The Age of Anti-Woke Overreach

American politicians must have a very low opinion of their own voters. In recent months, the Trump administration and the Republican Party writ large seem to have bought into the idea that Americans are craving cruelty, and as a result they are using their power to “own the libs.” The country’s new leaders have kicked trans service members out of the military; sent nonviolent, “low risk” immigrants to Guantánamo Bay; and appointed a defense secretary who has written that “dads push us to take risks. Moms put the training wheels on our bikes. We need moms. But not in the military.” But they have miscalculated.

The Republican Party’s views on what they call “DEI” are far outside the American mainstream. This became apparent when, after a Black Hawk helicopter collided with a passenger jet in January, the president launched into a public broadside saying it was “common sense” that DEI in hiring air-traffic controllers was at least in part responsible for the crash. That wasn’t an isolated event: Public schools risk losing federal funding if they continue to administer DEI programs; the administration has even launched a portal where people can report their community members (or really anyone they want to) for “concerning practices.” The portal is accompanied by a quote from a co-founder of Moms for Liberty, a conservative parents’ organization, calling on parents to dish: “Now is the time that you share the receipts of the betrayal that has happened in our public schools.”

[Conor Friedersdorf: DEI has lost all meaning]

Not content with just attempting to purge public institutions, Trump’s executive order “restoring merit-based opportunity” requires a witch hunt in the private and nonprofit sectors as well: “As a part of this plan, each agency shall identify up to nine potential civil compliance investigations of publicly traded corporations, large non-profit corporations or associations, foundations with assets of 500 million dollars or more, state and local bar and medical associations, and institutions of higher education with endowments over 1 billion dollars.”

Given the way this administration has targeted DEI and “woke” policies, you’d be forgiven for assuming that Americans were completely on board. Yet according to a Pew Research Center poll conducted right before the election, just one-fifth of employed adults think that focusing on DEI at work is “a bad thing.” Even among workers who are Republican or lean Republican, a minority (42 percent) say that focusing on DEI is “a bad thing.” In a January poll from Harris/Axios, a majority of Americans said DEI initiatives had no impact on their career; more respondents among nearly every demographic polled (including white people, men, and Republicans) said they believed it had benefited their careers more than it had hindered them. (The sole, amusing exception being Gen X.) A June 2024 poll from The Washington Post and Ipsos found that six in 10 Americans believed DEI programs were “a good thing.” And all of this was before any backlash to Trump’s presidency had time to set in.

An early signal that the administration is overreaching comes from a Washington Post poll on early Trump-administration actions, which found that voters oppose ending DEI programs in the federal government (49–46) and banning trans people from the military (53–42). When asked about one of Trump’s signature issues, deportation, the poll showed that, by a nearly 20-point margin, Americans do not want people to be deported if they “have not broken laws in the United States except for immigration laws.” It’s hard to imagine that those same Americans approve of sending a man to Gitmo for riding his bike on the wrong side of the street, or of calling a city’s administrator for homelessness services a “DEI hire” because she’s a white woman.

So-called wokeness was responding to something when it emerged as a dominant political force in 2020, and its argument was broadly convincing to the public. Concerns about racial justice had been building for decades before the murder of George Floyd, and that event was unusually galvanizing across American demographic groups. Economists have found that the June 2020 Black Lives Matter protests were—in terms of gender and race—more representative of Americans than even the voting public of that year’s presidential election. Similarly, a 2022 poll showed that just 21 percent of people opposed the #MeToo movement despite the relentless messaging from the right that people were sick of the feminist coalition. As the New York Times columnist Michelle Goldberg wrote last year, “However overwrought the politics of 2020 were, they also represented a rare moment when there was suddenly enormous societal energy to tackle long-festering inequalities.”

[Listen: Who really protests? And why?]

At its core, public-opinion polling is difficult, and certainly many Americans have become exasperated by the last decade’s progressive ideological winds. But some of the extreme positions—and appointments—of the Trump administration are self-evidently at odds with Americans’ views in the main. Recently, Trump appointedDarren Beattie to a senior diplomatic position at the State Department. Beattie is notorious for making arguments such as “Competent white men must be in charge if you want things to work. Unfortunately, our entire national ideology is predicated on coddling the feelings of women and minorities, and demoralizing competent white men.” I don’t need to look at survey data to argue that this is a fringe position.

Being “too online” is a dig the right has long leveled at the left. Liberal and progressive ideological commitments regularly get framed as fringe and unconvincing to “real Americans.” Republicans, not Democrats, in this view, are the ones speaking to the so-called median voter. This mindset has emboldened the right—perhaps to their eventual detriment; they now appear bound to provoke backlash from the “real Americans” they were elected to represent.

There are signs, in fact, that extremists on the right know their moment might be short lived. One recent anecdote was telling. A “top banker” was gloating to the Financial Times: “I feel liberated,” he told the reporter. “We can say ‘retard’ and ‘pussy’ without the fear of getting canceled … It’s a new dawn.” I was struck by the performative contradiction: The quote was anonymous.