ideological terms. He says he stands for nothing that is more complicated than simple “common sense,” by which he means the rules and principles most people took for granted when he was an ambitious youngster but have since been torn to pieces by what are flatteringly called the “cultural elites.” Back then, before he strode onto the political stage, it was generally assumed that there were only two genders, male and female, that men and women were different in many important ways, that racism would be overcome by taking an egalitarian approach to human rights and that all countries were entitled to police their borders and keep out those who wanted to cross them without fulfilling the legal requirements.
Until quite recently, the rebellion against such outmoded notions seemed to be going from strength to strength. With tenured academics in top universities such as Harvard and their former pupils leading the charge, the enemies of what was once seen as down-to-earth “common sense” succeeded in occupying a growing number of key positions in academe, journalism, law schools, public bureaucracies and the Democrat Party, where they set about persecuting anyone foolish enough to disagree with them, ending many promising careers. They thought they could get away with it because, as they were fond of saying, they believed history was on their side.
Under Joe Biden, who in his dotage became a convert to identity politics, advocates of DEI (Diversity, Equity and Inclusion) came close to establishing a dictatorship. At first sight, what they were trying to do looked innocuous enough, but it soon became clear that DEI meant saying goodbye to old-fashioned ideas about merit or hard work and involved promoting members of certain ethnic groups over others, especially those of European or East Asian origin, who were officially regarded as enjoying unfair “privileges.”
As should have been expected, people from all walks of life soon grew tired of being lectured to by generously remunerated leftists who told most of them they had been demoted and henceforth would have to play second fiddle to the offspring of alleged victims of prejudices that were held by previous generations. As North Americans tend to be instinctively “meritocratic” and feel people should be rewarded for what they manage to achieve, not because they happen to belong to what may be described as underperforming communities, they found this objectionable. Instead of discrediting racism among those who were obliged to listen to them, the DEI evangelists encouraged it.
Among the many who wanted things to go back to where they were before the “woke” onslaught are those members of “minorities” who found that even their friends attributed whatever academic credentials they may have acquired to “affirmative action,” not to their own unaided efforts. For the genuinely talented among the intended beneficiaries of the drive to replace equality of opportunity with “equity,” in which everyone gets the same academic results even if they are bone idle illiterates, politically sponsored efforts to help them has had humiliating results.
For the DEI establishment, Trump’s return to high office has been a devastating blow. He lost no time in starting to evict its militants from their positions in the branches of government that respond directly to him in order, as he said, “to forge a society that is colour-blind and merit-based,” without institutions that “try to socially engineer race and gender into every aspect of public and private life.”
Accompanying Trump are business concerns, big and small, that in an attempt to win the approval of the Biden administration and its offshoots had let themselves be infected by the “woke virus” and hired large numbers of expensive DEI operatives, but are now getting rid of them. The defection from the Democrat camp of “tech titans” such as Mark Zuckerberg showed them which way the wind was blowing. As that billionaire said weeks before the inauguration of Trump’s second term, a major “vibe shift” has taken place and it would be foolish to pretend otherwise, so out went the in-house censors who for years had done their best to silence miscreants guilty of wrongthink.
Trump’s appeal owes much to nostalgia for the world of not that long ago in which people did not have to worry about pronouns, nobody campaigned to make it permissible to mutilate children who allegedly sought to affirm their “true” gender instead of the one that was “assigned at birth” and, as Martin Luther King believed, it was “progressive” to want people to be judged by the content of their character and not the colour of their skin. Along with a great many others not only in the United States but also in other parts of the world, Trump thinks that, prodded by perverse and self-interested “cultural elites,” the West took a wrong turn several decades ago and since then has been stumbling towards a dark abyss. That is why he calls the movement he leads “Make America Great Again,” though of late he has begun talking about a “golden age” to come and not just a return to some period in the past.
This may seem hopelessly reactionary, but in their different ways all major political movements, including futuristic revolutionary ones such as Communism, have drawn their strength from the feeling that mankind should go back to some mythical age in the past in which everyone lived well and did not have to concern themselves with the problems that would bother their descendants. If Trump’s is a bit different, it is because the age of “greatness” he dreams about did not come to an end before recorded history got underway but within living memory.
Eight years ago, many saw Trump’s stint in the White House as an aberration which some blamed on Russian interference in the US election, others on the electoral-college system which gave too much power to rural areas or on the sexism of voters who disliked the idea of seeing a woman as president. That was short-sighted. By now, such “progressives” should be aware that what Trump represents is an increasingly powerful movement that is certain to endure, not only in the US but also in many other parts of the world where people are rising up against the order the “elites” did so much to bring about but which is now crumbling at what seems to be an accelerating rate.
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