When Wicked, the musical, debuted on Broadway in 2003, its big-hearted message about bullying and inclusivity barely caused a ripple. The film version, in contrast, opened only a fortnight after Donald Trump’s re-election, landing bang in the middle of a wokelash that helped him recapture the presidency.
Wicked’s celebration of a green-skinned heroine, played by Cynthia Erivo, was declared “racist against white people” by a former Trump advisor. This reverse victim narrative has become the new norm, put forward with ever greater boldness on the right. Ariana Grande’s remark that “Oz is a very queer place” was greeted with hoots of derision. Anything that smacks of DEI (diversity, equity and inclusion) is in for a tough ride under Trump.
The culture wars didn’t stop Wicked taking nearly $500 million at the box office. Americans still enjoy a good holiday singalong. But Maga Republicans have emerged as the decisive victors of these battles. The vibe shift is real and likely to last. The rise of the “manosphere”, with bro-casters like Joe Rogan commanding vast online audiences, has left the liberal media in the dust.
“We were laughing our butts off at Donald Trump for suspending his door-knocking campaign and letting [activist] Charlie Kirk and Elon [Musk] do a bunch online,” Van Jones, a former Barack Obama adviser, admitted recently. “We said, ‘These guys are idiots! These guys are stupid!’”
The Democrats have no hiding place, having lost ground to Trump in almost every demographic group they rely on – young men, young women, black, Hispanic and minority voters. They know they will have to rethink their strategy root and branch.
“The people driving this backlash are the very people that a lot of left-aligned folk view as their allies,” Musa al-Gharbi, author of the acclaimed new book, We Have Never Been Woke, told me.
Trump crushed two women rivals for the presidency, despite being dragged through the courts during the Biden interregnum over his business arrangements with sex worker Stormy Daniels and the E Jean Carrol defamation lawsuit. Some of Trump’s cabinet picks have abysmal records with women; others are billionaires who have no intention of “checking their privilege”. Exactly like their boss, who will be back in the White House on 20 January.
The assault on woke is only just beginning. Elon Musk, the richest man in the world and owner of X, is preparing to wield his chainsaw at DOGE, the newly-created department of government efficiency. Trump’s new BFF has vowed to destroy the “woke mind-virus” using every instrument at his disposal, spurred on by his distress and anger at the transition of his son Xavier into Vivian, now a 20-year-old woman.
“My son Xavier is dead, killed by the woke mind-virus,” Musk said in an interview with Jordan Peterson, the godfather of the intellectual dark web. “I was essentially tricked into signing documents for one of my older boys.” Vivian, for her part, has countered that her “narcissistic” father refused to accept her “femininity and queerness”.
This painful family drama is the backdrop to an upcoming war over identity politics. One of the most effective ads of the 2024 election campaign was “Kamala Harris is for they/them. President Trump is for you”. Trump proposed to begin reversing transgender rights on day one of his presidency.
He is likely to sign executive orders to implement pledges in the Republican manifesto to ban transgender people from serving in the military, keep “men out of women’s sports”, ban taxpayer funding for sex change surgery and stop schools from “promoting gender transition”.
That’s in addition to other commitments, such as embarking on “the largest deportation program in history”, as Trump vowed at Madison Square Garden; pardoning the 6 January prisoners; removing fossil fuel restrictions (“drill, baby, drill”); and ending the war in Ukraine, no small agenda.
The first skirmish in the battle over transgender rights came in November when Republican politician Nancy Mace put forward a bill banning transgender women from using female bathrooms in Congress. It was targeted at Democratic representative Sarah McBride, the first transgender congresswoman, who will take up her seat in January.
“This is a biological man trying to force himself into women’s spaces, and I’m not going to tolerate it,” Mace said.
Trump is more liberal on issues of personal freedom and identity, as long as they are not taxpayer-funded. In his Time magazine “Person of the Year” interview, he said, “I don’t want to get into the bathroom issue. Because it’s a very small number of people we’re talking about, and it’s ripped our country apart.” He suggested the Supreme Court would end up deciding the law.
This approach did not work out well for women’s reproductive rights. Thirteen states now have a total abortion ban after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v Wade in 2022. In the first case of its kind, Texas is now suing a New York doctor for providing abortion pills to a woman near Dallas. JD Vance, the vice-president elect, favours defunding Planned Parenthood, which provides abortion and care for women’s sexual health.
Supreme Court justice Clarence Thomas has previously suggested that laws relating to contraception and gay marriage could be re-examined. That’s unlikely, but Title IX provisions – the law that prohibits sex-based discrimination – for women and LGBTQ+ people in schools and higher education are under attack from Republicans in Congress. A number of previously settled rights are vulnerable to challenge.
Misogyny is rising, with trolls gloating “your body, my choice”. But this wokelash comes after a period in which, as my son told me on election night, “young men feel they are getting stuffed”. Only now are the Democrats admitting they should pay more attention to what people are thinking, instead of telling them what they “ought” to think.
Pretending that Joe Biden was fit for a second term of office was only the most glaring example of ignoring the evidence in front of one’s own eyes. Immigration was another. Six weeks after the election, the New York Times finally ran a front-page story admitting that the surge in immigration under Biden was the largest in US history.
The pace of arrivals has been faster than the peak years of Ellis Island traffic, when my grandmother entered America in the early 1900s. Total net migration is expected to top eight million, with 60 per cent estimated to have arrived illegally. Yet the Harris campaign insisted Democrats were tough on the border.
In Harris’s defence, she ran a centrist campaign. The words “defund the police” never passed her lips. For many on the left, her crime was not that she was too woke but that she catered too much to neo-liberals and Republican opponents of Trump. But the damage was done long before she launched her 100-day run for president.
As the commentator Ezra Klein has noted, Democratic politicians spent years pandering to advocacy groups rather than to voters. On an episode of Pod Save America, he drew attention to a 2020 questionnaire from the American Civil Liberties Union that asked prospective candidates about gender reassignment surgery for illegal immigrants who had been detained. “What in God’s name was the ACLU doing,” he asked. “Did they think they were helping trans people with this?”
Terms like Latinx, BIPOC (Black, indigenous and people of colour) and initials like LGBTQIA2S+, that appealed to nobody outside educational institutions, are falling out of favour. Under Trump, schools will be encouraged to dump “woke” history. The University of Michigan, famously liberal, has dropped its requirement for diversity statements from faculty for hirings and promotions.
The retail giant, Walmart, is one of many businesses to row back on its DEI commitments. Ford, the car makers, have said they will no longer comment publicly “on the many polarising issues of the day”. Advance obeying of Trump’s directives is well underway.
According to Musa al-Gharbi, my colleague at Stony Brook University, the wokelash is likely to last. “Durable declines in trust” often lead to “durable gains for the right”, he suggested, citing the impact of the “Great Awokening” of 1968.
“Basically from 1969 until 1992, Republicans controlled the White House for all but four years [under Jimmy Carter]. You had two Nixons, one of them a landslide. Then you had two Reagans, both of them landslides, followed by George H Bush,” Al-Gharbi said.
With young voters turning out in greater numbers in 2024 for Trump, Democrats can’t rely on the next generation to save them. At a Marine Corps “Toys for Tots” event at the White House this month, Jill Biden gave a festive, “Happy Holidays!” greeting.
“Happy Christmas!” a young boy corrected her, quick as a flash. “Happy Christmas, yes” the first lady said.
Sarah Baxter is director of the Marie Colvin Center for International Reporting
