Beginning of the End of “Peak Wokeness”?

By Michael Shellenberger on X

Across the United States, people who voted for Kamala Harris are reacting with shock, sadness, and anger at the election results. They are asking themselves why so many Latinos, Gen Xers, men, and women not only voted the way they did but also why so many of us feel enormous relief at Trump’s historic victory.

But do they really not understand? Or do they not want to understand?

After all, over the last decade, many of us who have moved away from the Left have been explaining our concerns at length:

• We didn’t appreciate being told we were bigots for not wanting to defund the police, open the borders, or mandate racial quotas;
• We didn’t enjoy being called phobic for not wanting doctors to experiment on children with pseudoscientific “transgender medicine;”
• And we didn’t like being labeled conspiracy theorists for asking questions about Covid policies or asking why the FBI, CIA, and Department of Homeland Security were involved in mass censorship.

We’re not suggesting those were the main reasons most voters or swing voters voted for Trump. The polls indicate that the top issues were the economy and migration.

But elections are won on the margins, and what made the difference between 2020 and 2024 was the defection of so many traditionally Democratic voters to Trump and the Republicans. And many of those who defected were, like us, alienated by the transformation of the Democratic Party into a mob of Woke scolds and persecutors.

Trump gained unprecedented ground across the electorate, disrupting Democrats’ hold on black, Latino, and Muslim voters in key areas. Even young people, and especially young men, swung to the right.

Trump won over large segments of the working class, while Harris improved over Joe Biden with high-income voters, college-educated white women, and white people in general.

These results are nothing short of a massive political realignment that should put to bed once and for all the corrosive myth that Trump’s coalition is driven by “white supremacy” or “fascism.”

Through the democratic process, voters have resoundingly rejected elites’ favored narratives about race, class, and immigration.

And so if anyone really wants to understand why so many of us, even if we have criticisms of Trump, feel relief and vindication at his victory, they need to consider that it has more to do with the repudiation of totalitarianism than with Trump as a person or even his policies.

Wokeism or whatever else you want to call it — progressivism, identity politics, radical leftism — has been rampaging through society for roughly the last decade, and those of us who have been stigmatized and ostracized by it feel like we can finally breathe again.

What we are experiencing is known as catharsis, which comes from the Greek word for cleanse or purge. In Greek tragedy, the audience experiences catharsis when it feels a release of negative emotions and a sense of renewal.

Many of us who have felt persecuted for our views, even in supposedly small ways, such as not feeling comfortable expressing our true feelings with friends and family, feel freer now to speak our minds. After all, the majority is with us. Our views are normal, mainstream, and common sense.

As Democrats weaponized the government and justice system, attempting to keep Trump off the ballot and put him in prison, we identified not with Trump the Republican or businessman or former president, but rather with Trump the wrongly accused.

At bottom, he was being persecuted by the same totalitarian forces that had been rampaging through society for a decade.

Sometime between Occupy Wall Street in 2011 and the first Black Lives Matter protest in 2013, seemingly normal liberals and Democrats started to lose their minds. Everything became racist. Everything became suspicious. And nothing was more suspicious than not agreeing 100% with the official Woke Democratic agenda.

Trump’s election put Wokeism on steroids.

Suddenly, a word that, in the past, only extreme radical Leftists had used to describe a Republican president — “fascist” — was now being used by Very Serious People like New York Times columnists, establishment Democrats, and the previously sober foreign policy establishment.

It was between 2016 and 2020 that Wokeism not only completed but intensified its grip on every major institution in society, from news and entertainment media to schools and universities.

These institutions encouraged and participated in the mass condemnation and cancellation of heretics, which became known as the Great Awokening and was a new witch hunt. Ordinary and otherwise decent people behaved cruelly. They accused people they had known for years or decades of bigotry or racism or wanting to genocide trans people or wanting millions to die from Covid.

Diverging from progressive orthodoxy in any way became enough for people to not only end friendships, but to insist that the transgressors be ostracized and excommunicated. Those who had made a great show of being courageously open-minded and tolerant became intolerant, incurious, and cowardly.

We were asked to pretend that the people carrying the pitchforks and torches to go witch-hunting were well-intentioned and just cared a lot more than the rest of us.

They didn’t. Behind the totalitarianism were individuals who had given into base motives like hedonism, envy, dogmatism, self-righteousness, prejudice, snobbery, psychopathy, and even sadism.

There are many underlying causes of the totalitarian Great Awokening:

• the growing distance between educated elites and working people;
• the rise of narcissism, psychopathy, and other Cluster B personality traits like entitlement and grandiosity;
• the way in which social media dehumanizes people and normalizes behaviors that would seem psychopathic in real life;
• the anxiety induced by social media’s fishbowl effect, where our natural fears of social disapproval are magnified to a degree we were not evolved for;
• the counterpopulist reaction from the deep state foreign policy establishment to a populist American president and populist uprising around the world;
• the list goes on.

Fully excavating the causes of the derangement of the last decade requires a book-length treatment, which we are dutifully working on.

The good news is that we are already on the downward slope moving away from Peak Woke.

If one had to find the moment where the lies were at their greatest power, it might have been during was the summer of 2020 when the public health experts who had demanded we shut down the schools said it would be immoral not to join Black Lives Matter protesters in physical events no different from the “superspreader events” they had, just a few weeks earlier, demanded people be arrested for attending.

Peak censorship came less than two years later when former President Barack Obama gave a Stanford University speech, urging government “regulation” of social media platforms.

The bad news is that much of the Censorship Industrial Complex remains in place, few of the abuses of power over the last eight years have been fully investigated, and Wokeism remains entrenched in every major societal institution.

The good news is that we understand the work we have in front of us.

We must defund the thought police; investigate the abuses of power by the FBI, CIA, and DHS; replace IC leaders and reform the agencies; de-Wokeify and reform public institutions; and get some accountability for all of the awful consequences of the last ten years.

Across the United States, people who voted for Kamala Harris are reacting with shock, sadness, and anger at the election results. They are asking themselves why so many Latinos, Gen Xers, men, and women not only voted the way they did but also why so many of us feel enormous… pic.twitter.com/vnIV064LsQ

— Michael Shellenberger (@shellenberger) November 6, 2024

Published on X and on his website, Public