RICH LOWRY

After hubris comes nemesis, and after the frenzied excesses of the woke revolution came Donald Trump.

The left didn’t lose everything with Trump’s second victory in 2024, but it did lose something that will be impossible to recover — broad cultural acquiescence to a radical agenda that briefly appeared to be sweeping all before it.

After the death of George Floyd, it seemed unlikely that five years later media outlets would be running rueful retrospectives about how the sweeping, nearly irresistible changes catalyzed by that event sputtered out or backfired.

Here we are nonetheless, and at the center of the turnabout is Donald Trump.

The populist Republican wasn’t the only factor in turning the page, but he was a decisive one, both as a symbol of relative cultural normality and as an instrument to wield federal power to blunt the left’s advances and prevent them from recurring.

This doesn’t mean Democrats won’t win again — they will, and perhaps as soon as next year’s midterms.

Things might not feel so great for the right when it is defending Trump during his third impeachment in 2027, yet there will be no taking us back to the years of peak woke.

Democrats may make inroads against Trump’s economic policy, his executive overreach or his crypto schemes. They aren’t, however, going to recover by fighting it out on the issues of gender fluidity or systemic racism.

After the death of Floyd, the left managed to catalyze American civil society for its purposes on the basis of fear and group think.

Corporations felt compelled to get on board and pony up funds for woke causes and organizations. DEI trainings were all the rage. Fear stalked the halls of our universities, where saying or thinking the wrong thing could end your career. Any institution, person or phenomenon could plausibly be accused of racism, and activists sought to change the American landscape by toppling disfavored statues. “Anti-racism” seemed to be going from a laughably reductive boutique set of ideas to the American mainstream.

The project had already lost steam a few years after George Floyd’s death. The country wasn’t interested in a revolution. Corporations realized DEI practices were a waste of time and created legal liability. Universities began to wonder what they’d achieved with their devotion to DEI. Meanwhile, trans-radicalism was running into a wall of popular opposition.

Part of the power of Trump’s victory was that he was a pungent representation of where the culture was already heading rather than being a lone, if high-profile, dissenter.

Still, Trump has shifted the Overton window in the culture away from woke, and it’s hard to imagine it shifting all the way back.

Corporations aren’t going to play ball again the way they did after the death of George Floyd. Trump could well lose his legal battle with Harvard and other schools, but they’ve admitted that they need to change. DEI and other race-conscious policies may go subterranean under different rubrics, although that, in itself, is a sign of weakness. Black Lives Matter has been discredited by scandal, and “anti-racism” now feels more like a relic than the hot new thing.

Trump’s executive orders and funding decisions can eventually be reversed, but re-radicalizing every institution in America will be difficult for any future Democratic president.

Shrewd, ambitious Democrats realize how the ground is shifting, even if the left of the party isn’t going away. The Democratic governor of Maryland, Wes Moore, recently vetoed a bill to create a commission to study reparations, and Gavin Newsom refused to fund a California ethnic studies curriculum. Both acts would have been unimaginable in 2020 and its aftermath.

Trump is to the woke ascendancy what Thermidor was to the French Revolution, and what Richard Nixon was to the anti-war movement. We can’t know whether his presidency will succeed or fail, but he is likely to retain his status as the bookend to an era of heedless cultural lunacy.

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Rich Lowry is on X @RichLowry.