Donald Trump’s election win shows progressive lunacy has been roundly defeated

Donald Trump’s election win over Kamala Harris may have signalled a turning point for identity politics. Picture: AFP

Across the non-left media world, it’s now an article of faith that Donald Trump’s emphatic victory is a woke watershed. After asking petulantly for year upon year, “Now have we hit peak woke?”, like children on the back seat nagging daddy “are we there yet?”, we learn repeatedly from conservative outlets that the progressive lunacy that has tormented us since about 2014 (if not since 1965) has been roundly defeated.

A decisive death knell for identity politics dangles the blessed possibility of no longer squandering our brief duration on this Earth on stupid conversations and debates over whether: women can have penises; racial discrimination cures racism; advancement in employment and education should be determined by skin colour; the Western civilisation that gave us penicillin, Rembrandt, Bach and the Hubble Space Telescope is a disgrace; being grotesquely fat is healthy; and wearing a sombrero that you bought yourself on Amazon is theft.

Friends, the folks who’ve really been stealing – and high-value items: our precious time, energy and attention – are the doctrinal morons who’ve roped us into addressing these painfully self-evident questions. I have devoted whole afternoons to seriously considering whether a mass movement to sterilise children and cut off their healthy body parts is a good idea.

Trans rights demonstrators protest moves in the UK to make it harder for transgender people to self-identify. Picture: Getty Images

Agreed, then: we yearn to put this rank idiocy behind us. In fact, I’m intensely curious how this period of communal madness will be regarded once it’s foreshortening in the rear-view mirror. Will this era’s edges blur until, in retrospect, “cancel culture” is remembered as rather cute? Will historians recall only that for a funny little period people cared innocuously more than usual about “social justice”? Or will the reign of woke instead take its place alongside Mao’s Cultural Revolution, Stalin’s show trials and Pol Pot’s killing fields as a lower-fatality example of a whole society losing its collective mind?

As for that rear-view mirror, there are promising signs. Preferred pronouns are quietly dropping from email signatures. The sanctimonious University of Michigan is firing diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) staff. Walmart has dropped the term DEI altogether. Investors are suing the retailer Target for putting commitments to DEI, environmental, social and governance and Pride Month above the interests of shareholders. Formerly left-wing Silicon Valley billionaires are publicly excited about, or even bidding to participate in, the Trump administration.

The atmosphere on podcasts is suddenly more permissive; why, it might finally be safe to make a joke. In the UK, the 2024 John Lewis Christmas advert doesn’t look as though it was filmed in Nigeria. In the US, Democratic media figures are drowning in self-pity, while the viewership of the hectoring MSNBC channel has plummeted. Red states are banning gender-defying care for minors, and these laws have a good chance of holding up in the US Supreme Court. The word “retarded” is enjoying a comeback.

Still, I worry that we’re jumping the gun. This dogma has infected all our institutions like a fungus. It won’t be easy to eradicate. Ever notice how quickly, after a full complement of treatments, athlete’s foot comes right back? One American election won’t do the trick. There are too many people with a vested interest in wokery because “decolonising the curriculum”, say, is their job. Many a museum director has been hired expressly to ensure an art collection doesn’t acquire work by white people.

Numerous black female hires who tick two boxes in a diversity “buy one, get one free”, but are sometimes conspicuously under-qualified, such as ousted Harvard president Claudine Gay, owe their appointments to that fungal way of thinking, and they won’t all go quietly. America’s entire Democratic Party is steeped in this brain rot, and Kamala Harris still came within 1.5 percentage points of winning the popular vote.

A protester at the court case involving Daniel Penny, who was acquitted over the death of Jordan Neely, who had been threatening people on a subway. Picture: AFP

On both sides of the Atlantic the universities, the judicial system, NGOs, the legal and medical professions, the news media, cultural institutions, theatre, publishing, film: they’ve all been putrefied by the zombie fungus. Picture the special effects for The Last of Us, all those hairy tendrils and fibrous clumps crawling up the skyscrapers of midtown Manhattan.

So this is a long fight that’s not yet won. That’s not to detract from the cheerful impression that we sane people do seem to have gained the upper hand right now. Indeed, I’ve never doubted that our level-headed and unindoctrinated contingent – however beleaguered, persecuted and shockingly few in number – has always been destined to win, because lunacy eventually collapses from its own contradictions. It has only ever been a question of how much longer we have to put up with this staggering bullshit.

As for the present juncture, I have a theory. Let’s remember the nature of the opposition. Wokesters are conformists. They didn’t invent their wretched ideas; they’re reading from a common hymn sheet. That’s why they all use the same words and subscribe to the exact same roster of convictions, no matter how preposterous: these people aren’t original thinkers. But they imagine they’re at the cutting edge. Being “progressive” means they’re in the vanguard. They think woke makes them modern, makes them hip.

Members of the TERF (trans exclusionary radical feminists) movement in Melbourne in March. Picture: Tony Gough

Whatever the more complex truth of the matter, it’s in our interest to promote the trope that woke is over. That woke has been vanquished. That woke is totally yesterday, hopelessly stale and played out. That the rest of us are moving on to genuinely thorny questions that aren’t stupid. That we’ll no longer waste our time pushing back against petty amateur linguists who insist we call the portly “people living with obesity”. That, whatever our private reservations about the guy, Trump’s election marks a hard Before and After. That as Kamala would say, we’ve “turned the page” and “we’re not going back”.

Because when you say something enough times (this is a gambit the wokesters themselves have mastered) you can make it true. Wokesters are highly suggestible. Furthermore, most of these folks don’t really care about social justice. They care about appearing to care about social justice. They care about other people’s esteem. They care about fitting in. They echo what everyone else around them says, because being a mindless copycat means other mindless copycats will like them and they’ll keep their friends and their jobs. And they care about social fashion.

So they won’t spout lingo like “cisgender” if that might risk an eye-roll at parties. They won’t want to seem behind the times. If we convince them that woke is over, that their BLM lawn signs are passé, that maundering about “white privilege” is boring and old hat, they’ll drop the whole patriarchy/neurodiversity/heteronormativity et al package in a New York minute. We just have to persuade them that woke is unhip. Which it always has been, but some people are slow.

Lionel Shriver’s latest book, Mania, is published by the Borough Press. This article was first published by Spiked.

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