Thus 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:
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.
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