The Forever War on Woke

In her New York Times column on “Trump’s Plan to Crush the Academic Left,” Michelle Goldberg notes that New College of Florida, ground zero of Gov. Ron DeSantis’s overhaul of the state’s education system, is offering a course on “The ‘Woke’ Movement.” A bit of further digging reveals that the course is taught by Andrew Doyle, best known for inventing the parodic online persona Titania McGrath. Texts by Ibram X. Kendi and Robin DiAngelo as well as Chris Rufo and Vivek Ramaswamy feature in the syllabus. Evidently, where once you could go to New College and learn how to be woke, now you can go learn how to be anti-woke.

This item caught my attention because it points to a question about what shape the ongoing anti-woke crusade will take in universities and beyond, now that the Trump administration (as well as plenty of allies in state and local government) has the power to implement the agenda activists like Rufo—a New College trustee—have spent several years laying out. One approach would be largely negative, focused on dismantling racial-preference regimes and reforming ideologically biased academic programs so as to “retvrn” to stuff like merit and great books. And this is some of what is happening.

The New College seminar on the “woke movement” points to another possibility: that just as woke institutions saw their mission as the extirpation of racism, cisheteronormativity, and so on, their anti-woke successors will now pursue the the extirpation of wokeness itself from hearts and minds as well as syllabi and h.r. practices. Hence, just as “bias response hotlines” were put in place to look out for recalcitrant microaggressions, perhaps similar surveillance regimes will need to be put into place to ensure there is no stealth reversion to diversity initiatives. It might even involve new forms of affirmative action to counteract the lingering discriminatory effects of wokeness. One can detect a hint of this in the recent announcement that Jewish-owned businesses would qualify for minority business loans and the ramping up—under pressure from conservatives—of university efforts to combat antisemitism, even as DEI is scaled back more broadly. These are seemingly contradictory developments, except if we consider that Jews, insofar as they have been excluded from minority protections under the DEI regime, deserve some recompense now. In the immortal words of Ibram X. Kendi: “The only remedy to past discrimination is present discrimination.”

In his inaugural address, President Trump promised to “forge a society that is colorblind and merit-based.” However, meritocracy isn’t as unifying a principle for the right as it might seem on the surface. That, indeed, was the real takeaway of the H-1B visa debate. For the tech moguls who went to bat on behalf of the visas, meritocracy means being able to recruit from the largest possible pool of talent, regardless of the national origins of applicants; most conservative critics of the program would surely be averse to equating their position with affirmative action, but they share with the latter’s advocates a belief in the relevance of factors other than merit—nationality, for one—to hiring decisions. The larger problem here is that meritocracy, by its very nature, is a divisive ideal, because it assumes individual competition as the primary arena in which worth is determined and accorded. It might in and of itself be a proper ideal for certain educational and professional contexts, but is unsuited to function as a source of civic cohesion.

The other element of the post-woke paradigm heralded in Trump’s speech was “colorblindness.” In my omnibus review of anti-woke books from just over a year ago, I expressed skepticism about the return of that ideal:

Appeals to identity to extract limited concessions from power will likely be deployed more than ever in the years to come by members of all political factions. This is especially true as long as America lacks both an economic settlement that benefits ordinary people and a compelling account of shared national purpose.

The decay of a culturally unifying civic-national ethos—the liberal mainstream’s embrace of racial divisiveness has been both a symptom of and an exacerbating factor in this development—has made the emergence of various sorts of “identity politics” difficult to avoid. We are already seeing various right-coded versions of it come to the fore. I expect we will see more.

Perhaps Trump’s most noteworthy move this week was revoking Executive Order 11246, dating back to 1965, which ended up massively expanding affirmative action by requiring federal contractors to take race and sex into account. It’s a good illustration of how much of what we call “wokeness” can be understood as the metastasis of the limited interventions of 1960s civil-rights legislation into the equivalent of a forever war. (This is roughly the account you get from Christopher Caldwell and Richard Hanania.) If there is anything we know about how the US government works, it is its tendency to become embroiled in forever wars through bureaucratic inertia and perverse incentives. So what I’m wondering here is whether a “forever war on woke” is now in the offing, especially given the internal fractures of the GOP coalition, and if so what it might end up looking like. It will probably take a while to tell.

This week at Compact

Compact started off the week with the winding down of Bidenism and the revving up of Trumpism 2.0:

• Columnist Nathan Pinkoski argued that “the Biden administration did not take place”—that it was a strange mediatic concoction with a void at its center.

• Columnist Batya Ungar-Sargon laid out the divisions cutting through the incoming Trump administration—between, in effect, OG MAGA and Elon Musk’s DOGE—and explained why the former must prevail if the administration is to fulfill its promises.

• Historian Adam Rowe offered a compelling account of the deep roots of Trump’s foreign policy vision, which draws on a number of 19th-century American precedents.

• The #resistance era of the Democratic Party is over. What now? Zaid Jilani contends that there is plenty of opportunity for the party’s pragmatists and populists in Congress to work with Trump and pursue their agenda in the process.

• New columnist Mark Krikorian argues Trump must do more than undo Biden’s excesses on immigration—he needs to pursue far more fundamental changes to the system.

• In not one but two contributions this week, editor-at-large Greg Conti offers a highly original account of the “anticlerical” impetus behind the new MAGA coalition, and examines one of that coalition’s key proposals targeting universities: endowment taxes.

Looking beyond the US political scene, we also had:

• Frank Furedi on the absence of statesmanship from the contemporary world, in which mediocre nonentities seem to be running most countries. The question for their surging populist challengers, he argues, is whether they can revive the ideal of the statesman.

• New columnist Dan Hitchens’s profile of the Syrian architect Marwa al-Sabouni.

Thanks as always for reading!