Can a Second Trump Term Quell Wokeness?

T hus far, the age of Donald Trump in American politics has coincided with the age of woke. One of the difficulties, then, in forecasting likely outcomes of the impending second Trump administration is hypothesizing the extent to which the wokeness that has come to define the modern Left was itself a product of the first Trump presidency. In fact, some Trump-skeptical conservatives made the case against a Trump vote by arguing that Trump is a form of “wokeness fuel.” As Tim Carney wrote last week:

In the Trump era, voters, particularly young adults and women, are becoming more left-wing, especially on social issues.

Voters born in the 1990s, those who became adults in the pre-Trump era but were still impressionable when Trump came to power, have become less Republican in the Trump years, surveys suggest. . . .

So one long-term effect of Trump is making the younger generations less pro-life, more liberal, and more likely to vote Democrat. The longer he is the standard-bearer of the GOP, the more he pushes young people and women towards bad ideas and bad political allegiances, which may last the rest of their lives.

At certain points, I’ve found this view compelling, but I also wonder if there’s a correlation/causation error here. Would the excesses of wokeness have been avoided had Hillary Clinton been elected eight years ago? Almost certainly to some extent. We are all familiar with peers whose opposition to Trump himself became an intimate matter of identity. But we possibly underrate the extent to which nonpolitical technological developments might have been wokeness’s real fuel.

Jonathan Haidt is responsible for persuasive and now well-known research on the impact of smartphones on the development of young Americans. But for Haidt, the digital crossing of the Rubicon, which he likens to the fall of the tower of Babel, that gave rise to wokeness actually predated Trump’s election. As he wrote in 2022:

I think we can date the fall of the tower to the years between 2011 (Gurri’s focal year of “nihilistic” protests) and 2015, a year marked by the “great awokening” on the left and the ascendancy of Donald Trump on the right. Trump did not destroy the tower; he merely exploited its fall. He was the first politician to master the new dynamics of the post-Babel era, in which outrage is the key to virality, stage performance crushes competence, Twitter can overpower all the newspapers in the country, and stories cannot be shared (or at least trusted) across more than a few adjacent fragments — so truth cannot achieve widespread adherence.

If Haidt is correct, that Trump “did not destroy the tower,” it stands to reason that a #resistance-style movement against a second Trump term might not have the same cultural militarism. For one, as the social stigma of supporting Trump fades, the Left loses the power of intimidation that was so essential to the liberal groupthink of the first Trump term. Second, thanks to the Biden years, the public has a clear vision of what woke governance looks like. The utopianism of the woke governing vision is no longer persuasive. Finally, the far Left might simply be too demoralized to keep fighting. Certainly, there will be leftist opposition to Trump. But the returns on the Left’s strategy of saying the word “fascist” in every other sentence are now demonstrably lacking. If we can see that, maybe they can, too.

An alternative take on Haidt’s thesis is that wokeness is merely the inevitable product of opposition to conservative governance combined with the ability to spread information digitally in milliseconds. That is, as long as technology is here to stay, so is wokeness. But I think that discounts the degree to which the unexpectedness of Trump’s 2016 victory was itself a source of leftist instability. Wokeness might not feed on Trump’s existence itself, but on the shock value of his eccentricities.

This could all be very wrong. It could be that on January 20, 2025, we will inaugurate both Trump and a woke resistance for another four-year term. That is easily plausible and ought not to be discounted. But neither should we blindly assume that such an occurrence is inevitable. It might be wish-casting, but there are reasons to think that wokeness will not as easily penetrate our domestic tranquility as it did during Trump’s first term. Wouldn’t that be nice?