Trump Elected- But There Must Be No Let UP In The Fight To Defend Our Culture!

Identity politics has suffered its first serious setback but there is much to be done before wokism is defeated.

The good news is that the defeat of Kamala Harris was in part a result of her failure to benefit from the politicization identity. She played the Black Card. She played the Women Card. She played the Hispanic Card. Yet in the end she could not really enthuse these groups. Suddenly they were forced to realise that their culture war had stalled!

No wonder that the American managerial elites feel betrayed by those millions of ethnic-minority voters who opted for Trump. For decades the oligarchy that runs the Democratic Party assumed that they possessed a monopoly over the loyalty of Black and Hispanic people. But the refusal of significant sections of these groups to vote for the Democratic Party has called into question the tactic of using minorities as election fodder.

The huge support that Trump gained from Hispanic voters is arguably the most serious setback suffered by the practitioners of woke identity politics since the emergence of political correctness. The importance of this development cannot be exaggerated. In recent decades, identity politics has become an integral component of elite ideology and an essential instrument used by the managerial class to retain control over society. Until this election, the politics of identity has rarely been so seriously challenged.

It is important to note that for over a half a century identity politics – in its different guises as the Counter-Cultural Movement, Political Correctness, Wokism – has been going from strength to strength. As early as 1970, it was evident to a few intelligent observers that they were losing the battle against the counter-cultural identitarians. By this time, the traditionalist conservative opposition to the cultural transformation of the United States had more or less lost its self-belief. A memo to President Richard Nixon from his advisor Daniel Moynihan in 1970 captured the prevailing trend. It stated:

‘No doubt there is a struggle going on in this country of the kind the Germans used to call a Kulturkampf. The adversary culture which dominates almost all channels of information transfer and opinion formation has never been stronger, and as best I can tell it has come near silencing the representatives of traditional America.’

Having taken over America’s media and institutions of culture, it was only a matter of time before what would be eventually called ‘woke culture’ gained ascendancy.

Moynihan’s warning was misunderstood and went unheeded.

Looking back on the two or three decades that followed, it is evident that  on both sides of the Atlantic, the significance and the durability of the counter-culture and its emphasis on the politicisation of identity were continually underestimated. Commentaries frequently portrayed identity politics in the past tense and prophesied its imminent demise. The leftist authors of the first book to refer to identity politics in 1973 claimed that ‘identity politics swallowed itself’.¹ During the following decades, numerous commentators speculated about the imminent demise of political correctness.

Writing in 1995, Ross Posnock, a Professor of Literature, wrote that ‘after twenty-five years of identity politics’ a ‘renascent cosmopolitanism is currently gaining ground on the left; indeed, belief that the prestige of identity politics is fading in the academy is fast becoming the received wisdom’.  ‘After Identity, Politics: The Return of Universalism’ is the title of an essay in New Literary History published in 2000. Eight years later, in her history of identity, Linda Nicholson observed that ‘identity politics seems now to be largely dead, or at minimum, no longer able to command the kind of public attention that it did from the late 1960s through the late 1980s’. In the United Kingdom, in the wake of The Brexit Referendum and the election of Donald Trump in 2016, British journalist Janet Daley rather prematurely declared that ‘Identity politics is Dead’.

It is worth noting that the issuing of obituaries to woke continues today. In 2022, the Conservative economist Tyler Cowen proclaimed that ‘wokeism has peaked’ – at least in the United States. ‘Is “woke” dead?’ asks a commentator in The Spectator. Wishful thinking lead its author to observe:

‘Perhaps the best cause for hope is simply time. New things will be needed to stimulate the new young. Firebrand wokeists who came of age in the 2010s are now in their forties. Those junior publishing staff will be senior staff soon, and maybe they’ll have to deal with young upstarts who think (often correctly) that they are barmy and bigoted’.

Countless observers since the 1960s have expressed the hope that as young people grow old, they will leave their woke toys behind. This form of generational wishful thinking has proved to be fundamentally flawed. Why? Because the so-called young firebrands are the products of a form of socialisation that leads them towards woke conclusions. And when they grow old, each new generation contributes to institutionalising new cultural ideals and practices. The tendency to associate the influence of woke to groups of campus radicals and their allies within the institutions of culture and education fails to grasp the scale of its influence.

In The Los Angeles Times, Michael Hiltzik made fun of the quixotic tendency to wish away woke. He noted, ‘Right-wing culture warriors say wokeness is dead. They can’t even define it’. Unfortunately, Hiltzik is not wrong. Despite occasional triumphs against the more grotesque manifestations of identity politics, wokishness retains its hegemonic status.

Unlike those commentators who continually predicted the demise of identity politics we are aware of its continued powerful presence in society. However, we are also aware of the fact that the scale of the defeat suffered by identity politics on 5 November is of a different order to the periodic setbacks it suffered in the past. This election showed that millions of voters refused to embrace group-think and voted as individual citizens rather than in accordance with the dictates of identity entrepreneurs.

That millions of Americans pushed back against the expectations of identity entrepreneurs indicates that it is possible to defeat wokism in our lifetime. But there are many battles that lie ahead. It is essential to note that the Cultural Elites who control America’s institutions of soft power enjoy great influence over everyday life in society. Just because Trump got elected does not mean that the schools have stopped indoctrinating their students. It does not mean that Cancel Culture will disappear on University Campuses. It does not mean that the mainstream media and the entertainment industry will cease to promote woke values. All these institutions will do their best to retain control over our culture. Indeed, if anything the defeat they have suffered at the hands of Trump is likely to lead them to renew their efforts to discredit their opponents.

They will renew their efforts to force more pronouns down our throats and to discredit those who still believe in the biological sex difference between men and women. They will continue to racialize anything that moves and they will try to make white people feel guilty on account of their skin colour. In particular they will do their best to use their institutional power to brainwash children in order to distance them from their parents and the values that their community upholds.

It is worth recalling an important lesson emanating from the Reagan-Thatcher Era. Outwardly the election of these two formidable leaders created the impression that Anglo-American culture was under the direction of people who respected the values and traditions of their society. Yet, despite the success of the Reagan-Thatcher Revolution in the sphere of economics and institutional politics, the counter-cultural movement went from strength to strength. It was right under the noses of Reagan and Thatcher that identity politics gained ascendancy in many sectors of society. What this experience indicates is that winning an election does not guarantee victory in the domain of culture. And unless our cultural heritage is preserved and developed, a victory at the polls will prove to be illusory and its effect, transient.

So the stakes are high and there is much to fight for! The good news is that 6 November showed that we can win. Now is the time to capitalise on this victory and do our best to to take on and defeat the culture warriors who wish to dispossess society of its civilizational values and traditions.

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