Trump’s war on woke is tearing down the left’s cultural sway

The right just experienced its best three weeks in the culture war in 50 years.

A blitz of executive orders issued by President Donald Trump have taken dead aim at left-wing cultural priorities and pillars of the left’s cultural influence.

Fashionable progressive ideas that have long been ascendant, including DEI and gender ideology, have received hammer blows since Trump’s inauguration, and there’s more to come.

Never before has control of the executive branch of the federal government had such potentially momentous cultural significance.

The Trump administration is determined to use every tool at its command — chiefly federal funding but also the enforcement of civil rights laws — to push back against decades-long trends that have long felt inexorable.

For quite some time, conservatives have focused on the notion of a “long march through the institutions” to understand how the left came to dominate elite culture.

The phrase is attributed to the 1960s-era left-wing German activist Rudi Dutschke, who wanted, in the words of a progressive analyst, “to create radical change from within government and society by becoming an integral part of the machinery.”

The left’s insight was that by taking over faculty lounges, Hollywood studios, HR departments and the like it could bring about revolutionary change in a way that it couldn’t through the ballot box or a frontal assault on such institutions.

Now, Trump is bringing to bear a real counter-force via federal power.

This represents a new way of thinking about cultural change for the right, and a strange reversal — to wit, it’s the progressives who effectively used civil society to their ends, and now conservatives are attempting to use government to theirs.

Government played a role in the tide of left-wing cultural change, but it wasn’t necessarily the dominant one.

The takeover of elite culture was largely driven by private actors: the hiring policies of university administrators, the funding decisions of large foundations and the practices promoted by corporate HR departments, among other things, had an enormous hand in effecting a de facto cultural revolution.

The Department of Health and Human Services didn’t direct Disney to inject woke story lines into its programming; the company did it on its own.

Trump is a new factor in this equation.

The most recent example was the executive order late last week saying that federal funding would be withdrawn from educational institutions that permit males to compete in women’s sports.

The NCAA instantly changed its policy to say that only athletes who were female at birth can compete against females.

Trump’s anti-DEI executive order will have similar effects at least among federal contractors, and perhaps more broadly.

Daniel Patrick Moynihan once said, “The central conservative truth is that it is culture, not politics, that determines the success of a society. The central liberal truth is that politics can change a culture and save it from itself.”

Trump is borrowing from the liberal truth in this moment of cultural insanity.

In part, his executive actions represent a case of what’s good for the goose is good for the gander.

If Barack Obama could use the threat of a cut-off of federal funds to impose star-chamber procedures on campuses in sexual assault cases, there’s no reason that Donald Trump can’t use the same tool for more rational ends.

Naturally, everything Trump has done will be subject to litigation, and liberal institutions will do all they can to skirt his executive orders.

There may, as happened the first time around, be a backlash against him that stokes cultural radicalism.

So far, no such reaction is in evidence, though. Mainstream institutions, like Meta, are treating Trump’s return to power as a permission slip to escape the chains of their woke captivity.

It helps that on DEI and trans ideology Trump is offering the recovery of a normality that is much more popular than the alternative.

However it turns out, the feeling of conservative impotence in the culture war is, for now, a thing of the past.

Twitter: @RichLowry